I changed the subject. Abruptly, I asked, “Are you going to stay in California after you graduate?”
“It depends on med school,” he said.
“Are you … do you have a girlfriend?”
I saw him start. I saw him hesitate.
“No,” he said.
Chapter Thirty-two
Conrad
Her name was Agnes. A lot of people called her Aggie, but I stuck with Agnes. She was in my chem class. On any other girl, a name like Agnes wouldn’t have worked. It was an old-lady name. Agnes had short dirty-blond hair, it was wavy, and she had it cut at her chin. Sometimes she wore glasses, and her skin was as pale as milk. When we were waiting for the lab to open up one day, she asked me out. I was so surprised, I said yes.
We started hanging out a lot. I liked being around her. She was smart, and her hair carried the smell of her shampoo not just fresh out of the shower but for a whole day. We spent most of our time together studying. Sometimes we’d go get pancakes or burgers after, sometimes we’d hook up in her room during a study break when her roommate wasn’t around. But it was all centered around both of us being premed. It wasn’t like I spent the night in her room or invited her to stay over in mine. I didn’t hang out with her and her friends or meet her parents, even though they lived nearby.
One day we were studying in the library. The semester was almost over. We’d been dating two, almost three, months.
Out of nowhere, she asked me, “Have you ever been in love?”
Not only was Agnes good at o chem, she was really good at catching me off guard. I looked around to see if anyone was listening. “Have you?”
“I asked you first,” she said.
“Then yes.”
“How many times?”
“Once.”
Agnes absorbed my answer as she chewed on her pencil. “On a scale of one to ten, how in love were you?”
“You can’t put being in love on a scale,” I said. “Either you are or you aren’t.”
“But if you had to say.”
I started flipping through my notes. I didn’t look at her when I said, “Ten.”
“Wow. What was her name?”
“Agnes, come on. We have an exam on Friday.”
Agnes made a pouty face and kicked my leg under the table. “If you don’t tell me, I won’t be able to concentrate.
Please? Just humor me.”
I let out a short breath. “Belly. I mean, Isabel. Satisfied?”
Shaking her head, she said, “Uh-uh. Now tell me how you met.”
“Agnes—”
“I swear I’ll stop if you just answer”—I watched her count in her head—“three more questions. Three and that’s it.”
I didn’t say yes or no, I just looked at her, waiting.
“So, how did you meet?”
“We never really met. I just always knew her.”
“When did you know you were in love?”
I didn’t have an answer to that question. There hadn’t been one specific moment. It was like gradually wak-ing up. You go from being asleep to the space between dreaming and awake and then into consciousness. It’s a slow process, but when you’re awake, there’s no mistaking it. There was no mistaking that it had been love.
But I wasn’t going to say that to Agnes. “I don’t know, it just happened.”
She looked at me, waiting for me to go on.
“You have one more question,” I said.
“Are you in love with me?”
Like I said, this girl was really good at catching me off guard. I didn’t know what to say. Because the answer was no. “Um …”
Her face fell, and then she tried to sound upbeat as she said, “So no, huh?”
“Well, are you in love with me?”
“I could be. If I let myself, I think I could be.”
“Oh.” I felt like a piece of shit. “I really do like you, Agnes.”
“I know. I can feel that that’s true. You’re an honest guy, Conrad. But you don’t let people in. It’s impossible to get close to you.” She tried to put her hair in a ponytail, but the front pieces kept falling out because it was so short. Then she released her hair and said, “I think you still love that other girl, at least a little bit. Am I right?”
“No,” I told Belly.
“I don’t believe you,” she said, tilting her head to one side. Teasingly, she said, “If there wasn’t a girl, why would you stay away for so long? There has to be a girl.”
There was.
I’d stayed away for two years. I had to. I knew I shouldn’t even be at the summer house, because being there, being near her, I would just want what I couldn’t have. It was dangerous. She was the one person I didn’t trust myself around. The day she showed up with Jere, I called my friend Danny to see if I could crash on his couch for a while, and he’d said yes. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I couldn’t leave.
I knew I had to be careful. I had to keep my distance.
If she knew how much I still cared, it was all over. I wouldn’t be able to walk away again. The first time was hard enough.
The promises you make on your mother’s deathbed are promises that are absolute; they’re titanium. There’s no way you’re breaking them. I promised my mother that I would take care of my brother. That I would look after him. I kept my word. I did it the best way I could.
By leaving.
I might have been a f**kup and a failure and a disappointment, but I wasn’t a liar.
I did lie to Belly, though. Just that one time in that crappy motel. I did it to protect her. That’s what I kept telling myself. Still, if there was one moment in my life I could redo, one moment out of all the shitty moments, that was the one I’d pick. When I thought back to the look on her face—the way it just crumpled, how she’d sucked in her lips and wrinkled her nose to keep the hurt from showing—it killed me. God, if I could, I’d go back to that moment and say all the right things, I’d tell her I loved her, I’d make it so that she never looked that way again.
Chapter Thirty-three
Conrad
That night in the motel, I didn’t sleep. I went over and over everything that had ever happened between us. I couldn’t keep doing it, going back and forth, holding her close and then pushing her away. It wasn’t right.
When Belly got up to shower around dawn, Jere and I got up too. I was folding my blanket up when I said, “It’s okay if you like her.”