May scoffs. “As are you.”
I smile at her immediate defense. “One night, we were hanging out and watching movies in his basement, and he just turned and kissed me and I... I don’t even know how to explain it really. It was this strange combination of excitement and butterflies and exhilaration, and at the same time, just this overwhelming feeling of peace.”
“Shit. My first kiss was a wet slop in the smelly gym at a junior high dance.”
This gets a laugh out of me. “Kissing Seth was perfect. It was everything.”
“Did you do it on his basement couch?”
“We were fourteen! No, we did not do it on his basement couch.” I give her a playful shove. “Not that night anyway.”
“Okay, I like where this is going.” May shifts in her seat, angling her body in my direction, prepped for more salacious details.
“From that moment on, our lives were intertwined. I had already spent a lot of time at his house, but once we officially started dating, his parents practically adopted me. His mom knew mine wasn’t around much, so she always included me in family gatherings, and trips, and holidays. Itwas like every part of my life was somehow connected to his.” Looking back with an adult’s perspective, I can see how that maybe wasn’t the healthiest, especially considering Seth was my first-ever boyfriend. But at the time, I felt safe and accepted and wanted, and I hadn’t ever really felt that before.
“Ah.” May brushes a stray strand of hair from her eyes, squinting a little as she studies me. “That explains a lot.”
“Yeah.” The pattern is easy to see now. I latched on to Seth not just because of who he was, but because of what his family meant to me and the sense of security they brought.
“So what happened?” she prods after giving me a minute of quiet.
I sigh, not looking forward to this part of the story. “By the time we got to senior year, it was just expected that we would be together forever. I know most people scoff at high school sweethearts, but no one ever doubted us. Even my mom loved Seth, although the feeling wasn’t mutual. We both wanted to be writers and we both wanted to move to LA, so we applied to all the same schools and made plans for our future.”
“And he didn’t get in?”
I shake my head, fingers still threading through the loose strings of my shorts. “No, he did. We both got into USC, but he didn’t get the financial aid he was expecting. His parents couldn’t afford to send him. So I did something I had never done before and haven’t done since.”
May raises her eyebrows.
“I asked my mom for money. I asked for her to pay for Seth to go to college.”
She lets out a low whistle. “Damn, girl. You really loved him.”
I give her a nod of confirmation as my lips turn down.
“And your mom said no?”
“She said yes. Of course she did. Education is her whole life’s mission.” I wait for May to interject, but she’s too shocked to speak. “We made our plans to come to California together. It was going to be perfect. We’d live in the dorms for a year, then get an apartment off campus. He probably would’ve proposed at graduation and we’d have been married by twenty-three.”
“Given our very single thirty-year-old asses sitting here, that obviously didn’t happen.”
I shake my head. “I moved out here a week early, mostly to avoid having to do the sappy goodbye thing with my mom. Seth would’ve come with me, but he had to stay for his sister’s birthday. The night before he was meant to fly out, he called me and told me he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t take the money from my mom.” The memory of total abandonment washes over me along with the words. “Even though my mom really liked Seth, he always harbored a lot of resentment toward her. He was there, and his parents were there, all the times she couldn’t be bothered to show up. Seth couldn’t stand the idea of being indebted to her, and rather than swallow his pride and accept her scholarship, he decided not to go away to school. And he waited until I’d already left to tell me.”
“Shit, LP. That’s awful.”
“I would’ve stayed,” I say quietly. “I would’ve stayed at home with him, gone to a state school, continued to live with my mom, even if by that point I was already pretty much living on my own.”
“But he didn’t want that for you.” May already knows him better than she thinks.
Shaking my head, I purse my lips tightly. “He told me to stay in LA, that we’d find a way to make it work long-distance. He told me our love for each other was strong enough and real enough to overcome anything. A few thousand miles was nothing in the face of our feelings.”
“That’s quite poetic for a high school boy.”
“He always had a way with words.”
“When we first met, you never mentioned having a boyfriend.”
I turn away from her, facing directly into the overhead sun so I have an excuse to close my eyes. “I was mad at him for not coming, for turning down our perfect future, for putting his own pride before me. But we still talked and texted constantly. And I started to think he was right; we could make it work. We spoke so often I hardly had a chance to miss him.”
