When I got back to the apartment, I decided to write to Lily anyway.
I fear you may have outmatched me, because now I nd these words have nowhere to go. It’s hard to answer a question you haven’t been asked. It’s hard to show that you tried unless you end up succeeding.
I stopped. It wasn’t the same without the notebook. It didn’t feel like a conversation. It felt like I was talking to silence.
I wished I had been there to see her dancing. To witness her there. To get to know her that way.
I could have looked up all the Lilys in Manhat an. I could have shown up on the doorsteps of all the Lilys of Brooklyn. I might have scoured the Lilys of Staten Island, sifted through the Lilys of the Bronx, and treated the Lilys of Queens like royalty. But I had a feeling I wasn’t supposed to nd her that way. She was not a needle. This was not a haystack. We were people, and people had ways of nding each other.
I could hear the sounds of sleep coming from my mom’s bedroom—Dov snoring, Yohnny murmuring. I called Boomer to remind him of the party, then reminded myself who was going to be there.
So a. It was strange she hadn’t told me she would be in town, but it wasn’t that strange. We’d had the easiest breakup imaginable—it hadn’t even felt like a breakup, just a parting. She had been going back to Spain, and nobody had expected us to stay together through that.
Our love had been liking; our feelings had been ordinary, not Shakespearean. I still felt fondness for her—fondness, that pleasant, detached mix of admiration and sentiment, appreciation and nostalgia.
I tried to prepare myself for the inevitable conversation. The awkward teetering. The simple smiles. In other words, a return to our old ways. No sharp shocks of chemistry, just the low hum of knowing our place. We’d had her going-away party at Priya’s, too, and I remembered it now. Even though we’d already had the talk about things ending when she left, I was still put in the boyfriend position; standing next to her for so many goodbyes made me feel the goodbye a lit le more deeply within myself. By the time most of the people had left, the feelings of fondness were nearly overwhelming me—not just a fondness for her, but a fondness for our friends, our time together, and the future with her that I’d never quite wanted.
“You look sad,” she told me. We were alone in Priya’s bedroom, only a few coats left on the bed.
“You look exhausted,” I told her. “Exhausted from the goodbyes.”
She nodded and said yes—a lit le redundancy I’d always noticed in her without ever saying something about it. She’d nod and say yes.
She’d shake her head and say no.
If it hadn’t been over, I might have hugged her. If it hadn’t been over, I might have kissed her. Instead, I surprised both of us by saying, “I’m going to miss you.”
It was one of those moments when you feel the future so much that it humbles the present. Her absence was palpable, even though she was still in the room.
“I’m going to miss you, too,” she said. And then she slipped out of the moment, slipped out of the us, by adding, “I’m going to miss everyone.”
We had never lied to each other (at least not to my knowledge). But we had never gone out of our way to reveal ourselves, either. Instead, we’d let the facts speak for themselves. I think I’m in the mood for Chinese food. I have to go now so I can nish my homework. I really enjoyed that movie. My family is moving back to Spain, so I guess that means we’re going to be apart.
We hadn’t vowed to write every day, and we hadn’t writ en every day. We hadn’t sworn to be true to each other, because there hadn’t been much to be true to. Every now and then I would picture her there, in a country I’d only seen in her photo albums. And every now and then I’d write to say hello, to get the update, to stay in her life for no real reason beyond fondness. I told her things she already knew about our mutual friends and she told me things I didn’t really need to know about her friends in Spain. At rst, I’d asked her when she was going to come back to visit. Maybe she’d even said the holidays were a possibility. But I’d forgot en. Not because there was now an ocean between us, but because there had always been something in the way. Lily probably knew more about me in ve days of back-and-forth than So a had known in our four months of dating.
known in our four months of dating.
Maybe, I thought, it’s not distance that’s the problem, but how you handle it.
When Dov, Yohnny, and I arrived at Boomer’s place a lit le after six-thirty, we found him dressed like a prizefighter.
“I figured this was a good way to celebrate Boxing Day!” he said.
“It’s not a costume party, Boomer,” I pointed out. “You don’t even have to bring boxes.”
“Sometimes, Dash, you take the fun out of fun,” Boomer said with a sigh. “And you know what’s left then? Nothing.” He trooped o to his room, came back with a Manta Ray T-shirt and a pair of jeans, and proceeded to put his jeans on right over his prizefighter shorts.
As we headed down the sidewalk, our own rock-bot om Rocky acted out his approximation of a boxer’s moves, punching wildly into the air until he accidentally connected with the side of an old lady’s grocery cart, toppling both of them. While Dov and Yohnny helped them back up, Boomer kept saying, “I’m so sorry! I guess I don’t know my own strength!” Luckily, Priya didn’t live that much farther away. While we waited to be buzzed in, Dov asked, “Hey, did you bring the boot?” I had not brought the boot. I figured if I saw some girl limping around the city wearing only one boot, I had enough of a recol ection of the item to at empt a mental match.