The fifth night, he came out again and I followed him longer. It made me nervous. I worried he would wake up. I also worried he’d hurt himself and never make it back to his house so he could sleepwalk again and our nights together would end. That worry kept me awake.
The fifth night, no lights came on and I kept whispering that same question over and over because I needed to know.
Jed, do you think of me?
And then the most incredible thing happened: he answered my question.
But not in the way I guessed he would. When we reached the corner, he turned right. I had a feeling where he was going but I wasn’t prepared for it. He took another turn, left, and it made me feel cold in a way that had nothing to do with the weather. He was going to the river. I had to stop following him. I didn’t like the river. The river is where everything ended.
My parents wanted to move to a new town to get the ugliness behind us.
They meant well, but they didn’t understand. I couldn’t imagine giving up all these nights with Jed for days that would be hollow nothings.
I took a rock again, the sixth time out.
I wasn’t sure why, but the itch made me feel like I should.
I held on to it, and he didn’t show.
The seventh night was the same thing. The eighth night, I was so frustrated I decided to break his window after all. Even if it ruined everything, at least he would have to wake up and see me on his lawn. Maybe that was what was supposed to happen. He’d see me on his lawn and realize his family didn’t matter; that girl he was with now, she didn’t matter. What happened at the river didn’t matter. I raised my arm and steadied myself. I’d never broken a window with a rock in my life—but before I could, the front door opened. He came out.
I love him.
People are funny when you talk to them about love. I don’t think most people have the kind of heart I do. I’ve always been the kind of person who listens to my heart and follows it. When I say I listen to my heart, I mean I have to listen to it. It shouts at me. Sometimes it beats so loud, I can’t think. When it does that, I have to pay attention, no matter what. It wasn’t like the itch, it was different. It didn’t tell me what to do, it just guided me to the people I needed in my life and then it made me wide open for them. It made me love them so much, it was hard to take.
With Jed, my heart beat louder than it ever had before.
He was the one.
One of the last times we spoke, Jed told me I needed to get him out of my head. I tried to explain to him in a letter he wasn’t in my head, he was in my heart. But I didn’t explain it well so I had to write another one but that one didn’t do the job either, because he just didn’t understand, but now I think he might have understood more than I realized.
I don’t regret writing the letters, ever, but I wish Jed hadn’t showed them to our parents after my accident. It made things far more complicated than they had to be.
But what’s done is done.
It’s not like there was anything in them he could doubt.
I couldn’t follow him to the river that night, either.
Even though I wasn’t ready for the river, I was ready to get closer to him.
The ninth night, I crossed the middle of the road and raised my voice above a whisper, but the words that came out of my mouth weren’t the ones I meant to say.
Imagine you can’t breathe. Imagine you’re trying so hard to breathe, but every time you open your mouth, it’s full of water and dirt you can’t breathe.
As much as I loved him, I was angry with him, too.
That’s how you can tell you really love someone. It’s just, we had something good and he ruined it and now we were here and I couldn’t touch him, I couldn’t have a conversation with him, and my skin was burning with how much I wanted both.
I wanted to ask him how he could plan the rest of his life with her when she wasn’t the kind of girl who would die for anyone. I’d give up everything for him, and now here we were, trapped in an endless cycle of nights. I needed to know what the itch driving me meant. It felt like there was something I had to do but I didn’t know what and that made me angrier. I wanted him to taste the ground, but if I pushed him and pressed his face against it, he’d wake up.
Still. I bridged the distance between us and circled in front of him and then we were facing each other and seeing his half-open eyes staring right at me, I still wanted to make him eat the earth. That’s the thing that worries me sometimes. I feel everything so much, it makes me say or do the wrong things. I don’t think. And the things I do—from the outside they might look like the opposite of love, but they’re really just actions inspired by it.
How do you think of me, Jed? I asked. I knew he thought of me, but I had to know how. Do you think of me the way I think of you?
I walked backward as slowly as he walked forward, and I wished again I had the rock. When they pulled me out of the river, my teeth scraped against the dirt, the stony embankment. I wanted him to know what that was like. If I had my rock, I would aim it at his mouth and he’d stay asleep while I tore up his lips and forced it against his tongue.
But then he said my name.
My name.
His voice.
I stumbled a little. He said it again but there was no flicker in his eyes so I knew he was still asleep. To hear him say it made me feel so alive and disappeared every bad thought from my head. He kept coming at me. I wanted to reach for him but instead I sidestepped and backed onto the curb. I watched him make his way to the river and wondered if, when he woke up in his bed that morning, I would just be a dream he’d had. A good dream.
The second-to-last time I saw Jed was before my accident.
It was the night the votes came in. His father won them all, won by a landslide but neither of us was concerned because we all knew Mr. Miller would win. Jed drove me home before the party was over. We sat side by side in his car and there was a nice buzz in the air but there was also a familiarity in it, too, the kind of familiarity that comes with sharing someone’s soul, like you’ve been married for years and years.
Jed and I had that.
He pulled over an entire street away from my house and reached for my hand and then I was awkwardly underneath him and when we were finished, he said he was so glad we had time together, that I kept his head above the water, that he’d miss me. I put the first two compliments away for safekeeping, but the other I echoed back at him stupidly, not understanding. Still not understanding.
Miss me?
It was the first taste I had of drowning. The water was all around me, in my lungs, in my nose. Everywhere. I couldn’t breathe and Jed had to hold me until I calmed down and even then, I only calmed down enough to ask what he was talking about.
This was nice, he said, but now it has to stop.
It seemed to take forever for him to understand my lack of understanding and then all of these horrible words were coming out of his mouth about this other girl and how could I not know about her, it wasn’t like it was a secret. Her family was in politics, too. They’d been matched. They were in press photos together, it was broadly hinted at, well—everywhere.
You had to have known.
But love is exclusion. How was I supposed to see her in a picture of him? I said it before, but I don’t really like politics. It’s all strategy and secret keeping and tearing people apart. Selling your son off to another girl from a family even higher up the ladder because that’s what it was, they were selling Jed, they sold him.