The Way I used to Be

“TELL ME AGAIN,”
he says breathlessly, moving his fingers through my hair,
“why you can’t just be my girlfriend?”
“Why?” I groan. God, even if he is nice, he can annoy me.
“Because,” he mumbles, with his mouth against my neck, “I don’t like
thinking about you with other guys, you know. . . .” His voice trails off,
swallowed by his kisses.
“Then don’t.”
He stops and looks at me in that intense way he sometimes does that
terrifies me. “It’s not that easy to just not think about.”
I don’t answer. I know I’m supposed to tell him he has nothing to worry
about, that I’m all his, that there aren’t any other guys. But somehow, I can’t.
Instead, I say, “When would I even have time to spend with anyone else?
We’re together every night.”
He grins that grin of his, and I think, for just a moment, he’s going to let it
go. But finally, after all these weeks, he begins the conversation I assume must
have been on his mind ever since he realized my name was plastered all over
the bathrooms.
“So, I’m just curious . . . ,” he says, playing with a strand of my hair.
“About?”
“Who else did you, uh . . .” He trails off again.
“What?”
“Who else have you, you know, been with?” he finally finishes.
“Why?” I ask, and not in a nice way.
“I don’t know,” he mumbles.
“Does it matter?”
“I guess not.”
“Good.” Because I didn’t want to have to think about it, let alone talk
about it. I didn’t want to even acknowledge the fact that there had been
someone else.

---

“But . . . ,” he begins again, “I still wanna know.”
“Just pretend you’re the first, okay?” That’s what I’m doing, after all.
“That’s not what I meant. It’s not like it bothers me or anything. I was just
—”
“It bothers me.” Goddamn it, my stupid mouth—it needs to be wired shut.
I roll away from him so that I’m on my own side of the bed. I feel my
underwear down by my legs. I put them on under the sheets.
“What? Why? It’s not like I haven’t been with other girls.”
“Yeah, I guess.” It’s definitely not the same thing, though. I clamp my teeth
down on the insides of my cheeks—need to stop myself from saying anything
else. I taste blood, I bite harder.
“No big deal or anything, I just wondered is all.” He pauses a beat, two,
three, four, then inhales and says, “So . . . was it more than one person?”
“Seriously, Josh! I really, really don’t want to talk about this!”
“All right.” Pause. “I’ll tell you mine. . . .”
“No, don’t. I don’t care, okay? It doesn’t matter to me. I don’t want to
know.” Of course, I already knew his, because he was never exactly a low-
profile type. Until me. “And I don’t want to talk about this anymore. Really, I
mean it.”
“I just—sometimes I feel like I don’t know anything about you. It’s weird.”
“You do too.” But I know that’s not the complete truth.
He just sighs.
“All right, ask me anything else, really, anything else and I’ll tell you,
okay?”
“God, it must’ve been pretty bad, huh?” I turn my head to look at him;
there’s no other way to tell him how incapable I am of discussing this. “What?
I’m just saying the guy’s a fucking asshole. Whoever he is.”
“Why?” I smirk. “Because of all the nasty things written about me on the
bathroom walls?”
“You know about that?” he asks quietly. “Eden, you know that I don’t
believe any of those things, right? I mean, I know the truth.”
Truth. Truth! Truth? He doesn’t know shit about the truth. I open my
mouth, and I almost tell him that. “Never mind,” I mumble instead.

---

“What now? I’m just trying to—” I pull away from him. “Oh, come on. I’m
just trying to tell you I wouldn’t do that. I think that’s really shitty.”
It was a shitty thing to do. He’s right about that. I don’t say anything
though. We need to drop this immediately. I think he finally gets it too,
because he’s quiet for once. Quiet for a long time.
I stare up at the ceiling of his bedroom. His house is soundless like always
—parents sleeping or somewhere else, I don’t know which. I turn to look at
him, lying there, still facing me.
“Tell me a secret,” he whispers. I always get the sense he knows I have a
secret. A deep, dark one. “You know, something that I don’t know about you
—a secret.”
“Right.” I grin, trying to erase what just happened. “Because you don’t
know anything about me . . .” I’m only halfheartedly mocking him.
“I know,” he says, pulling me closer, covering my mouth with his, “that’s
why I want you to tell me something.” I wonder what he would say if I told
him. What he would do. If I told him my deep, dark, black-hole secret, the
one that had the potential to swallow up the entire universe.
“Okay, my middle name is Marie.” That’s a lie. My middle name is Anne.
“Now you?”
“That’s not a secret. I meant something real.” Kiss. “Matthew.”
“What?”
“Matthew,” he repeats. “Joshua Matthew Miller.”
“Oh.” Kiss. “That’s nice.” Kiss. “Tell me something else.”
“No, it’s your turn, Eden Marie McCrorey.” He smiles that crooked smile
of his and lays his head down on my chest, waiting for me to be honest, to
share some tidbit of truth with him, a detail, anything. I should’ve told him
then that Marie wasn’t really my middle name. He seemed to like saying it,
though, like he thought that small scrap of information made him know me a
little better, made him like me just a little more.
“I used to play clarinet in band.” True, although not really a secret, per se.
He lifts his head and grins at me. “You did not.”
“Yes, I did, I swear,” I tell him, putting my hand over my heart. “You can
even check the yearbook. But wait—don’t—because I looked like a real dork

---

last year.”
He laughs, still looking at me like he doesn’t quite believe me. “For real?”
“I was even in this book club thing last year,” I offer.
“You don’t seem like a book club kind of girl to me,” he says, eyeing me
suspiciously.
“I don’t?” I ask, pretending to be surprised. “I even started the book club
with Miss Sullivan.” I laugh.
A smile spreads across his face as he decides I’m telling the truth. “That’s
cute,” he finally says, grinning wider. “That’s really cute.”
“No, it’s not,” I mumble.
“No, it’s not. It’s kind of hot actually.” Then he kisses me seriously, deeply
—the kind of kisses that lead somewhere. But he stops and looks at me, his
eyes so soft. “You’re really beautiful, Eden,” he whispers.
I don’t ordinarily like to hear things like that—nice things—but maybe it’s
the tone of his voice or the look on his face. I smile. Not on purpose, but it’s
just that my face won’t let me not smile.
“You know, I already had sex with you,” I try to joke, “so you don’t have to
say stuff like that.”
“Stop, I mean it.” And then he leans in and kisses my lips, so sweetly.
Sometimes he uses his words like weapons to chip away at my icy exterior and
sometimes he can break through to the slightly defrosted layer beneath. But
then again, sometimes he just hits solid iceberg. For instance, he knows what
he’s doing when next he says, “And you should smile more too.”
I look away, embarrassed. He has no way of knowing how sometimes it
physically hurts to smile. How a smile can sometimes feel like the biggest lie
I’ve ever told.
“No, I love your smile,” he says, with his fingers on my lips, which only
makes my smile widen.
Only it doesn’t hurt this time.
“Eden Marie McCrorey . . . ,” he begins, like he’s giving some big lecture
about me, “always so serious and gloomy . . .”—my eulogy maybe—“but then
you have this great smile nobody ever gets to see. Wait, are you blushing?” he
teases. “I can’t believe it. I made Eden Marie McCrorey blush.”

---

“No, I’m not!” I laugh, placing my hands over my cheeks.
He takes my hands in his, though, and gently moves them away from my
face. “You know what I think?” he asks me.
“What do you think?” I echo.
“I think . . .” He pauses. “You’re not so tough—you’re not really so hard,”
he says seriously, his smile fading, “are you?”
My heart starts racing as he looks deeper into me. Because he’s right.
Tough girls don’t blush. Tough girls don’t turn to jelly when a cute boy tells
them they’re beautiful. And I’m terrified he’ll see through the tough iceberg
layer, and he’ll discover not a soft, sweet girl, but an ugly fucking disaster
underneath.
He brushes the hair out of my face and runs his index finger along the
two-inch scar above my left eyebrow. “How’d you get this?” he asks. “I’ve
been wondering, but every time I notice we’re—eh-hem—busy.” He smirks.
“And then I always forget to ask.”
I touch my head. I grin, remembering the sheer absurdity of the accident.
“What?” he asks. “It must be something embarrassing. . . .”
“It happened when I was twelve. I fell off my bike, had to get fifteen
stitches.”
“Fifteen? That’s a lot. Just from falling off your bike?”
“Well, not exactly. Me and Mara, we were riding our bikes down that big
hill, you know, the one at the end of my street?”
“Mm-hmm,” he murmurs, listening to me like I’m saying the most
interesting things he’s ever heard in his life, paying such close attention to
every word out of my mouth.
“And there’re those train tracks at the bottom, right?” I continue.
“Oh no.”
“Well, I guess at some point I kind of flipped over my handlebars and
rolled the rest of the way down the hill, that’s what Mara said, anyway. I don’t
really remember, think I blacked out. My face smashing into the tracks broke
my fall, though.”
“That’s terrible!” he says, even though he’s laughing really hard.

---

“No, it’s stupid. You should laugh at me. I’m the reason the town had to
put up fences at the end of all the streets in my neighborhood.”
That makes him laugh even harder. Me too.
Then I start thinking about everything that came after.
That was the day I fell in love with Kevin—or what I thought was love, with
the person I thought he was. And he knew it too. And he used it to get to me.
This was the day I wish I could go back to—the day I need to undo to stop it
all from happening. It was so hot, and the air so thick, it felt like my lungs
couldn’t even breathe it in. Mara and I were just two twelve-year-olds in our
pathetic two-piece bathing suits, which revealed nothing because we basically
had nothing, drawing with sidewalk chalk in my driveway, ice-cream-
sandwich ice cream dripping down our arms and legs.
We were drawing suns with smiley faces and rainbows and trees and
hideous, artless flowers. We played tic-tac-toe a few times, but it was boring
because no one ever won. We made a hopscotch court, but the cement was on
fire, too hot to hop on. I wrote in big bubbly pink letters, across the driveway:
MARA LUVS CAELIN
I only did it to embarrass her. So then Mara swung her two long braids
over her shoulders and hunkered down with a fat lump of pastel blue. In huge
block letters she wrote: