I’m letting him go.
AFTER
January
Katy is still talking about it as we pull into her driveway. As we wave hi to her mom, watching a crime-investigation show in the living room, and take the steps two at a time to her room.
“I mean, of all the things, who would have thought what that little skeeze responds to is, ‘I’m in a relationship.’ ” By “little skeeze,” she means Kevin. “He backed right off.”
“Sure it had nothing to do with your rant onA Vindication of the Rights of Woman,which you have never even read?” I ask as we enter her room, which smells just like my best friend. Like lavender. When I’d finished talking with Zach, I’d walked back to find Katy giving a purple-faced Kevin a piece of her mind. (“Do you know what girlsACTUALLYdo at sleepovers? They talk about the pervy guys who catcall and lick their lips and how nobody likes them. Do you want that to be you, Kevin?DO YOU?”) I guess she needed to blow off all the steam she was holding in at Zach.
Now Katy drags a chair up to her closet and retrieves a cardboard box.
“Nah. I think the brat just knows Mitch has the hardest thighs in Lyndale and could crush him in a fight.”
“Oh God, Katy,” I say as she cackles at her own joke. “Ew.”
She shrugs and climbs down, handing the box to me. It is full of all the things we took from my room before the procedure, full of things that are in any way related to Zach. Pictures, horrody DVDs, notes. The clothes I wore on the day of the procedure.
I hold up a DVD with a person covered in what seems to be a whole lot of ketchup. It has Zach’s name on the spine.
“Maybe I should mail this to him?”
“How do you know he didn’t give it to you?” Katy says, dismissing the idea. “Anyway, half my belongings are from exes. Remember Marvin Mouth?” I nod, and she points to a lamp on her desk. “And Josh What’s-His-Face?”
“MacPherson?”
“Whatever. These are his gym shorts. And, God, I wouldn’t own any T-shirts at all if I gave back stuff,” she says. “No, no, Grasshopper. You wouldn’t listen to my wisdom when you were heartbroken right after the Zach-or-Mac-or-Jack thing, but now I will teach you my ways. You borrow stuff from other people—books, clothes, DVDs, mannerisms, jokes—and after a while, you break up, and you stop remembering who it’s from. It all melds together and it doesn’t even matter, because now it’s yours. Such is the circle of life.”
“I think that’s called stealing,” I say, eyebrow quirked in skepticism, mirroring her signature look.
“It’s calledappropriating,” Katy argues.
“Also theft.”
“Fine. Maybe I have a condition,” she concedes with a shrug. “But I thought the rule was that you get to keep one item for every time his tongue has been down your throat.”
“Ugh.”
“Oh, and there’s this!” she says, reaching back in her closet and giving me the biggest-ass umbrella I’ve ever seen in my life. “Part of the Zach Pile.”
“What’s it from?”
“Two Dollars or Less,” she says. “And the day of the best car wash of your life.”
I don’t understand what that means.
Zach told me the highlights of our relationship, but he obviously left out some things. And maybe the details he thought were important are different from those I did.
“I’ll tell you what I know,” Katy says, squeezing my arm. “Whenever you want.”
“Okay.” I nod, fighting a sudden swell of emotion in my throat. I throw my arms around her. “Thank you.”
We hug for a moment, and then Katy fake-pushes me off her. “Love you, Sullivan, butI’m in a relationship,or did you forget? Who knew that line was so powerful? God, no wonder normal people date for ages!”
“You mean other people don’t date forrock-hard thighs?” I ask, feigning surprise as I back out of her room, the box in my arms. Katy’s pillow just nearly misses my head, but she’s blushing. Happy.
I drive home as quickly as I can in the snow, desperate to go through the box. I grip the box tightly as I carry it carefully up the stairs. I sit on the floor in my room and start taking the items out one by one. There are two ticket stubs for a concert at the community college during the September I was with Zach. Is that where I first heard “Air on the G String”? Does the real Zach know that was our song? I’ll never really know.
