We sat like that for a few minutes, the fading daylight glowing off his face. I couldn’t look at him directly. I was already afraid of the lines I might cross if I did.
“Drink?” he offered.
“Sure.”
He twisted off the cap and handed me the bottle. We clinked bottle necks. “Cheers,” he said, and took a swig. I tasted the drink, surprised at the lemony sweetness. The aftertaste was sour, but not in a bad way. I took a longer sip.
“So. Spill, Roberts. Why are you really here?”
I sighed. “Truth?”
“Mm hmm.” He swallowed.
“It’s kind of embarrassing, actually.”
“Nah,” he said. “There’s no such thing as ‘embarrassing’ between us.”
“Honestly, it’s so much to even think about.” I paused, looking at the last sliver of sun as it dropped below the skyline.
“Too soon?” He swirled the beer around in his bottle. “I can wait.”
The words stabbed me, calling to mind the way I ignored him in the weeks and months after my dad’s sentencing, and how Matt eventually stopped pushing me to see him or take his calls. I remembered the times on the phone when he begged me to just let him in, just speak to him so he could help, and how I couldn’t even explain the fact thatI couldn’tfeelanything. It was like not being able to breathe but not really dying. Just trapped, suspended in mid-air, I watched the shell of my former self let what was left of my world wither away without having the capacity to say or do anything about it. My medication made everything hollow, empty, unable to stick. Now that I was done with it, I still felt the remnants of being totally lost, like my brain couldn’t quite understand that this moment was actually happening. The universe was giving us a second chance. It was the stuff of fairy tales, and I was suddenly overcome with remorse for the way I treated Matt back then.
It was a lot to sit with.
“Where do I even begin?” I say.
“Have you seen your dad?” Matt asks.
“I went once. Around Christmas time, senior year. It was awful. It’s all pretty hazy. I’m sure my subconscious remembers it somewhere, but I’ve kind of blocked it out.”
“No one would blame you for that.”
“Yeah. I barely could get over what happened to my mom, and then boom—my dad.”
I didn’t expect it, but he put his free hand around me and pulled me in, squeezing tight for a moment before releasing me.Don’t stop,I thought, as he brought his hand back to his own lap.
“After senior year, I left for school at UConn. It was just so much change in such a short period of time. And really, the medication; I can’t even explain how it numbed everything.” I gulped my drink. “Which is why I let you go.”
He looked at me then. Faced me, listening.
“It was too much. You knew everything. All you wanted to do was help, but I think that at the time the only help I needed was the space tobe able to forget. Reinvent myself as somebody different. Somebody normal. Does that make any sense?”
“I guess.” He shrugged.
“You didn’t do anything wrong. There was really nothing anyone could do to help me then.”
Matt nodded.
“So, I went about school. I tried to forget. Being somewhere new helped. I mean, Jess was there too, which was great, because she understood that I didn’t want to talk about it and just wanted to move on. But still, because she knew, it was like having a safety net somehow. Someone who Icouldtalk to if I needed to.”
“I get it.”
“I didn’t really study, didn’t feel much of a connection to the classes I was taking, especially that first year. I struggled to make friends since I didn’t really want to be around anyone. I started sleeping a lot, and completely lost my appetite. Lost a lot of weight.”
“You’ve always been thin,” he noted.
“Yeah, but I started looking almost sick. Then, halfway through sophomore year, I ended up on academic probation. I failed anthropology and got a D minus in psych, which was my major.”
