You First: A Joe Goldberg Prequel (You, #0)(127)

The train is slowing down and the doors are about to open. It’s good timing.

I’m in no rush. I need a minute to prepare, to stop and smell the hot dogs. I don’t fight the joy. If you think about it, this is a happy ending for any first love, for any family. All parents want to go first, all good ones anyway. You hoped that you’d be lucky enough to see me fly away from the nest and soar into the unknown. But that’s life, that’s love. The risk all expectant, misguided mothers take on when they indulge the wrong man, a roving-eyed dick who stands there smoking a cigar and sizing up a nurse while his woman is in labor, screaming. I know. I can’t fixate on you and be good to any woman all at the same time. Life is too short, too crowded. You died for me, and I killed for you. It’s my duty as your son to outlast you, to find someone to love and do it right. You don’t have to worry. I won’t repeat the mistakes of my messy, human parents. I learned a lot from you and I’m not gonna overdose or run into a bus at the young, old age of twenty-five. I know you want better for me, and I promise to do the one thing you could never pull off.

I will close the white box on you and never look back.

I made it, Vail. I’m on the edge of the East River. I reach into my pocket for the dog tags. I wait for myself to feel something, but that’s how I know I’ve changed. Grown.

I don’t cry. I don’t shake. I toss the fake-ass dog tags into the fucking river. And that’s it.

I made a deal and I’ll honor the contract. I won’t talk to you when I’m lonesome and I won’t think about you when I’m lonely. It won’t be easy, not at first, but every step toward Brooklyn is a move in the right direction. I’m not the man I was; I don’t even have the same Portnoy. And talking about you to myself, to the next girl I meet, would be a bad thing.

After all, that is how you killed us. You…No. No more you.

The bus hit me hard, but it didn’t kill me. I’m young, strong. Still open for business. And my “parents” really didn’t die in vain. When I get back out there, I’ll be smart. I’ll make X-ray vision goggles so I can see the things I need to see, the things a young girl coming into her own doesn’t want me to see. The important things. Her secret life…her little chats.

But then a crack in the sidewalk. What if I never love again? What if you…No. I don’t say your name, not anymore.

They say you never forget your first. But they also say, “Never say never.” I am choosing to erase you from the hard drive in my head. I am choosing to stop talking to myself about you, about us. Better to make room for good things.

It’s like my old Aunt Misty. I only met her once when my mom took me to the nursing home where she lived. She was chomping on a Popsicle. Red juice everywhere, red tongue, white nightgown. She licked her fingers and tossed the dead stick on the floor. She never had kids. She was like a kid.

“I want a Popsicle.”

“You just had one, Aunt Misty.”

She didn’t get mad. She just laughed. I don’t think I ever saw anyone happier than Aunt Fucking Misty when my mother peeled the paper off a Popsicle and handed it over. Forgetting things comes naturally when you get old, when your time is short, as if your brain is trying to make it easier to let every Popsicle taste as sweet as the first.

We never went back to the nursing home. My mom hawked Aunt Misty’s ring to pay the gas bill. “It’s not like she’ll miss it,” she said. “Same way she won’t miss us.”

Aunt Misty is a good role model. The wind picks up as I buy a lighter at a newsstand. Night starts to fall. (Touching skillfully, mysteriously) her first rose. The smile on my face comes from within, for no reason, like an excuse you make for someone you love. I’ve never been in love, not yet—I’m pretty sure the other person has to be in there with you—but the thing with feathers is alive inside of me. Unflappable. A little scary, the idea of a bird in your gut that won’t stop bashing the walls of your insides and maybe Mooney is right. Maybe smart, sensitive guys like me are supposed to abstain from hope altogether. I turn a little red. Who am I kidding? There are no “guys like me.” I’m not a dick. And I know the way you know about a…I’m special. I can’t lose hope, because I am hope. And it would be selfish of me to run home to my typewriters when there’s a girl out there yearning for a man to love her down to the last, frostbitten drop. I can love a woman at her lowest when she feels like she’s not enough, like she’s disappearing. When I was a kid, I licked the Popsicle stick until it gave me a splinter on my tongue, and then I pulled out the stupid splinter and licked the stick some more. I toss my new lighter to a homeless guy. I don’t need props. I have a good feeling about tonight as I line up with all the other people looking to get lost in the fog of love, in the noise of music, the pursuit of the kind of happiness you can only find in something outside yourself. A Popsicle, a girl. I’m gonna be okay. Fate is on my side, because for the first time in my life, I am too.





Acknowledgments


You First is the first book that I finished in a world without my mom. Every day we break another record. Every day it’s the longest we’ve gone without talking. Talking leads to writing, and my mother and I talked a lot. I felt hyperaware of both my mom and my dad while bringing young Joe to life. He wasn’t like that with his parents. My house was loud, and that’s probably why my brother and I are…a little loud. It’s also what made me want to give voice to characters.