Back When You Were Easier to Love (3 page)

“Yeah. We have it every Thursday as an alternative to all the lame school clubs we didn’t want to join. It’s evolved into true greatness. We’ve made our own root beer, and another time we made smoothies, and last night we made stuff from this cookbook called
101 Drinks You Can Make with Sprite.
A lot of them had alcohol so we had to substit—”

“Right, right, I get it.” I put down my pencil.
Miss Thorpe Thinks You’re Special
. Once, Zan did, too. “So let me get this straight. Your big screw you to Haven High society at large is
Beverage Night
?”

“Well, I wouldn’t have chosen those words.” Noah’s voice is calm and even.

My arms are folded on the table, and my head sinks onto them, face-first. Breathe. Raise head. Speak calmly. Match his tone. “Don’t you get it? This is your fault. This is why Zan left. Beverage Night. MODEST IS HOTTEST T-shirts. Libraries that suck.”

“Hey, I had nothing to do with the libraries.” Noah puts out his hands palms-first, all innocence. “Don’t blame me for that.”

“But I can blame you for everything else? Because just so you know, I do. You were his best friend here ... his
only
friend here. Couldn’t you have eased up on the whole Mr. Haven Embodied thing? So he didn’t have to completely rebel? So he didn’t have to leave this place immediately?”

“Wait.” Noah actually waits, like he’s thinking something over. “You think it’s because of me that Zan got his GED, skipped his senior year, and went to school in California? Have you
met
Zan? You of all people should know that he doesn’t factor anyone else into his decisions.”

“I just know what it’s like when your friends don’t understand you. It makes you want to find people who do.”

“Maybe you’re right, okay?” Noah looks more serious than I’ve ever seen him. Although, that’s not saying much. “Maybe I didn’t understand him. That’s what he had you for.”

“Maybe I wasn’t enough!” The words burn leaving my mouth. I’m surprised a tear is forming in the corner of my left eye. I am not sad. I am mad.

Mr. Jasper, the librarian, taps his meterstick against the checkout counter and glares at me, putting his finger to his lips and wiggling his eyebrows like “Be quiet!”

“This is not what I came here to talk about.” Noah speaks in a whisper, and Mr. Jasper nods at him approvingly. Everyone approves of Noah. I am the only person in this school, this town, this world, who doesn’t.

I look at him expectantly. “Then why
did
you come here?”

“I’m just trying to be your friend. Let me be your friend.”

I hate it when people say they’re trying to be your friend. You shouldn’t have to
try
to be somebody’s friend. Either you like someone or you don’t. Either you want them as a friend or not. Making friends isn’t like trying for the lead in the school play.

“Noah, can’t you just leave me alone?” That’s what seeing him reminds me of. Zan leaving me. Alone.

“Sorry,” he says, not sounding sorry in the least. “We are going to be friends. That’s how Zan would have wanted it.”

He makes it sound like Zan’s dead. “How do you know?”

“He told me,” says Noah. He shrugs. “I promised, Joy. Don’t make this harder than it already is. I promised.”

I never got
it, those magazine articles I read when I was thirteen and anticipating romance. Never understood why they went on and on about finding a guy you could be yourself around. I could be me all by myself. I was
already
me. I wanted a boyfriend to make me more than me.

Zan was that guy. Zan was that guy, and more. I wasn’t myself with him, I was
better
than myself—Joy 2.0. When I was with Zan my jokes were funnier, my mind was sharper, my vanilla perfume smelled better. I was better read—quotes from books jumped into my memory during conversations with him.

With him, the world changed. Music was more intense—chords were stronger, old beats felt new, and lyrics were good again. Food tasted better. I didn’t need as much of it because every bite had twice as much flavor, twice as many nutrients.

Before, I had to fight to fall asleep. Once I met Zan, sleep came quickly, flowing through the night, deep and dreamless. Before, I woke exhausted in the morning, the concept of rest baffling me. Once I met Zan, I awoke full of energy, my heart pounding, not out of fear but anticipation.

Without him, the world is smaller. Without him, I am smaller. Without him a place like Haven, a place that was small before, shrinks to the size of a fingernail clipping—something so small, something no one needed anyway.

I am not Haven. I shrink without Zan. But with him, I am not insignificant.

Super-Saturday was a
Haven tradition. The white brick Mormon church on Nola Drive, built by pioneers and renovated about a dozen times since, hosted the annual event. It was a day-long extravaganza where mothers and daughters bonded over miniscrapbooks and fabric paints.

“I don’t do crafts,” I told Mattia.

“Everyone does crafts,” said Mattia, rolling her eyes. “We’ll sign you up for something supereasy, like springthemed fingertip towels. Trust me, even an untrained ape could make those.”

“No.”

She kept talking. “You’ll love it—it’s such a good way to get rid of the winter blahs. I’m making a way cute magnet board with this polka-dotted ribbon on the—”

My look was strong enough to silence her.

“Okay,” she said, ducking her head. “You can help in the nursery.”

I actually didn’t mind nursery duty. As one of the rare Mormon girls without any siblings, I had always jumped at opportunities to watch the little kids while the church held Valentine’s Day Dinner-Dances or had guest speakers and a potluck dinner for adults only. I’d open the nursery toy closet and dump assorted blocks and board books out of their plastic bins. The kids and I would play hangman on the chalkboard. I’d feed them graham crackers and pretzel bites.

I was the first babysitter at the church on Super-Saturday. I unlocked the toy closet and weeded through the toys, throwing away broken stuff and matching up the underwear-clad dress-up doll with her various felt outfits. Soon moms started dropping off their kids—mainly boys, or girls too young for the Super-Saturday festivities.

“I’ll make you a flower barrette,” one mom promised a clingy toddler. “But you have to be good.”

Bribery by barrette. Only in Haven.

Pretty soon we had a full house, and I was managing nicely. One group was racing Hot Wheels on a homemade vinyl mat with little streets and parking lots drawn on it. A four-year-old was playing the minikeyboard with her little brother. I was regulating a dull game of Red Light/ Green Light with everybody else.

It was only when a girl in pink-sequined shoes asked me to take her to the bathroom that I realized something: I was all alone.

Where was everybody else?
Was
there an everybody else? I checked the standard-issue wall clock. Super-Saturday was well underway.

So I did the only thing I could think of: I texted Zan.
Wanna help me babysit? It’s dire!

He was there six minutes later. I knew I’d woken him because his hair was still wet and his chin and upper lip were stubbly. “Hey,” he said, sounding tired.

“Be right back,” I said, running out of the room holding hands with sequin-shoes. “I’m taking Trina to the potty.” I whirled back around. “I mean, I’m taking her to the restroom.”

Zan’s lips hinted at a smile. “Go. I’ll take care of things here.”

Sometimes, lonely times, I replay those words in my head, the way I replayed them out loud that morning. “Yeah. You take care of things here.”

I have an
exceptionally large bladder, so usually it’s easy to avoid the school bathrooms. Today there’s no way around it: the girls’ room is the only place I can go where Noah won’t follow me. The fluorescent light bouncing off the pink-tiled walls practically gives me a seizure, so I lock myself in the nearest stall.

There’s zero actual graffiti anywhere on school premises, because whenever students get more than three tardies in one term, they have to “work them off” by cleaning the school for two hours. It’s common to see a kid from your French class scrubbing garbage cans while you’re heading out to the parking lot after school. The bathroom stalls are usually sparkling, according to Mattia, who has cleaned them more than once.

But while I’m standing in the stall, waiting for my eyes to adjust, I see something written on the top corner. There, in black Sharpie, are small letters—too deliberate for your run-of-the-mill vandalism.
Back when you were easier to love.

Blink.

When did loving me become so hard?

Blink.

Why did loving me become so hard?

Blink. Blink.

What did he want me to be that I wasn’t?

I can be that girl again. But I need him, first.

My first date
with Zan was to a gay-rights rally on Super-Saturday.

After the crafting died down and moms and big sisters came to collect, and after Zan and I put away the slobbery, broken toys, I was sure I’d never see him again. Not because I hadn’t had fun.

I had. Kids loved Zan. Zan, who wore old-man shoes and had probably never played with a toy in his life. He talked quietly, and kids dropped their own voices to hear him. They laughed easily with him. They touched his no-time-to-shave stubble and he let them.

I’d had fun. But I wasn’t sure Zan had.

“There’s a poetry reading in about an hour, at the library,” he said. “Want to go?”

I didn’t want to feel anything but excitement, didn’t want to feel anything but giddiness. Zan still liked me. Zan liked me even more, maybe. Zan was asking me out on a real date.

But I couldn’t help the puzzlement crawling in my mind. “The library?” I was thinking a poetry reading at Haven Public Library would yield exactly six people, all of them related to the poet.

He caught my meaning, of course. “The city library. Downtown.”

The reading was by the poet laureate of some state back east, who had won a poetry prize I didn’t want to let Zan know I’d never heard of before. For him, I wanted to be smarter than I really was.

So we took off, me in jeans with sticky fingerprints on the legs and Zan in a T-shirt with Latin all over the front that translated into:
If you can read this, you’re overeducated.

It was still light out, that glinty, glary late-winter-afternoon light that always deceived me into thinking it would last longer than it actually did. Winter days: reminders of how something so bright can fade so quickly.

Street parking was free after four on weekends, and Zan wedged his car into a space behind the library. The downtown library was one of my favorite buildings ever, and as I walked toward the front doors I kept my eyes upward, staring at the angular glass walls, jutting just-so to make the most of the lingering light.

When I bumped against someone I apologized instinctively, not realizing until I looked around that it wasn’t just one person I’d run into—it was a whole bunch of people blockading the sidewalk.

“What’s going on?” I asked, craning my neck. I could see now that the road between the library and City Hall was caution-taped off, and a cop was directing pedestrian traffic.

“I think it’s a protest,” said Zan, his eyes lighting up. “See the news vans?” He motioned to a woman with neat hair and a too-big microphone, standing next to a white van with the name of a local TV channel across it.

“Cool!” I grabbed Zan’s hand, a risky move I was only now willing to make, now that the crowds were heavy. I wanted to get mixed up in them. I wanted to become one of the people with a cause, not one of the people who did crafts and babysat.

His hand was warm against my cold one, and I tightened my grip. “Come on!” I said, pulling him into the crowd. I wanted to lose myself, but I didn’t want to lose him.

“You want to check this out?” Zan said into my ear as we ran across the street, zigzagging through groups of people. He sounded surprised.

“This might be my only chance to be in a protest march,” I said. “And I want to make the world a better place.”

“You realize this is a gay rights rally, don’t you?” He dropped my hand and pointed upward.

I looked through the bare tree branches at a sign: WE ARE ALL EQUAL. Zan raised an eyebrow at me.

“We
are
all equal.” I pulled together the two sides of my jacket and fumbled with a button. “And health-care rights for gay couples in this state are a joke.”

His eyebrow arched higher. “Oh, really?”

“What, you don’t agree?” I was trying to get my stupid button through the buttonhole without taking my eyes off Zan. Zan, with his thick, soulful eyebrows crinkled in thought, his big eyes, his two-day stubble pronounced against his pale skin.

“I’m just surprised,” he said. “Not a lot of Mormons think about things like that.”

“Not a lot of Mormons in
Haven
think about things like that,” I said. My fingers were too cold now, and my button still wasn’t done up.

“You really think it’s different anywhere else?” His voice hadn’t changed, not really, but there was a certain challenge in his tone. “In California the Church thinks gay marriage is hunky-dory?”

I rolled my eyes. “You
know
that’s not what I mean. But at least for California Mormons gay marriage is actually an issue. Here, gay marriage is wrong, sinful, nevergonna-happen, period. There’s no real debate. Just cold, midwinter protests that won’t do any good.” I blew on my hands, the warmth spreading fingertip to palm. “But I want to be a part of it anyway.”