The Way I used to Be

part. After the first five minutes I’ve stopped reading them altogether. At
some point I shut my eyes instead. And right in that space between being
asleep and being awake, I hear my own voice, whining: “No, I wanna be the
dog—I’m always the dog, Kevin.”

---

And it’s like I’m back there, but not as myself. I’m there as someone else,
like a bystander sitting at the table with them, watching her slide into the seat
opposite him. It’s like I’m watching it in a movie—looking for signs of what’s
going to happen in only a few hours. He reaches his arm across the kitchen
table and places the little metal dog in front of her with a smile. “Thank you,”
the girl sings. She can feel her face turning pink, blushing for him.
“I guess I’ll be the hat.” He’s resigned.
“Be the shoe—the shoe’s better.” Their options were pretty limited. The
dog was obviously everyone’s first choice. They had lost the car several
summers earlier in an ill-fated outdoor game of Monopoly that got rained
out, so they were left with only the wheelbarrow, thimble, hat, and shoe. In
the girl’s mind, the shoe was at least a little more relevant than the others—it
could walk. Theoretically, anyway. Hat, thimble, and wheelbarrow just
seemed too arbitrary to her.
“Okay. If you think the shoe’s better, I’ll be the shoe.” He smiled across the
table at the girl. They placed their pieces on the GO square at the same time,
and she couldn’t tell if she had made their fingers brush against each other or
if he did. “You want me to be the banker, right?” he asked her. She nodded.
And her stomach suddenly felt sick, but in a strange, good way. He had
remembered that she hated being the banker. And she was flattered. Her face
was burning pink like a total idiot’s.
He made it around the board twice while she was stuck in the cheap
properties: Baltic Avenue, then Chance, which had her back up three spaces
to Income Tax. Monopoly had never been her game, anyway.
“Where’s my brother?” the girl asked him casually. It was unlike him to be
detached from Caelin. It was unlike him to be treating her like a human
being, to voluntarily be spending time with her like this.
“On the phone.” He rolled an eleven and bought St. Charles Place, giving
him a monopoly on the pink properties; he put two houses on Virginia.
“With who?” she asked, desperate to keep him talking to her. She rolled a
one and a two and wound up back on Chance: another fifteen dollars for Poor
Tax. “Shhhoot!” she said in her good-little-girl voice. She couldn’t possibly
have said shit.

---

Then he smiled at the girl in a way nobody had ever smiled at her before.
For the first time, she felt like she should be embarrassed to be wearing that
childish little flannel nightgown covered with tiny sleeping basset hounds in
front of him. “His girlfriend—who else?” he answered, taking the money from
her hand.
“Do you think she’s pretty?” she asked as she watched him roll two fours
and scoop up New York Avenue for the orange monopoly.
“I don’t know, yeah, I guess. Why?”
She shrugged. She had only seen pictures of her brother’s college
girlfriend, but she could tell the girl was really pretty. She didn’t know why
she suddenly cared if Kevin thought the girl was pretty or not. Maybe because
she knew deep down that she herself wasn’t. Because she was just all angles
and flatness. Because she didn’t look like a girl someone like Kevin might
think is pretty, and she was afraid she never would.
She rolled a six and a four. Community Chest: Go to jail. “Oh, come on! I
have to go to jail now?” she said, flipping the card over for him to see.
“Oh, shoot!” he mocked in a girly voice.
“Hey!” She grinned, but only once she realized he was making fun of her.
And then she kicked his foot under the table.
“Oww, okay, okay.” He put houses on Illinois Avenue and Marvin Gardens
while the girl waited to roll doubles to get out of jail.
When it was her turn, she shook the dice in both hands and then
unleashed them. A six landed off the board at the edge of the table and the
other fell on the floor under Kevin’s chair.
“Oooh, what is it? What is it?” she asked, trying to see.
“It’s a six,” he announced from under the table. He placed the die in the
center of the board, six side up. “You’re free.” He grinned.
“Was it really a six?” she asked him. After all, the girl was not a cheater.
“I swear to God,” he proclaimed, holding his hand up in an oath.
She looked across the table at him suspiciously, finally deciding. “I don’t
believe you.”
“Ouch. How do you not trust me by now? That hurts, Edy. Really.” He
spoke in a strange way, almost seriously, but not really because he was

---

smiling. The girl didn’t quite understand. All she knew is that it made her feel
nervous and excited at the same time. Like there was maybe something else
happening, but she wasn’t sure what.
“All right, I believe you—I trust you,” I hear the girl tell him.
I want to slap the girl. I want to stand up and sweep my arm across the
table, knocking over the little dog and the little shoe, the plastic houses and
the paper money. Because as the girl smiles demurely, I look in his eyes and I
see now what the girl couldn’t then: that this is the moment. He had been
thinking about it for some time and was pretty sure, I could tell, but this was
the moment he knew not only that he would do it, but that she would let him
get away with it.
“Good.” He grinned again. “It’s your turn.”
She moved her dog ahead, not thinking about anything except the way he
kept looking at her, like she was a girl and not just some annoying kid. She
pretended to have something in her eye so that she would have an excuse to
take her glasses off. “So,” she started, trying to sound as nonchalant as
possible, “do you have a girlfriend?” And I remember how her heart raced as
she waited, taking mental inventory of every pretty girl she’d ever seen him
with.
“Yes,” he answered, as if that was the most ridiculous question anyone had
ever uttered in the history of the world.
“Oh. Oh, you—you do?” She tried so hard to sound casual, but even she
knew she just sounded pathetic and sad. She rolled again and tried
desperately to add the two numbers together.
“That’s eight. You only moved seven,” he told her matter-of-factly. She
moved her dog one more spot. “Are you disappointed?” he asked, reading her
thoughts somehow.
She looked up at him. He was slightly blurry without her glasses.
“Disappointed? No. Why—why would I be?”
“Do you have a boyfriend?” he asked.
Her breath caught in her throat. She thought, for sure, he’s making fun of
her. “A boyfriend? Yeah, right,” she mumbled, reaching to pick up her
glasses. But suddenly the girl felt his hand on top of hers, just for a moment.

---

“You look good without your glasses, you know that?”
She literally could not breathe. “I . . . do? Really?” She tucked her messy,
grown-out bangs behind her ears. She passed GO, she collected her two
hundred dollars. Her heart skipped some vital beats.
“Yeah, I’ve always thought that.” He leaned in across the table ever so
slightly, looking at her intensely. “You still have that scar,” he said, touching
his own forehead in the place where her scar was, the place where my scar is
still.
She mirrored him, too bewildered by what was going on to make
sentences. She started to get scared she might actually faint.
“You remember that day?” he whispered, smiling through the words like it
was something to him, like that day meant something to him the way it meant
something to her. “In the emergency room,” he reminded her. “Your bike
accident?”
“Uh-huh,” she breathed. It was as if he knew that she thought about that
day all the time. How she thought it was probably the most romantic thing
that would ever happen to her in her entire life.
“So, do you want a boyfriend?” He narrowed his eyes at the girl. “You
finally like boys now, don’t you?”
“I—yeah, I do, but I—” She was confused, though. Because what was he
really asking her? It sounded, in a way, like he was asking if she wanted him to
be her boyfriend, but no. No, of course not, she told herself silently. She
looked down at her flat chest and thought, definitely no, that couldn’t be it.
Besides, he had a girlfriend—he’d just told her that. Plus, he was too old, too
mature for her, the girl thought. But, still, she couldn’t make sense of that
smile.
The girl’s brother emerged from his bedroom, standing at the head of the
table, looking at their game. “Kev, you don’t have to babysit her. She can
amuse herself, man.” He grinned. The girl didn’t even know that she was
supposed to be offended. She was supposed to get mad at her brother when he
said stuff like that about her. But she didn’t. Her brother disappeared into the
kitchen and returned seconds later with a bag of chips under his arm and two

---

beers in each hand. “Let’s go,” her brother whispered to Kevin, making sure
his father wouldn’t see them stealing his beer.
But the girl wanted to keep playing whatever game this was. She wanted to
finish. Because this, she thought, could be the biggest night of her life.
“Edy.” Caelin grabbed the girl’s attention. He pointed a finger at her and
then placed it against his lips, the universal sign of silence. “Got it?”
She nodded, thinking they were just so cool, feeling so special to be in on
their delinquency.
Kevin pushed his chair out and stood up. “Good game, Eeds.”
Then the boys left the room with their bootleg beer and chips. The girl
tried to breathe normally, and then she slid her glasses back on her face where
they belonged. She cleared away the colored money and the plastic houses,
the dog and the shoe. She folded the board up inside of the falling-apart box
and set it back on the game shelf in the hall closet where it belonged. But
something still felt out of place.
She tiptoed into the living room, kissed her mother and her father good
night, and sent herself to bed promptly at eleven. She knew because as she
shut her bedroom door, she heard the news say: “It’s eleven o’clock, do you
know where your children are?” She tucked herself in tight and pushed all her
stuffed animals away, up against the wall—stuffed animals were for kids, and,
God, how the girl was so sick of being a kid, that stupid, stupid girl.
As the girl closed her eyes, she was thinking of him. Thinking that maybe
he was thinking of her, too. But he wasn’t thinking of her in that way. He was
holding her in the palm of his hand, wrapping her around his fingers, one at a
time, twisting and molding and bending her brain. I try to whisper in the
girl’s ear: “Edy, get up. Just lock your door. That’s all you need to do. Lock
your door, Edy, please!” I shout, but the girl doesn’t hear me. It’s too late.
I open my eyes. I’m breathing heavy. My forehead is beaded with sweat. My
hands are wrapped tight around the edges of the cup holders. I look around
quickly. Mara touches my arm and whispers, “What are you doing? Are you
okay?”

---

I’m okay. I’m safe. It was a dream. Only a dream. And now I’m awake.
I nod my head and breathe the words, “Yeah. I’m okay.”

---