“I can’t believe you let me sleep for that long.” It’s been ten minutes, and my stomach is still rolling from embarrassment. “Did you finish reading the whole journal?”
“I stopped after I read about our first kiss.”
That’s good. That’s not too embarrassing. But if he would have read about the first time we had sex while I was sleeping in the seat next to him, I’m not sure I could have recovered.
“This is so not fair,” I mutter. “You have to do something mortifying so the scales even out, because right now I feel like I’ve completely ruined our night.”
Atlas laughs. “You think me doing something to mortify myself will make you feel better about tonight?”
I nod. “Yes, that’s the law of the universe. Eye for an eye, humiliation for humiliation.”
Atlas taps his thumb on his steering wheel as he massages his jaw with his free hand. Then he nudges his head toward his phone, which is sitting in the cupholder. “Open the Notes app on my phone. Read the first one.”
Oh, wow. I was kidding, but I snatch up his phone so fast. “What’s your password?”
“Nine five nine five.”
I enter the numbers and then glance over his home screen while I have it open. Every app is tucked neatly into a folder. He has zero unread texts and one unread email. “You’re a neat freak. Who has one unread email?”
“I don’t like clutter,” he says. “Side effect of the military. How many unread emails do you have?”
“Thousands.” I open the Notes app and click on the most recent one. As soon as I see the two words at the top, I drop the phone, pressing it facedown on my thigh. “Atlas.”
“Lily.”
I can feel my embarrassment being swallowed up by a warm wave of anticipation falling over me. “You wrote me a Dear Lily letter?”
He nods slowly. “You were asleep for quite a while.” When he glances at me, his smile falters, like he’s worried about whatever it is he wrote. He faces forward again, and I can see the roll of his throat.
I lean my head against the passenger window and begin to read silently.
Dear Lily,
You’re going to be mortified when you wake up and realize you fell asleep on our first date. I’m a little too excited for your reaction. But you seemed so tired when I picked you up, it actually makes me happy to see you getting some rest.
This past week has been surreal, hasn’t it? I was beginning to think I may never be a part of your life in any significant way, and then poof, you show up.
I could go on and on about what that run-in meant to me, but I promised my therapist I’d stop saying cheesy shit to you. Don’t worry, I plan on breaking that promise many times, but you asked if we could take things slow, so I’ll give it a few more dates.
Instead, I think I’m going to steal a page from your playbook and talk about our past. It’s only fair. You let me read some of your most intimate thoughts at such a vulnerable point in your life, I figure it’s the least I can do to give you some insight into my life at that time.
My version is a little grittier, though. I’ll try to spare you the worst of the details, but I’m not sure you can fully know what your friendship meant to me without knowing what I went through before you came along.
I told you some of it—about how I ended up in the position I was in, living in that abandoned house. But I had felt homeless a lot longer than that. My whole life, really, even though I had a house and a mother and, occasionally, a stepfather.
I don’t remember what things were like when I was young. I have this fantasy that maybe she was a good mother once upon a time. I do remember a day trip we took to Cape Cod where we tried coconut shrimp for the first time, but if she was a decent mother outside of that one day, that one meal, that part of her never became a core memory for me.
My core memories were stretches of time spent alone, or just trying to stay out of her way. She was quick to anger and quick to respond. For the first ten or so years of my life, she was stronger and faster than me, so I spent thebetter part of a decade hiding from her hand, from her cigarettes, from the lash of her tongue.
I know she was stressed. She was a single mother working nights to try and provide for me, but as many excuses as I made for her back then, I’ve seen my fair share of single mothers navigate life just fine without resorting to the things my mother did.
You’ve seen my scars. I won’t go into the details, but as bad as it was, it got even worse when she was on her third marriage. I was twelve when they met.
Little did I know, the age of twelve would be my only peaceful year. She was always gone because she was with him, and when she was home, she was actually in a decent mood because she was falling in love. Funny how love for a partner can make or break how some people treat their own children.
But twelve turned into thirteen turned into Tim moving in with us, and the next four years of my life were hell on earth. When I wasn’t making my mother angry, I was making Tim angry. When I was home, I was being yelled at. When I was at school, the house was being destroyed by their fights, and I’d be expected to clean up after them when I got home.
Life with them was a nightmare, and by the time I was finally strong enough to take up for myself, that’s when Tim decided he didn’t want to live with me anymore.
My mother chose him. I was forced to leave. They didn’t have to ask twice; I was more than ready to go, but that’s because I had somewhere to go.
Until I didn’t. I was gone three months before thefriend I was staying with moved with his family to Colorado.
At that point, I had no one and nowhere else to go, and no money to get there if I did, so I was forced to go back to my mother and ask if I could come back home.
I still remember the day I showed back up to that house. I had barely been gone three months, and the place was already falling apart. The yard hadn’t been mowed since the last time I’d done it before being kicked out. All the window screens were missing, and there was a gaping hole where the doorknob used to be. By the looks of the place, you would think I’d been gone for years.
My mother’s car was in the driveway, but Tim’s wasn’t. It looked like her car had been there for a while. The hood was propped open, and there were tools scattered near it, along with at least thirty beer cans someone had shaped in the form of a pyramid against the garage door.
Even the newspapers had piled up on the cracked concrete walkway. I remember picking them up and setting them on one of the old iron chairs to dry out before I knocked on the door.
It felt weird knocking on the door of a house I had lived in for years, but on the off chance Tim was home, I wasn’t about to open the door without permission. I had a house key still, but Tim had made it very clear that he’d turn me in for trespassing if I ever tried to use it.
I couldn’t have used it even if I wanted to. There was no doorknob.
I could hear someone making their way across the living room. The curtain on the small window at the top halfof the front door moved, and I saw my mother peek outside. She stared for a few seconds, unmoving.
She eventually opened the door a few inches. Far enough that I could see that, at two o’clock in the afternoon, she was still in her pajamas, which were an oversized Weezer T-shirt one of her exes had left behind. I hated that shirt because I liked that band. Every time she wore it, she ruined them a little more for me.
