Filed to story: If He Had Been With Me Book PDF Free
“That’s true,” he says.
“Will you come?”
Finny shrugs. “Your friends won’t mind?”
“We already discussed it,” I say. It’s an accurate way to describe the argument this proposition caused on the steps this morning, but he doesn’t need to know that.
***
“Look, you guys,” I said, “I’m not having all these people over unless I know Aunt Angelina won’t say anything.”
“And you think having Alexis and Sylvie over will make the party seem tame?” Sasha said.
“Having Finny over will,” I say.
“I don’t see what the big deal is anyway,” Noah says. “I figured he’d be coming. He lives next door.”
“If he comes, they’ll all come,” Jamie says. “They never do anything alone.”
“Neither do we,” Brooke says.
“I do not want to hang out with them,” Jamie says.
“Me neither,” says Sasha.
“How about this,” Alex says. “If they try to come near you, I’ll pelt them with candy corn.”
“You don’t have to,” I say. “I doubt they want to hang out with us either.”
“But you think they’ll come if you ask them?” Jamie asks.
“If I ask Finny, yeah,” I say. “And I’m going to.”
***
Finny bends down and ties his shoe.
“Okay,” he says, “we’ll come.”
“Awesome,” I say. “But I didn’t think it would be hard to convince a big partier like you.”
“I’m not really. Mostly I just stand there. And I’m almost always driving Sylvie home, so I can’t drink.”
“Sounds like fun. So why do you go?”
Finny looks away and shrugs. “Sylvie needs someone to look after her,” he says.
“Oh,” I say. It’s as if someone has opened a window and a cold breeze is fluttering around us. And suddenly it’s unbelievable again that I could invite Finny—and Sylvie!—to the Halloween party with all my friends. Finny and Sylvie were Homecoming King and Queen this year. Up on stage, Finny looked miserable and blushed while they crowned him, and Sylvie beamed at the crowd. They held hands. I can’t have them in my house.
“Well, thanks for the favor. You don’t have to stay the whole time if you want,” I say.
“It’s fine,” Finny says, and I know he can feel it too. We sit in silence for the rest of class.
I open my notebook and turn to a fresh page.
“Okay, remember the rules, no crossing words out, no stopping. Ready?” Mr. Laughegan says. We look at him expectantly. “Your strongest memory. Go!” I bend over my desk and my hand flies across the page.
The night
Finny kissed me
I—
My hand recoils from the page as if burned. This isn’t the right answer. That isn’t my strongest memory. That’s the memory I’ve tried so hard not to have. I can’t possibly remember it well enough to write it down.
“It’s a stream of consciousness, Autumn. Don’t stop.”
I can’t disobey Mr. Laughegan.
The night
Finny kissed me
I didn’t know what to do.
***
We’d hardly spoken for weeks. All autumn we had drifted and drifted away from each other, and I never knew what to say to him anymore. That last week of school before break in eighth grade, we had even stopped walking to the bus stop together. My mother asked me if we had had a fight.
But then it was Christmas Eve. My mother and I came over, and I sat down next to him on the couch, and there weren’t the other popular girls or our different classes or the way the kids at school thought our friendship was strange. There was only our family together and the tree and our presents and we watched
It’s a Wonderful Life together while The Mothers made dinner.
We didn’t talk about how things had been different, because suddenly everything was the same again. On Christmas morning, we laughed and threw balled up wrapping paper at each other. It was unseasonably warm that afternoon; we went into the backyard and for the hundredth time he tried to teach me to play soccer. The next day, he came over and we made a fort in the attic. We lay on our backs and looked at the sunlight bleeding through the ripped quilt above our heads, and I told Finny the plot of the novel I was going to write, about a kidnapped princess whose ship sinks and she has to start a new life among the natives of the island she washes up on.
For a week, we were us again, and I forgot to call Alexis back, and Finny shone his flashlight in my window at night. We made popcorn and watched movies. We took silly pictures of each other with his mother’s camera. I made paper snowflakes and he hung them in the windows.
It had been like rushing down a swift river. I had been swept away from Finny and into popularity without the chance to come up for air. But now I was breathing again, and I thought we could find a way to stay friends. I don’t know what he thought.
We had one week. And then it was New Year’s Eve. My parents were going out, and I was going to stay with Finny and Aunt Angelina until they came home. After dinner, Finny and I baked a cake with his mother, and while it was in the oven, we sat at the kitchen table and made increasingly silly lists of resolutions, that we would befriend ducks and build jet packs, meet five dead celebrities, and eat an uncut pizza starting from the middle.
“Here’s a real one,” Finny said. “Let’s build a tree house this summer.”
“Okay,” I said. “Can I paint it?”
“Sure.”
“Any color I want?”
“Yeah.”
“Even if it’s pink?”
“If that’s what you want.” Finny added it on the bottom of the list, drew a dash, and added a notation on color schemes. “I missed you,” he said, his head still down. My throat tightened. He looked up. We stared. I don’t know what my face looked like. His cheeks were pink, and I remember thinking that his eyes looked different, darker somehow. And something else. Something had changed in the weeks we had been apart, but I couldn’t place it.
“Finny, Autumn, it’s almost time,” Aunt Angelina called. Finny broke our gaze first, and went to grab wooden spoons and pots for us to bang.
When the moment came, we ran down the lawn together, and the neighbors were setting off fireworks and we stood on the sidewalk and whooped and banged and watched. Finny was louder than I had ever seen him be before. He yelled and his voice cracked; he raised the pot above his head and it clanged like a gong. It unsettled me slightly, like his eyes. He didn’t seem the same anymore.