Divorcing My Secret Love in Year Six

Nora

I have been in love with the same boy since I was fifteen.

This morning, just after six, I decided to stop. The decision took about as long as the coffee did, which is its own kind of answer about what the last six years were worth. That is the end of the story, and I am not going to begin there. I am going to begin with a certificate and a rainstorm, because that is the actual order.

The certificate came first.

The art room smelled of linseed oil and radiator dust. Ms. Ferreira walked in with her coat still buttoned and set it down on my table instead of handing it to me, which is how I knew before she opened her mouth that it was the citywide one.

"Gold. Nineteen years I have taught this class, and I have never had a student who reads color the way you do."

I picked it up by one corner and said thank you in a voice smaller than I meant it to be. She asked whether I couldn't be happy about one thing, since that was every kid in the five boroughs. I was happy. I have just never known where on a face that goes. I put the paper in the front pocket of my case and went to chemistry.

The rain started that afternoon and stayed unreasonable about it. I stood under the overhang by the east door with the case against my knees — my father's, older than I was, the leather gone soft and gray along the handle — and watched the line of cars at the curb. A girl from my biology class went by and stopped.

"Nora, is anybody coming for you?"

"I'm waiting for it to thin out."

Nobody was coming, and I had known that before I said it. My mother was on a shift and my father had the shop and neither of them had asked about the certificate. So I said the true thing and let people take the other meaning from it, which is a skill I have had since I was fourteen.

The rain got heavier. I pulled the case against my chest and got ready to go.

Then there were running steps behind me, fast and flat on wet concrete. A boy came past, breathing hard, and pushed an umbrella into my arms.

"Take it."

I looked up. I knew the name the way you know a senior's — all of it and none of it out loud. Adrian Cross stood there, his hair already dark at the front, the shoulders of his sweatshirt going through.

"Then what about you?"

He had the hood up before I finished the sentence, and he stepped out into it and turned his head and grinned at me over one shoulder.

"I'm fast."

And he was. By the time he reached the far side of the street the rain had eaten him down to a shape. I stood there with the handle still warm from his hand, and I did not say thank you, and I have thought about that more than anything else that happened that year.

I wiped the handle down with a dish towel twice, which was more than it needed and I knew that while I was doing it. The next morning I stood outside the juniors' chemistry room at the bell with the umbrella in both hands.

"Whose is this? Somebody left it."

The girl who came out first did not even have to think. "Adrian's. The tall one. He plays basketball."

He was in the back row by the window with his head down over a problem set, and when I stopped beside the table he looked up.

"Can I help you?"

"The umbrella. From yesterday."

I held it out. He took it, and our fingers overlapped for no more than a second, and I pulled my hand back the way you pull back from a hot pan. He looked at the handle and smiled — a mild, closing smile, the kind you give a delivery.

"Oh. You brought it back."

Then he put his head down and went on with the problem set, and I stood there long enough for it to become strange, and I went out into the hallway. It is a long hallway, the one outside the science rooms, and I walked it slowly. My heart did one thing, once, near the top of the stairs. I noticed it, and I filed it, and I did not know yet that it was going to run the next four years of my life.

After that I began to notice him, which is different from looking for him. Noticing happened on its own, the way you start noticing a word once somebody has told you it is spelled wrong.

I saw him in the hallway with a girl who was crying over a crumpled test paper, and he knocked twice on her desk and said, "Come out here," and walked her through the page from the first question she had gotten wrong. When she said, "You must think I'm stupid," he said, "Who said that. This question is a trap. Half the class missed it." I saw him on the court stop playing when a boy from the other team went down and put a hand out and pull him up, and I heard his teammate yell that they were losing, and I heard him say over his shoulder that losing could be fixed and a wrist could not. I saw him thank the woman at the cafeteria register by name, and stop at the front desk to ask the guard how his daughter's surgery had gone, and stand there for the answer.

None of it was for anyone. That was the part that undid me: it is easy to be kind where somebody is watching, and he was not doing it where anybody was watching, which meant it was simply what he was.

I sat in the corner of the cafeteria with my sketchbook open on my knees and drew it all. The forward tilt of his shoulders when he explained something. The shape his hand made coming down to pull a person up. The line of his neck when he bent his head to listen. Pencil, mostly, and my thumb, and about six minutes to a drawing. One afternoon the girl next to me leaned over while I was working.

"Who are you drawing?"

I shut the book so fast the corner caught my finger. "Nobody. Practice."

"You're blushing."

"It's the light in here."

She gave me a look and let it go, and I sat with the book closed on my knees for the rest of the period, feeling the heat in my face and hating it, because my face had just told a stranger something I had not said to myself.

That night I opened the sketchbook to the last page and wrote three lines in the small handwriting I use when I am not sure I want to be able to read it back later.

"Every girl in this school has tried. He has said no to all of them."

"I thought he had standards."

"Later I found out that wasn't it."

Then I closed it and looked out the window. Out on the field, Adrian was walking back with a basketball under one arm, the sun down far enough that his shadow stretched the length of the whole sideline. The feeling did not ask me for anything. It did not have a plan in it yet.

I turned to a new page and started drawing. When I was finished I put a few small marks in the corner, the way I always did on days I wanted to keep. No more than specks. But they read like stars if you knew to look for them.

I looked at the page for a while, and then I thought the plainest thing I had ever thought about another person.

Someone like that deserves to be liked.

By the middle of November the radiator pipes in the art building had started knocking at nine-thirty every night, and I had gotten into the habit of letting them knock while I worked past the hour I should have gone home.

The competition deadline was in December. That was the reason I gave anyone who asked, and it was a real reason, though it was not the whole one.

The canvas was forty by fifty, and I had stretched it myself over two evenings that left my palms bruised from the staple gun.

On the third Thursday of that month the power went out while I was alone on the third floor. It did not flicker; it dropped, and the dark that came after was thicker than I had expected.

The moon came through the west windows at a bad angle, hard light on one half of the floor and hard shadow on the other, and the canvas sat exactly on the seam between them. I could not see the paint, and my phone was in my bag by the door, on the far side of a room I could not read.

I stood there and told myself it was thirty feet, maybe less, that I had walked it a hundred times. My heart was going faster than it should have been. I took one step and my foot caught the leg of a stool I had not remembered was there, and the stool scraped loud across the floor and I stopped.

My hands were shaking. I pressed them against my sides and that did not help. I told myself to breathe slower and my breath came faster instead, shallow and tight, and I hated that I could not make it stop. It was just a dark room. There was no reason for my body to be doing this.

I crouched down beside the easel and put my arms around my knees and pressed my face against them, which is what I used to do when I was young and the house got loud in ways I could not fix. I counted my breaths. I made it to eight before I lost count and had to start over.

I had been sitting like that for a while, my pulse loud in my ears, when I heard footsteps in the corridor. Quick ones. Certain. A band of light slid under the door and I looked up.

The door opened, and Adrian Cross stood there with his phone flashlight on, and he swept the beam once around the room and stopped it on me.

The relief hit so fast I felt dizzy with it.

"You're still here."