Хлоя Бенджамин: The Anatomy of Dreams

He was disheveled, greasy-haired, and his eyes were bloodshot. He stopped in front of me and knelt.

“What are you doing here?” I asked, scrambling into a sitting position.

“I can’t stay for long, but I needed to see you. I have to tell you something.”

He exhaled, looking up at the ceiling. When he faced me again, his jaw was set.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Okay.” My head was pounding. “For what, exactly?”

“For acting like a total weirdo. For freezing you out in the library. For—for not being honest.” He put a hand on my knee. “The truth is, Sylvie, I’m not doing so well. My head’s in a bad place. But I don’t want to lose you.”

“Then don’t,” I said.

“It’s not that simple.”

“What’s wrong? Is it your mom? Or your grades? Did you hear from your dad?”

“No, no.” Gabe shook his head.

“What, then?”

He seemed more impenetrable than he ever had before, and I was exhausted. Embarrassed, too, that he had seen me this way. The waistband of my jeans had ridden up, digging tracks into my stomach; one sock had fallen off and somehow wound up on my pillow. I hadn’t bothered to take my hair out of its bun, and now it sagged over the side of my head, bobbing above one ear whenever I spoke.

“Do you trust me?” he asked.

“I want to.”

“Well, can you try?”

“I have been trying.”

I could feel my eyes filling again. Stop it , I told myself. You’re being a girl, a stupid girl .

“Hey,” Gabe whispered. “Don’t cry”—and his thumbs were below my eyes, scooping the moisture off my cheeks and wiping it on his jeans. He was frustrated, thinking hard; when we spoke again, it was labored.

“All I need is a few days. A week, tops, to sort everything out. Then we can go back to normal—to how things were. I’m serious this time.”

I stared at him, trying to understand. For a moment, I almost gave in, but I was still angry: at his audacity and his withholding, his request for me to trust him when he wouldn’t tell me anything. I pushed him by the shoulders, pulling my knees up to my chest so he couldn’t come closer. But he pushed back, and we struggled against each other, Gabe trying to calm me while I wrestled even harder. I shoved my knee into his stomach, and he made a low noise of pain, but he didn’t pull away. Thick, sloppy tears rolled down my chin and onto the chest of his T-shirt.

Gabe was making snuffling noises, noises that I thought were from exertion before I realized he was crying, too. His head was limp, hanging forward from his neck like a scarecrow’s, but he held me just as strongly.

I had never seen him cry before. Against my better judgment, my resistance softened. What did I know of his secrets, and what right did I have to know them yet? Gabe laid his forehead on my chest, wrapping his legs and arms around me until I stilled. I don’t know how long we stayed like that; the next thing I remember, it was the middle of the night, the moon a sliver of fingernail in the window. We were lying down, Gabe breathing steadily with sleep. His knees were tucked behind mine, and one of his arms was around my waist. I must have moved slightly, because he stirred and looked at me, his eyelids flickering.

I turned to face him. There were four inches, maybe less, between us.

“Are you sure you don’t want to break up?” I asked, keeping my voice low so I didn’t wake Hannah.

“I’m sure.”

“Why?”

“Why am I sure I don’t want to?”

He grinned at me, lopsided.

“Yeah,” I said. “Because it kind of seems like you don’t know what you want.”

“Sylvie,” Gabe whispered. He tucked his forehead into the nook of my shoulder; I could feel his breath against my ear. “You’re my person.”

The words vibrated inside me, and I grinned despite myself. You’re my person : he was mine, and I was his. But when I woke up the next morning, I wondered if I’d dreamed it. The light was pale and bluish as water, Hannah was snoring softly below me, and Gabe was gone.

That day, he wasn’t in the dining hall at breakfast. I thought he was avoiding me until he was absent at lunch, and again at dinner. Gabe could scarf down three sloppy joes before belching loudly and declaring himself satisfied; there was no way he’d subsisted for an entire day on granola bars from the dorm vending machines. That night, I stood in front of the dessert window, staring at that night’s special—whipped-cream-topped Jell-O in plastic cups—while feeling increasingly nauseous. There was a whiff of perfume, and then Nina, Gabe’s ex, appeared at my side. She grabbed my arm.

“Sylvie,” she said. Her long dark hair fell forward in a sheet, and her silvery eyes were wide with urgency. “Have you heard?”

“Heard what?” I asked, but my stomach was already curdling.

“He’s gone,” Nina said.

It spread through the dining hall within minutes. The rumor was that Gabe had been asked to leave after he ditched our history exam, but that didn’t make sense—Mills would never expel someone because of such a minor transgression. Everyone asked me what had really happened, and the fact that I was just as clueless made me burn with resentment. How could he have told me nothing? I was convinced his departure had something to do with Keller, but I shared this with no one and couldn’t prove it even to myself. After dinner, I ran to Gabe’s room, but when I burst inside, it was empty: his bottom bunk stripped of sheets and his dresser bare. Beneath a pushed-up window, one open drawer rattled in the wind.

Hannah was the only one who wasn’t shocked by Gabe’s disappearance. The rest of our group picked over the rumors in the dining hall, hushing in sympathy when I sat down. But she was silent and evasive. One night, while doing homework in our room—Hannah sitting in the chair by the window and I in her bottom bunk, leaning against her enormous frog-shaped pillow—she swiveled abruptly to face me.

“I’m glad he’s gone,” she said. “There—I said it. Everyone acts like this whole thing is some Shakespearean tragedy, but he wasn’t exactly a great guy to begin with.”

“That’s not true,” I said. “You didn’t even know him.”

“Neither did you!” burst out Hannah. Her curly, corn-silk hair was wrapped in a towel; below it, her cheeks were the color of strawberries. “No one else will come out and admit it, but he was using you, Sylvie. You think it’s a coincidence that he only came over at night? That he left before you woke up the next morning?”

“We were talking , those nights,” I said, but Hannah only raised her eyebrows. “What? You think he was using me for sex?”

“He wouldn’t be the first guy to do it.”

“That’s a really shitty thing to say, Hannah.”

“I’m not saying it to hurt your feelings,” said Hannah. “I just don’t want you to look back through rose-colored glasses.”

It was one of our inside jokes, a phrase our English teacher favored. (“Now, it’s Gatsby’s nostalgia that gives him life, but it’s also what destroys him—he can’t help but look back through rose-colored glasses.”) But I didn’t laugh.

“I’m not,” I said.

I turned back to my math sets and looked down at them, hard. I could feel Hannah’s eyes on me.

“It’s not like you were in love with him, were you?” she asked.

A wave of heat washed through my body. My cotton pajamas felt like wool, and Hannah’s blanket was stifling. Hannah stared at me, but I couldn’t answer her; I pushed out of bed and ran to the bathroom in my socks, slowing as I passed the hall monitor’s office. At the sink, I splashed cold water on my face until the heat passed. I had never been in love before, and I couldn’t explain to Hannah how I knew I was now. But my love for Gabe was as recognizable as anything I had seen with my own eyes. Mr. Keller’s garden, for instance: its unlatched gate, its shapely darkness, and that strange doubled flower, so vivid a color it could be seen without light.