If He Had Been with Me
: Chapter 53

I open my notebook and turn to a fresh page.

“Okay, remember the rules, no crossing words out, no stopping. Ready?” Mr. Laughegan says. We look at him expectantly. “Your strongest memory. Go!” I bend over my desk and my hand flies across the page.

The night Finny kissed me I—

My hand recoils from the page as if burned. This isn’t the right answer. That isn’t my strongest memory. That’s the memory I’ve tried so hard not to have. I can’t possibly remember it well enough to write it down.

“It’s a stream of consciousness, Autumn. Don’t stop.”

I can’t disobey Mr. Laughegan.

The night Finny kissed me I didn’t know what to do.

***

We’d hardly spoken for weeks. All autumn we had drifted and drifted away from each other, and I never knew what to say to him anymore. That last week of school before break in eighth grade, we had even stopped walking to the bus stop together. My mother asked me if we had had a fight.

But then it was Christmas Eve. My mother and I came over, and I sat down next to him on the couch, and there weren’t the other popular girls or our different classes or the way the kids at school thought our friendship was strange. There was only our family together and the tree and our presents and we watched It’s a Wonderful Life together while The Mothers made dinner.

We didn’t talk about how things had been different, because suddenly everything was the same again. On Christmas morning, we laughed and threw balled up wrapping paper at each other. It was unseasonably warm that afternoon; we went into the backyard and for the hundredth time he tried to teach me to play soccer. The next day, he came over and we made a fort in the attic. We lay on our backs and looked at the sunlight bleeding through the ripped quilt above our heads, and I told Finny the plot of the novel I was going to write, about a kidnapped princess whose ship sinks and she has to start a new life among the natives of the island she washes up on.

For a week, we were us again, and I forgot to call Alexis back, and Finny shone his flashlight in my window at night. We made popcorn and watched movies. We took silly pictures of each other with his mother’s camera. I made paper snowflakes and he hung them in the windows.

It had been like rushing down a swift river. I had been swept away from Finny and into popularity without the chance to come up for air. But now I was breathing again, and I thought we could replace a way to stay friends. I don’t know what he thought.

We had one week. And then it was New Year’s Eve. My parents were going out, and I was going to stay with Finny and Aunt Angelina until they came home. After dinner, Finny and I baked a cake with his mother, and while it was in the oven, we sat at the kitchen table and made increasingly silly lists of resolutions, that we would befriend ducks and build jet packs, meet five dead celebrities, and eat an uncut pizza starting from the middle.

“Here’s a real one,” Finny said. “Let’s build a tree house this summer.”

“Okay,” I said. “Can I paint it?”

“Sure.”

“Any color I want?”

“Yeah.”

“Even if it’s pink?”

“If that’s what you want.” Finny added it on the bottom of the list, drew a dash, and added a notation on color schemes. “I missed you,” he said, his head still down. My throat tightened. He looked up. We stared. I don’t know what my face looked like. His cheeks were pink, and I remember thinking that his eyes looked different, darker somehow. And something else. Something had changed in the weeks we had been apart, but I couldn’t place it.

“Finny, Autumn, it’s almost time,” Aunt Angelina called. Finny broke our gaze first, and went to grab wooden spoons and pots for us to bang.

When the moment came, we ran down the lawn together, and the neighbors were setting off fireworks and we stood on the sidewalk and whooped and banged and watched. Finny was louder than I had ever seen him be before. He yelled and his voice cracked; he raised the pot above his head and it clanged like a gong. It unsettled me slightly, like his eyes. He didn’t seem the same anymore.

“Okay, come on guys,” Aunt Angelina said. We turned and, still breathing hard, began to trudge up the lawn behind her. She had almost reached the porch when Finny grabbed my arm.

“Wait,” Finny said. I stopped and looked at him. He swallowed and stared at me.

“What?” I said. I saw him lean in, but I thought I must be confused. He couldn’t be about to kiss me. Then he turned his face to the side, his nose brushed along my cheek, and Finny’s lips were on mine. Warm. His lips moved gently against mine once; there was only enough time for my eyelids to instinctively flutter closed and open again. He pulled away slowly, his eyes never leaving my face. His hand was still on my arm, his fingers clenched around me. My stomach had tied itself into a knot.

“What are you doing?” I said, even though Finny wasn’t doing anything now. He was just looking at me with an expression I’d never seen before. His fingers dug deeper into my arm. We took a breath.

“Kids?” Aunt Angelina called from the doorway. “Come on. Cake’s done.”

I gently tugged my arm and his hand dropped. I took a step away from him. Our eyes never wavered.

“Kids?”

I turned and ran up the lawn. He followed me, and I imagined him grabbing me and pinning me to the ground.

Finny, my Finny, kissed me. It was horrible. It was strange and wonderful. It felt like I was watching a meteor shower and did not know if it meant the stars were falling and the sky was breaking apart.

When I got back home, I closed my blinds and buried my face in my pillow. My tears were hot in my eyes and it was hard to breathe.

“What are you doing?” I said. “What are you doing?” I whispered it to him again and again until I had cried myself to sleep.

The next morning while The Mothers made our New Year’s brunch, Finny and I sat on the couch with three feet between us and did not talk. We stared straight ahead.

There were four round bruises on my arm where his hand had clasped me. He had never hurt me before.

And we weren’t friends anymore.

***

It’s not fair I wasn’t ready It’s not my fault. Did you kiss me because you wanted to kiss a girl or did you kiss me because What was I supposed to do I wasn’t ready I wasn’t ready I didn’t know

“Time,” Mr. Laughegan says. I drop my pen and it rolls off my desk and onto the floor. “All right. Now read over what you wrote. Is there a story there?”