I told myself that this year I wouldn't be weird. That I could be friends with him. What was the big deal? Nothing. It was last year. 10th grade. It was over. Over.

So, first day of school and I see him standing by his locker. God, what is it about him? His head down, that sort of tense first days of school look on his face. I panicked. I couldn't do it. I couldn't be friends with him. All I could think of was last year and crying in my room and wishing so badly that it hadn't happened, Manny and the pregnancy and the lies, lies, lies.

He said my name, I heard him. I kind of spun around as I walked by, and I couldn't say anything. I could barely look at him, really. So I walked away fast. So much for not being weird.

Okay, so I was still hurt. It doesn't go away. I hold onto things in my mind, chew on them like a dog with those chew toys shaped like bones. I can still see how he looked last year, the long curly hair, that soft dazed look he seemed to always have, and how I had believed him when he said he loved me in that song. How I had believed, like a stupid kid believing in Santa Claus.

This year he looks a little different. He looks a little different every year. Ninth grade and he was tall and kind of gangly skinny, his hair kind of short but curly at the edges. This year his hair was all straightened and gelled, the curls obliterated. Too bad. I liked the curls. I shook my head. It doesn't matter what I like. I can't even be within 10 feet of him without getting all weirded out.

I'd spent some time being angry with Manny but that wasn't right. It wasn't her fault, not really. Craig was the one to blame, he had hurt me, not Manny. So I tried to forgive Manny in my head, tried to sympathize about the abortion. I mean, an abortion in ninth grade? That is fucked. Poor Manny. But I was jealous, too, in a sick twisted way. Not jealous that she had an abortion but jealous that she had sex with Craig, that his first time wasn't with me.

Oh well. Water under the bridge. It doesn't matter anymore, it doesn't matter this year. But the thought of being friends with him wasn't going away. I wanted to have some sort of relationship with him because I had really liked him as well as loved him. He was smart, creative, and he got things. I could talk to him in a way that I couldn't talk to anyone else. Like that day when we practiced the "Taming of the Shrew" skit in the woods. Before I had met up with him I was hanging out with Paige and Terri and Hazel and they were talking and laughing and I was not involved. What they were talking about, it wasn't connecting with me. We weren't on the same wavelength like we had been before that, eighth grade. I was moving on from them. I was friends with Craig before we hooked up, and I had liked being friends with him, and I missed that.

So I resolved anew to be friends, or at least try to be. I saw him in study hall doodling. Eyes down, legs stretched out, his new spiky bangs across his forehead, almost in his eyes. I looked at him, knowing he was concentrating on his doodles, not aware of me or the room or anything else and so I could look at him and not worry about interacting for these brief seconds.

Did I have the courage to go over and talk to him? I stood in the doorway, watching him. Watching the soft rise and fall of his chest as he breathed. Watching the way the light looked on his hair. Watching the way he pressed his lips together in concentration. Watching. Breathless. Maybe I didn't have the courage to cross the distance and pull him from his concentration, to make him look at me, to form some ridiculous thing to say to him when what I really wanted to say was, 'I miss you, be my friend again,'

"Those are backwards," I said, crossing the distance, breathing in the air with no oxygen, feeling light headed. The music thing he was drawing was backwards, and he looked up at me, his eyebrows raised in surprise that I was talking to him.

"Thanks," he said.

So we talked, about me being weird and being sucked into the last year time warp, and I swallowed hard. He still got it. He understood things. Why did he have to screw it all up with Manny? But I kept that off my face. I was being cool. Last year was no big deal, I was fine now. Fine.

His expression darkened and he told me about the check from his father, told me he was going to rip it up. What had his father done to him that he would rip up a ten thousand dollar check out of anger? Narrowed my eyes at him, and I realized I hadn't been so aware of that. I expected things from him, expressions of love and all that he maybe was not capable of doing for reasons I dimly understood. It was a funny thing to glimpse your own ignorance. To begin to understand that you didn't know everything or even most things.

He never talked about his dad. All I really knew was what he said that first time I had met his father. Gray rainy day, cold, standing on the steps of the school, thinking about the tests that were coming up. And then there he was, Craig's dad, dressed to the nines in that suit, his hair slicked back, black framed glasses. Smiling but looking sort of concerned, too. And then I looked at Craig and he had whipped around at his father's voice and his eyes were wide. He was scared and I saw it for one second and then the scared look went away and he asked him what he was doing there. But his dad had seemed nice enough.

"He seems nice," I had said, and Sean was glaring at Craig with this incredulous 'you're not serious' look and Craig was staring with puzzled anger into the middle distance. He was somewhere else.

"Yeah," Craig said, "when he doesn't have a belt in his hand,"

But I couldn't let him rip up that check no matter how mad he still was.

"Do you know how much fun you could have with that much money?" I said, and his eyes kind of lit up.

At the music store with him, and he was taller now. I noticed it walking beside him. But his voice was the same, that voice that made my stomach feel twisty. We could be friends, sure. This could work. In the music store we were like kids in the candy shop. Kids with ten thousand dollars.

The crybaby wah wah amplifier thing that they had, I was looking at it and pointed it out to him. Joking, he mentioned making me cry last year, mimicked it, "wah wah," and that smile. That careless thoughtless joking he was capable of. I'd almost forgotten. And that time up in my room, making out to beat the band and I'd wanted to do it then, just go all the way right there in my bedroom and I could feel it. If I just let things slide we could have had sex right then and there. He had been breathing all shallow and fast, and his hands were traveling down my body and I felt so almost out of control, heading for a crash. But I had pulled away because sex, the first time, was something special. You couldn't just do it when you were supposed to be doing homework because neither of you wanted to stop. It shouldn't be so careless.

I pushed him away, sat up, and I saw the frustration on his face. Told him I loved him and saw the panic in his eyes, and I started to feel cold. I couldn't have sex with him unless he loved me, and I wasn't all that sure that he did. So I asked him if he felt the same way and instead of doing what I needed him to do, saying something like, "Ashley, I love you. More than I've ever loved anyone," or something naked and real like that he jokes. He joked. Oh how I had forgotten. So I glared at him and walked away. The pain I felt because of him, was still feeling. It was just under the surface. Being with him was sort of painful. Pleasurable and painful, the line blurring, one sliding into the other. I didn't know where I was with him. It was weird. There was no denying that. No fixing it. I didn't know if I should exactly be seeing him, if I should be attempting to be friends with him.

Then we saw the beautiful guitar, the fender strat, and Craig caressed it with reverence. The nervous little salesman kept wanting him to put it back down but Craig said he'd take it. Now that was more like it. That was the kind of fun you could have with ten thousand dollars.

"My dad would hate it," he said, and the manic joy in his eyes still hid a pain that was always there. I wondered again exactly what his father had done to him, and wondered why I hadn't been able to see before that whatever it was effected everything else in Craig's life, even me.