The Last Time I Saw You Read Free

left a damp imprint on your essay when he handed it back.
    “Look at those cheeks. He’s definitely got a bulimic hamster vibe going on.”
    “Don’t be mean!” I say, peering critically at his picture. He’s not madly good looking, it’s true, but there’s something honest about his gaze, and I liked the way his profile didn’t read like a psycho’s shopping list of nonnegotiable attributes—he sounded like a proper human being. Sounds.
    “Just saying, Livvy, I don’t think we’ve found the one.”
    It was half an hour later when I stepped out of the house, having guiltily and inevitably canceled my date, and somehow ended up volunteering to be the person to go to the liquor store. James called me as I got to the end of the road.
    “I know, I know. I won’t get anything rank just because it’s on special.”
    “Livvy, you need to come home.”
    “I’ll only be five minutes.”
    “Seriously. Turn around now,” he said, his voice shaking. James never sounded like that.
    “What is it?” Slivers of dread crawled down my back like icy raindrops down a window pane. “Tell me.”
    “I’m just going to say it,” he said, steeling himself. “Sally’s dead.”

October 1995
    My first day at Leeds was one of those rare, lethal occasions I couldn’t keep Mom and Dad apart—both of them were determined to propel me into adult life, and it would have been too cruel to play favorites and condemn one of them to the parental scrap heap. We squashed my stuff into the trunk of Dad’s brown Volvo (a vehicle that I knew embodied why Mom left him: by then she was tearing it up in a zippy Japanese candy kiss of a car) then squashed ourselves in after it, all set for four hours of sticky, congealed tension.
    “Would you mind if I opened the window a crack, Jeremy?”
    “I’d prefer you didn’t, if you don’t mind, it negates the air conditioning.” Translation: you’re irresponsible and flighty, same as it ever was.
    “I do so love to be able to breathe.”
    Translation: you stifled my womanly magnificence for quarter of a century.
    I sat in the back feeling nauseous, for so many reasons I couldn’t have identified the root cause—polishing off a family pack of malt balls solo, the irony too great to risk offering them around, probably clinched it. As the junctions crawled past, fear knotted my intestines and compressed itself in my chest, the reality of being hundreds of miles from all that was familiar starting to hit home. It wasn’t just the prospect of losing the prickly, scratchy comfort blanket of my family, it was also the idea of being severed from James. He and I had done everything together the last couple of years—everything other than the thing I most wanted to do—and now he would be at the University of East Anglia, right at the other end of the country, girls vying for his attentions. The thought was almost too much to bear.
    But it was me who had chosen to go so far north: I knew very little about myself at that age, but one thing I did know was that I was clever, and that had given me options. I was denying something that another part of me had intuitively sensed, that I needed to find my own place in the world, far away from everything that currently defined me.
    Many moons later we finally parked, Dad efficiently hauling my suitcases out of the recesses of the trunk, Mom critically surveying the shabby façade of my halls through her gigantic sunglasses. Dad dragged my luggage up the stairs, refusing any help as if to do so would emasculate him even more, Mom and me clattering behind him. Sally was the very first person I saw, hanging out of the kitchen with an oversized cartoon mug in her hand saying “ WORLD’S BEST DAUGHTER . The sight of Dad’s red, sweaty face made a spontaneous grin break out across her own.
    “D’you want a hand with them?” she said, taking in the bizarre tableau we made. Her voice was a little nasal,infused with a merriness that felt a million miles