After the pictures come down, the walls are bare, except for a few pieces of sticky tack, and the ticking clock above his desk, which was more a piece of football memorabilia than a functioning clock, since you couldn’t really make out the numbers. The room looks like it did that first day, when I came up here and he told me it was the bunker. It feels like forever ago. It feels like a moment ago. One year together, a bell curve in photos.
There’s a version of me and Caleb that fell apart. There’s a version of him that braced his arm against the doorjamb, banning me from his life from then on. There’s a version of me who walked away. There’s a version of him who changed, grabbed his keys, left this room for the last time—
But right now I want this part of him. I want to find him here, see him at the moment when everything was right.
I know what I’m looking for. A navy blue, hard case, usually kept in the top drawer of his desk. But it’s not where I thought it would be. It’s not where it’s always been.
It’s almost desperate, the way I’m ignoring everything, wasting time in search of this one item: it’s a case for these generic black glasses that he’s had forever.
They had smudged lenses that he’d have to rub against the hem of his shirt constantly. He’d only wear them at home, even though he would sometimes complain about his contacts bothering him. Sometimes I wondered if some days he wasn’t wearing his contacts either, if that accounted for the faraway look, the things he didn’t notice about me, that he ignored. I like to think it was that, at first: that he just couldn’t see it.
But he hated these glasses. Hated wearing them, and hated being seen in them.
I caught him in them the first time I came up to the bunker unannounced. It was just before Christmas break, I remember, because he was working on a history paper due the last day of class, which he claimed was ruining the holiday spirit. He had his headphones on when I knocked, and he hadn’t heard me. I cracked open the door, careful to inch it open, call his name—give him time to react. But he was sitting at his computer and had a textbook out in front of him. He had a thick pair of glasses on, and they turned his expression solemn, his face more boyish. The music drifted faintly across the room.
It took a moment for him to register my presence, and then he spun his chair toward me, swiped the glasses off his face in one quick motion, as if I’d caught him doing something embarrassing, like I had stumbled upon him writing in a diary.
It was the moment I fell. When I knew it was more than a crush—that I was drawn by more than the charisma, the smile, the way he made me feel like I was someone worth desiring. No, it was this. This moment. I almost said it right then, was sure he could see it in my stunned expression, but his gaze had gone watery, and he said, “I’m pretending that I can see you right now, but I totally can’t.”
“At all?” I asked.
“I mean, I can see like the shape of you,” and he ran his hand in the air, tracing my outline. A shiver ran through me. “But I can’t tell if you’re, like, smiling or laughing or totally appalled right now.”
I took one step closer. “How about now?”
He scrunched up his nose. “Still nothing.”
“Why don’t you put your hot glasses back on then?”
He lunged off his seat for me, missed as I sidestepped, and I was laughing. He caught me around the waist, pulled my body flush with his. “Got you,” he said, and his eyes searched my face, his smile stretching wider.
“My contacts were bothering me. Those are emergency only,” he explained.
“So put them back on.”
“Oh no, no no no, you do not get to see me in my glasses until you definitely, one hundred percent, have fallen in love with me.”
I froze in his arms, and he seemed to sense something then. If only he had understood it was that moment itself. That moment, that insight, that vulnerability that did me in. I felt his breath on my face. His lips gently pressed to mine. He didn’t make me say it, and didn’t say anything back. He stepped away, put the thick-rimmed glasses back over his nose, so his eyes looked so large, so freaking blue, and went back to his work.
It was later that night, when he told me. When he was dropping me back off at home, and the sky was dark, and the heat in the car was running, and I was bundled in my jacket with a hat pulled down over my ears. “I love you too, you know,” he said, like he’d been thinking about it. His voice was low, and his words hung in the space between us.
“Too?” I asked.
“Yeah, too,” he said.
“You’re doing it all out of order,” I said, but I was smiling, my whole body thrumming.
“Doesn’t mean it’s not true,” he said, unbuckling his seatbelt and leaning toward me.
I whispered it to him then, like I was the first one to say it, in the moment before his lips met mine.
“I knew it,” he said, and the memory of his smile warmed me as I walked to my front door in the cold winter night.
I shift the contents of his top drawer around, checking again—nothing. Next I check the surfaces of his dressers, the backpack in the corner, still filled with a few notebooks from the last day at school. The glasses are a part of him that only I had been allowed to see.
And now they’re gone. Missing.
I didn’t hear Eve coming up the steps. Didn’t feel her standing at the top of the steps. Didn’t notice until I spun around and saw her standing there, watching.
“What are you looking for, Jessa?” she asks, not unkindly, but not gently, either. She has no need to be gentle with me any longer.
I tell his mother. “I can’t find his glasses.” But she doesn’t seem to get the implication. She does not understand the significance for me. Because there’s always this hope, somewhere in my mind, that this is all some huge misunderstanding. And the glasses seem to support this fact. That there’s something we are all missing, that is so obvious, that I am bound to uncover.
She ignores my comment about the glasses. “You’ve only just started,” she says, and I nod. They could be anywhere, she’s implying. Keep working, she’s implying.
But it’s dinnertime on Saturday, and my parents expect me home, and I tell her this.
She considers, nods once, relieving me of my penance.
“When should I expect you tomorrow?” she asks.
Tomorrow, Sunday, there’s still so much to do. “In the morning,” I say. “As soon as I’m up.” And when I leave his room, she pulls the door shut behind me.
There’s a mystery, if you can call it that, at the heart of Caleb’s last day. It’s why his mother blames me. It’s why I come here, letting her blame me, in the hope that I will find out the truth. It’s why people don’t quite know what to say to me—whether to feel sympathy or something else. It’s a mystery that keeps me tethered to this room, this hope that if I keep at it, I will finally and completely understand.
Because I don’t. And it grates at me. This is the first thing, and it’s a big thing, for which I cannot get a clear answer. And I worry that the moment will always sit incomplete. There will be no resolution that will let me move on. I can see it, even now, as if I am ten years older, looking back.
And that is the question of where Caleb was going, and why he was at my cross-country meet to begin with.
Part of me thinks it was just habit.
Part of me thinks he’d forgotten he didn’t need to be there anymore.
Part of me thinks it was Max, who he came for.
But the fact remains that he told his mother he couldn’t watch his sister Mia because I had a race. He always used to come to my meets. I wonder if it was a slip of his tongue, a mistake, that the breakup hadn’t quite registered yet. Or if he hadn’t told his mother and didn’t want to. If he was thinking, even then, that we might mend things. If he’d come because he wanted to—and then, for some reason, decided he didn’t want to be there after all.
Or if he just didn’t want to watch Mia. He was good with her, and Mia idolized him, but he also wouldn’t rearrange his own schedule just to accommodate his mother’s, or Sean’s. She already has two parents, I’d once heard him say to his mother as an excuse. I’d watched her flinch, turn away, and wondered if she could hear the longing for the same thing in his voice, underneath the bitterness.
So he said he couldn’t watch Mia, and then he came to my meet. I saw him there, not quite registering the surprise of it. I asked him to hold my necklace. The gun sounded. The rain started, but it began as a steady drizzle. It wasn’t until the end of the race that it started falling fast, and hard. We kept running anyway, as we always do—the winner of the boys’ race was probably already finished by then anyway.
The rain kept coming. By the time I crossed the finish line, mud-streaked and dripping wet, Caleb was gone.
I wonder if maybe it was that—the rain picking up, and not me—that made him leave early. He came home first, we know that. From the neighbor who saw his car, to the clothes on the floor, to the timing.
Meanwhile, we waited out the rain after the race, the coaches and spectators all dripping inside the athletic center after, the floors slick with muddy water, the lobby humid and sweaty. I remember pressing my hands to the glass doors, watching the way the rain came down in a sheet. “It’s like standing inside a waterfall,” Hailey said. Her hands pressed to the glass beside mine, her nails painted alternating green and black, our school colors.
We stayed there, sitting cross-legged on the linoleum, playing with a stack of cards from Oliver’s bag, while others spent the time on their phones, leaning back on their gym bags. Max tapped out a rhythm on the floor with two pencils—taken from Skyler, who was doing her homework. One hour passed. Two. Before the school deemed it safe to drive, and the flash-flood warnings were over.
And while we sat there—deliberating over our hand of playing cards; counting out a frantic beat; trying to remember how to find the inverse tangent; taking a nap—what were you doing, Caleb? Where were you going?
No one is sure. But the last thing you said to your mom was about me. The last place you said you’d be, with me. Had something else driven you to this sequence of events? To convince you to go home, and to leave again?
It’s a mystery that has me complicit, in this room. Because I want to know. And I have this painful hope that I will pull open that drawer, or find a note in your handwriting hidden under that book, or see something on a calendar I didn’t know existed, and everything will become clear. The mystery solved. And I will be absolved.
Caleb, please, I need to know.