Now I watch the flight attendant make her way back up the aisle to collect garbage, everyone passing empty cups and napkins and cans. Tyler gives his over, wordlessly reaching out his hand to collect mine, too. It’s not something that should be that big of a deal, but chivalry on a plane thirty-five thousand feet in the air is hard to come by.
“You know,” he says quietly once the flight attendant has moved on to the next row. “It’s been really weird running into you at school and just…not getting to talk to you like we always used to. I kind of hate it.”
I do, too.But I don’t voice that out loud—instead I nervously twist my fingers around the edge of my hoodie sleeve, wishing that the next few hours could burn by so we don’t have to do this awkward slow dance with each other. It’s much easier to handle in school, where I can always make an excuse about being late for a class or needing to run to my locker or disappearing in the fold of my field hockey teammates before a practice. But here, with no handy distractions or excuses, there’s no escaping the awkward conversation that Tyler seems insistent we have.
“It’s just different now,” I eventually mumble into my lap,my heart breaking further with every single word. It’s hard to believe there are still pieces of it left to break after everything that happened, and judging by the pained look on Tyler’s face, that seems to be how he feels, too.
“Okay, Olive,” he responds softly, hurt still echoing across his face—rolling over his cheekbones and eyelashes and the gentle slope of his nose that I always used to love tracing with my fingertips while lying together. “I get it. We don’t have to keep talking about it.” He shifts back in his seat toward his own TV, popping his headphones in and giving me the silence I thought I’d been craving. But now that I’ve got it, I’m not so sure.
But that’s always been Tyler for you—aware of other people’s feelings to a fault. Sometimes before you even realized that it’s how you felt.
Tyler and I dated from the start of sophomore year until the fall of junior year. Moving from friendship to dating him felt as natural as breathing, swimming, the seasons changing. Our date nights were filled with all sorts of adventures—late nights taking the leftover pizza slices from work and having picnics in the open trunk of his Jeep, movie marathons spent curled up on the couch arguing over the merit of putting Sno-Caps in the popcorn, grabbing Coke slushies and sitting on the sun-warmed concrete while watching Tyler practice new tricks on his skateboard at the park. Every second I wasn’t with him, I was thinking about the next time I would be, and every time we were together, it felt like magic.
That was the start of what I thought would be forever.
Butboy,was I wrong.
Tyler was like the easygoing, adventurous antithesis to my more structured nature. Spontaneous date nights and day tripswere one thing, but when it came to our futures—something that, at sixteen, felt both light-years away and eerily pressing at the same time—Tyler had absolutely no idea what he wanted to do with his life. Whenever I brought it up, he’d get cagey and change the subject or laugh and make a joke about how he wanted to be a professional skateboarder, pizza slinger, or something equally ridiculous.
“I’m thinking about being a professional tattoo decider,” he’d joked the fall of our junior year as we were heading to class, pausing in the hallway to gesture at the career-fair poster tacked up on the big community board. “Like, my job would be to hang out at the tattoo parlor and help people decide between the two designs they aren’t sure about.”
I hummed noncommittally, fingers tightening around my backpack straps. I’d grown tired of Tyler’s cheeky jokes about his future, which were funny at first but then shifted to annoying, then downright stressful. Delia and I had several conversations about it, which already felt like crossing a line, because discussing one of us behind the other’s back wasnotsomething we were prone to doing.
I think this is why you need to talk to him,she’d pointed out over text just the night before, which I found rather unhelpful.Clearly you guys aren’t on the same page about things, and it’s time to shape up or ship out.
While some may find that harsh, I was unfazed, because that was Delia Franklin for you—blunt to a fault, even when you didn’t want to hear it. If she knew it’s what youneededto hear, that’s what you were going to get, whether you liked it or not.
Granted, I don’t think she expected everything to fall out the way that it did. Even after, when I’d occasionally scroll throughour now-silent text thread in heartbroken dismay, I’d think about how theship outpart of her statement was meant to be rhetorical.
Junior year was when everything was supposed to startfalling into place—SAT scores, career fairs, college visits, lifeplanning. I’d been meticulously studying the list of company attendees at the career fair for a week, internally memorizing the layout and planning who I was going to talk to at which point, what I was going to say, who I still needed to research, and what I was going to wear. Tyler, on the other hand, just seemed thrilled about the fact that the last two periods of that day were going to be cut short.
“Ol?” Tyler nudged my shoulder to get my attention, jerking his chin toward the poster. Even though his joking attitude about our futures was grating on me, I couldn’t fight the flip in my stomach at his beaming smile.
I was addicted, for better or for worse. “Sorry, what?”
“I said, what do you think about that? Being a professional tattoo decider?”
Bite your tongue, Olive.I knew that snapping at Tyler or pushing him away wasn’t going to get me anywhere—it never does with free spirits like that. They don’t respond well to directness. It’s better to approach things as recommendations. “I think that there won’t be a professional tattoo decider booth at the fair, so you should probably expand your options a little bit.”
Something in Tyler’s face subtly tightened. “Yeah. I told you, I’ll look at the list before the fair.”
“The fair’s on Tuesday. It’s Friday.” Even then, I hated the nagging in my voice, but I couldn’t stop it. The thought of spending my life with a professional tattoo decider, whatever that was, filled me with the same sinking feeling I got whenever Momwalked out the door for a date with whatever man she’d been seeing, swearing this one wastheone when I knew later that night she’d walk back in with a crushed look on her face that told me she’d been wrong, again.
Tyler adjusted the strap of his backpack and didn’t look at me. “Yeah, um, about that.” He took a deep breath, visibly steeling himself in a way that sent warning bells off in my stuffed-to-the-brim brain. “I’m…I’m not even sure if I’m going to go, Olive. I don’t know if there’s anything there for me.”
We rounded the corner toward a quiet hallway, and I couldn’t stop from turning on my heel and looking at him, dumbfounded. “What do you mean? You don’t even know what you want to do! How do you know you won’t find something that you like there?”
He answered with a shrug. “I don’t know, Ol. I just…I don’t have a ten-step life plan the same way you do, okay? I don’t have a planner in my backpack that weighs more than a small child, organizing my life to a T. We’re only juniors. There’s a lot that can change between now and when we graduate and choose entirecareers.” He tugged at the collar of his Modest Mouse shirt, face flushed. “The thought of locking myself into a life path right now makes me feel…itchy.”
Looking back, I should’ve told Tyler that things could change over time, that what he chose then didn’t necessarily have to be his forever path, as long as he put himself onsomesort of path. That anything was better than wandering around aimlessly, not having a care in the world about the future because you’re all aboutliving in the moment,that while it’s fun to be young, it’s also important to put stock in your future, to put yourself on a track that gives you the ability to put down roots. Anything thatsaves you from a string of heartache after heartache when you realize that being young, wild, and free isn’t forever.
If anyone knows firsthand what that looks like down the line, it’s me.
I could’ve said any of those things, but I didn’t. What came out of my mouth were the seven words that I wish more than anything I could’ve delivered differently.
I don’t think we’re going to work.
“Olive?” Tyler’s voice nudges me now, breaking me out of my trance. “Are you feeling nervous being on this plane right now? You’re doing that thing with your hands again.”
