Page 108 of Fundamentals of Being a Good Girl
“But,” she says raggedly, “there’s this.” A big oval smashing against everything else she’s drawn. No squiggles, but she tilts her hand sideways and starts writing without stopping.What if I’m wrong what if I’m making the same mistake what if I’m weak for falling in love right after a breakup what if this ruins my future what will people say what if I love you more than you love me—
I push out of my desk chair, my skin made of sparks, my heart both doing too much of its job and not enough, and I walk to the board. She doesn’t move, one arm still lifted to her badly sketched vacuole, her shoulders moving with every breath.
Even in her heels, she’s so much shorter than me, and it’s too easy to take the marker from her. I start drawing something like a ribbon folded unevenly on itself, with little circles around it. She stays frozen, but frozen in a way where I think she feels—as I do—the vanquishing gravity of the single inch between us. The way that every movement of my hand, every deep breath, shrinks the space between us to almost nothing.
I finish drawing. The Golgi apparatus. The processing and shipping department of the cell. “What if you’re wrong?” I ask her.
“What?” she whispers, sounding dazed. I wish I could see her face.
“What you wrote in the vacuole—I’m asking you to answer the question because that’s what a classroom is for. Answering questions. So what happens if you’re wrong about needing me?”
“Then I—” A breath. “I’ll be okay. It’ll hurt a lot, but I’ll be okay.”
“And if you’re making the same mistake that you made with Gentry?”
“I can’t be,” she murmurs. “Because I’m not the same person who made that mistake. I might make different ones, but not that one ever again.”
“And what if it ruins your future?”
Her voice is stronger now, threaded with relief. “No one else gets to define ruin for me. Not anymore.”
“Professor Kowalczk, turn around and tell me who loves whom more.”
She takes a second. A long second, and I know that I’ve done something unfathomably stupid, that I’m laying my soul bare for her again, but I want this—this anatomy of us, this diagram of our broken edges, of our rupture, to mean what I think it means. I want to hope. I want to look into her eyes and feel something vital take root between us.
She does turn, and when she looks up at me, there’s a shine in her viridian eyes. “I don’t know.”
I cup her jaw, gently, and she trembles. “You don’t?” I ask tenderly.
“It can’t be you,” she says thickly. “Because I love you so much that even my ribosomes hurt with it.”*
The confession makes me close my eyes. I’m floating, a spore, a samara off a maple tree, spinning and spinning.*
“You love me.”
“I love you,” she repeats in a whisper. “I love you and it scares the hell out of me.”
She turns again and takes the marker. I open my eyes to see her draw a cell wall around everything—nucleus, chloroplasts, vacuole, Golgi apparatus, and mitochondria.*She writes next to it.
I fucked up. I’m sorry. I love you.
I find her fingers around the marker, wrap my fingers around both, and then write my response.
I love you. There’s nothing to forgive.
“I lied,” she whispers. “About things only being physical between us. It was so much more, and I knew it, but I lied anyway. And I thought your past meant we could have no future, but watching Gentry’s secrets unravel on national television...” A shaky laugh. “Bram, your past is everything I need for my future. I need a partner in crime and I need someone to pull me back when I want to go too far. I need someone who’s charted a path along the edges of morality, and I need someone who found their way back again. I need someone to give me five different layers of advice, who will be as merciless on my behalf as I am for the things I care about, who will make sure I never stand alone, no matter where I find myself.”
I drop my lips to her head. Her hair is the glossiest silk. Jasmine is everywhere.
“Forgive me for lying,” she breathes. “Forgive me for clutching a dream I didn’t even want in the end. Forgive me for being so preoccupied with what a just-broken-up woman is supposed to do that I couldn’t even see what Iwantedto do.”
A dream I didn’t even want in the end.“You no longer want to run for office?”
A small shake of her head, like she’s being careful of my lips on her hair. “There’s a way to do so much more, behind the scenes.That’swhere I’m meant to be. That’s what I’m going to do.”
“Whatever you want,” I murmur, and I mean it. Whatever she wants, whatever she needs. I’ll be behind her, beside her, underneath her when she needs to sit on my lap and hear about how perfect she is.
“Forgive me,” I add now, guiding the marker down to the tray and then finding her waist with my hands. “Forgive me for breaking our rules. Forgive me for pushing for more when you’d made your lines in the sand clear. Forgive me my greediness, that I want so much of you, to keep you and care for you, to be the soil and water and sun. That I love you past all logic even though logic demands I should let you go now, that you should get a chance to build your life without a lonely dad weighing you down.”
