It's Simply Complicated

Once Aliza's bedroom door was shut, she went into her walk-in closet and shut that door behind her. She was getting as far away from the hall and from the earshot of anyone-- mother, father, prying sister, and even Jeremy, who was notorious for just walking into the family's home and going upstairs to visit Aliza. She scrolled through the contacts until she found the name she was looking for. Tapping the name, she brought the phone up to her ear and heard the ringing commence.

“Hello?” The voice answered.

“Ok, so I have a problem and we need to figure this out. I haven’t been able to sleep for more than a few hours, eat a meal without getting nauseous, and it looks like I have herpes on my mouth!”

“Ok,” the voice responded slowly, letting the last letter trail out.

“Evan, this is serious! I was fine before you came along!” Aliza nearly screamed at him.

“What do you want me to do? I’m back at school. I’m studying for a test I have in a couple hours and I got no sleep last night because the fire alarm went off and we all had to evacuate.”

“Well, that sucks, but it looks like I have herpes on mouth.” She snapped back sharply.

“Matthew. Poor guy,” Evan sympathized, though bitter sarcasm pervaded his speech. Matthew was a friend of Aliza’s .The two had met over the summer at an out-of-state, go-away camp before their junior year started. There was nothing romantically going on between them but they stayed in touch, became close friends, and talked constantly despite having a state in between them. In fact, Matthew had a girlfriend, Reagan, who had been taking up more of his time recently. However, Evan didn’t know that. Evan only knew that Matthew was a guy that Aliza was texting nearly 24/7 since her junior year of high school. He discovered it only after overhearing Aliza talking to someone else about Matthew emailing her.

“He has nothing to do with this!” She nearly screamed into the phone. It was no surprise to Aliza that Evan would bring up Matthew. He had a tendency to throw Matthew in Aliza’s face. “Whatever, I’m not talking to you about this.”

“Well, then, what are we talking about?”

“We are talking about how something is wrong with me and I was fine a few days ago but, since you’ve left, things have been messed up.”

“Well, it sounds like you’ve got some things to figure out.” Evan retorted.

“No, if anything, we’ve got some things to figure out. I was fine before you came along so this is just as much your problem as it is mine.”

He laughed to himself softly and, in Aliza’s head, she could see the corners of his mouth. She could tell that he licked his lips, leaned back on his heels or in the chair he was sitting in, and looked up to the sky or ceiling. “How about this? How about you figure all of this out and you get back to me?” Evan tried again.

“You know what? Fine, Evan. Whatever, I’ll do just that but I won’t call you back. I’ll figure out on my own, no thanks to you.”

Aliza heard the smugness in his voice as he breathed out before answering, “Ok, then.”

He thought he had gotten away with something—that he managed to avoid dealing with Aliza’s problem because of his smooth talking, his deflecting, and his calm demeanor. When, in actuality, quite the opposite was occurring, that was when Aliza was starting to lose faith in him. That was another strike for him. Though they had just established that they would start over and try things again, Evan quickly sunk back into his star role: the guy that constantly lets the lead down.

“Yeah, bye,” Aliza stated. She hung up the phone before falling onto her bed. She was bent at the waist with her feet planted on the ground and her sweater rising up exposing her belly button. She reached for a pillow on the bed and sat it on her face, blocking out the March sun that was streaming through her bedroom window.

Underneath the pillow, she closed her eyes. Her mind almost instinctually began to race and wander, thinking about what happened the last time, the other last time, and the other other last time. Evan letting Aliza down and not being there for her was a common motif in their relationship; however, despite all of it, Evan always believed that he was a good guy and a great friend. Though obviously, he could not have been that great of a friend to Aliza if he was never there for her. Twice, she needed his help for something that was important to her and, twice, he failed to deliver.

His failure was not due to an inability or the task being too difficult. It was just the good, old-fashioned “stand the girl up” and hiding behind a lame excuse, respectively. It certainly would have been foolish for Aliza to go to her prom with him. The two of them went to different schools and, if she wanted to go, Evan offered to be her date. Nearly instantaneously after Evan offering, in fact it was within the same conversation, Aliza turned him down by simply saying that she had no intentions of going to prom. How could she trust him to show up at her doorstep on prom night after months of planning when he can’t stick around to help with her something simple? What would have happened if she needed him at some point through the night and he was too busy flirting with some other girl to come to her aid? What would everyone say about Aliza going to prom with the infamous heartbreak, Evan McAlister? What would happen between the two of them, especially on Prom Night, the night that is supposed to be the most magical and romantic night in high school? Aliza definitely did not know the answers to these questions because she and Evan never talked about things like this. She never explained her concerns, but, more importantly, he never asked. It was most likely because he never cared.

There was one thing that came flooding back to Aliza’s memory at this time. Her heart rate was slowing, she felt herself slipping out of consciousness, and her breathing was getting deeper and slower. She was in a limbo state between dream and reality. One way or another, she was having a conversation with Evan. They were talking about their relationship, friendship, or whatever they were, without actually talking about it.

“You can’t do things like that to me,” Aliza said.

“What?” Evan questioned. “Be a friend?”

“There’s a difference and there’s a line. It’s not the same and you know it! You can’t just hug me for too long, rub circles on my back, and whisper things in my ear when people are around. We can’t be in the same room together without witnesses after a certain amount of time. You can’t text me certain things because your name shows up on my phone, even when it’s locked. I got so much crap after that night with you.”

"So what do you want me to do? Stop talking to you? Fine, I won’t say anything to you, not even a greeting. I won’t even touch you.” Evan dared, nearly starting a game of Chicken.

That thought scared Aliza. What would that even look like, if there were no Evan? They had a complicated relationship and, on a good day, they only three or four fight. That was on their doing though. Everything is different when someone is influencing behavior. It is acceptable to not want a cookie, but when Mom says not to have one. Then, that is when all cookies become desirable and avoiding them seems almost impossible. Evan being off-limits in any, and every sense of the word, and was doomed to become a manifestation of that hypothetical cookie. Aliza knew that somewhere deep down. She knew that she could not demote Evan to a cookie from the proverbial cookie jar, but she was conflicted.

“No, don’t,” Aliza spoke up. “Just be more careful, please, and don’t do anything that would draw any attention.” Her voice had a pleading tone, as if she was begging Evan for this one favor—unbeknownst to her whether or not he would actually honor the request. He nodded, but whether or not, it was a form of understanding of Aliza’s petition or a nod in confirmation that he would uphold his end of a burgeoning bargain, was unclear. Evan did nod, while Aliza was doing the same.

She jolted up from the bed quickly when she felt something cold brush against her skin. She looked down at her body and found Jeremy’s finger in her navel. He had walked into her room as she was dozing off and decided that that would be the best way to wake her.

“Hey,” he greeted with a crooked grin, removing his finger from her midsection. “Sweet dreams?” He chuckled.

Aliza pulled her sweater down and gave him a quiet, suspicious look with narrowing eyes

Jeremy put his hands up defensively. “Hey, calm down. I was just trying to get you up to ask for some help. Your mom said you guys needed some things moved up to the attic and taken down. She said she asked your dad a million times, but he hasn’t done it so she’s given up.

As Jeremy spoke, reality started to sit in and Aliza began to come back to her senses. She ran her fingers through her hair and nodded, following intently with each of Jeremy’s words. She pointed to the pile of boxes in the corner of her room, “Those are going up, but we should probably take down what we need to take down first.”

Jeremy nodded and opened to the door to walk of Aliza’s room. Aliza pressed a button on her phone to illuminate the screen. She had no new messages from Evan.

“You coming?” Jeremy spoke up.

Aliza looked up to find him holding her bedroom door open for her so she could join him in retrieving things from the attic. “Yeah, sorry, I was just checking my phone.” Aliza got up from her bed and walked across the room towards the hall.

“Yeah, I can tell. What time is it?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” she answered.

“What do you mean you don’t know? You were just looking right at it.”

“Yeah, I know,” Aliza started. “I wasn’t paying attention to the time. I was seeing if I got any new messages.”

The two walked down toward the end of the wall to get to the door, which opened up to the attic.

“Makes sense you wouldn’t have heard anything. You were too busy talking in your sleep.” Her companion rattled off nonchalantly.

“What? I did? What did I say?”

They stopped in front of the panel on the ceiling with the string attached. Alize pulled the string down releasing a door that dropped down at an angle. She reached on top of the door to pull out the collapsible ladder that led up to the attic.

“Not much,” Jeremy answered. “I wasn’t in your room listening to you or anything. You just wouldn’t wake up right away. You moaned a bit like you were in pain and mumbled something. It was pretty incoherent, but it sounded like you said ‘Don’t, please.’”

Aliza shrugged her shoulders as Jeremy began to ascend up the ladder. “I don’t know what that could have been.” She said to no one in particular. Jeremy was up the ladder and in the dusty, spider-web stricken attic of the Bonfrey house. It probably was best that Jeremy did not hear Aliza and the lie that she had uttered. Aliza knew very well, not what that could have been, but instead who.

She was awake for the most part but she was about to slip into a dream—a dream that featured none other than Evan McAlister.