Page 70 of Glass Half Full
“And I’m telling you that shit sticks around. I wouldn’t be getting too full of myself if I was you.”
Something about the way he says it makes the back of my neck prick with sweat.
“Are you threatening me with something?”
He holds up his hands. “Nah, man, I’m just saying...”
“If you’ve got something to say, fucking say it, Kyle.”
He has to be bluffing. He can’t have anything on me. He can’t. It’s been too long.
“I just know you is all,” he admits, “and you aren’t a big shot, Trottard. You never were.”
He slides his hands into the pockets of his hoodie and lopes off. Even the way hewalksscreams drug dealer. I only watch him for a second before I turn and start heading in the other direction. I make it a few feet up the sidewalk before I have to stop and brace myself against a wall. I’m breathing way too hard, and the rush of the city around me is a distant roar.
I thought I could run far and fast enough from my past to keep it out of my present. The shadows of what I’ve done are never going to leave me, but the things that cast those shadows—I thought one day those would be far enough they couldn’t catch me.
I was wrong.
He was just standing there, looking almost the exact same as he did at nineteen. I could bump into him again anytime, with anyone. He could walk into Taverne Toulouse one night. Hell, he could show up on the sidewalk like that when I’m meeting Renee’s parents for the first time.
He could haunt me the same way my record haunts me every day. I have no control over when and where that mark against me will cause problems. What kind of a life is that to share with someone else?
Stella was wrong. Your past can reach you whether you want it to or not. There’s a whole world just waiting to swallow me up again, just waiting for me to slip through the cracks. I’ve got so far to fall, and when you fall like that, you take everyone down with you.
Eighteen
Renee
ELEGY: A poem that expresses a sense of grief or loss
I textmy dad to let him know I don’t need a ride home from therapy. I feel bad for bailing on our bonding session, but something about Dylan’s suggestion that we hang out today felt urgent. I try to squash down the insecurities and convince myself nothing’s wrong as I take the elevator up to my therapist’s office.
Picturing Dylan’s lazy smile as he held me in his arms in bed does wonders to reassure me. It’s been four days, and I’m still replaying our night together like it’s a hit song I can’t get enough of. Everything about being with him just felt so perfect, like we already knew where to touch each other and when. We didn’t think; we just felt—with our bodies, our breath, our minds. I lost track of where my pleasure ended and his began.
Okay, rein it in there, girl, I warn myself as the elevator doors slide open.
I do not need to walk into this session looking like someone who’s spent all day thinking about getting fucked.
Which I totally have.
I settle myself in Sarah’s office, and we spend an hour talking about my job, about my family, and of course, about Dylan. I don’t go into detail, but I do tell her we ‘spent the night together.’ I half expect her to tell me I made a mistake, that I should have waited, but of course she doesn’t. This isn’t somewhere I come to be judged. This is somewhere I come to simplybe, and as we work our way through the hour, I realize that what I’m being now is happy. Hopeful. Excited.
I have so much to look forward to—not just about Dylan, but about me, about my life—that it’s practically bursting out of me. It’s like I’ve been a bed of frozen soil for months, and I’m finally ready to bloom.
“I’m still anxious,” I tell Sarah. “I think anxiety is part of my life now, but that’s just it: it’s part of my life. It doesn’t define it. I’m so much more than that.”
I leave my worries about Dylan’s message behind when I leave the office. All he did was say he wanted to see me and suggest we meet today instead of Saturday. That’s a perfectly normal thing to ask.
He wants to see me.
With my doubts gone, the thought almost makes me giggly, like I’ve downed too much champagne.
I tell Dylan I’m a little ahead of schedule and offer to pick up our drinks. It’s an unseasonably warm day, and since I’m only a few blocks from McGill University, I suggest we switch plans and meet up there so we can hang out on campus. The leaves have already reached and surpassed the height of their colour, but it will still be nice to walk around the tree-lined paths and old stone buildings with our drinks.
Dylan’s running late, so I find myself a bench on campus and set the coffees down while I wait. I really am drinking coffee this time, instead of the chai lattes I’ve gotten obsessed with. Tahseen would be proud of me for going to Starbz, and since fall is winding down now, I couldn’t resist the call of the pumpkin spice latte in its final days of the year. Of course, I went with an Americano for Dylan.
Students surge past me, their backpacks sagging with the weight of their books, scarves thrown around their necks as they gulp down caffeine and late lunches, rushing from lecture to lecture. For the first time since I got back from England, I feel a pang of longing for the lifestyle I left behind. I miss learning. I miss filling my days with ideas and arguments and theories. I miss the challenge of it, the constant invitation to expand who I am and what I’m capable of.
