Filed to story: If He Had Been With Me Book PDF Free
“I don’t like coffee,” he says. I laugh.
“You know what? Me neither,” I said. We both laughed. The Mothers took a picture of us but we didn’t know. They were far away and we are small, sitting together on the corner of the fountain. I’m looking at the ground; he is looking at me. We look as if we sit there every day, together.
On the way home, I look out the window and watch the trees fly by like road markers telling us how far we have come from where we were.
On August 8th, nothing happens.
Lightning does not strike the Earth. No old woman shows up at the door with a warning. Finny doesn’t see a black dog staring at him as he gets out of his red car. No one says anything prophetic or ironic. I do not awake in darkness to hear the clock strike thirteen.
Did Finny feel something? Was there something nameless that shifted within him? Did that last year feel to him like late afternoon, the sunlight creeping across the floorboards of his room, slowly fading until there is but a thin veil of gray between day and night?
Did I feel something? Did I know?
Like all things that have become history, I now feel as if I always knew it, as if all through this story, it had been lurking in the shadows. The story underneath the story.
On the first day of school, Jamie and I drive past my old bus stop, and the freshmen look like children. A girl with black hair and combat boots shuffles her feet and glares at the ground. I wish her well.
“We’re seniors!” the girls squeal to each other. The boys mimic our squeals and roll their eyes. It’s deathly hot on The Steps to Nowhere, but we will have to sit there before class and during lunch so that all the freshmen know it’s off limits to them. We sit together before the first bell rings and talk about realizing that, in a way, this was our last summer. Next summer, we won’t be children in any sense of the word. We’re almost there, that finish line that has stood before us all our lives. We are almost adults, our lives are about to begin.
I’m in Mr. Laughegan’s creative writing class.
“I told you I’d see you in here again,” he says when I walk into his janitor’s closet classroom. He tells us to write a page on what kind of fruit or vegetable we would be. I would be a kiwi, obviously.
I also have a college credit literature class, two English classes, and no math class. It’s almost more than I can bear.
I do have gym though, a themed class called lifetime sports. It’s supposed to be sports that you’ll be able to play your whole life, like bowling or walking or something. I signed up for it because it sounded easy.
I’m not sure why Finny signed up for it. He’s good at all sports; I can’t imagine why he would want a class with so little activity. I’m already sitting on the bleachers when he comes in the gym. The teacher takes his name and he sits down in front of me. I’m not sure if he saw me.
While Ms. Scope goes over the expectations of the class, what we’ll be doing, and when we’ll do it, I look at the back of Finny’s head. His mother probably thinks he needs a haircut, but I like it when it gets a little long. At the end of her speech, Ms. Scope says we must choose a partner for the semester, someone to play shuffleboard with and keep score in pool. Everyone looks around and whispers, pairing off as quickly as possible so as not to be left behind. Finny turns around and looks me in the eye.
“You want to?” he says.
“Sure,” I say. I think about standing at the bus stop with him that first day of freshman year, too awkward to even say hello back to him. We couldn’t have been partners that year, or maybe even last year. He’s still the most popular boy in our school, and I’m still the girlfriend of the misfits’ leader, but since we’re the only seniors in the class, we can be gym partners; it won’t look like it means anything.
Ms. Scope writes down every pair and tells us we are free for the rest of the period to shoot baskets or sit on the bleachers. Everyone else gets up or climbs higher to gossip in the corners. Finny and I stay sitting. He turns to me again. I’m not allowed to wear a tiara in gym, and I feel strangely exposed to him.
“So we’re seniors,” he says.
“Yeah,” I say.
Angie and Preppy Dave had sex the second weekend after school started.
“Where did you do it?” Sasha asks her. It’s lunchtime and the boys are flinging themselves around in the field, punching shoulders and calling names. The concrete step is warm through my jeans. I remember sitting exactly like this and listening to Brooke tell her story.
“We were in his car,” Angie says. “We didn’t plan on it,” she tells us. “It just kinda happened.” She doesn’t look upset though; she looks beautiful. There is a flush in her pale cheeks, and her eyes are bright.
“Really?” I say. I don’t understand how sex can happen by accident. After Jamie and I have been kissing for a long time, I tell him that we should stop, because that’s what the girl is supposed to say at some point. But I’ve never said that we should stop because I thought we actually needed to. I’ve never forgotten that we’re in his car, that the moment isn’t right.
“It hurt like hell, right?” Brooke says.
“Actually,” Angie says, “I threw up.”
“Oh my God,” I say. She looks at my face and laughs.
“Was he…you know, done?” Brooke says.
“Yeah,” Angie says. “But it was, like, right afterward.”
“You threw up in his car?” Sasha says. Angie shakes her head.
“No,” she says. “I rolled over onto my stomach, opened the door, and threw up in the driveway.”
“Oh,” I say. I can’t think of anything to say to this, but Sasha can.
“Wait, if you weren’t planning on it, did you use anything?”
“Well, no,” Angie says. “But it was just the once, and next time we’ll get some condoms, or, I don’t know, something.”
“It only takes once,” Brooke says.
“Mmmhmm,” Sasha says. “And you guys need to sit down and talk about birth control options before there can be a next time.”
“Guys,” Angie says. She sighs. “Don’t ruin this for me.”
I frown again. If being in the backseat of a car and vomiting in the driveway didn’t already ruin it, I’m not sure what we could do that would. I don’t understand how Angie could be happy with such a clich? place to lose her virginity. I don’t understand why Dave didn’t come to his senses when he remembered that there was no birth control. Brooke puts her arm around Angie.
“Sorry,” she says. “We’re happy for you, really.”
“Yeah,” Sasha says.
“Good,” Angie says, “’cause I can’t stop smiling and—” She sighs again. “I love him so much that every time I think of him holding me afterward, I just want to die.”
I would want to die too if I was Angie, but for different reasons. I don’t understand how something like this happens.
On the way home from school, I tell Jamie Angie’s story. He listens quietly and stares straight at the road.
“I mean, I guess I’m happy for her if she’s happy,” I say. “But doesn’t that sound horrible?”
“I dunno,” Jamie says. “I think it’d be cute if you threw up.”
“What?” Jamie looks calm.
He shrugs and smiles. “I’d hold your hair back for you and take care of you.”
“I won’t throw up,” I say.
“And you won’t do it in a car. I know, don’t worry.” Jamie pulls into my driveway.
“Well, not the first time,” I say.
“We’ll get a hotel room,” Jamie says. He glances over at me now. “A really nice one. And we’ll dress up and have an expensive meal first.”
“That sounds—” I pause “—nice.” I unbuckle my seat belt and turn toward him. Jamie kisses me, and I realize that, during that dinner, he will give me a charm for my bracelet, something subtle that only he and I will understand. It’s romantic, and I wish I hadn’t already thought of it so that it could be a surprise. I try my hardest to forget.
We’re playing badminton, and I just flinched when the plastic feather thingy flew at me. Even though it’s sitting right next to my sneaker, Finny walks over to pick it up. He backs up a few paces and holds up his racket. There are too many pairs of us to be able to use the nets, so we’re scattered in random intervals throughout the gym.
“Try again,” he says. “I’m hitting it to you slowly. It can’t hurt you.” I dutifully raise the racket. With exaggerated movements, Finny tosses it into the air and hits it gently toward me. I bat defensively at it and it bounces off my racket and arches toward the floor. Finny dives, but my poor return is too much for even him. He plucks the white thing off the shiny yellow boards of the gym and looks at me again.