Page 246 of Falling Backwards
“Oh, damn,” Emma says.“Well, there’s that.”
Joy looks between the phone and me.“What are you gonna do?”
I wrap my arms around myself even though I’m suddenly feeling warm.
“Good question,” I whisper.
L U K E
While I’ve been stretched out here on the couch, there has been a lot for me to think about.
Jayden started texting me pissed-off things earlier; I haven’t answered any of them, but they still keep flitting into my thoughts.
My message to Maggie has gone unanswered, too, and it’s been an hour since I sent it.I have oscillated between feeling like she’s ignoring me and thinking she hasn’t seen what I said because she’s asleep.
Then there are the bits and pieces of that voicemail my dad left me.I especially keep remembering the end of it, when he said….
But mostly, my mind has been stuck on high school.
It’s been stuck on things I haven’t thought about in a long time, like how nobody in my life has kissed me quite as gently as Maggie did in my short time with her, even though years have passed since then.I remember how damngentleher kisses were because they held me still in the moment.The world wasn’t spinning out of my control when she kissed me like that.There was just us in perfect peace—a boy who felt unlovable and a girl who’d found a way to love him anyway.
An unusual detail for me to have held on to, perhaps.Except really, it’s one of those kinds of things you don’t forget.One of those little moments that stir you for some reason, that teach you something new about what life holds and what you want out of it.
I had a lot of those moments with Maggie, actually.
The first time I made her laugh and felt like something in my chest had taken flight because I’d accomplished it by pure accident, not by trying to be funny about anything.
The sweet way she spoke to me when I was dismayed about miserably failing a test for a subject I’d fallen behind in.
The time she was breathless and anxious after almost being in a wreck on the way to school and I sat with her, holding her hands, until she was soothed—I remember we were both almost late to class because of it, which she didn’t like, and yet she only looked at me with gratitude.
Yeah, she taught me new things about joy and kindness and comfort and vividity and softness and…and, fuck, she also taught me new things about heartache and betrayal and regret and lividity and bitterness.
Falling for Maggie Moss the first time taught me a world of new things aboutmyself.
Falling for her again now has done that, too, except that world has become a whole damn universe.
And I don’t want to everstopfalling for her.
I’ll take the bad with the good.I’ll take the challenge with the effortlessness.I’ll take the shadowed minutes with the sunlit days.
That’s the balance of life.
That’s the balance ofus.
My phone vibrates in a new-message way and my pulse skips with hope that it’s Maggie this time—but only if she’s sent a good answer, not a….
No, it’s just Jayden again.More insults without any hint of remorse for the things he’s said and done.He hasn’t spent a single sentence trying to redeem himself, only trying to make me feel bad for ditching him like I—
What was that?
I look to my front door.
I wait to hear the little noise again.
I don’t catch it, even after many moments.
In my head, I play it back to try to discern what it might’ve been…other than what it sounded like: the quietest, smallest knock.
