Wish You Were Her(56)
And it was frightening. To be falling for someone who thought they liked a version of you that could never be real. It filled her with anxiety, the worry of being found out. That she would let him down and he would feel cheated. That he would end up cursing her for letting him fall in love with a lie, with a person who did not exist.
Not a statue. Just a mortal with a disability. Not any kind of creature from Olympus. Just someone who borrowed a little stardust now and then, when there was film in the camera.
“Jonah!”
He stopped on the cobbled stones up ahead and she recognized the disillusionment in his shoulders, the kind of weariness and wariness that aged neurodivergent children in comparison to their peers. That early knowledge of rejection and the constant choice between being guarded or being hurt.
“Allegra, it’s all right,” he called back to her, as she closed the distance between them on the dimly lit road. “You don’t owe me anything, that’s not … I didn’t walk out because of that, you don’t have to explain.”
You’re just like me, she wanted to say. I think we probably have so many memories that are the same. I think if we were both songs, the melodies would sound so similar. Or maybe they would be in harmony. And we would know the tune and the words straightaway, we wouldn’t need to rehearse it. The cadences are already inside us. I just need to know you see me, the real me, before I give you everything. Loads of people love her. The girl on the screen. But she’s not real, she’s the mask. I’m what’s underneath.
“Jonah, I don’t like him. Not that way and, actually, not any kind of way, right now.”
She could never properly articulate what she felt. Instead, she wrapped her arms around his torso, laid her head against his heart and closed her eyes.
Chapter Twenty
Jonah felt his arms slowly wrap around Allegra. His chin fit perfectly atop her head. The rain came down around them and he felt all of the noise stop. The sound that had always buzzed in his head, made worse by an unquiet world, suddenly turned to stillness. As a child, he had always loved stories: That was what had led him to bookshops, his hunger for stories and his need for patterns and order within the chaos of a neurotypical world.
The stories always spoke of true love. Of Gods and gathered flowers, of princes on horses and lonely men in large houses with no room big enough to hold a broken heart. To him, it had always seemed as far away as stories of dragons and wolves who could speak. Now, as he linked his hands together, he felt as though he were holding the whole world. The stories made sense.
Color showed up in the world in ways it never had before.
“You don’t need to like me back,” he told her as he held her. “It’s okay. But I don’t think I’ll ever stop liking you. So, maybe … maybe if it’s you and him, I shouldn’t be around you both anymore.”
“Shut up, Jonah.”
He blinked. “What?”
“Jonah, I don’t like Simon. He kissed me, I didn’t want him to.”
He felt himself scowl. “Then I’ll kill him.”
He felt her laugh against his lungs. Lungs she had robbed of breath from the first moment he saw her.
“I shouldn’t even have come out with him tonight,” she said. “I saw you talking to Kerrie, and I felt jealous. I’m so stupid.”
“Not stupid.”
“And lonely. I’m so fucking lonely.”
Jonah looked up at the stars that were always brighter in Lake Pristine than anywhere else he had ever been. Stars that couldn’t be seen in the hellish smoke of the city, where everything was too much and all at once.
Allegra was just lonely. In Lake Pristine for a season and then gone like the fine weather. She wasn’t staying. She just needed a new palate for a while.
He could be that for her.
“Come home with me,” he said against her hair. “Please.”
He knew she was going to say “yes” by the way she looked up at him, but before the word could come out, a strangled, excitable scream made both of them jump. They turned like two spooked animals to see Saffron Billingham and her older sister, Rebecca, staring at them in visible glee.
“This is too cute,” Saffron cried, her smartphone out and filming the two of them like they were two exotic flowers or a stag in the mist. As if they were something far more interesting than just two teenagers in the street with their arms around each other.
“Please don’t film me,” Allegra said softly, and Jonah knew it was a plea she had made so many times before.
More people were gathering, most of them people Jonah did not recognize—out-of-towners who had come to see Pamela. Jonah felt a stab of fear as he looked into some of their faces. He was invisible to them, as they stared at Allegra, ravenous. It completely terrified him, especially as they started to edge closer.
He tightened his arms around Allegra. “Back off her.” They ignored him. They progressed with terrifying intensity and Jonah saw the world, in a flash, through Allegra’s eyes. People’s individual natures, the parts that made them whole and loveable, gone in an instant as they formed into a mob. Their faces all looked the same. “I said back the fuck away from her!”
He pulled Allegra with him as he started walking toward home, and she followed him, gripping his hand tightly. The crowd, however, moved after them like an amoeba. Jonah wondered if they would follow him all the way up to his apartment, when a jeep suddenly lurched into his eyeline, pulling to a stop before the two of them.