Those early years of being in love with her were hard, but I had no idea how much harder it was going to get.
I met Jack on the first day of middle school. Autumn and I did not have a single class together—I would be less distracted, for one thing—but not having lunch together seemed like a joke. Surely the school administrators knew we had always been together, were meant to be together. Surely, if I looked around the cafeteria, she would be there?
But she wasn’t. Autumn ate during the first lunch, where she’d meet her new friends and my future friends, though I knew none of that right then.
When I finally sat down next to Jack at a mostly empty table, he reacted as if he had been waiting for me. We had been in the morning gym class together and kicked a ball around with a few other guys after the teacher had given us free time. I didn’t sit down because I recognized Jack though; I simply sat at the first empty seat, defeated. But Jack remembered me. He asked me if I ever watched pro soccer. I said yeah, not really interested in conversation, not really listening, wondering what Autumn was doing.
And then Jack sealed our fates.
“Paolo Maldini is the reason I play defense.”
My head shot up and I looked at him for the first time, noticing his freckles, the reddish tint to his hair.
“Me too,” I said. “He’s my—” and we said “favorite” together. I don’t remember the rest of the conversation, but we were friends.
At dinner with The Mothers that night, Autumn talked about the girls she had eaten with, especially a girl named Alexis, and I was glad we had both worked out our lunches. For those first two weeks, I thought maybe everyone had been right: it would be good for us to have other friends. I could have Jack for lunch and soccer and Autumn for everything else. Autumn would have those girls for going to the mall. All those girly things were starting to be important to her, and she would still have me, like always, for everything else.
When my mom sat me down and explained that this year, after we had Autumn’s birthday dinner as a family with Uncle Tom, Autumn’s father, Autumn would be having girlfriends over for a slumber party and I couldn’t participate, I understood. I didn’t mind. The only thing that confused me was why my mom was telling me instead of Autumn.
I decided it was a timing thing. I was in all honors classes and Autumn wasn’t, not even in honors English. She’d gotten a B-minus in English the year before. She’d read all the assigned books back in fourth grade, so she used her in-class reading time to secretly read Stephen King. Then she wrote her book reports based on what she could remember from two years earlier. I thought it was impressive that she’d gotten a B-minus under those circumstances.
Because we weren’t in the same classes, our homework was different. There wasn’t much purpose in doing our work together unless she needed my help with math. So we were spending less time together in the evenings. I told myself Autumn meant to tell me herself but didn’t have time.
I had been talking to Jack all month about Autumn. How fun she was, how cool, how funny, how she always remembered to say “Paolo” and not “Pablo.” （Not that she talked about soccer. It was more that she cared enough to remember when I talked about Paolo Maldini.）
For my birthday, one week before Autumn’s, Jack came out to dinner with Mom, Aunt Claire, and Autumn. （Tom didn’t appear for my events, and I wouldn’t have wanted him. My own father sent a notice that he’d taken out another savings bond in my name.） I was excited for Jack and Autumn to meet.
Autumn smiled at him, and his eyes popped. He shook himself like he was getting out of a pool. I had talked about my friend Autumn, but I had not told Jack about her face or the new shape of her body. He said, “Hi,” and the evening had seemed fine and normal, like every other birthday celebration with The Mothers and Autumn, except Jack was there too. It was only later that I realized how much time Autumn spent looking at her new phone, how distantly polite she was with Jack.
The Mothers had said we could not have cell phones until we were thirteen, but Autumn had received hers at the beginning of the month because her dad had messed up the contract’s start date. Tom had given it to her anyway, as my mother put it, “without checking with Claire, as is custom in his kingdom.” That night, when I received my first cell phone, I told Autumn we could text instead of using the cup and string strung between our windows. She’d smiled at that, but it hadn’t seemed like she was planning to text me the way she had been texting her new girlfriends all week.