If He Had Been with Me

I wasn't with Finny on that August night, but my imagination has burned the scene in my mind so that it feels like a memory. It was raining, of course, and he was arguing with his girlfriend, Sylvie. He was distracted, thinking of the cause of their argument - thinking of me - when the red car his father gave him swerved on the slick road. He was blameless. He was wearing his seatbelt. But when he got out of the car to check on Sylvie, he stepped on a downed power line. I see him in that moment before, perfect and untouched, and I whisper to him, *Stay. Stay in the car.* But he never does. If he had been with me, everything would have been different.

Our mothers were best friends, pregnant together that summer long ago. Phineas Smith was born the week before me, and we grew up next door to each other as something closer than siblings. In my memory of childhood, it is always summer first, and Finny and I are hiding under bushes or in trees. I was quirky and odd, with no friends besides him; he was sweet and shy and everyone's favorite, but he was fiercely loyal to me. He was my protector, my other half. It was understood by everyone that I belonged to Finny and that we belonged together. We were rarely apart, separated only to sleep in our own beds, knowing the other wasn't very far away. All that time became known in my mind as Before.

The first day of high school, everything changed. By some strange accident, my weirdness became acceptable, and I was swept into the popular group we called The Clique. Finny joined a group of guys who were vaguely geeky but not harassed. We took different classes and stopped studying together. Every moment we spent in silence was another brick in the wall going up between us, and soon we weren't friends anymore. It wasn't a choice, not really. After I was evicted from The Clique for failing to make the cheerleading squad, I reinvented myself again. I dyed my hair black, started wearing tiaras every day, and found new friends on the Steps to Nowhere - a group of misfits I could fit in with. I started dating Jamie, a dark-haired Adonis, a gothic prince. And Finny - now called Finn - became a soccer star, absorbed into the very group that had cast me out. He started dating Sylvie Whitehouse, a cheerleader.

For years, we moved on completely different planes of existence. My life was with Jamie and our friends. He gave me a charm bracelet, and we talked about getting married someday. I loved him, I was sure of it, even if I sometimes wondered what it would be like to be with someone else. Finny and I still saw each other at forced holiday dinners with our mothers, the silence between us a chasm. There were moments, though, when the old connection sparked. The night he came to my porch, drunk after a party, his jacket warm around my shoulders as he asked, “Do you love Jamie? I mean - is he good to you?” Or the silent war our friends waged over a cafeteria table, when I finally confronted him and his blue eyes met mine, and for a moment, it was as if no time had passed at all.

Our senior year, we were assigned as partners in a lifetime sports class. We played badminton and pool, the small talk slowly rebuilding a fragile bridge between us. He started to smile at me again in that old, familiar way. Then, just after graduation, my world fell apart. Jamie broke up with me, confessing he'd been sleeping with my best friend, Sasha. The pain was a physical thing, a hollow space ripped from my abdomen. I stayed in bed for days, numb and lost. And then Finny was there, knocking on my bedroom door. It was his idea, he said, not our mothers'. He took me out for ice cream. He let me read on his bed for hours while he played video games. He made me promise not to call Jamie.

The summer became ours. We drove around late at night in his red car with the windows down, eating greasy food from drive-thrus and talking for hours. We sat by the lake and watched fireworks, and it felt like we were the only two people in the world. I taught him about poetry; he taught me how to drive. One night, after I finally finished writing the novel I'd been working on for years, he read the whole thing in one sitting. He found me asleep in his bed and woke me. “Why did you have to leave me like that?” he asked, not talking about the living room, but about eighth grade. He told me he had been in love with me forever, since we were eleven. And I finally told him the truth: I loved him too.

That night was the most perfect of my life. It was our first time, and it felt like coming home. We lay tangled in his sheets, sharing secrets we'd held for years. He told me he only started hanging out with the popular crowd to get closer to me, that he'd loved me even when he was with Sylvie. I told him I'd loved him even when I was with Jamie. It felt like things were finally the way they were always supposed to be. But Sylvie was coming home from Europe the next day. He had to break up with her. He promised he'd come straight to my room afterward, that he would hold me all night.

He kissed me goodbye in the driveway as the rain began to fall. “After this,” he said, “things are going to be the way they were always supposed to be.” I stood and watched his car disappear down the street. I waited all night for him to sneak in my back door, but he never came. The next thing I knew, my mother was shaking me awake, her face a mask of grief.

The world went gray. I stopped taking my medication. I knew Finny would forgive me for what I had to do next; it would be better than the other paths I might go down without him. On a cool September night, I left a note on the kitchen table, took a knife from the butcher block, and let myself into his empty house. I wanted to be close to him one last time. I locked myself in his room. But I woke up in a hospital, my wrists bandaged, a nurse asking me questions. “And when was your last menstrual cycle, dear?”

I can't remember, I told her. And in the sterile silence of that room, I knew. He wouldn't want me to follow him, not now. Not if I was carrying a piece of him with me. For the first time since that rainy August night, I felt that things might just turn out the way they were always meant to be.