“So what was it like, that time?”
We were still lying in my bed, but now we were eating pancakes from a shared plate. We’d made them together while our feet froze on the linoleum kitchen floor, and then we’d raced back upstairs.
Lucas speared a hugely syrup-saturated bite with his fork, held it in front of his eyes like he was inspecting it, and said, “What do you think? Could I get more syrup on here?” I giggled and sank deeper into the pillows. And then, as if the entire course of our relationship had not been dominated by unanswered questions, he began to talk.
He talked as we finished the pancakes. He talked as we set the plate down on the floor. He talked as the light changed in the windows, as we ran downstairs for cups of tea, apples and peanut butter, tuna sandwiches, Oreos, toast. I asked questions and Lucas answered them. He talked and he talked and he talked some more.
What remains with me from our conversation is images and short bursts of story. Lucas could only remember the parts that had stuck with him for some reason, those memories that are like souvenirs you pull out to look at time and again.
As he shared one memory after another, I began to realize something. Maybe it should have been obvious, but I hadn’t thought of it before.
I realized that what he remembered was not guaranteed to happen the same way again.
Most things, Lucas said, were the same. The way he felt when he was around me: a lifting in his chest, a happy shortness of breath. But other parts of that “time before” had been different. And it wasn’t just that our first kiss had taken place months earlier. Or that this time we had his terrifying secret between us. Lucas himself was different. He was more careful, more appreciative of what we had.
And I was different too. Or at least, Lucas said I was. The concept was beyond my comprehension—I mean, Lucas’s extra memories were changing him. Fine. But how could I be different when I couldn’t remember anything but the time we were living in now? “Please,” I found myself saying over and over. “I think all of this would be a little easier to understand if you stuck to specifics.”
“Okay,” Lucas said. “I’ll try.” He said he remembered my bedroom, my house. He remembered sharing an apple bite for bite with me on a sunny afternoon in his car. He remembered a fight we had over his not coming to watch a debate tournament. He remembered the way I smelled. (“That’s a good thing,” he clarified after I gave him a look.) He remembered the way my hair felt in his hands, how protective Rosemary had been.
“She’s not protective now,” I said.
“Last time, she didn’t like the way I treated you. This time, she’s afraid you’re in too deep. She’s afraid she’s losing you. She’s afraid you’re going to get hurt.”
Lucas remembered that I got him to study a lot more. “My GPA went up a whole point,” he said.
I shrugged. “This time, mine has gone down.”
He told me the way I look when I study hadn’t changed. “You go radio silent, as if everything and everyone around you has ceased to exist. I remember watching you, thinking how I could never do that. I got jealous, the idea that you could be so absorbed by something that wasn’t me. But I don’t think of it that way now. Now I just see how amazing you are. What makes you you.”
I hung on every word. I felt safe and lazy and loved.
He remembered me crying once, he said. We were fighting again in the front seat of his car, but he didn’t remember what we were fighting about. “It was the kind of fight where you kept saying the same things over and over. What seemed obvious to you made no sense at all to me.” He told me my hair was wild, my face was blotchy. He remembered thinking at the time that maybe I was right, but something kept him from admitting it.
“You were harder to move,” he said.
“Move?” I said. “Like, pick up and carry?”
“Yeah, I didn’t tell you? You used to be a bodybuilder. You weighed two fifty in your socks.”
“Kidding!” He kissed me on the forehead. “You were harder to move, like, mentally,” he explained. “You didn’t trust me. Or anyone, really. It was hard to get you to change your mind.”
“It was hard?” I repeated lamely. I felt like he was describing my dad. Ugh.
“Impossible, actually.” He lay back on the pillows, looking up at the ceiling, an Oreo raised like a pointer he was using to illustrate a talk. “Which is weird. You should be just the same. But you’re more open than you used to be—”
I cut him off. I was mad at him now, and at myself. “Maybe Rosemary is right. Maybe I shouldn’t be so trusting.” I moved away from him. “I think I need a shower,” I said.
Lucas took my elbow, drew me back toward him. Lifting my chin, he peered into my face. “You’re mad,” he said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. I’m explaining this all wrong.” I gave him a skeptical look. “Juliet, you’re exactly the same person. I’m just seeing different parts of you this time around.” He broke the Oreo in half, spilling crumbs he didn’t seem to notice, then said, “Here, open your mouth, eat this.” I did.
“See?” he said. “That other time you wouldn’t have accepted the Oreo. You would have thought I was playing a trick on you. Now you trust me.”
I wasn’t convinced, but I wasn’t feeling like pulling away from him again either. He popped the other half of the Oreo in his mouth and then kissed me. “Whatever happened that time around doesn’t matter. What matters is this time. What matters is that you’re the girl. I get to be with you again, the way it should have always been. You’re the one I never got out of my head. Serious. Stubborn. Driven. Smart.” He laughed. “What can I say? You’re you.” He kissed me a second time. “I can’t believe how lucky I am.” He pushed my hair back from my forehead. I think there were Oreo crumbs on his fingertips, but I didn’t care.
My hurt feelings had melted away. I nestled back into the pillows. As long as Lucas was with me, everything was going to be okay.
“You’re the girl,” he repeated with a contented sigh, and I felt a growing warmth in my chest. I felt like the luckiest person alive, like the earth was revolving on its axis at a thousand miles an hour, but the axis was me.
Still, there was something I needed to know. “So what’s going to happen?” I said. This was the same question I’d asked on the phone from the ski resort and he hadn’t answered.
Lucas swallowed. He looked away. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “I have a bunch of ideas, but I think we have to wait until I get to the end of the dream to find out if any of them will work.”