There weren’t any new photos over the weekend, and there weren’t any on Monday morning, either. I felt like I was missing something. Missing you more. Missing whatever was going to happen next.
Monday at lunch I followed Matt from calculus, talking about homework and our history test and nothing that mattered. You and I never talked about calculus. There were football players sitting at our table, so Matt led me over to where Katie and that group were sitting. Katie had a camera out.
“What’s that for?” I asked her.
She looked at me strangely. “For taking pictures? For art class?”
Charlie chimed in with, “Do you want her to take your picture?”
“Oh, cut it out,” Fiona said. “It was a perfectly valid question.”
Katie’s camera was new and digital and small—not the kind of camera I imagined had taken the photographs that Jack and I had gotten. So I didn’t know how valid a question it had actually been.
Valid questions:
Why am I still here?
Who are these people?
What should I say next?
Are they expecting me to say something next?
Katie and Charlie were eating from the same cardboard boat of French fries. Matt was talking to Rich, another refugee from our usual table, about World of Warcraft. Fiona would take a look at us all, then take a bite of her sandwich, then take another look at us all. Which was pretty much the same thing I was doing, only I was eating a square slice of pizza.
She and I didn’t have any classes together, so I didn’t know what we could talk about.
“Do you like to take pictures?” she asked me.
“No,” I said. Then I realized too late that I’d shut down the conversation. I had to think of something else to say.
“Do you?” I asked.
She shrugged. “When the mood hits me, I guess.”
“When does the mood hit you?”
“I don’t know. It’s a mood.”
I thought: You don’t understand that talking is hard for me. I watch all of you doing it, but I just can’t. I could with her. But I can’t now.
“Evan?”
I looked up at Fiona. I hadn’t realized I’d looked down. I hadn’t realized she wanted me to say something else.
“Sorry,” I said. “I was just … thinking.”
“About what?”
“Nothing, really.”
She looked disappointed.
“I’m sorry,” I said again.
She smiled. “What do you have to be sorry about?”
Ariel. The fact that I can’t talk to you normally. The fact that you’re being nice and I can’t be nice back—not because I don’t want to. I want to be nice. But my mind won’t let me speak. My body won’t let me speak. It’s too uncomfortable.
“Lots,” I said.
Now Fiona looked at me a different way, and I wondered if this was how I used to look at you, the barely masked concern that lands like pity.
What was weird was: I thought I’d hidden it so well. I thought, to them, I was just quiet Evan, shy Evan, plain Evan. I was the orphan sidekick, the trusty wallflower.
“I gotta go,” I said, even though my lunch wasn’t finished and there were still at least fifteen minutes to go before next period. As I stood up, I had the strangest sensation that this would be the moment that someone would take a picture of, because this was the moment I’d least want to be captured.
You said that once, didn’t you? I remembered it. One morning, I was at your locker and you were just staring inside it, as if there was a mirror there. “Ariel?” I asked. And you said, “Why is it that I’m always forced to see people at the exact time I don’t want anyone to see me? Why is life that cruel?” Jack might have made a joke about it, but I took it seriously.
“Bye,” Fiona said, and I managed to say it back. Even Matt was looking at me a little weirdly as I left; he’d noticed me talking to Fiona, and it was clear he thought it was a good thing, which I was now messing up. This only made me want to leave faster, and I almost spilled my soda on Katie’s head as I swerved away. I liked them all, but I was going, and the only person I blamed was myself.
As I left, I saw Jack at his table, laughing with his friends.
This feeling would always be mine alone.