Chapter Text
LARA JEAN S.C
big girls don’t cry (personal) - fergie
I’M NOT A PSYCHIC. I don’t pretend to know the future. I of all people know that your entire life can change before you get used to the one you’re already living. But I always thought some things were permanent. The love of a sister. The comfort of having warm tea and a book you’ve read ten times waiting at home when you need to disappear. The fact that love can heal all wounds, no matter how deep.
I thought Peter and I were permanent.
I was never one for the numbers. But I remember this one by heart now: 2% of high school relationships lead to long-lasting marriages.
It’s a small number, both in stature and meaning. At first, I thought it cruel. Pessimistic enough to be fake. After all, how could 98% of people who found and pushed each other through the turmoil of growing up just let each other go so easily?
After high school, I understood that statistic a little better. It isn't easy to hold on to someone. But even if it’s hard to hold on, that doesn’t mean you should let them go.
But maybe that’s how I got me and Peter wrong. Because it’s not easy to let someone go, but it’s even harder to hold on when you know you should be doing the opposite.
Maybe it was the distance. Maybe that’s the reason why Peter slowly stopped asking about the books I’d help publish each month. Maybe him not being able to see my face at his games made me dissipate from his mind altogether. Maybe not being able to hold him as I had picnics in Central Park with Gen made me crave someone who wanted to be near me, too.
Or maybe—
“Lara Jean.” A sharp voice snaps me out of my thoughts. I spin around to find Margot, her hands on her hips. She looks at me in the way Mom used to when I got a stomachache from not eating, but I refused to tell. “That’s the fifth time you’ve zoned out today.”
“Sorry. I’m fine,” I glance around, bringing myself back to New York. “What is it?”
“That was the last of the boxes.” Margot steps forward, her eyebrow raised. She knows I’m lying. But she just sighs, not saying anything. I think she knows right now, I need to lie about this.
“And you have to leave.” I knew that Margot’s trip, born out of worry and disguised by her helping me apartment hunt, would end eventually. But I don’t want her to leave. I don’t want to be alone again.
The walls of the room are barren. The only piece of furniture is an old couch that I suspect survived the previous World War. The first time I got a new apartment, two years ago with Gen, I couldn’t stop jumping around for joy.
Now, the same sight leaves me hollow, knowing what I’m missing out on, and what I’ve chosen. A new beginning. The end of what could’ve been.
A bare apartment in San Francisco, Peter’s paint-stained shirt on a chair in the corner, and the scent of his favorite cookies wafting from the oven as we sway to our song. We’d write little messages on the walls to be covered up by paint, and we’d end up kissing too much to end up getting any progress done.
“Lara Jean,” Margot calls me again. She brushes hair out of my face. “I’m sorry to leave you.”
I shake my head. “Scotland and your new art gallery await you.” If I could afford a plane ticket, I would go see my sister at the debut. But part of me wonders if I even have the energy.
She squeezes my shoulder softly.
“It’s only been two months, LJ. You have to give it time,” Margot says, as if she read my mind.
Exactly. It’s been two months and I still feel like part of me died.
Her hands reach down to grab mine. She swings them around like she used to do when we were kids. Always trying to cheer me up, even when it’s not her responsibility. “But I think this’ll be good for you.”
“What, Margot?” I gulp. I don’t want to say it. Even after two months, I still don’t understand how any part of this goodbye could ever be good.
“Being here, on your own,” She says softly. “You were with Peter for so long. He became a part of your identity. But now you can figure out who you are on your own.”
“I don’t want to know who I am without him.” I look down at my boots. I need to get rid of these boots. These are the boots he always said he liked on me. “I want him.”
“I know,” she whispers, now pulling me into a hug. Suddenly, I’m reminded of Josh Sanderson. One of the former recipients of my heart, and Margot’s. I wonder if that’s why she broke up with him—to figure out who she was without him.
She pulls away, and smiles. I can see the tears in her eyes, but I don’t comment. I can feel them, too. “Do me a favor, LJ? Don’t stay in this apartment all the time, alright?”
I nod. It’s another lie. But maybe she knows that already.
Then her phone dings.
“It’s Dad,” She laughs softly. “He’s checking to make sure I’m at the airport.”
“Your flight’s in four hours.”
“He knows.” Margot looks away, but not before I see how her eyes shine.
For a moment, it’s easy to pretend that things are normal. That Margot is only leaving for a little bit. That she isn’t ripping herself away the second I got her back. That all of this isn’t my fault.
For just a moment, I can pretend all I am is Margot’s little sister.
It takes us twenty more minutes to officially say goodbye, although Margot assures me it’s not. I know if I don’t come home during the holidays, she’ll drag me back to Oregon herself.
Then the door shuts with Margot’s signature softness. You should never slam a door hard on someone you love, she told me once after I’d had a fight with Dad. Something Mom told her first.
And yet again, I’m reminded of Peter. The last time I saw him. How empty my bedroom felt, even though it was filled to the brim with my books and my messiness, once he was gone from it. How the door slamming was a harder sound to keep in my head than the words we exchanged last time we spoke.
That entire week before…
“No,” I whisper softly, to nobody. I can’t think about that week. I can’t.
I turn around, taking in the apartment in full. It’s the cheapest thing I could find closest to Columbia. Thirty minutes away and just small enough for me.
I can’t stand here anymore. I barely have room to do anything, but with just me in the apartment, with the absence of Peter, I fear if I stay one more second, it’ll swallow me whole.
I take a seat on the fire escape, looking out over the building tops, the dimming sky, and the retreating sun in the distance. I let the late summer breeze wash over me. For the first time in months, I can breathe. The city below isn’t quiet. It never has been. Cars honk, birds scream little songs at each other, and someone laughs in one of the apartments below while someone else yells profanities on the street.
Peter hated this. He always said he could never think for a second in New York.
That’s where he and I differed.
I look at the noise and I find myself turning it all into something more. I take one look at the warm light emanating from an apartment on the other side of the alleyway, and I imagine a couple, married for forty years, dancing to an old vinyl inside. I spin up a story about how the traffic across town is caused by a group of ducks crossing from the Hudson. He saw meaningless noise—I saw proof of life.
Maybe we were just too different. Maybe opposites don’t attract. Maybe the laws of physics just didn’t apply to us. The romance books, too. Maybe they were wrong. But they’re never wrong.
Maybe we were just wrong.
I lean my head back against the brick wall, and look up to find another level of the fire escape. Odd. I thought I was the last level. Although the landlord did mention someone in the attic. Maybe that’s what it’s for.
I feel like I’m looking through jail bars. Isn’t that what I’ve done? I’ve locked myself away in a city I’m no native to even after four years. I’m far away from my family, friends, and everything I’ve ever known. Even Gen has returned to the West Coast, probably running the San Francisco startup scene by now.
Everybody’s moving along, and I’m still stuck here, in New York.
I glance at my phone, waiting for a text, a notification, anything. But all that’s left is an unread text from Margot ordering me to call her regularly.
The clock reads 7:50 PM. A shiver runs from my phone to my fingers, as if it realizes too what’s missing.
Sundays at eight. Eight for me, six for Peter. We promised, when I first moved to New York, that we’d call each other every Sunday at eight, no matter what. It was our date. Another part of my life that I carved Peter’s likeness into.
Now, I can’t even call him.
That’s it. I can’t take this anymore.
I scramble up, and back through my window into my apartment. I ignore the bland walls and creaking floor, and reach for my red leather traveler’s bag. I look inside, desperately searching for paper and a pen. It takes me all of ten minutes to dig through the entire thing.
Note to self; do not pack a bag when emotionally vulnerable.
Finally, I find a notepad, and my pink-flowered bag with my daily pens.
I make my way back out to the fire escape, and as the sky begins to transform colors, I open a pen, flip to a blank page, and begin to write.
Dear Peter,
I didn’t think I’d be writing another letter to you. I thought I’d never need to. I thought that the days where you were far apart were gone. That you’d always be there. Now, you’re three-thousand miles away. Literally and emotionally.
I hate writing this letter, Peter. Because you’ll never read it, and you’ll never know how I feel about you. You’ll never know how much I blame myself for this breakup. You said that I gave up on you, Peter. But haven’t you, too?
My pen stills on the page, and ink begins to pool.
You… you… I can’t even write. I have so much to say that I don’t want to say any of it at all.
I don’t want to get over you, Peter. And writing this letter means one day, I will. I don’t want to let you go. I don’t even want to let the heartbreak go. Because letting that go means letting go the only thoughts of you I can think.
When did you stop trying? When did you stop… Maybe I’m the problem. Maybe I do love New York more than I loved you. I probably could’ve written in San Francisco, too. But back home, I always felt small. I feel like every dream I had, I tied to you.
It’s then when tears begin to drop onto the page.
I know this breakup is my fault. I know I broke my own heart. I regret it. But I… I…. I don’t know if I want to undo it.
I think a part of me wants both. My heart wanted you, my brain wanted the best version of myself. I thought that those versions could co-exist. That I could be yours and mine. But right now, I’m sitting alone in an apartment, looking at every dream I’ve ever had, and wondering if they’re even mine anymore. If I’m worthy of them.
Maybe those two versions aren’t different people. Not yet. Maybe one day you’ll come back to me. But I just couldn’t shake the fact that this was where I was meant to be. And for the first time in my life, I found a place I felt I belonged that wasn’t tied to you.
And I felt like if I left New York, I’d be sacrificing myself.
But now, I see you in everything, which doesn’t help. The walls are bare, and you’d immediately volunteer to paint them if you were still here. It’s in a quieter part of New York, for New York’s standards.
I miss you, Peter. I think I always will. You took up so much of my heart, and now that you’re gone, it feels like the whole organ is missing.
I don’t know how I’m going to live without you. Margot says it’ll get better. That I’ll figure out who I am individually.
But I don’t know how to do that when all I want is to run back to you. But then I think of your face that night in my room. How you cried. You told me to choose, and I hesitated.
You deserve someone—or at least a version of me—that doesn’t hesitate to choose you, Peter.
I’m sorry for wanting both. I’m sorry for wasting your time. I’m sorry for giving my heart to you and then asking for it back.
I stop writing when the following lines on the page turn wet. I sit back up, wiping my eyes, but it’s no use.
I close my notebook, and put it off to the side. I’ll tear the paper out, sign it, and address it later. Right now, it feels too raw.
I always write a letter whenever I have an emotion so intense, it’ll consume me whole if it doesn’t have another place to go. But this time, I don’t think one singular letter will be able to patch up the Peter Kavinsky shaped hole in my heart. I don’t think any amount of letters will.
I pick up my phone, and fish for my wired headphones that I always keep in my pocket.
There’s only one song I want to listen to right now, even if it’s the last one I should be hearing.
The second the melody of Beginning Middle and End floats into me, I can’t stop the tears from hiccuping out in unraveled, ugly sobs.
But somewhere along the way, I feel the buzz of humming my former favorite song replace the stabbing soreness that tears always bring into my throat. The kind of soreness that nothing, not even a cup of tea, can fix.
I don’t know when I start singing. I’m not belting—I’m not that desperate. But just transitioning between humming and mumbling the words until I somehow string together a tear-stained cover of the song up there, on my fire escape. Thankfully, none of my neighbors are around to hear it.
Then the song ends, and I open my eyes. Manhattan is now blue, the deep dark blue you only find at the bottom of the ocean. It’s comforting, how much sadder the city looks at nighttime. Maybe in one of the glowing windows, somewhere in this city, there’s someone like me. Someone whose heart also just got ripped out, either by their hands or otherwise. Someone who’s stuck. Someone who knows how I feel.
That’s the beautiful thing about New York. You can be lonely, but you’ll never be alone. The flip side? You can be surrounded, and forever lonely.
Right now, on the hard fire escape, staring down the Manhattan skyline, I’m both.
I head inside, bringing my notebook with me.
I open the lighter suitcase I brought with me, and pull out my mom’s teal hatbox. I left it behind at home when I went to NYU. But now that I’ll be here indefinitely, with no promise of when I’ll return to Portland, there was no way I was going to be without it.
It’s empty. It’s begging for a new letter.
I place Peter’s letter inside of it, vowing to return to it later when I have envelopes. I almost place the box inside a kitchen cupboard, but then stop myself. I don’t need to hide it.
It’s not as if Kitty’s here to mail the letters for me again.
I smile at the memories the box brings out. I can’t remember the last time I did so peacefully. The hatbox brings a comforting pop of color to the apartment that was otherwise so dull. It’s like bringing my mom with me.
If she were here, what would she say?
Nothing. She would say nothing. She would draw me in, until all I could feel was her soft sweater against my cheek and the scent of her jasmine perfume. She'd wipe my tears, and let me cry until I couldn't anymore.
Then, the next morning, after I’d had a cup of coffee and something to eat, she’d sit me down at the table. She’d look me in the eyes, and tell me that I was strong. That I was wise. That I was loved. That nothing had been wasted.
And finally, that it’s better this way. After all, she never wanted us girls to stay with the boyfriends we found in high school.
But she’s not here. She’s not here to hold me. Be with me. Tell me what to do.
There are some things you never get over. Some losses you don’t quite replace. You just adjust to them. Become someone new.
I never truly got over her death. I wrote her letters when big life milestones happened instead of getting to tell her them. I ate an extra cookie for her whenever I baked instead of giving her one in the morning. And whenever my heart felt broken, instead of being held by her, I’d sleep in my dad’s bed, and pretend her jasmine perfume was still on the sheets.
I adjusted.
But now, there’s nothing. I don’t have anything to bake. It’s too late to call my family. They're probably having dinner, and I don’t want to bother. The apartment’s faint smell of old wood and dust suffocates any imagination I’d had. And Peter’s gone.
All I have right now is this apartment, and a letter that has no home.
All I have is myself.
I guess I’ll have to adjust. Maybe someday, I’ll get better at pretending that’s enough.