Page 92 of Leaving the Station

“I couldn’t,” he mumbles finally. “Sleep, I mean.”

“Oh,” I say. “Sorry about that.”

“It’s fine.”

He’s speaking in a tone of voice he never used when we were dating.

“Okay, well,” I begin, “did you see my letter?”

“The one you slid under my door in the middle of the night before you vanished?” he asks. “Yeah, Zoe. I saw your letter.”

“So did you... ?” I don’t know how to ask this without making him even more pissed at me, but that ship has sailed. “Did you think that we were still together? All this time that I haven’t been answering?”

“What? No,” he says, sounding shocked. “I assumed we’d broken up when you wrote me a letter saying you were a lesbian and then disappeared in the middle of the night and stopped answering my texts and calls.”

I’m the worst.

This is true for many reasons but mostly due to the fact that I’m deeply relieved. I was worried that because of the way I tried to end things, he’d think there was still a chance for us. That he’d try to rationalize, to bargain with me, to say that what we had was good and we shouldn’t give it up because of the small matter of me not being attracted to him the way he was to me.

But obviously he knew our relationship was over. All of thiscould’ve been clarified if I’d spoken to him, but I was too cowardly to answer his texts.

At least this solves one of my problems: we’ve been broken up while things were going down with Oakley. It still wasn’t fair of me to not tell her about him, especially when she opened up to me.

But it wasn’t anything worse than that.

“Are you done?” Alden asks. “I should try to sleep.”

“Well—” I start, but he interrupts me.

“Wait, you know what,Iactually have something I need to say.” He takes a shuddering breath. “Did you know you were gay when we were first dating?”

I nod even though he can’t see it over the phone. “Yeah,” I tell him. “I did.”

“Then why the fuck did you date me?”

Because you spoke so eloquently about Charles Dickens. Because you smiled widely at everything I said.Because you made the world seem big.

But I begin with the simplest explanation: “Because I liked you.”

“Oh.”

The call is filled with static, with his ragged breaths on the other end.

“Seriously, I thought that I could be bi or pan for a little while,” I tell him. “Because ofhow muchI liked you.”

He makes ahmsound,and I take it as a sign to keep talking.

“And Ididcare about you, Alden,” I add. “That part of the letter wasn’t a lie.”

“Okay,” he says, his voice unreadable. “Well, thanks.”

“Wait,” I say, willing him not to hang up. “I need you to know that I’m not coming back to school after break. So you don’t have to worry about running into me.”

“I wasn’t worried about that,” he says quietly.

I don’t say anything. I let the silence justbe.

After a moment, he says, “Is it wild that I still want to see you?”