If I Stay

I hear Adam gasp. Immediate family. The nurse doesn’t mean to be cruel. She’s just clueless, but Adam won’t know that. I feel the need to protect him and to protect the nurse from what he might do to her. I reach for him, on instinct, even though I cannot really touch him. But his back is to me now. His shoulders are hunched over, his legs starting to buckle.

Kim, who was hovering near the wall, is suddenly at his side, her arms encircling his falling form. With both arms locked around his waist, she turns to the nurse, her eyes blazing with fury. “You don’t understand!” she cries.

“Do I need to call security?” the nurse asks.

Adam waves his hand, surrendering to the nurse, to Kim. “Don’t,” he whispers to Kim.

So Kim doesn’t. Without saying another word, she hoists his arm around her shoulder and shifts his weight onto her. Adam has about a foot and fifty pounds on Kim, but after stumbling for a second, she adjusts to the added burden. She bears it.

Kim and I have this theory that almost everything in the world can be divided into two groups.

There are people who like classical music. People who like pop. There are city people. And country people. Coke drinkers. Pepsi drinkers. There are conformists and free-thinkers. Virgins and nonvirgins. And there are the kind of girls who have boyfriends in high school, and the kind of girls who don’t.

Kim and I had always assumed that we both belonged to the latter category. “Not that we’ll be forty-year-old virgins or anything,” she reassured. “We’ll just be the kinds of girls who have boyfriends in college.”

That always made sense to me, seemed preferable even. Mom was the sort of girl who had had boyfriends in high school and often remarked that she wished she hadn’t wasted her time. “There’s only so many times a girl wants to get drunk on Mickey’s Big Mouth, go cow-tipping, and make out in back of a pickup truck. As far as the boys I dated were concerned, that amounted to a romantic evening.”

Dad on the other hand, didn’t really date till college. He was shy in high school, but then he started playing drums and freshman year of college joined a punk band, and boom, girlfriends. Or at least a few of them until he met Mom, and boom, a wife. I kind of figured it would go that way for me.

So, it was a surprise to both Kim and me when I wound up in Group A, with the boyfriended girls. At first, I tried to hide it. After I came home from the Yo-Yo Ma concert, I told Kim the vaguest of details. I didn’t mention the kissing. I rationalized the omission: There was no point getting all worked up about a kiss. One kiss does not a relationship make. I’d kissed boys before, and usually by the next day the kiss had evaporated like a dewdrop in the sun.

Except I knew that with Adam it was a big deal. I knew from the way the warmth flooded my whole body that night after he dropped me off at home, kissing me once more at my doorstep. By the way I stayed up until dawn hugging my pillow. By the way that I could not eat the next day, could not wipe the smile off my face. I recognized that the kiss was a door I had walked through. And I knew that I’d left Kim on the other side.

After a week, and a few more stolen kisses, I knew I had to tell Kim. We went for coffee after school. It was May but it was pouring rain as though it were November. I felt slightly suffocated by what I had to do.

“I’ll buy. You want one of your froufrou drinks?” I asked. That was another one of the categories we’d determined: people who drank plain coffee and people who drank gussied-up caffeine drinks like the mint-chip lattes Kim was so fond of.

“I think I’ll try the cinnamon-spice chai latte,” she said, giving me a stern look that said, I will not be ashamed of my beverage selection.

I bought us our drinks and a piece of marionberry pie with two forks. I sat down across from Kim, running the fork along the scalloped edge of the flaky crust.

“I have something to tell you,” I said.

“Something about having a boyfriend?” Kim’s voice was amused, but even though I was looking down, I could tell that she’d rolled her eyes.

“How’d you know?” I asked, meeting her gaze.

She rolled her eyes again. “Please. Everyone knows. It’s the hottest gossip this side of Melanie Farrow dropping out to have a baby. It’s like a Democratic presidential candidate marrying a Republican presidential candidate.”

“Who said anything about marrying?”

“I’m just being metaphoric,” Kim said. “Anyhow, I know. I knew even before you knew.”

“Bullshit.”

“Come on. A guy like Adam going to a Yo-Yo Ma concert? He was buttering you up.”

“It’s not like that,” I said, though of course, it was totally like that.

“I just don’t see why you couldn’t tell me sooner,” she said in a quiet voice.

I was about to give her my whole one-kiss-not-equaling-a-relationship spiel and to explain that I didn’t want to blow it out of proportion, but I stopped myself. “I was afraid you’d be mad at me,” I admitted.