After my conversation with Bennett, I felt a new urgency about my situation with Antoinette. If guys like Bennett were getting with girls like Hanna, it was time for me to do something about Antoinette. I deserve to know where things stand, I told myself.
She was, as usual, elusive at school. So I texted her, asking if we could talk. She didn’t reply. So I called her. Her phone was turned off. So I drove over to her house. I knocked on the front door. Her mother answered.
I said hi and did the polite-friend routine. I asked if Antoinette was there. Her mother said yes and called up the stairs. We both waited. A minute later, Antoinette appeared in sweatpants and a hoodie.
“Hey,” she said. She seemed surprised to see me. “What’s up?”
“Can I talk to you?” I said.
She seemed a little worried by this request. But she walked outside with me and shut the door. It was a warm night, still September, so we walked across her front yard to the street and sat on the curb.
“So what’s going on?” I said, I still hadn’t quite caught my breath.
“Nothing,” she said. “What’s going on with you?”
“I called you, but you never called me back.”
“I know. I keep forgetting to charge my phone. Sorry.”
So she had an excuse for that. But now what was I supposed to say? I had promised myself I wouldn’t bring up Berlin. But what else was there to talk about?
“It seems like I’ve barely seen you since school started,” I said.
“I’ve been really busy.”
“It’s almost like you’re avoiding me.”
“I’m not avoiding you.”
We sat there. Crickets chirped in the grass around us.
“How was the rest of your time in Germany?” I asked.
“Fine. I was only there another day or two. And then my dad got mad, because he thought I was leaving the next week, and so then he was complaining that he barely got to see me.”
I nodded. She was staring at the house across the street with a faraway look. That wasn’t good.
It occurred to me there wasn’t any good way to do this. And anyway, it wasn’t going to matter what strategy I used. So I said the exact line I had vowed not to say. “Are we going to continue what we started in Berlin?”
She exhaled softly. She looked down at her shoes. “I thought that was more of a friends thing,” she said quietly.
I swallowed. I took a long breath. I gathered myself and then said with a steady voice: “Could we at least try?”
“Being together.”
“We have tried,” she said.
“When have we tried?”
“This whole time we’ve been trying,” she said.
“This whole time? Like starting when?”
“Starting when you came here the night my brother died.” She pointed across the street at the spot I had stood with my bike.
This was a blow. “I didn’t know that,” I said, my voice faltering again. “You should have told me that. If I’d known we were trying, I would have tried harder!”
Antoinette sighed. “Gavin. C’mon. I like you so much.”
“No. Please. Don’t start with the ‘friends’ thing.”
Antoinette let a few seconds pass. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to mislead you. I thought since we were in Berlin . . . and it was so fun to see each other. . . . It was like a perfect moment.”
“And that’s all it was?” I said. “Just that one moment?”
“That’s what summer is for. To do things you might not normally do.”
That was it. The answer to all my questions. I looked down at my feet.
Antoinette didn’t say anything for a long time. I kept my face down. Tears came into my eyes, which I tried to wipe away without her seeing.
Antoinette handled the situation perfectly. She said nothing. She let more time pass. She let me sink down into the depths of despair. And then waited for me to float back up.
Eventually I did. I lifted my head. I stared across the street.
“Kai said you guys hung out a lot,” she said.
“Yeah, we did.”
“And you read some of her writing?”
“Yeah.”
“What did you think?”
“About her writing? I dunno. It was good, I guess.”
Antoinette smiled at that. Eventually we talked about other stuff. The conversation petered out.
Back in my car I cried a little more. None of this was a surprise. Never once had I believed, in my realistic mind, that Antoinette and I could be together. It was just a dream that followed me around, like a ghost, the ghost of Antoinette loving me, or rather, the ghost of Antoinette letting me love her.