And I would do anything to see you again.

Ten years ago, a boy said to me, Is there a phone in here that I can use?

No, I said snottily. There is not.

 

Val and I continued rifling through the vanity, extracting old maroon lipsticks with cracked cases and grubby, flaking makeup sponges. The pads of our fingers turned shimmery blue and green and gray as they brushed against the broken eyeshadows in the bottom of the drawers. This was our thing – we’d go to parties and pillage the makeup drawers of the unfortunate parents who’d left town for the weekend. Or, in this case, the ill-fated neighbors who’d asked a graduating senior to housesit while they were on vacation.

 

There’s a phone right there, he said, pointing to the messy bed.

Indeed, there was a phone there, sleeping between the tangled sheets.

So use it, then, Val said while flicking her cheeks with pink blush.

 

The boy used the phone and left. When he opened the door, the sounds of the party charged through – it was the noise of an old Outkast album, screaming girls, and growling young men. And cars, there was the noise of cars pulling up outside. We had graduated high school earlier in the day. I was seventeen.

 

Hours later, Val and I were leaving. Dirk from the football team had already slid an empty beer bottle up under my shirt and between my breasts, and Jeremy from Spanish Honor Society had declared his heartfelt love for Val after vomiting in a potted plant. High school boys were so not our destiny, me and Val. We had jobs in mortgage banks and wore push-up bras. We dated men who got off on our youth and innocence. High school, and specifically graduation from high school, was an optional extra, and we’d made the very conscious decision to immerse ourselves in it one last time, knowing we’d never look back.

 

The boy who had used the phone now stood on the porch with a friend. They definitely didn’t attend our high school.

 

You’re crashing, Val says as we pass them. Are you even seniors?

No, the boy says. We’re juniors at Creek.

Naughty, naughty. Don’t let the football boys know, I chide.  They will bury you in the yard.

 

Val and I go to her car, an old 1961 Valiant and open the doors. The boys follow us like puppies. We learn that they have the same name, spelled differently, and they are best friends. One is stocky with dark hair. The other one is angelic – blonde, tall, sinewy. This one will be mine.

 

–

 

He calls two nights later. It is close to midnight. I tiptoe into Mother’s room and kneel beside her as she sleeps. Father sleeps like he’s dead, hands folded neatly on his chest.

Mom, I whisper and I can see her slick pink eyelids moving in the darkness.

Mom?

Hmmm…?

That boy called. I’m going to go watch a movie with him, ok?

Suddenly, she’s alert. She turns her head ever so slightly and peers at me, saying, Go. Just don’t tell your father.

 

–

 

We sit close on the couch and pretend to watch a movie. We kiss and I rub his hands in mine, wringing them into malleability, until they are warm and soft and limp like little dying mammals.

 

We are the first ones through the doors of McDonalds when they open for breakfast. Over pancakes, coffee, and McMuffins, he says to me, This was the best night ever. When I propose to you someday, it’s going to be over pancakes at McDonalds.

 

We say goodbye. I drive around the corner to Val’s house, and hoist myself down into the window well of the basement, cupping my hands around my eyes and putting them to the glass. She is fast asleep in bed. I knock gently and she gets up, slides the window open, and lets me in. We crawl into her bed and before we fall asleep, I tell her that I’ve fallen in love.

 

–

 

Our parents, seeing that we are inseparable, don’t really try to keep us apart that summer. At the same time, they don’t really acknowledge that they are allowing their teenage lovers to have sleepovers every night. Every day is the same. We work our day jobs and I go to his house where we listen to music and lay on his bed. His parents have adopted me into the fold of their family. My parents begin to think of him as a son. We beg to have the other go on family vacations because we can’t bear to be apart. On a camping trip, we make love in a tent beside his parents tent. On a roadtrip, we make love in the back of the van while his mother drives. Away at my brother’s baseball tournament, we sneak off into the woods and make love on the prickly, lumpy ground.

 

In the fall, I turn eighteen. He gives me a gold ring – the tiniest chip of a diamond on the skinniest gold band. It is inscribed on the inside with a secret message. He slides it onto my left hand ring finger.

 

He wants to be a firefighter. I want to be a writer. My beautiful firefighting husband-to-be. We name our phantom children, future pets. We pick our house, a rambling ranch house west of downtown with a weeping willow in the front yard. It is, in the most exquisite and clichéd way, a summer of love.

 

We will be together forever, forever, forever.

 

Then I go away to college and nothing is the same again ever, ever, ever.

 

–

 

He sees me through eating disorder therapy.

We watch my house burn down and he holds me while I cry, tears cutting through the black soot that covers my face.

We had arguments about how much I’m not eating, and about the friendly backrubs I receive from boys at the college dorm. By late winter, he’s on the outs with his parents because he’s failing school due to spending so much time on the road, sneaking off in his car to drive up to campus. We talk about to running away to Mexico and fail, laughably so.  

 

On Valentine’s Day, we sit on the carpet in his bedroom and cry as I break up with him. Our lives are too different – he’s in high school – when he actually goes to school – and I’m in college. College means college men, and well, he is still a boy.

 

–

 

In the grandest of gestures, he makes a poster with photos of me. It displays my height, weight, eye color, hair color, and a description of my personality.

 

The text, in short, says WANTED: My girlfriend back.

 

He copies it hundreds of times and plasters the campus, enveloping the university and entire student body in his love for me.

 

–

 

A few years pass and we don’t speak or see one another.  I am living on my own in a ground floor apartment with a crooked, crumbling concrete slab for a patio. One night, late, I’m in my local Target, staring blankly at a display of folded t-shirts and then he’s right there.

 

Hey.

Hey.

 

It turns out he lives next door to me and we never knew it. He’s in a relationship and has a baby on the way. I am very much a loner, spending all my time working and seducing strange men. 

 

We have officially drifted., just two bobbing boats on the same sea. Except his boat appears to have a motor, and mine, just a heavy anchor.

 

–

 

Three more years pass, and I’m ending another relationship. Again, my idea.

 

Somehow, I end up at his house. He says my dress reminds him of a flight attendant, so I peel it off. We go to bed together, one last time. I bleed all over his sheets. The next day, I move to New York and never look back.

 

–

 

It’s been five years and two months when Mother calls and giddily tells me that she had an interesting visitor at work. A friend of my forgotten sweetheart stopped by and gave Mother a phone number. My past is once again within my reaches.

 

Except not. He’s in LA. I call him anyway and leave a voicemail.

 

He calls the next day and we talk. It is warm and lovely and it feels like a treasure, a relic. The warmth of his voice wraps around my undone life, attaching all the floating pieces and parts with sticky tenderness.

 

We send a flurry of photos back and forth. We have changed so much, yet we get on the same. He is covered in tattoos and has a daughter. I am thinner and stupidly living on another continent. He is a cop. I am confused. He’s just ending a two year relationship. I’m still coming to terms with the end of mine.

 

My mom was so happy that we found each other again, he says. She made me promise to call the moment we hang up.

Mine too, I say and I laugh because it’s so true.

 

I have tried to find you so many times, he says.

Me too, I say and it’s true.

 

I wondered about you so often. Googled you, stalked you on MySpace, Facebook…

Me too, I say and it’s true.

 

I know this is weird, but I can say without hesitation that I’ve only been in love once in my life, and it was with you, he tells me.

I’m spread across the sofa but this sends me upright. I want to say it, say me too. But no, I have been in love twice. I have loved many, lusted after many many many, but I can say without hesitation that I’ve been in love twice. And fuck if that doesn’t burn, I don’t know what does.

 

We’re about to hang up when he says, One more thing, and I know this is totally inappropriate but I don’t care.

What?

Best sex I ever had.

 

I smile and say, Me too.

 

–

 

We hang up and breathlessly call our moms.