Page 61 of When the Lights Come On
We both laugh at the memory for a moment. The DeeDee Effect is a powerful force.
“So, what’s your question?” Zach asks as he settles into the couch a little more. “About the guy?”
I consider laughing it off and joking about how crazy it would be if I was actually asking for romantic advice.
Is that what this is? ‘Romantic’ advice?
That sounds like something you ask for when you have a crush on someone in the office. It’s the farthest thing from what Youssef and I have going on.
“Um, well...”
“Full confidentiality,” Zach assures me when I don’t go on, holding up two fingers. “Scout’s honor.”
“Something tells me you actuallywerea Scout.”
“I grew up in a small town! Everyone went to Scouts.”
“Okay, Scout, here we go.” I take a deep breath and stare at the wall across the room. “Someone recently came back into my life that I hadn’t seen for a long time. We have...a history.”
I glance at him out the corner of my eye and see he’s nodding. Every sentence I force out is like pulling a tooth, but it’s also weirdly cathartic—like the relief that blooms when you realize your mouth is actually better off without a bunch of rotten molars.
“We were best friends for a while, and then it became...more. He was two years ahead of me in school, so we always knew he’d be leaving Brampton before me, but we didn’t really care. It wasn’t just some stupid high school relationship, you know? Or at least, I didn’t think it was. It felt...It felt real. It was a big deal for me.”
“Just because you were young doesn’t mean it didn’t matter,” Zach says after a moment of silence. I still can’t look at him. “When we’re young we’re not...we’re not afraid to feel, you know? I think the relationships at that time in your life, whether it’s friends or dating or whatever, are made of something that doesn’t break the way relationships do as you get older.”
“Wow.” I pull my knees up under me and adjust my sling. “That was...very wise.”
He pretends to stroke an imaginary beard. “Just call me Gandalf.”
I chuckle. “But yeah, it makes sense. The older we get, the more we learn to hold back.”
Those lessons happened pretty quickly for me.
“Me and this guy,” I continue, “we didn’t hold back. It took some time, but I...I trusted him.”
I’m almost talking to myself now, considering the words as I say them. I wanted Youssef to know me even before I trusted him enough to let him in. He thought I didn’t give a shit about him for the longest time, that all he did was annoy me when he’d bug me about music in the hall, but it didn’t take long at all for me to realize he looked at me differently than everyone else.
I wasn’t the pretty girl or the hot girl, the weird girl or the bitch. I was just me. I’d never beenjust meto anyone before.
“We got really close, and when graduation started getting closer, we came up with all these plans about how we were going to handle things. They were stupid plans. They probably wouldn’t have worked, but still, we talked about it a lot. I thought we were serious. He was going to McGill to be an engineer, and a couple weeks before he left, I found this letter from him. I mean, aletter. It was so cliché. He literallytypedit. Who the fuck types a letter like that?”
“Uh, an asshole?”
“Thank you!” I raise my good arm and then let it drop back to the couch. “Hewasan asshole. He wrote this whole letter about how things could never work between us and how all those plans we had didn’t actually mean anything. He said he really liked me, but that it would be better if we just moved on and lived our lives.”
“He said hereally liked you?” Zach’s voice is laced with incredulity. “Those were his exact words?”
I nod. “That part, yeah. That’s a direct quote.”
“Fuck.”
“Whoa!” My jaw drops. “You said fuck!”
“I do swear, you know.” He shakes his head. “Why does everyone act so surprised about it every time?”
To be fair, it’s as shocking as a Labrador puppy looking up at you and dropping an F bomb.
“So what happened after that?” he urges. “Don’t tell me you just never spoke again.”
