Before You Knew My Name by Jacqueline Bublitz (books to read for teens txt) 📕

that came before, is how I know she understands. That if you tell yourself a lie enough times over, you eventually come to believe it.

EIGHT

AFTER THAT NIGHT WITH THE BOY ON THE GROUND, THINGS feel different.

It isn’t that I think the sky will fall. Or that I wouldn’t know what to do if it did. You should understand that I’m still sure of myself at this point. But I was just starting to feel safe, starting to forget. Which is all that safety is, right? A forgetting of what you know. A refusal to remember bad things are only ever just around the corner.

Your days are numbered. Blood-red, leaking down tunnel walls. It felt like a warning, that subway graffiti. A reminder. Before New York, before Noah, I never truly believed I’d be safe.

Do you know how aware we have to be? Girls like me. The man ahead who slows down, who disappears into doorways. The man close behind who walks too fast, his encroachment felt on your skin, creeping. Vans with dark windows and streets with alley ways. A park at dusk, or empty lots, eerie, any old time of the day. The friend’s father whose hand lingers, or the group of boys with beer on their breath. The door closing and the room spinning.

Do you know how aware we have to be?

Did that kid on the ground ever feel safe? Did he have a small life before something turned, twisted, and he became the kind of person others would step around? Did anyone hug him, love him, miss him when he was gone? There is darkness over my days now, a kind of cloud, and it isn’t just the rain, or the fact that Mr Jackson has never tried to call me, or that no one at all seems to care that I’m gone. It’s the record scratch of my new life. Baby Joan skips across flooded streets, takes photos of crowned buildings, collects facts about sirens and churches and stars. She walks other people’s dogs and two days ago, when one of the dogs stopped to pee, she found herself out front of a photography school. Three blocks from Noah’s apartment, with a sign on the door saying late spring classes were starting soon. She has flyers for the school on her bedside table, and she has Noah. And there, the scratch, the glitch. Once again, just like my mother, my life has grown up around a person, one person, who could get tired of me anytime, could ask me to leave. And then I would be alone again. Homeless, penny-and-parentless, destined for street corners and coins thrown into coffee cups, and signs asking strangers for food. Can I—would I—survive another loss so soon?

I sit three days with these thoughts, my fears growing hot, until Noah is convinced I have a fever.

‘You haven’t been yourself,’ he says at dinner, as if we have known each other for months instead of weeks. ‘Do we need to take you to a doctor, Alice?’

The ‘we’ sounds out across the table, the simple promise of it. I feel a cool hand at my forehead. Perhaps he is not like the others. I need to know.

‘Noah,’ I look at my accidental benefactor sitting across from me, our mosaic of IOUs visible behind him. ‘Why do you have people come stay with you?’

Franklin skulks at my feet, licks my bare ankle.

‘I don’t, usually,’ Noah answers after a time. His smile is small, wry. ‘Most times, Alice, people would show up at the door and I would turn them away. I even paid one or two to leave—for their troubles.’

‘Oh!’

I see myself at the door that first night, bags and camera and hopefulness hanging off me, and watch as the door clicks shut in front of me. No blue eye, no bay windows or piano, or Franklin, knocking against my knees. Turning with my six hundred dollars in cash toward—what?

‘I have so much, you see,’ Noah continues, opening out his hands toward me, ‘and I had a thought that someone else might need a little of it. However’—he brings his hands back together now, clasps them—‘the people who showed up were never quite what I had in mind.’

‘But you made it so easy for me,’ I push. ‘No references needed, no credit card deposit like all the others asked for. You must have known someone like me would come along.’

‘Indeed,’ Noah sighs, his expression inscrutable. ‘I suppose, Baby Joan … you were what I had in mind.’

Then much more quietly, so I am not sure I hear him correctly.

‘To be precise, you reminded me of a girl I once knew.’

Later, I will understand that when he opened the door to me, Noah thought, suddenly, of an open, eager face so oddly like his own. His one improbable, glorious attempt at immortality, many years ago. A girl gone to the other side of the world while still a child, address long since lost. For a time, before, the child used to visit with her mother. They would show up unannounced one day or another and she would clunk down on the piano, and he would give money to the woman for clothes, school, holidays. No room, no desire for a family back then, but he had reserved a pocket of himself for the girl, and when they went away so suddenly, the girl left an echo, an emptiness around what might have been. No life is without secrets, without doors closed. When I showed up at Noah’s front door—young, dirty, hopeful—things inched open again.

Of course, he doesn’t say this tonight. He merely makes to tip his cap at me, his smile widening to meet mine across the table.

I breathe.

‘Not to mention the fact, Baby Joan, you clearly had nowhere else to go.’

Lucy Lutens wants us to throw a birthday party for her anxious Schnauzer, Donut. ‘Nothing over the top, just cake and those tiny hats, and perhaps you could