The Way I Am Now (The Way I Used to Be)

As we stand in the middle of her room, I can sense it—that hollowed-out feeling—coming out of her and crawling into me.

“I’m so sorry,” I whisper because I don’t know what else to say.

“You didn’t do anything,” she mumbles into my shirt, hugging me back like somehow she knows I might need her arms around me right now just as much as she needs mine.

“I’m still sorry.”

“Don’t feel sorry for me, Josh.” She looks up at me, her eyes so full and open. “Please.”

“No, it’s not that I feel sorry for you. I just feel sorry that you’re having to go through all this. It’s not fair. And I wish I could do something to—to help or to make it easier.”

“You do help, though.” She sets her head against me again. “You do make it easier.”

“What do you want to do tonight?” I ask her. “Are you hungry at all, or do you want to go back to bed . . . watch a movie? It’s whatever you want.”

“Could we lie back down?”

As we get undressed, she starts taking her pants off and looks up at me with this small, mischievous grin. “I promise I’m not trying to have sex with you again; I’m just getting into pajamas.”

“Stop,” I groan, folding my jeans over the back of her chair. “You know why I said that.”

“I’m just messing with you.” She takes her sweater off again and hangs it on the doorknob of her closet, walks over to her dresser in a mismatched bra and underwear, looking so beautiful I almost wish she would try to have sex with me because I need to feel human again now too. She pulls out one of my T-shirts I hadn’t even realized I’d left here. “Can I wear this?” she asks.

“Sure,” I answer, trying not to sound too enthusiastic about seeing her in my clothes. But as I watch her take her bra off and slide on my old beat-up gray T-shirt with a hole in the collar, my feet won’t let me not go to her. “By the way, I pretty much want to have sex with you constantly.”

“Oh, constantly?” she repeats, laughing as she gently pushes me away.

“I’m not kidding. I think about it way more than I should.” I follow her to the bed. “Truly, you’d be offended if you knew.”

She’s smiling as she pulls back the covers and climbs in first, but then she looks up at me with her eyes narrowed, like she’s confused about why I’m saying this.

“So, I would never reject you,” I tell her as I climb in beside her.

“Oh,” she murmurs.

I kiss her the way she was kissing me earlier—deep, serious. “Never,” I repeat. “Okay?”

“Okay,” she whispers.

As we lie here, she curls up around me, her head on my chest, her arm and leg draped across me. I start to feel more like myself than I have all week. We breathe in and out together, and I can feel her drifting to sleep when her phone vibrates from somewhere in the room, muffled. I look around and notice that she’s cleaned, rearranged things.

The phone keeps going off. She sighs loudly.

“Do you need to check that?” I ask her.

“I don’t want to,” she whines.

“It might be important.”

“I know it’s important, that’s why I don’t want to get it.” She rolls off me and says quietly, “It’s under the dresser.”

I don’t ask why it’s under there; I just get out of bed and tell her, “I’ll get it.” But as I walk up to her dresser, my eyes go directly to the pills lined up on top of it. I glance back at her. She sees me seeing them.

“My full pharmacy,” she explains. “Insomnia, depression, anxiety.”

I nod. “Okay,” I say because I don’t know if there’s anything else I should say. I’m happy she’s not hiding them anymore, but I can’t say that without letting her know that I knew about them already. I kneel down and press my face to the floor, see the phone all the way against the wall, glowing. I reach for it and pull it out, trying not to look at the screen.

I walk back over to her and hand her the phone, but she’s just staring at me. “Does that bother you?”

“What?”

“Those,” she says, gesturing to the dresser, the pills.

“No, they don’t bother me. Why would they bother me?”

“Because of your dad.”

“You need them, Eden. It’s totally different.”

“Yeah,” she whispers sadly, holding her phone facedown against her chest. “I do.”

She curls up to me again and breathes deeply, finally raises the phone.

I glance down. There’s a whole screen full of notifications she’s missed. Texts from me, her brother, Mara, someone named Lane, two missed calls from her mom. And a text from “DA Silverman.” This is the one she opens.

“Sorry.” I kiss her head, close my eyes. “I’m not looking, okay?” I tell her.

“You can.” She tilts the screen toward me. “It’s happening.”

I have news and wanted to make sure

you’re the first to know: we’re going to

trial. Congratulations, you girls did it!

I’ll be in touch when I know more, but

plan for sometime in December, possibly

January. Talk soon.

“Eden, this is really good,” I start, but she clicks the phone off, reaches over me and tosses it onto her desk. She shakes her head and pulls herself against me tighter, tucking her head down so I can’t see her face.

“Eden?” I try to get her to look at me. “Baby?”

She’s clutching my shirt, breathing heavy, sniffling. And then I feel her body start shaking. She’s crying. “I can’t,” she gasps, finally looking up at me, tears streaming down her face. “I can’t do it again.”

I kiss her forehead, try to wipe her tears away. “Yes, you can.”

“No,” she breathes. “I can’t. I really can’t.”Text property © Nôvel(D)ra/ma.Org.

“It’s okay,” I tell her, even though I don’t know that for sure. I don’t know if it’s okay or if she’s okay or if it will be okay. But I say it anyway.

She keeps repeating it: I can’t. She says it over and over until it doesn’t even sound like words anymore, just breathing. And then, after what feels like forever, she finally stills, falls silent. I think she’s asleep, but then she says, her voice clear, calm now. “His lawyer asked me if I ever said no.”

I raise my head. “What do you mean?”

“Like he assumed I was given a choice. Like I could choose to say yes or no. And I couldn’t explain that there was nothing to say yes or no to—there wasn’t a chance to say it—but he just kept interrupting me.”

“Fuck,” I say.

“But just because I couldn’t say no doesn’t mean I said yes, either.”

“I know that.”

She kisses me, then touches my face, just looks at me.

“I love you,” I tell her, and I start to worry I’m saying it so much she’s going to stop believing that I mean it.

She smiles and closes her eyes for a moment. “I don’t know what I would do without you, Josh.”

“Yeah,” I agree. “Back atcha.”

“It’s sort of scary,” she whispers, like it’s a secret, “how much I need you.”

“Don’t be scared,” I tell her, even though it scares me, too, how much I need her. “You won’t ever have to be without me. I mean, unless you wanted that.”

She looks me in the eye now, holding my face steady in her hands. “I would never want that.”

I wake up to her moaning in her sleep. She’s thrashing. Having a nightmare. “Eden?” I whisper.

“No,” she moans, kicking my leg under the blanket. “No.”

“Hey, hey, hey, Eden?” I try. “Eden, wake up.”

I touch her face, but she turns away from me. “Stop,” she says, her hand flopping lifelessly against my stomach. “Please,” she whimpers, crying with her whole body.

I touch her arm now, try to rub it gently. “Eden,” I repeat, louder this time.

She starts coughing, gasping, and then her hand goes to her throat, all the veins and tendons in her neck visible like she really can’t breathe. I’ve got to get her to wake up somehow. “Eden!” I shake her shoulder.

Her eyes fly open, and she bolts up, swinging at me. She scratches my neck with one hand, my chest with the other. I grab her arms. “Eden, stop.”

She screams, “Let go of me, let go of me!”

I do, but she hits me over and over. She’s breathing so heavily, gasping for air. I back up against the wall, but then she’s backing up too, about to fall right out of bed, so I lunge forward to grab her again. She’s kicking me with both her feet. This time she cries just one word: “Mom.”

“Eden, wake up!” I shout, but she doesn’t hear me.

She yells, “Stop.” I don’t know what to do—she’s going to hurt herself. But I let go of her arms, and I can do nothing but watch her fall. The sound is terrible—she hits the desk and her lamp crashes down, part of the glass shade breaking, but it’s still on, lighting her at this severe angle that makes her look haunted. She looks up at me like I pushed her or something, like it hurts her to look at me.

“Eden?” I scramble to get down on the floor with her, but she flinches away when I reach for her. She looks around the room: at the lamp, me, her skinned knees bleeding, the palms of her hands scraped. “Eden,” I repeat. I kneel next to her and she holds her arms out, but I can’t tell if she’s reaching for me or trying to keep me away. “Hey, it’s just me. It’s just me. You’re okay.”

“What?” her voice squeaks. “What happened?”

“You were having a nightmare. You—you fell out of bed,” I stutter, trying to give her the gentlest version of the truth.

Parker’s pounding on the door now, which makes her jump. “Eden?” Parker calls. “Eden, are you okay?”

Eden looks at me like she’s not sure how to answer, but I don’t think I should answer for her because I don’t know either.

“Eden!” She knocks some more. “I’m coming in.”

She opens the door, and her eyes go to the broken lamp, then to Eden, huddling against the wall, arms around her knees, then to me, crouching next to her. “What’s happening in here?” she says to me, then to Eden, “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I—I’m okay,” Eden tells her.

Parker narrows her eyes at me. “Did you fucking hit her?”

“NO!” we both shout at the same time.

“Oh my God, Parker, no,” Eden says, seeming to snap out of it, the focus coming back into her eyes. “It’s okay, really. I was having a bad dream. I fell.”

“You were screaming,” Parker says.

Eden shakes her head. “I don’t—I don’t know. I don’t remember that.”

“I’m gonna go get something for these cuts, okay?” I tell her. “I’ll be right back.”

Parker follows me into the bathroom. “What the fuck, Josh?” she mutters under her breath.

“It’s like she said, she had a really bad nightmare. I was trying to wake her up, and I freaked her out even more. That’s all.” I open the medicine cabinet, where I’d found the bandages for her hand last week. I get Band-Aids and a tube of ointment. “I swear to you I would never hit her.”

“Did she hit you, though?” she asks.

“No!”

“Josh, look at yourself,” she says.

I close the cabinet and look in the mirror. I’m bleeding. Scratches on my neck, my chest. The red welts of early bruises on my arms and chest and stomach. I look down at my legs. Marks on my thighs and shins. “I’m fine. She didn’t even know what was happening.” I turn away from her to wet a washcloth in the sink. My hands are shaking.

“Josh,” Parker says. “Are you okay?”

“I don’t want to leave her by herself,” I tell her instead of answering, because the answer is No, I’m not fucking okay. “It’s gonna be fine.”

“Okay,” she says, not convinced.

Back in Eden’s room, she hasn’t moved; she’s just staring at the floor. I reach for her lamp and set it back on her desk because it hurts to look at her like this too. I set the Band-Aids and ointment and washcloth on her desk and reach my hands down to help her up, but she doesn’t even look at me.

“Eden?” I sit next to her on the floor. “Can you hear me?”

“What happened?” she asks again, finally looking at me.

“You were just dreaming, okay?”

“No, I wasn’t—this was different.”

“Let’s get you up. Hold on to me, all right? Arms around my neck.”

She lets me help her up off the floor and set her on the bed. “I’m just gonna clean these real quick,” I tell her, reaching for the washcloth and pressing it against her knee.

“Oh my God, Josh.” She touches my neck, presses her hand against my chest. “I scratched you. I’m so sorry.”

“It’s okay,” I tell her as I apply a row of Band-Aids to one knee. “That was fucking stupid of me to try to wake you up like that. It’s my fault, I’m sorry.”

“I thought you were him—I didn’t know.”

“No, I know.” I bring the washcloth to her other knee, and she draws in a sharp breath. “Does that hurt?” I ask her.

She takes the washcloth from me, folds it over to the clean side, and brings it to my neck, dabbing at it gently, her hands shaking so badly. “I’m so sorry.”

“I’m fine,” I tell her as I finish putting Band-Aids on her other knee. “I promise.”

I get up and put my shirt on. She’s already freaked out about the scratches; she doesn’t need to see the bruises, too. “Do you want to keep the light on still?”

She shakes her head and gets back into bed.

I turn the lamp off, avoiding the broken glass.

Lying back down next to her, I feel uneasy. Afraid. Not of her, exactly, but of the things haunting her. She lays her head down in the spot she always lays her head down in and drapes her arm across me the way she always does. But everything feels different.

“I love you,” she says. “Josh?”

“Yeah?”

“I love you,” she repeats.

“I love you too.”

“Are you mad?”

“Of course not,” I tell her. I’m a lot of things right now, but mad—at her, anyway—isn’t one of them. “Eden, does that happen a lot? Having nightmares like that, I mean.”

“Sometimes,” she answers. “It hasn’t been this bad in a long time, though. I know I scared you. I’m sorry.”

“Will you stop apologizing?” But then I worry I might sound too harsh. “Really, you don’t have anything to be sorry about.”

“Okay, I’ll stop,” she whispers. She touches my chest in the spot where she scratched me and kisses my shirt—it stings as the fabric rubs against my open skin.

“Eden, can I ask you something else?”

“Mm-hmm,” she mumbles.

“Are you getting help for all this? More than the meds. Like counseling or something?”

“Yes.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, I have a therapist back home. We talk once a week.”

“Is it helping?”

“Mostly, I think.”

“Good, I’m glad.”

She gets so quiet for so long, I think she’s fallen asleep. But then she raises her head to look at me and says, “What about you?”

“What? Sorry, what about me?”

“Have you ever seen anyone—I mean, for the stuff with your dad? Or just in general?”

“Oh.” I think back to the Alateen meetings my mom brought me to when I was in middle school. “When I was younger, I went to a few group meetings but . . .”

“But what?” she asks me.

I shrug. “They just weren’t for me, I guess.” But as we lie here, I remember more clearly. That’s not what happened. The meetings conflicted with basketball and I stopped going.

“Hey, you should really try to sleep, okay?” I tell her. “I’ll be here the whole time.”