I jerk around, and she barely skids to a stop before slamming into me. And my voice is too loud, and she’s too close, everything is too close as I yell, “It’s for me, damn it. It’s not for you. It’s not for my friends. Did you ever think of that while you were dissecting me? My life? The way I am . . . I do that for me.”
My heart thuds in my ears so loud I’m surprised it doesn’t echo in the tunnel, too. Nell swallows, and I can see those big eyes working, studying me, moving around the pieces of me in her head to fit this new development.
“Why?”
One damn word. Just one damn word, and it’s the absolute last thing I want her to say because I know how my answer will sound. Pathetic boy with a broken heart pretending so it doesn’t hurt. It’s so goddamn ridiculous.
“Because it helps. Helped.”
She lifts a hand like she wants to touch me, but then seems to second-guess herself, and it stays hanging in the air between us as she asks, “With what?”
Then I tell her everything about Lina. With my eyes on the ceiling and the walls so that I don’t have to look at her, I tell her how in love I was.
“She was this brilliant, confident girl. The kind of girl that when you look at her, you know she can do anything, be anything. She had the whole fucking world in the palm of her hand, and she had me there, too. From the moment I met her. But you can’t . . . you can’t love someone like that without feeling like you have something to prove. To her. To the world. I needed everyone to know that we belonged together. That even if I wasn’t some genius, even if I had zero hope of going to the Ivy League schools that were practically begging for her attention, I was important. I was going places. So when it looked like football could do that for me, I threw everything into it. I had to play college ball. I had to go pro. There was no other option. She and football were linked in my head, the two great loves of my life, and I would have done anything, given whatever it took, to keep them both.”
I break off, and I realize that my breathing is ragged, that my heart is pounding hard enough to put a dent in my ribs.
“What happened?” she asks.
And finally, I look at her. Only she’s not looking at me; she has her arms wrapped around herself and her gaze on the circle of light my flashlight makes on the ground.
“I got too caught up in it all. I was so focused on proving myself that I didn’t realize I was losing everything in my attempt to gain it. Lina and I started fighting. Every time I brought up football, she would tell me to be realistic, that I needed to have a backup plan in case it didn’t work out. But all I could hear was that she didn’t trust me to be good enough.”
“For football? Or her?” Nell’s voice is small as she asks.
I sigh and drag my hand over my face. “Both. It was always both.”
“Senior year, I narrowed it down to two schools. Rusk, which had the bigger program and was closer to home, and a smaller Division Two school that was not too far from the university that Lina had chosen. I was torn. Rusk was the better place to prove myself, but it was too far away from her. The Division Two school had a good football program, but the chance of getting noticed in Division Two was a lot smaller. I could have possibly swung a transfer to a bigger university eventually, but it was a risk. In the end, though, it didn’t matter. She broke up with me the night before I was going to commit to the Division Two school. She said that we wanted different things out of life. Her exact words were something about her moving on from high school to bigger things. But I was so stuck on football that I didn’t know when it was time to let go. She didn’t want to hang around while I relived my glory days for as long as I could.”
“That’s awful.”
It was awful. Most of the time our fears come from within us, but she planted the seed that day. And every time I’m feeling low, I water it with thoughts about whether or not the best parts of my life are behind me.
“To be fair,” I say, “I wasn’t exactly the best boyfriend there at the end. I let the recruiting game go to my head. I was so wrapped up in being the best athlete that I could be for her that I didn’t realize I was ignoring her in the process. I tried to fix it. God knows, I tried. I would have done anything, maybe even given up football, if she had shown even the slightest interest in giving me a second chance. But she didn’t. So I committed to Rusk, and tried to put it all behind me. And when I got here, I thought I was starting over. I hid my broken heart behind parties and jokes in the beginning because I wanted to make a good impression. No one likes that mopey guy who misses high school during freshman orientation. After a while it became second nature. And some days, it was almost like I’d never known Lina at all. In fact, I’d almost forgotten her completely.”
“Until you met me.”
“I—”
I don’t know what to say. Is it better to be honest? To lie? Either way makes me an asshole.
“The day we met, after I got hit with the Frisbee . . . you said I reminded you of someone. It was her? Wasn’t it?”
I don’t answer because words will only make this worse. And I wish my earlier joke about that disaster movie would come true, that some pipe would burst or there would be some freak flood, and a wall of water would come and just drown this all out.
“I think I’d like to leave now.”
She takes the flashlight out of my hand and walks past me, and for a few long moments I stay where I am. I let the light fade away. Her footsteps, too. And as silence moves in around me, I realize that what just happened was nothing like the fights I had with Lina. Our fights had been loud and aggressive, and they’d left me burning up. And when things with Lina had ended, I felt like I’d been at the center of some explosion, and all the pieces of me were scattered everywhere, and that everyone had to see it, see how broken I was. I was alive, but in pieces.
Fighting with Nell is like . . . it’s like drowning. And each word that pushed us further apart, each step she took, was another gulp of water into my lungs. And just like someone stuck underwater . . . I knew I should stop. I knew that each gulp was killing me, but I just couldn’t.
And now that she’s gone, I’m not in pieces. There was no explosion. No battered and bleeding pieces of me to hold together. No, I would almost prefer that there were.
Because she’s taken the last of the air with her, and inside now I’m as still as the dark tunnel around me, and just as lifeless and empty.