“She always had headphones on. Like, always. Even when she wasn’t listening to music, she had them around her neck. One day I was walking past just as she was pulling them off her ears. I heard her playing some remix of an MGMT track and said something about it. I don’t even remember what. I did it without thinking. I’d been trying to come up with a way to talk to her for weeks, and it just happened.”
“Did she tell you to fuck off?”
“How’d you know?” I deadpan. “Yeah, she said something to that effect. I had an in now, though. Every time I got a chance, I’d ask her opinion on some DJ or band. Usually she’d just glare at me or say something sarcastic, but one day we ended up getting into this huge debate about Sufjan Stevens.”
“Oh my god, you and Sufjan Stevens.”
“Hey!” I snap as I give Sufjan a scratch behind his ears. “Sufjan Stevens is a fucking deity. Paige said he was overrated, and somehow, that led to us developing a friendship of sorts.”
“Wack.”
“Yeah. It was.” I grin at the memory of those early days. It was such a thrill to be around her, like discovering a brand new sound. Just walking next to her in the halls made me feel electrified by the new beat running through my body. “It took some time, but eventually we were doing things like going to the park after school to talk shit and listen to music. She was still super mysterious and wouldn’t say much, but this one night she texted me to say she had a bottle of wine.”
“Oh, damn.”
“I mean...yeah,” I admit. “By then, that’s what I was thinking too, but it didn’t go down like that. We just...talked. A lot. About everything. I found out she’s biracial too—tri-racial, actually, and we had all this other crazy stuff in common. It was like I already knew her, you know? Like I was remembering things as she said them instead of hearing them for the first time. I was sixteen. I’d never felt anything like that before. It all just felt so...huge. So important. I didn’t know what to do with it. I don’t think she did either. So we stayed friends for a while. I bought my first DJ controller for Christmas that year, and she’d come over so we could mess around on it together. I mean, this girl was there for basically the beginning of everything I am now. So much of what I am is because of her. I know that sounds stupid since it was so long ago, but shit matters more when you’re that age. It sticks with you in a way things don’t when you’re older. People stick with you.”
I’ve gotten so worked up I’ve stopped patting Sufjan. He lifts his head and butts it against my hand to ask for more.
“What happened?” Nabil asks. “It must have been bad.”
I’ve tried to tell myself it wasn’t, that it shouldn’t matter so much, that in the end, it made a lot of sense.
I’ve never been able to believe it.
“Her mom was kind of crazy. She was obsessed with making Paige and her sister famous. If you tell anyone this, Paige will kill us both, but she can sing. I’ve never heard her sing, but her mom had been hauling the two of them off to singing auditions all the time since they were little kids. One day, Paige...”
I trail off. That’s not my part of the story to share.
“Well, she just got sick of it. She decided to run away. She showed up at my bedroom window at like seven in the morning and said we should skip school and take the train to Toronto. I didn’t know she wasn’t planning on coming back, so I went with it. We had this...this fucking perfect day.”
We walked around for hours, ate the craziest food we could find, and somehow managed to sneak into a show that night. I still remember the way her face looked under all the flashing lights.
“Then she told me she wasn’t going back. I knew I couldn’t just leave her in Toronto. I made all these promises about being there for her, about how she just needed to make it through high school and then we’d figure it out. I know I was just a kid, but I meant it. I kissed her on the train ride home, and after that...I mean we never put a label on it, but we were together.”
I wait for another ‘awww cute’ comment, but Nabil stays quiet.
“Of course, her mom flipped when she got home and basically put her on house arrest, but we were teenagers, so that just made us even more determined to see each other as much as we could. The whole rest of my senior year...It was fucking amazing. She meant everything to me.”
She was my first in so many ways. I may not have gone all the way with a girl until college, but when I think of firsts, it’s always of her. I felt and shared things with her that I’d never experienced with anyone else. It wasn’t just our bodies; it was our hearts and minds too. I opened my whole soul up to her and let her carry it away to keep beside her at night.
“We had all these plans for after I graduated, all the stuff we’d do when she came to visit me in Montreal, how we’d live together once she finished high school. They were stupid dreams, but we believed in them. Or at least I did.”
I hesitate, but I have to keep going. I need to get this out.
“A couple weeks before I was supposed to move into my dorm, I wrote her this letter. The only way I could ever visit her at her house was by going through her bedroom window, so I did that one day when she wasn’t home and left it in her room.”
“Not creepy at all,” Nabil quips. He has a point.
“Well, I was eighteen,” I defend myself. “I thought it was romantic or something. That letter was the most honest thing I’ve written in my life. I told her...everything. I promised it all again.”
I told her everything I felt about her, everything I wanted with her, everything I’d give her if she’d let me. I shared all my fears about our future and all the hopes that reminded me I had nothing to be afraid of.
I told her I loved her.
Sufjan hisses when I tighten my grip on his fur too much. I give him an apologetic stroke, but the tension doesn’t leave my body. All my muscles are tensed at the memory of the pain.
“And then?” Nabil asks.
