“I come when I’m in town. My grandmother’s bookstore is close by.”
“That’s right, next to that store that sells comics and secondhand records. I haven’t been there in ages. I love it over there!”
I looked over my shoulder. Where the hell was my coffee? I needed to get out of there. The air in the room kept getting thinner and thinner. I was nervous, my heart was palpitating, and I could feel the blood pumping in my head.
“Hoyt told me you graduated and got a job at a publisher.”
“It’s just an internship for now,” I said impatiently.
“Well, it sounds brilliant, and I’m sure they’ll end up hiring you. Hoyt says you’ve got a knack for it.”
“I see Hoyt likes to talk.” The frustration in my voice was evident.
“I ask him now and again how you’re doing,” he muttered, chastened. “He also told me you were thinking of going to grad school. So probably you’ll head back to Toronto soon.”
“I’d say that’s the likeliest thing.” Finally I had to look away. But I couldn’t for long, not with that perfect smile I’d called up in my mind so many times. Did he really ask Hoyt how I was doing? Why would he? I never mattered to him. He ditched me the way you throw a cigarette butt on the ground and forget it.
“I admire you for that.”
“Thanks.”
“I finally graduated from MIT last year.”
“So you’re an architect. You always wanted that.”
“Yeah. But now comes the hard part: getting a job. For now I’m back in Montreal working on my own things.”
I lost it.
“Trey, what makes you think I care about your life at this point? I don’t even understand why you came over to talk to me.”
His expression was so disconcerted that I instantly regretted what I’d said. I tried to catch my breath, remembering that November morning and the last words that had come out of his mouth, thosecold, hard, piercing words. The pain came back, and my body went numb. For four years, I’d been unable to face what had happened between us, what had happened after.
It was too humiliating.
I couldn’t stay there any longer.
“Sorry, I’ve got to go.”
I walked past him and outside without stopping. He said something else, but I don’t know what. My steps took me back to the bookstore, but my head was still in the café with Trey. Seeing him again had upset me more than I’d have thought.
A million times, I’d imagined running into him, the different ways it might happen, the different scenarios. In all of them, I acted like an adult, and I was marvelous and interesting and living a life anyone would have envied. I’d see him, and he’d be standing there with regret in his eyes, contemplating what he could have had if he hadn’t been so foolish. But I wasn’t that lucky. Trey looked better than ever, and I…
I…
I saw my reflection in the mirror and wanted to die. My hair was ratty and the little makeup I’d put on that morning was smeared from the tears I couldn’t control every time I thought of my grandmother.
Trey. Fucking Trey.
For a long time, he was my unrequited love. At first, in a childlike, innocent way, because I was too little to understand what love and desire meant. Later, with the passage of time, I did, and all my happiness hinged on him and on his smile and just one look from him could make my world stop turning.
I’d always felt something intense for him. Or at least that’s how it seems to me now.
I was twelve the first time I saw him. He was sixteen and had just moved to Montreal with his father. The first day of school, the first time they ever saw each other, he and Hoyt came to blows in gymclass. They both wound up in the infirmary and had to write a paper together on violence and its consequences. That same day, Trey came to my house to get started on their punishment.
I was on the floor in my bedroom with the door cracked, doing homework, when I saw him walk down the hall. He had a black eye and a fat lip, but he was the best-looking boy I’d ever seen. He looked at me, and his brief, almost imperceptible smile gave me a tingle. I was captivated.
Hoyt and Trey soon became best friends, along with Scott, who was my sister Hayley’s boyfriend at the time. The four of them were inseparable. They spent all afternoon at home watching movies and talking. I would observe them with fascination, and I dreamed of being like them. Of belonging to their universe one day.
