At the station on Sunday night, I thanked him again for the necklace.
“You should always wear it,” he said before I caught the last train to Mystic. His voice was wistful, and when he kissed me goodbye, the moment had become melancholy. I didn’t feel like a girl who was returning in a week for her eighteenth birthday. I felt like a girl being sent off with only a Hello Kitty necklace to remember him by.
When I called a few days later to confirm our weekend plans, his voice was different. Strained and distant.
“I don’t think you should come in,” he said.
Something didn’t compute. We’d been planning this weekend for more than a month. “Why? Did something come up at work?” My shoulders started to tighten with worry.
“No. It’s just…I don’t think we should.”
“Should what?”
There were so many ways to answer the question, but the scariest one was the one he said next.
“I don’t think we should be together.”
I looked at my phone briefly as if it were a radio, mistakenly tuned to a channel I could no longer understand. I brought the phone to my ear and said the only thing I could think of. The thing I was clinging to. “But I’m totally in love with you, Bryan. One hundred percent and then some. And I want to be with you.”
Then I waited, and I waited, and I waited.
Words didn’t come.
The silence choked me. It was as if hands were on my neck, gripping me.
How could I have misread him so badly? He’d said he was falling for me. Where else do you fall but in love?
Then he spoke, and his words were sharp glass. “I have to go.”
Breaking the clasp in a single, fierce pull, I ripped off the necklace, then tossed it into the trash, stuffing it at the bottom of the can.
That was the last time I spoke to him.
Even now, five years later, those words rang through me. I could hear them, the pause before he spoke, the shape of each and every syllable. I have to go.
That’s exactly what he did. He left.