is told in alternating points of view between Amy and Joe, from Lisa Burstein's
The headings at the top of each section lets you know who's point of view you're reading...and now I'll leave you to it. Here's your excerpt of
Amy
I finally ducked into
the bathroom, put the seat down, sat, and called Joe. He probably wouldn’t
answer. You weren’t allowed to have your ringer on in the library and when Joe
was doing work, he got lost in it. I’d seen it. His eyes practically sparkling
as he turned the pages in the dusty, old leather-bound law books. It was almost
like he was inhaling knowledge. I always admired him for being lucky enough to
find something that he’d really cared about.
I
pictured his phone shaking in his backpack as mine rang in my ear, a vibration
like someone trying to wake another person from slumber—from a bad dream.
Except it wasn’t him who had to wake up from the nightmare, it was me.
I
probably didn’t have any right to really call it a nightmare if it was
self-induced.
It
went to voice mail and I heard his message: This
is Joe’s phone. He’s not answering, but you can talk after the beep. If he’s
not ignoring your call, he’ll call you back.
It
was Joe in recorded form—smart, funny, confident Joe.
I
didn’t leave a message myself, though. It was strange considering that was how
we had gotten together. How after my arrest, he had tried to connect to me via
my parentally forbidden phone during the time we were across the street from
each other but I had still assumed worlds apart.
Back
then, we weren’t even friends anymore. Not like we had been before sophomore
year when everything changed. I thought he was mad at me. He thought I was done
with him. We talked, but only because we lived next door to each other.
But
he had been calling me, checking on me, wanting me to know he hoped I was okay.
It was all archived on my phone. When I was finally allowed to have it back,
Joe’s messages were waiting.
Each
recorded time he reached out, when I didn’t even know he was there. When in
real life he and I were too afraid to really talk to each other.
That
was what I needed to be thinking about. Not why I was here with Trevor and was
such a shitty girlfriend.
Maybe
not remembering that when he asked me
to move in with him was what made me so shitty.
Not
being able to fly across the dining hall table and kiss his lips off was what
made me so shitty.
Hanging
up without leaving a message was also what made me so shitty.
I
called back and said quickly, “Thinking about you,” before hitting end.
In
the months before Joe and I arrived here, we were in the perfect bubble between
my arrest and now. Our lives back then were only waking up each day and being
with each other. It was beautiful.
And
most importantly, simple.
I
remember the two of us in my backyard on my old, rusty swing set. Joe and I would
spend hours on those swings not even swinging, but being held up off the
ground. The feeling bringing me back to the day we first kissed and kissed
again—that weightless, flittering sensation that being on a swing can give.
Even
though the arrest was behind me, we hung out in my backyard because my parents
still liked having me near enough to know I wasn’t fucking shit up.
Shit
being my life.
With
Joe in the picture I finally didn’t feel like I was. I actually thought things
were starting to make sense, were starting to fit. I probably should have known
that continuing to count on someone else to validate my happiness would
backfire on me. But at the time, I was too blissed out to care.
At
least until we’d talked about coming here.
“I
wish we could stay like this forever,” I’d said, because I knew that being
outside this perfect bubble would change things. I had reasons for my
suspicions. The world had pushed us apart for years when I was too bad-girl for
him and he was too all-American-boy for me. When we let the choices we made and
the people around us dictate how we felt about each other.
With
no one around, with just the two of us, we only had to worry about pleasing one
person. Lucky for me, Joe was easy to please, and when it came to him, I was,
too.
“In
your parents’ backyard?” Joe had asked, laughing his laugh that had the power
to make my stomach float like it did on the swing.
Being
on the swing, I felt it double.
“Life
goes on, Amy,” he’d said.
I
looked at him, his profile turned pink in the sunset. “That’s what I’m worried
about,” I’d mumbled.
“It
doesn’t matter where we are. I’ll be there,” Joe had said, taking my hand.
“What
is this, a love song?” I’d asked, even though I held his hand tightly.
“I
don’t think you want me to sing,” he’d said. “But I can,” he added, leaning
into my ear and humming, his breath on my neck, making me shiver.
I’d
wanted to believe him. That no matter where we were, this, us, wouldn’t change.
With the two of us connected as the swings below us wobbled, I tried to believe
him. Unfortunately, I also knew I’d been wrong about a lot of things; the
highest on the list resulted in me being arrested.
He
kissed my neck.
“But
we both know what noise can do,” I’d said.
We
did.
I
did.
The
years he avoided me and I avoided him. The years we wasted that we could have
spent like we were now. The years that may have led me to an actual prom night
I could have celebrated with him, instead of celebrated in a jail cell.
“I
think we’re beyond that,” he’d said, getting up and pulling me out of my swing.
He touched my face, his hand still. Somehow when he was with me, close to me,
he could get the shaking in his hands to stop. The shaking that started the day
his father left, that he hid any way he could.
He
moved his hand over my cheek like water to my thirst, a blanket to my cold.
Before I even knew I was thirsty or cold. He kissed me. His kiss that made me
want so much I bit his lip. That could only be a kiss because my parents were a
kitchen window away. That could and would turn into more later when he snuck
into my room that night.
The
other place we could be where we could forget about the rest of the world.
“I’m
scared,” I’d said into his lips. I didn’t say anything else, knowing I didn’t
have to explain it to him. That he would know what I meant.
That
maybe he knew what I meant because he was scared, too.
“We’ll
be together,” he’d said, kissing me again, launching me like the swing, up, up,
up. Each kiss pushing me higher and higher.
And
we had been, until I was alone in the bathroom at a party having to make myself
bother to leave him a message.
Having
to make myself remember why I’d agreed to come here with him in the first
place.
***
Joe
I took out my phone:
two missed calls from Amy and a message. I would call her back, but not here. This
sounded less like a library than a bowling alley did.
It
was odd that she’d called twice, but I also knew she second-guessed herself a
lot. To be honest, it was one of the things I loved about her. If she felt like
something wasn’t right, she went back and kept trying until it was. I knew
she’d called again just to leave the message, and I also knew it would probably
say, Sorry I hung up before.
I
watched Emily at the fridge across the room. I didn’t really like talking to
Emily about Amy. Amy was mine.
Finally,
mine.
Or
at least she had been.
Not
in a weird, possessive way, but in a how could
I not have known that this was what I always needed way. I didn’t want to
share her and because of the arrest I hadn’t had to. She didn’t want to be
friends with the girls she used to be friends with anymore. She was afraid of
other guys because of the ones from her past who only wanted to use her, so she
chose me.
She
chose me.
I
hoped Emily, regardless of how semi-naked she was, wouldn’t change that.
Living
across the street from Amy meant that after we got together I could sneak in to
her bedroom whenever I wanted, and I did want.
I
would carry a ladder from my garage to her open and waiting-for-me window. The
heavy, metal, clunking one my mother never used but made me hoist up every fall
to do the gutters. I would lay it against Amy’s house so lightly, so quietly,
hoping not to wake her parents, the rest of the neighborhood, but most
importantly her.
I
would climb up to her window and push the screen out to be in her room—right
across the street from my room. Once inside, I would sit on her bed and touch
her face, waiting for her to wake up. Loving the way her lips pouted like she
was angry. The way her chest moved up and down, up and down so gently, her hair
growing over her pillow like dark ivy.
She
was Amy.
The
one I’d known since she was six. The one I’d loved since she was ten. The one I
hoped I would love until she was one hundred and ten.
That
is, once we both got through the confusion that the freedom and choices of
college seemed to be causing for both of us.
Sleeping
in her bed, she was my Amy without the voices in her head that plagued her and
made her think she was anything less than the amazingness she was—funny, smart,
and so caring.
When
she would finally wake up, the look of fear I saw at first was quickly transformed
to recognition and then to love.
Then
to a kiss.
“Joe,”
she would say, her breath minty with toothpaste.
“It’s
me,” I would say. The bed would always squeak while I tried to get comfortable.
She
would say, “Shhh my mom has ears like a Doberman in heat.”
I
would say, “I think your dad sees my ladder every morning.”
She
would laugh and kiss me again.
AJ,
her parrot, brought in from his aviary for the night, would twitter in his
cage. And repeat, Joe, Joe, Joe and
make kissing noises.
We
would laugh.
Amy
would say, “Don’t you ever sleep?”
I
would say, “How can I with you across the street?” and growl into her neck.
She
would laugh harder. The kind of laugh that made her body fold in on itself as
she said, “You’re crazy.”
I
would say, “For you.”
She
would say, “No, just crazy.”
AJ
would repeat crazy, crazy, crazy and
fly around his cage.
In
those moments I would know what Amy meant when she said she wished we could
stay here forever.
Except
my forever was under her blankets, body to body, breathing like one, sweating
and kissing and reaching for each other in the night, kissing her shoulder and
her kissing mine.
And
after, her head on my chest, perfectly fit in the crook of my neck, my arms
around her in a tight, constant orbit.
When did that become not enough
anymore for either of us?
I posted my review today as well, and I really enjoyed this one. :) I haven't read Pretty Amy yet, but I definitely will be reading it soon. :D
What did you think of the excerpt?
Does The Next Forever sound like something you want to read?
And have you read Pretty Amy already...thoughts?
