Page 21 of Never Alone
I worked the dough.
The boy in my head was sixteen.
He was sitting at a table in the back booth of a diner that no longer existed. There was a folder open between us, a textbook I couldn't now name, and a cup of bad coffee he hadn't finished. He was thin. He was quiet. He had hair that needed cutting.
He was looking at the page in front of him and not at me, because he had figured out, somewhere around the second week of our project, that not looking at me was the only way to get me to do any work. If he looked at me, I talked. If he kept his eyes on the page, I eventually got bored of talking and started on the project. He had read me, that boy. From the side. Without making me feel watched.
I pushed the dough away from me, folded it, pulled it back.
My boyfriend that year was Ryan. He was eighteen, which felt like a relevant fact about him, and he didn't like me being at the diner with another boy, which also felt, at sixteen, like a sign of how much he cared. Most afternoons, he came to the diner. He leaned in the doorway. He called my name. I packed my things and went out to him.
I'd tell Cole on my way past that he had the project down. Cole would nod. The next time I came in, the part we'd been working on would be in his handwriting in the folder, neatand complete. I'd thought he was being responsible. I had not understood, at sixteen, that he was being kind.
The afternoon Ryan was out of town—some trip, some errand, I had not asked because asking made him angry—Cole let me work the whole way through. We finished the section that had been hanging for a week. He set down his pencil. He looked at me for the first time in days and asked me about Ryan.
He didn't sayyour boyfriend is bad for you.He asked. And I, the sixteen-year-old girl who had finally been picked, told him. Not all of it, but enough. The drugs. The stealing. What Ryan said to me when I didn't want to do what he wanted. I told it the way a sixteen-year-old girl told somebody about the boy who had picked her, the boy who saw something in her, the boy who was the way out of the house she didn't want to keep going home to. I thought I was telling Cole how cool my boyfriend was.
Then he said it.
You do know that what he's doing is wrong?
Quietly. The way he said most things.
And I, the sixteen-year-old girl who had finally been picked, told him, calmly, that maybe he just didn't get it.
I pushed the dough down hard.
He reported Ryan to the police. He didn't tell me he was going to. He didn't ask me. He walked out of the diner that afternoon, went home, and made the call. I didn't learn this until the police arrived at Ryan's house two days later. Ryan's mother called my mother. My mother told me. The look on my mother's face when she told me was a look I had not seen on her since we'd moved to Havensworth.
Ryan went to jail. My father got us packed inside a week. Before we left, I found Cole.
I didn't remember every word I'd said to him. I remembered the shape of it.Who asked you? Who gave you the right?I remembered telling him he had ruined my life. I rememberedhow I said,hated, the way a sixteen-year-old girl said a word like that when she had not yet had occasion to know what hating actually was.
I remembered him standing there. He didn't defend himself. He didn't tell me I was wrong. He stood there and let me say it.
When I was done, he said, quietly?—
I'm sorry, Natalie.
I turned and walked away.
I worked the dough. I worked it harder than I needed to.
He had been right. He had been the only person, in any of the cities we had lived in, in any of the schools I had been in, who had told me the truth. I'd told him I hated him. I'd left.
What I did with the next seventeen years was prove him right. My parents got harder on me after Ryan—the trust gone, the leash shorter—until I was twenty-one and they let me go because Nicholas was a lawyer ten years older than me and seemed, on paper, like a man who would settle me down. He had. He had settled me down all the way to a marriage that took me twelve years to get out of.
The dough was starting to come together under my hands. Smoother. Springing back when I pushed.
I had carried a piece of him, on bad nights, all those years. The thin, quiet boy with hair that needed cutting, sitting at a diner booth, doing my project for me because I would not stay long enough to do it myself. That was what I had of him. I had not built a picture of who he had become. He was a boy in a booth in my head, and he had stayed a boy in a booth, because I had not given myself permission to imagine him grown up.
I'd imagined finding him sometimes. I had imagined what I would say. TheI'm sorryI should have said when I was sixteen. Theyou were rightI had owed him for almost two decades. I had imagined the apology landing in a quiet exchange somewhere ordinary.
I had not imagined him as the man at the bakery counter who had ordered the Reeves cake.
I had not imagined him as the man on the lawn.
I had not imagined him as the man whose hand my hand had been in.
