Page 18 of I'm Not Done with You Yet

I screw up my face and start crying, and he stops talking, his mouth hanging open as he watches my performance. I wish I could watch my performance. I bet it’s stellar. Hot tears roll down my cheeks. “He asked me to go inside his car because he had a surprise for Mom, and then he—uh, he—put his hands on my—”

“Stop that!” he hisses. “Jesus fucking Christ. This is not funny!”

I stop mid-sob and look pointedly at him. “It’s not a joke. I’m dead serious. Break up with her, or else.” Then I turn and walk back toward the apartment.

He breaks up with Mom that very same night, and as I listen to her sobs through the thin walls, fierce joy blooms in my chest. Now, maybe, she’ll give me the attention I deserve.

9

Nine Years Ago

Oxford, England

Time’s up!” Emily says, and I wonder if she’s aware of how ominous that sounds. Maybe she’s a sociopath like me and she enjoys the way those two words work to slice through our dreams. Or maybe I’m just being melodramatic because I’m still staring at a blank page with the word “I” gouged into it.

Then, suddenly, a piece of paper full of words slides on top of my blank page. My head shoots up and I catch Thalia’s face, a mischievous expression written—written, ha!—on it. She winks at me and gives the smallest of nods at the paper. My breath comes out in shallow, tiny gasps. A note. I’ve never received a note in class before. Back in high school, it seemed like everybody was passing notes. Everybody, that is, except me. The only times notes have graced my table were when they had to go through me to be passed on to the intended recipient. Passing through, DO NOT OPEN, JANE, please pass to Maura, please pass to Jake, DON’T OPEN IT, YOU FREAK, pass to Aiden.

I wonder what Thalia wants to say to me so badly that she has to say it in the middle of class. My mind jitters ahead, hope turning into a gibbering mess. She’s written to say she’s sorry for not going to breakfast with me, that she was going to, but was ambushed by Ani, who had come knocking at her door in the morning—she spent the night alone, of course, just like I did—and refused to take no for an answer, and as she’d marched her down to Haygrove Hall, she’d gazed longingly at my door, wishing she had the courage to tell Ani no, that she’s going to breakfast with her best friend Jane.

Then I look down at the paper and it’s even better than I thought, because it’s not a note for me, but what Emily had asked us to do—a little freewritten essay, done in Thalia’s elegant cursive. I read it slowly, quietly, while the first student is called upon to read his work out loud. And it’s good. Achingly so. Words as exquisite as the person herself. I glance up at Thalia. Her mouth quirks ever so slightly and my stomach turns soft. A little secret. Our little secret.

Fuck Ani and everyone else around us. This piece of paper is proof that Thalia is mine. Because it’s not even that she’s somehow managed to squeeze in double the work in the same amount of time, but she also gets me. The words she’s written for me aren’t just good, they’re also strangely relatable, and relating to anything isn’t something that happens often for me.

When it comes to my turn to read, my voice comes out with false confidence, bolstered by Thalia’s words.

I am alone and not alone. I coat myself with barbed wire and broken fur, stay away, please come near, come you with bolt cutters and bran muffin and cut your way into my heart...

Tears prick my eyes as I read her words out loud. She sees me the way I truly am, past my human mask. With her, I don’t need to wear the mask.

“Wow,” Emily says when I get to the end of the passage. She’s beaming at me. All around the room, I can sense everyone else adjusting their impression of me. My image is recalibrated, upgraded from the poor kid who doesn’t belong to the poor kid with surprising talent despite the unfortunate upbringing. I don’t know how I feel about it all, don’t quite know how to handle anything warmer than polite, bland interest in me, so I duck my head and focus on my fingers as Emily lists out why “my” passage worked so well. The whole time, I go back and forth with thoughts of how to adequately thank Thalia, how to let her know that she is perfect and amazing and that she’s saved me. I need her to know, above all else, that I see her the way she sees me.

Pam is right about the Creative Writing master’s being intense. After Emily’s seminar/workshop, we pause for a five-minute bathroom break during which Thalia goes to the bathroom, so I don’t get a chance to even thank her before the next session begins. The next class is a critical seminar on fiction, and I struggle to follow as our teacher drones on and on about modernism and postmodernism. At least there’s no freewriting session this time, though we are assigned homework—a five-hundred-word paper on creative trends of the twentieth century that’s due the next day.

Finally, finally, we break for lunch. Thanks to the hangover and the heaviness of the course seminars, I am thoroughly defeated. I turn to Thalia, the words “thank you” halfway out ofmy mouth, but the sixty-year-old man’s talking to her. For a second, I sit there awkwardly, wondering if there’s a socially acceptable way of cutting into a conversation. Joining, I remind myself. The word I’m looking for is “joining” a conversation. And maybe I should just jump in? But no, I’m not built to jump into anything, so I focus on gathering my notebook and worksheets and pens, keeping half my attention on Thalia and this chatty-as-fuck old man who can’t seem to shut the hell up. My last pen is in my bag now, and there’s nothing left for me to tidy up, so I stand.

She stands too. She stands too! She’s just as aware of me as I am of her, because our souls are two parts cut out of the same fabric. She’s probably trying to extricate herself from the inane conversation just as much as I’m willing it to end. But the old man—I think his name is Peter—doesn’t take a clue. He follows Thalia out of the classroom, me trailing them like a shadow. Finally, he realizes he’s a senior goddamned citizen who doesn’t belong with us and he says goodbye to Thalia. Good riddance. But Thalia walks on as though she doesn’t see me there, as though my nearness means nothing to her.

One step, two steps away from me. I’m going to lose her. “Hey!” The word jerks out of me with more force than I intended, jarringly loud in the hallway. Heads turn toward me.

Thalia turns around, looking confused, then she smiles and all is right once more. “Jane! I’m so sorry, I didn’t see you there. What’s up?”

“Um, I just—” I walk up to her and lower my voice, my skin still prickling with gazes from my classmates. “I just wanted to thank you for um. You know, the freewriting thing. You saved my ass.”

“Oh, that,” she laughs. “It was nothing.”

I shake my head. I hate that she’s using that word—nothing.It wasn’t nothing, Thalia. Do not cheapen what you did.Writing something for me had proven a lot of things: that I wasn’t wrong about how I felt, that she feels the same way too. I want to grip her slim shoulders and shake them hard, feel those brittle bones cutting into my palms, and tell her it’s not nothing, it’s not nothing, over and over until she gets it.

But before I can say anything, she says, “Anyway, I should go. I told Ani I’d meet her at the Porter’s Lodge.”

She might as well have punched me in the heart. Ani? At the Porter’s Lodge? That means they’re not lunching at Haygrove Hall. They’re going someplace else, somewhere outside of the college, venturing out and exploring Oxford together like how she and I were supposed to do. My cheeks are melting with anger. I can hardly stand it. Mom’s voice in my head, soft as a feather:Baby, you gotta get used to not having anyone. People say things they think you want to hear, but at the end of the day, you’re on your own.

I came here to break away from Mom, to be as far away from her poison as possible, but maybe she’s right after all. No, she can’t be. I won’t let her. I mentally shriek at her voice until it dissipates into the wind.

“Can I come?” Those three simple words are the hardest I’ve had to say. Can I come, so pathetic, so needy.

Panic crosses Thalia’s face, fleeting and gone before it even settles; she’s too nice to let her reluctance show. But I catch it anyway, and my gut gurgles with acid. “Oh, um—you know what, let me check with Ani—”

“Don’t bother.” I brush past her. I have to get back to my room, I have to get away from everyone but especially from Thalia before this darkness bursts out of my chest and destroys everything.

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