Page 48 of The Getaway List
He gives me a sleepy smile. He doesn’t look very punk rock right now with his mop of bed head and his sleep shirt and a pair of sweatpants with our school’s infamous earthworm screen-printed on the pocket. More like the little-kid version of himself he was back in elementary school, before he told his parents he would be dressing himself from now on, thank you very much, and promptly showed up to school the next day in a Snuggie. (At least his parents were amused, even if the principal was not.)
“How’d you sleep?” Jesse asks.
“Like a rock,” I say honestly. It was like my bones were too tired to process being a human anymore. “You?”
“Also like a rock. If the rock was in a volcanic explosion, that is.”
I wince as I settle down next to him, the fire escape creaking slightly and deeply uncomfortable against my butt, but otherwise sturdy enough to hold us. It’s quiet down below, a sharp contrast to the lively bar scene we could hear outside their window all night when we were up eating pizza and watching Eddie and Dai attempt to demolish each other in some video game. Now it’s just early-morning joggers and a slow-moving line outside the bagel shop below.
“You’ve had something on your mind, huh?” I say to Jesse.
He smiles wryly into his coffee mug. “Yeah. This feels like the incorrect time to pick your brain about it, though.”
“Nonsense,” I tell him. “My brain is extremely pickable right now.”
I mean it. The last thing I want to do is think about the conversation I had with Tom last night, because I still have so many unfinished thoughts and unanswered questions about it that I can’t risk following any of them too far down right now.
Jesse’s still staring at his coffee, considering. “Well. First of all, I should come clean about something.”
“If you’re about to make me an accomplice in a murder can I at least finish my coffee first?”
Jesse loosens up a bit at that, leaning farther into the brick wall. “I was the one who sent you those wildflowers.”
I blink. “Wait, really?”
“I thought maybe then you’d make the connection about the song? The, uh. The ‘Wildflower’ one we sang the first night we were all here,” says Jesse, uncharacteristically self-conscious. “It was about you.”
Before I can even process what he’s said, a string of the catchy lyrics swims through my head: You’re every season, always in bloom, you’ve got every color living in you / Forget where I’m planted, I’ll follow you, you’re a wildflower, always in bloom.
I feel my face start to flush—feel a lot of questions and thoughts coming on—but none as relevant as this: “When you introduced that song you said you wrote it two years ago.”
Jesse clears his throat. “Yeah, well.” He nudges someone’s abandoned cigarette butt with his slipper. “Two years ago I still wasn’t quite over you.”
“But,” I start, and then stop. Jesse doesn’t need my help to do the math on that. We stopped dating two years before that song was written. Which might mean something I’m hoping it doesn’t.
Jesse’s eyes are rueful when I lift mine to meet his.
“Jesse,” I say, not sure what’s hitting me harder, the confusion or the guilt.
He lifts a hand up. “Hey, I knew what I was getting into. You’re a heartbreaker, Riley Larson,” he says with a quirk of a smile, as if to play it off.
“I’m not.” I set my mug down, pressing my palm to my forehead as if it can make me process this faster. “Oh, shit. Jesse. I’m so sorry. I really didn’t know.”
“I know,” says Jesse quickly. “It’s not—I’m not upset with you. The whole thing was more my fault than yours, really. Looking back I get the sense that it was like—you weren’t in it the way I was. And why would you be? I never said anything. If I had then you would’ve known.”
I run a hand through the tangle of my hair, trying hard to put myself in past me’s shoes. It only makes the guilt in my chest widen. That year feels like all the others in high school—like a Band-Aid that got ripped off so fast that I didn’t feel the ouch of it until it was already over. So fast that in retrospect, I was barely considering anybody else.
“I guess it’s just been on my mind lately, now that we’re hanging out more again,” says Jesse. “Enough that I felt like I had to pull that song out, and send those flowers anonymously. Like getting some closure by doing some of the stuff I probably should have done when we were actually together, you know?”
I’m about to protest, but the way Jesse’s blinking with hesitation it’s clear that he has more to say first. When he does his voice is so thin it feels like it’s evaporating in the air between us.
“When we broke up, was it—something I did?” he asks. “Or was there some way it would have been different?”
“Oh, Jesse,” I say, feeling like something in my chest is crumbling. I lean in so fast that the fire escape gives an unholy creeeak beneath us. “Fuck. No. You’re one of my best friends. I love every second of hanging out with you. I really just—I had no idea you ever wondered that or I would have said that a hundred thousand times, directly into your ear. Announced it on the damn loudspeaker at school.”
Jesse laughs and says, “All right, all right.”
“I mean it,” I say effusively. “And as for breaking up—I feel terrible. I really thought it was mutual. This is a shit excuse, but—on my end it felt almost like we hadn’t really started dating in the first place. It didn’t seem like there was an ending to it so much because we never really said anything when it began.”
