I cross my arms over my chest, and Luke anxiously clears his throat. I think he knows he’s about to get kicked out, so he races through the rest of the story.
“Anyway, you came up to me after the fight and helped me. You gave me your sweater to stop the bleeding. It was totally ruined. I thought it was poetic or something to give you my sweatshirt that day outside the gym,” he says as an aside, gesturing to the hoodie I’m wearing. “But of course, you didn’t get that,” he adds.
“I can’t help it!” I shout.
“I know,” Luke says. “I didn’t mean it like that.” He shifts and I check the clock. I hope with all my might that my mother doesn’t come home and interrupt our conversation.
“It’s almost ten,” Luke says.
“I can tell time,” I fire back at him.
“Do you want me to leave?”
“Yes,” I say harshly. “But finish first.”
“Okay, well, anyway, at camp, the day after the fight, I came up to you and said hello, and you didn’t remember who I was. At first, I was hurt. I thought you were pretending not to know me. Like you were too cool or something. But you were nice, and chatty. So, I thought you had amnesia or something. I asked you if there was something wrong with your brain. You said, ‘No, is there something wrong with yours?’ ”
One corner of Luke’s mouth turns up a little as he remembers the exchange. He waits a beat, and then continues.
“Anyway, I kept asking in different ways, and finally you pulled me to a corner and told me that you had a big secret. That you remembered the future but not the past. You made me swear not to tell anyone, and I never did.”
Luke pauses, and I stare at him silently. Realizing he’s not getting props for secret keeping, he goes on.
“So, every day, we’d meet each other again. We had a lot of the same conversations over and over. But we had a lot of new ones, too. Sometimes we’d sit in the bottom of one of those climbing things that looked like Swiss cheese, and try to figure out who the kids were by the shoes they had on. It was really fun. You were good at that game.”
I am taken aback by the realization that the “foot game” I’ll play forever came from my childhood relationship with Luke. I’m curious about that, but I hold back. Anger is easier right now.
Luke’s smiling wistfully, which makes me even madder. I roll my eyes and let out my breath, and he gets it. Nostalgia wiped clean from his face, he goes on. “When I moved here I thought maybe you’d remember me. But then, especially that night we fell asleep in the van… I knew for sure.”
There is a little tug on my heart when I hear the sadness in his voice. But I hold my ground.
“Is that it?”
“London, I’m really sorry for not telling you sooner,” he says, taking two slow steps toward me, like he’s approaching a wild animal.
Instinctively, I edge backward, away from the guy I couldn’t get close enough to minutes ago.
“You mean you’re sorry for lying,” I say harshly. “For betraying me. For taking advantage of my situation.”
“That’s a little extreme,” Luke says with a small laugh. “I mean, you’ve pretty much been lying to me, if you think about it.” He almost smirks now, which sends me into a tailspin.
“It’s not the same!” I shout at him. “You have no idea how it feels to completely forget every single day. I wake up not knowing what I wore to school the day before, let alone what stupid things I may have said or done. I remember things that no one—no one—should have to anticipate experiencing. Horrible things. Things that are going to happen to me…”
Tears are streaming down my face now. Luke takes another step toward me and I put up a hand to stop him. I keep ranting through the sobs.
“I’ve got enough going on, and now this. My best friend has gone off the deep end. My mom is lying to me, and apparently you’ve been lying, too.”
Something hits me and I interrupt myself.
“Wait, if I knew you, why didn’t my mom tell me that when she met you again? Or was that just another one of her lies? Were you in this together?”
Luke looks down and away. His cheeks flush.
“I never met her in person, and she wouldn’t know my name because I went by something else back then.”
“What?” I ask, curious despite my anger.
“L.J.” Luke says sheepishly. “I thought I was tough, and that all tough guys went by their initials.” He takes another step.
“Stop,” I command, finding no amusement in Luke’s childish confession. “Whatever your name is or was, the point is that you lied. You could have pieced together some of my past for me. You could have actually helped me, Luke. Can’t you see that? But you didn’t. You willingly deceived me. I can’t believe you’d do that to me. To someone you supposedly love. To someone who thought she loved you.”
Luke’s face falls and he’s silent for a few seconds. Then he brushes away two tears that escape his blue eyes. He looks helpless, and part of me wants to hug him.
Instead, when I can control myself enough to speak again, I say, almost choking, “Just go.”
“London, I’m so sorry. I didn’t think it would upset you this much. I wasn’t trying to…” His voice fades and his head hangs for a moment. Then he looks up at me and our eyes hold steady. “I just didn’t want you to have to feel self-conscious around me.”
I shake my head and back out of the kitchen doorway so that he can leave. His shoulders are slumped as he walks by me on the way to the foyer.
From the kitchen, I hear him put on his shoes and then open and quietly close the front door behind him. I hear the van start and rev; when its gentle hum fades into the night, I crumble to the kitchen floor.
Despite it being after midnight, my hushed ringtone sounds from beneath the pillow for the third time in an hour. There are voice mails waiting to be deleted once I can touch my phone without accidentally answering his call.
It’s amazing how much stuff one can accumulate after dating someone only four months. A mini-mountain of notes and photos are piled high in the fancy hatbox from my closet. The hatbox is meant for mementos. Instead, it will be a time capsule never intended to see the light of day.
Girls the world over will be envious of my ability to dole out the perfect heaping of revenge to the boy who wronged me. Done crying now, I summon the ability that I and I alone seem to possess, and channel what surely would be Jamie’s sound advice were she here to give it.
“Forget him,” she’d say.
“Good plan,” I say aloud.
Sweeping away the sweetness and focusing on the bad, I smash the hatbox pile to make room for the last few items. Before closing the lid, I add the note scratched in barely dry ink, explaining what he did to deserve this fate should I uncover the box in the future.
The note for my mom is on the kitchen table: the one that summarizes the breakup and instructs her never to speak of Luke again.
The job is almost complete.
I delete the voice mails without listening to them and erase his number from my cell. When I’m positive that my mom is out cold, I sneak to the basement to hide my failed relationship among old kitchen appliances, boxes of notes from years gone by, and worn toys littering the junk closet beneath the stairs.
