"Gatsby," I sighed. His voice was a drug to me, a sense of comfort. My body and soul relaxed the instant he said my name.
"How was your day?"
"It was okay. It was the anniversary of my mom's passing. Nona made me go to her grave to place flowers. I cleaned up her tombstone. I visitedDad as well."
"I'm sorry. You told me that was today; I totally forgot," he said.
"It's okay. I'll be doing this again in a week, and then after their anniversaries are done, I don't think about it until the next year," I tried to joke through my pain. While I had no memory of my mother, knowing my father killed himself to be with her, was still hard every single year. "Let's talk about good things. What did you do today?"
"If we're only talking about good things, then I can't really tell you about my day." Gatsby snickered. I waited, and after a moment, he sighed and continued. "My mom keeps me working. I got invited to play video games with my friend Luke, but my mom told me I had to go... fix his mom's bathroom sink. So while all my friends were in the living room playing and laughing, I was stuck in his mom's room, working."
"Oh, that sounds awful." His mother made him work him so much. He was always fixing people's plumbing. Since all the husbands were away in the military, the wives relied on Gatsby a lot to help them with maintenance. That stuff should never be put on a child.
"It was. I got filthy and tore my shirt. It was embarrassing."
"If I lived on base, I'd never make you fix anything," I said.
"No, you wouldn't, would you?”
Silence settled for a brief moment before I remembered the notebook in front of me.
"Oh! Are you ready for our book discussion?"
"Of course, I have my notes right here. Now, where did we leave off?"
I leaned forward, grabbing my notebook. "We were discussing the idea that Gatsby didn't love Daisy at all but the idea of her."
"Right. I hate this one," he complained.
Over the time in our friendship, we'd gone through lots of books, but we always came back to revisitThe Great Gatsby. We'd read and analyzed the book over and over, chapter by chapter, line by line. We'd gone online to look up people's theories and interpretations and were discussing those.
"Agree or disagree?" I asked, my heart squeezing.
"Disagree, obviously."
I relaxed.
"I think people want Gatsby to be delusional, to make his death less sad. That he 'got what he deserved' for not seeing the real Daisy. That Daisy was this cruel, uncaring woman who only used Gatsby, but I don't believe that's the case."
"Then why didn't she go to the funeral?" I asked.
"Nick didn't see her at the funeral. Maybe she didn't attend the service but that doesn't mean she didn't pay her respects before or after. That's the most interesting part of the story, that it's not told by Daisy or Gatsby, leaving the truth to never be truly known. I think pessimists want Daisy to be the bad guy, and Gatsby to be a sap, but the optimists choose for them to have just been victims of circumstance."
"So you're an optimist?" I lay my head onto my pillows, twirling a lock of hair around my finger.
"When it comes to Gatsby's love for Daisy, of course."
I bit my lower lip, holding back a loud squeal. He always knew exactly what to say to get my little teenage heart beating wild.
Throughout the night, we discussed our favorite book until exhaustion. I started to yawn, and looked over, seeing it was midnight.
"Should we call it a night?" His voice dripped in sadness.
"I mean, is there anything left to say?" I asked, sitting upto flip through my notes. I had twenty hand-written pages of notes front and back, and we'd gone through them all.
"Actually... yes."
I blinked. Something about the shift in his tone got my attention.
