“I love you,” he said as we waited for the screen to load. “I’m proud of you no matter what.”
I couldn’t talk over the thick knot in my throat, just slid my fingers along the track pad to click through. Finally, the screen loaded, and my eyes scanned through the numbers, my brain frantically adding them up even though the total was surely displayed somewhere.
And when I figured it out, my shaking did stop. Every movement ceased, and for a split second, even the thudding of my heart. And when I finally managed to pull in a breath, I heard roaring in my ears and felt a faint tingle in my face that told me I was close to passing out.
“What?” Andy asked anxiously, peering at the numbers on the little laptop screen. “Is that a good score? What does it mean?”
I sucked in a huge breath and touched my fingers to the tip of my nose. Numb. I felt almost drunk.
“Yeah,” I said faintly. “It’s…very good.” I gulped. “Ninety-ninth percentile good.”
Fingertips still gently prodding my tingling nose, I looked over at Andy. His olive-gold skin had taken on a distinctly greenish undertone, and his throat worked as if he might be sick.
“You’re going to medical school,” he said, his voice faltering ever so slightly. “Anywhere you want.”
I moved my hand over to my cheek, hot with my pounding blood. “Looks like it. Anywhere I want.”
The woozy feeling had started to recede, and as I reached out and resumed control of each of my senses, I looked back to Andy. If anything, he looked even worse . . . miserable, even.
“Are you—” I started, but broke off when he looked away, back down to the screen in front of us. “Are you happy for me?”
He scrubbed furiously at one of his eyes, refusing to meet my gaze. “Of course I am, Josie. Why wouldn’t I be?”
An oily wisp of unwelcome suspicion curled through my chest, and I scooted away a couple of inches. He was not elated for me, at all, I realized, and that knowledge felt like a tent stake to the heart. Years of work, hundreds of hours of studying to achieve an almost impossible score—I was going to be a goddamn doctor, and my own boyfriend couldn’t be happy for me?
He reached a hand out to me, but I bristled at the touch and put another foot of distance between us.
“Don’t lie to me,” I snapped. “You know how much I wanted this and how hard I worked. Do you know how few people get a score like this? What it means for me?”
“Yes, it means you have your pick of any school you want to attended. Anywhere.” Andy said, his posture tense. “I’m allowed to have feelings about this.”
I shot to my feet and took a couple of steps away. “Yeah, but it sucks that now it’s all about your feelings and not about me at all,” I shot back, unable to hold back my angry words.
He flinched, but his face remained ashen and stony and he offered no response.
I closed my eyes and breathed deeply through my nose, inflating my lungs to capacity like I’d always done in yoga. It soothed my ragged nerves—not much, but just enough that when I spoke again, my tone was milder. Not so reproachful, but I would not let him off the hook for this.
“Just be honest with me, okay?” I almost winced when it came out as a question. “Please.”
The grayish cast to his skin was receding, and in its place, an uptight flush colored the tops of his cheekbones. Even through the haze of anger and hurt I felt, I still noticed it and how on his beautiful face, it looked like an artist had painted it on the high, elegant curves.
“I’m scared about you leaving me,” he said, his jaw clenched tight as he gave me the honesty I’d asked for. “Of course I wanted you to do well and get into medical school, but now half the schools in the country will beg to take you and you’ll go somewhere else that offers you some fat scholarship and I’m just some…some guy who never made the dean’s list and you’re you. Why would you keep me? Why should you?”
The implication—a different state, a different life, a different boyfriend—struck viciously at my heart like a surgeon’s blade. I stumbled back a step, hand on my chest where I imagined the wound to be. As if I could stop the bleeding.
“That’s what you think about me?” I asked in a choked voice. “You think I’m that kind of person?”
He didn’t answer, just leveled me with a fierce stare as his chest rose and fell with each harsh breath. And his beloved face was tight, muscles so rigid that I thought I might brush him with my fingers and he would break apart or simply dissolve.
My hand fell away from my chest and I stepped forward to pick up my laptop. I closed it gently and picked it up to tuck it under my arm. “How long have you felt that way? Days? Weeks?”
Andy stayed silent, but the pained look in his eyes spoke volumes.
“Oh, I see. You’ve always felt that way.” My lips thinned, and I lashed out before I could stop myself. “That’s…fragile.”
It was a shitty thing to say. Almost instantly, I wished I could take it back, but it was too late. Andy’s eyes widened, and then—it was like a light winked out. A light I knew I couldn’t bring back with an apology or reassurances or whispered I-love-yous.
It was just gone.
Like it never was.