Filed to story: If He Had Been With Me Book PDF Free
“Let me guess. You didn’t cry, and you didn’t tell anyone how much it hurt?”
I shake my head. “Crying is embarrassing,” I say.
Finn smiles. “But if that greeting card commercial with the old lady comes on, you’ll tear up,” he says. I shrug and cover my face with the ice pack.
“That commercial is so sad,” I say.
“It has a happy ending,” he says. I shrug again. We fall silent. It’s Finny who speaks first again, when I take the ice off my eye twenty minutes later to not damage the tissue.
“I don’t think it’s as bad as before,” he says.
“Really?” I say. I touch my face tenderly. The swelling is down, but I don’t know how it looks.
“Yeah,” he says. “The ice is closing the capillaries, but the bruising will be worse tomorrow.”
“Maybe you should be a doctor,” I say.
Finny shrugs like he did before. “I’ve been thinking about it actually,” he says.
“Wow,” I say. “Just tonight or…” My voice trails off as I think about it. It makes sense now. Stoic, calm Finny who hates for anyone to suffer, even worms on the sidewalk.
“I’ve been thinking about it for a couple of months,” he says, “but I don’t know. I mean, not everyone discovers what they want to be during Job Week in fourth grade.” He smiles an affectionate smile and I have to look away.
“Well, I’ll have to figure out something more practical than that,” I say.
“Why?” he asks. “You’re good.”
“You haven’t read anything I’ve written,” I say. I look back up at him again. He’s acting odd. I can’t remember the last time he teased me or smiled at me like that.
“I read the story you wrote in sixth grade,” he says. “That was good.”
“That was sixth grade.”
Finny shrugs to show me how little that detail matters.
“You should be a writer,” he says. “You’ll find a way to make it.”
“It would be a lot to ask Jamie to support me so I could write,” I say. “I mean we’ll have kids and a house and stuff.” Finny frowns. The television has all but been forgotten. I don’t even know what is on the screen anymore.
“You think you’re going to marry him?” he says. I don’t like the way he’s looking at me now, his eyes narrowed like in the kitchen. I turn my face down again and look at the couch.
“We want to,” I say. “I mean, we know we’re young, but we can’t imagine ever breaking up.” There is a silence after I speak that startles me as much as if he had shouted something in return. I look back up at him. He’s staring at me. He must think I’m crazy for saying I’m going to marry my high school boyfriend. I feel a flush of heat spread across my cheeks.
“You really love him like that?” he says. I nod. “Huh.” He looks back at the TV but keeps talking. “So what will you do? I mean, if you’re not writing?”
“I thought about teaching,” I say. My voice picks up hopefully on the last word. I realize I want his approval. He frowns again but does not look at me.
“That doesn’t sound like you,” he says.
“Why not?” I say too quickly. “I could teach English like Mr. Laughegan.” Finny is shaking his head.
“Teaching is too—” His frown deepens. “Teaching is too normal for you, Autumn,” he says. I shrug and look back at the TV too. When he speaks again, it is so quiet I’m not sure at first if he meant for me to hear it.
“Doesn’t sound like you at all,” he mumbles. “Teaching, a house, kids. What happened to the turtlenecks and coffee?”
“That was a dream,” I say. “I have to accept reality.”
Accept when things are as good as they’re ever going to get, I mentally add but do not say. It doesn’t matter though. We watch the television without changing the channel or speaking. When he and his mother leave with Kevin an hour later, Finny only says a quick bye over his shoulder. I don’t look up to watch him go.
***
Later in my room, I remember what I wouldn’t want Finny to see in my sock drawer—the old framed photo of us that I hid in the top drawer last year before Jamie came over for the first time. I buried it at the bottom of the drawer and I’ve hardly seen it since that day. Now it’s sitting on top of the dresser, centered as if on display. I look at it hesitantly. My eyes linger over our easy smiles, our arms slung over each other’s shoulders.
I take the photo and bury it again. I close the drawer with both hands. I can’t afford to have him as a friend.
Of course, my black eye causes a stir at school on Monday. I compromise with Jamie by telling the story the way I accidentally told it in the kitchen, allowing everyone to have the wrong impression for half a second. When Alex is there for the explanation, he gives a detailed third-person narration of the accident; it almost sounds poetic the way he describes Jamie and I crashing.
“…and then as they were twirling and twisting through the air, Jamie’s head snapped back just as Autumn was beginning to descend, and they collided with a sound almost like rocks crashing together.” He holds his hands apart and smashes them together to demonstrate, and his audience laughs in appreciation.
By the time the bruise is beginning to fade, everyone has heard the story and no one is asking about it anymore. Now they want to tell me how much better it looks. I have a running update by the hour, yet each classmate thinks that they are the first person to tell me this, just as they all asked me on Tuesday if I picked out the dark purple tiara to match my bruise. I smile and say thanks, but by Friday I am sick of talking about my stupid black eye.
It’s on Friday that I run into Sylvie in the restroom.
I’m washing my hands when I hear a stall door open behind me. I instinctively look up, and I see her standing behind me in the mirror’s reflection. I keep my face blank and look down at my hands as I rinse them. It’s between classes; we are the only two in here.
“Hi, Autumn,” she says. I look up at her reflection warily. I’m not sure what she could want from me; Finny is at school today.
“Hi,” I say. She smiles at me. I’m too surprised to return the courtesy.
“Your eye looks a lot better,” she says.
“Yeah, thanks,” I say. I’m confused and worried this is going to be some kind of trap. In the back of my mind, I wonder if this is how she felt when I spoke to her on the Fourth of July, except back then no one was stealing tables or trying to spread pregnancy rumors. Or hurting Finny. I turn away and pull a sheet of paper towels from the roll. She sighs behind me.
“Look,” she says, “I’m trying to be friendly.” My hands pause their drying for a second.
“Oh,” I say. Even though at school her friends are pretty much publicly recognized as our enemies, the social conventions of the larger world stop me from saying what I really want to say:
Why?
She seems to understand my thoughts anyway.
“Finn asked me to,” she says.
“Okay,” I say. Once again my thoughts do not match my reply; again, I want to ask her why. This time she does not answer my question.
“So…” she says. She wants me to say something. Our eyes meet in the mirror again.
“We can be friendly,” I say.
If that’s what Finny wants, I think.
Sylvie smiles. I turn one corner of my mouth up for her. I’m too confused to manage much more. I leave as she turns on the faucet to wash her hands. Neither of us say good-bye.
***
At lunch, as we hunch protectively around our round table, I tell Jamie and everybody about Sylvie in the bathroom. We try to guess what this could mean, but they are as stumped as I am. Of course, since I didn’t tell them that Finn had asked her to be nice to me, it’s probably my fault that no one guessed the answer. Maybe if I had told them the whole truth, they would have realized what Sylvie being nice to me meant. I didn’t though, and so it wasn’t until I walked into Mr. Laughegan’s class that it all made sense.
Finny and Sylvie are back together. She’s sitting on his desk facing him, their fingers twined together as they talk. I walk to Mr. Laughegan’s desk and sit down. He’s reading more Dickens,