Page 30 of Falling Backwards
It’s hard to keep it away, though, now that I’m not at work.It was easier to get around it during those hours.I had other things to focus on.I had people to talk to and tasks to keep in mind.Even most of my interactions with her didn’t go too far below the surface.
‘Oh, can I trust you?’
The way she said it went beyond whether I was capable of finding a roll of stickers on my own.And on both that front and the deeper one, I instinctively wanted to argue that shecantrust me.Of course she can.I’m not some terrible force of destruction.
But I knew that wasn’t exactly true.I knew in a way, I am.
Well, Iwas.Years ago, for that brief time in the eleventh grade, yeah, I was.
All too late, I figured out it stemmed from teenage boy stupidity; the damage was already well on its way to being done by then.Figured out later still that everything with my dad had been weighing on me in different ways, some of which I didn’t understand, some I didn’t even see.
You don’t have to be chaos incarnate to be untrustworthy.Don’t have to be an all-out monster.Sometimes you just have to get caught in the perfect storm of shitty circumstances.
That’s what happened to me.For one reason or another, my brain wasn’t in working order when I was sixteen.
Then Jayden and I had a bet going one night about which of us could go the longest without throwing up the very expensive tequila he’d stolen from his older brother, and we agreed the loser would have to do something embarrassing at school to make up for wasting the booze.When the loser turned out to be me, I found out his idea of‘something embarrassing’was dating a random girl he considered unattractive and taking her to junior prom a month later.If the outcome was anything other than that, he would rat me out to his brother and I would owe Jayden two hundred bucks for being a double failure.
I didn’t have that kind of money, so to my ridiculous little mind, I was stuck.
What a nerve-racking notion it was.
I didn’t relish having to go out with someone I didn’t choose myself.I’d be courteous to whoever got picked and the whole thing would be temporary and it wouldn’t be significant enough to have any lasting effects on her, but still.For one thing, who wants a girlfriend they’re not attracted to somehow, fake or otherwise?And for another, what if she thought I was too boring and it kept us from making it to prom time?
Well, as it turned out, Maggie was the girl whose name got drawn out of Jayden’s baseball cap.
I was equal parts relieved and confused because I wasn’t sure why he thought she was ugly.She wasn’t thin like so many were or strived to be and she’d gotten into that car wreck and been scarred in a couple places, but I liked the way she looked.I’d liked it since our freshman year when I switched from private education to the public high school.And though we hadn’t gotten around to speaking, she had given me a few incredibly shy smiles over the years when we happened to catch each other’s eye.
Of course, I didn’t tell Jayden any of that.Didn’t tell him he was letting me off easy.He would’ve remedied it somehow without pause or mercy, and I would’ve groaned and wondered why I didn’t just go along with his initial so-called punishment.
So I accepted his terms.
God, it sounds so lame to say I genuinely believed it wouldn’t be a big deal, but at the time, I did.I wasn’t setting out to be cruel to Maggie or gain anything.All I was doing was following along with some dumb shit my friend had concocted.
From where I stood, it seemed harmless.She had given me those little smiles in the past, so she at least didn’t find me repulsive.Even though I wasn’t about to pour my heart and soul into bonding with her, I would be nice and treat her with respect, as I’d already intended.I wasn’t anything special by any means, but hopefully we’d get along just well enough to be each other’s date to the junior prom—girls hated going to dances alone, so I had my fingers crossed that she’d be down to keep me around that long.I would try to make that night fun.Then after it was over, we would be over too.She wouldn’t be upset about it, especially since everyone knew high school relationships to be flaky; students got together and broke up all the time, notably right before summer break.It would be a trivial month-long thing that, although kind of insincere, would be a blip in her radar and as good a deal as I could hope for in my situation.
Date, dance, done.That was my simple plan.
All I had to do was keep my secrets quiet so my unexpected luck of the draw wouldn’t get wrecked and so I wouldn’t have to come up with a bunch of money to give to anybody.
No one was supposed to start feeling anything real.
But things with Maggie didn’t go according to that plan.
She turned out to be…glorious.
The sound of her voice and the things she said.How her giggles were soft and her big laughs were moments of proof of little old me feeling safe to her somehow.The way she looked at me and the things we connected over.
I couldn’t resist any of it.Couldn’t ignore, couldn’t detach, couldn’t keep my own guard up.
When I touched her, kissed her, asked her out, I did it because I badly wanted to.Not because I was expected to—Iwasn’teven expected to do most of that, since only the dating part was a rule of the bet.In every one of those moments, the bet wasn’t what I was thinking about; there was justherin my head, the way she made me feel.I meant those things with her like I’d found myself meaning so, so many others.
We grew far closer than I expected us to, and it happened faster than I could keep up with.
And before I could wrap my mind around it, much less figure out how to handle it, one overheard conversation ripped us apart and in half and down to ugly shreds.
Another flashing memory spears through my mind, making my stomach churn something fierce.
The devastated way she looked at me that afternoon in the hallway at school.
