She Had the World // Ryan Ross

They first met in a drafty basement in the dregs of March, when the sharp gusts of winter's last gasp sent her auburn hair flying about her face as she hugged some oversized jacket about her tiny waist. Small and pale with steely blue eyes that tore the secrets from Ryan's soul, she stood over in the corner by the rusty lawn mower he hadn't touched since summer, and she watched them with this avid look on her pretty face that still didn't marr the self-assured cleverness there. Her sharp eyes regarded them with interest, this band--she examined them the same way she examined the whole world, the same way she picked everything apart and determined its place in life.

Ryan felt intimidated when she came around. This was some sort of achievement, as he was generally too indifferent, too preoccupied with more grave and trying matters, to feel much of anything for strangers--much less girls, and even much less girls who associated with Brendon. But this girl was different. She didn't speak loudly or smile broadly or laugh obnoxiously or instigate unwanted conversation or strike slutty poses--and yet she demanded your attention. Her presence alone demanded your attention.

She had these eyes, these eyes that analyzed everything and sparkled with this undying curiosity. It only took one glance at her eyes to see that she knew everything there was to know, obviously.

But she wasn't a know-it-all. She wasn't snobby, or uptight. She was real, earnest, down-to-earth. What you saw was what you got. The deep burden that lay behind her eyes she bore with indifference.

She knew the secrets of the whole world, and she hardly seemed to care.

It was terrifying. She stood across the room and watched Ryan play guitar, and their eyes locked for a moment, and as he looked away, down at the dirty concrete floor, he was sure that she could see--she knew all the things he had done. She knew everything.

-----

It was all Brendon's fault, really. It had been his idea to bring her along to band practice. And he had done it on purpose, though he never would have admitted it--he had intended for Ryan and Leah to get tangled up in each other.

He might have saved her for himself, but she was just too smart. It wasn't that he didn't like smart girls, and it wasn't that Brendon wasn't smart himself--it was just too much work. It was too much work to try and keep a smart girl around. It was too much work to try and keep her from getting to you.

And it wasn't that Ryan was any more capable of this than Brendon was, but Brendon felt that Ryan had had more than his fair share of dumb blondes lately. Brendon felt that it was time for a bit of a wake up call.

And, well, Leah was refreshing, to say the least.

-----

"You're good," she said, and Ryan's pulse sped up. Spencer was pushing his drum set back into it's place in the corner and Brent was talking to him in a low monotone. Brendon was pretending to tune his guitar, but Ryan knew he was watching. Ryan could feel the sweat bead on his forehead.

"Thank you," he managed. He tried to smile. It came out all crooked and lopsided.

She smiled then, too, a perfect little half-circle that lit up her perfect little face. "That last one--I'd never heard it before." She frowned slightly, as if the feeling of unawareness puzzled her.

"Oh--well, it's my song, I wrote it," he stammered sheepishly, his voice fading with every syllable so that the last part was hardly within the human hearing range. She seemed to hear well enough, though.

"Really?" She raised her eyebrows--they were flawlessly symmetrical, they framed her eyes beautifully--at him, interested. He wished he hadn't let that particular detail escape: her eyes were already delving into his soul, did she really need to know the pained lyrics were his, as well?

He was nodding stupidly, over and over again, compulsively, without stopping, like some kind of uncontrollable bobble head. He couldn't think of anything else to do. She was just so pretty, and so smart--clearly, she was smart, he felt that she was reading his every thought--

"Well, I think they're brilliant--your lyrics, I mean." She was matter-of-fact. "You're very talented."

His cheeks burned. He stared at his shoes. They were so ugly, ratty--why had he chosen to wear his ugliest, rattiest shoes today, of all days?

"Thank you," he mumbled again.

Leah twisted her head around so that she was face-to-face with him again, and he could no longer stare at the ground instead of at her. "You don't have to get so embarrassed," she told him, smiling a small reassuring smile. "I was just trying to compliment you."

His hands, shoved deep in his pockets, fidgeted, and he fought to still them as he said, "I know. Thank you. I just..."

He trailed off, but she understood, and she smiled at him again. "Well, I'll be around," was all she said, and she turned and walked down the driveway to Brendon's car, sliding easily into the passenger's seat as she waited for him to drive her home.

-----

She came to almost all of their practices after that.

He never got used to her. Never. Every time he looked up and saw her, sitting there watching them with that same bright expression, with her pale blue eyes and refined features, he felt like he had been punched in the stomach for a moment. Every time he saw her, her beauty surprised him. Like she was so beautiful that he couldn't wrap his head around it--it was impossible to store her face in his memory, it was beyond anything his mind could capture. Like he forgot how gorgeous she was every time he stopped looking at her--like it was impossible to fathom, impossible to remember.

And she was always taking him off guard. She always made the funniest jokes, when he least expected them, and they always took him a few seconds to understand. She always said things he didn't expect, took positions on various political and social conflicts that he never would have predicted from her. She always laughed at subtle sarcasm he didn't think anyone else would find funny, and bit her lip in thought at things no one else found particularly profound. And she always knew everything.

-----

Ryan wasn't sure when he had started wanting her. He guessed that he had always wanted her--that probably every heterosexual male who had ever laid eyes on her had wanted her at some point--but it started to get a bit absurd after the first few weeks. He started dreaming about her constantly: in class, when the professor's lecture got a little long-winded for his liking; at night, in his sleep; during lulls of conversation or activity throughout the rest of the day. The dreams he had about her as he slept were the worst, because he couldn't control them and they got out of hand, and sometimes he woke up in the middle of the night, soaked to the bone with sweat and short of breath and ashamed. And even then, there was nothing he could do but lure himself back into sleep with the memory of her soft, melodic voice, the memory of her sweet lips, the lips he had only ever touched in the dark loneliness of his imagination....

-----

Leah didn't have a boyfriend. She had once confessed to Ryan, quite matter-of-factly (as always), that she had never really had a real boyfriend before, ever. She had never been in a real relationship before because she had never been asked. But Ryan suspected that it was just because she was so goddamn intimidating.

She really was very smart. As time went on and he grew more comfortable around her, they would sit in his garage and eat string cheese and have the most bizarrely profound conversations for hours. They discussed the reasons for everything: for the innocence of children, for the selfishness of adults; for the beauty of nature, for the hideousness of humanity; for Ryan and Leah and life and everything in it.

She had an answer for everything. If she did not have it right away, she would fish it out eventually; she would bite her lip and glance up towards the heavens as she pieced together thoughts and observations to produce some sort of epiphany. Sometimes Ryan agreed with her and sometimes he did not. When they did not agree, they would argue for a while, and then one of them would change the subject and they would forget their disagreement.

They were both stubborn and opinionated. They were both slightly quirky. They were both quiet and reserved, and for the same reasons: not because they were afraid of people, but because they were fed up with them. They had seen all that the best of them amounted to and all that the worst had done to the world, and they didn't really feel that humanity could be saved, or that it was worth saving. They knew that people in general tended to be stupid and selfish and completely unimpressive, and they had resigned themselves to this fact of life. They just didn't care to humor them any more.

But Leah was different. She didn't ask to be humored; she didn't even ask that you listened to what she had to say, but you did, because you could see in her face--beautiful, and old for its years--that she knew what she was talking about. She was clever and brilliant and, at worst, indifferent. But, intringingly, she didn't seem to know these things about herself (perhaps they were the only things she didn't know), or give herself much credit for it, at least.

She was special, and she didn't care.

-----

But the biggest similarity between Leah and Ryan was that they were both very lonely. Chronically lonely--it didn't really matter where they were or how many people were around. They were born lonely: their hearts beat alone and their minds raced in solitary. Even when they were together, with the same emotions pumping through matching hearts, they were lonely.

They weren't made to be anything else. They didn't know how to be anything else. Every feeling they had they felt alone, and every thought they had they thought alone, and every dream they had they dreamed alone. And even when they shared these things, they were still alone.

Because they never felt good enough. Ryan never felt good enough to even come anywhere near Leah and her untouchable grandness, and, though he never would have guessed it, and he wouldn't have believed it if he had been told, Leah had never felt good enough for Ryan, either. Well, she had never felt good enough for anyone. She had never felt good enough, period. She didn't like herself. And she wasn't entirely sure anyone else liked her, either. She didn't blame them.

-----

Ryan's childhood had made him lonely. His mother's absence and the lack of a match between who Ryan actually was and who Ryan's father wanted him to be had forced him to retreat into his own head for solace. He had never learned to rely on anyone else for comfort, because no one else had ever offered it. He had grown dependent on himself and himself alone. He didn't know how to depend on anyone else for his own happiness. And that is what love is, really.

-----

Ryan spent a very long time trying to decide if he loved her or not. It was very easy for him to lie in the darkness of his bedroom at night, listening to his father's snores drowning out the long-ignored droning of the television in the next room, and convince himself that there was nothing there, that he had just never met a girl like her before, that she had taken him off guard (which she had), that he had simply mistaken the intensity of his admiration for her for love. But it was a lost cause when he saw her smiling (a soft, sad little movement of muscles, usually), when he saw the sparkle of her eyes as she made some sarcastic comment about Brendon's ass. And, of course, he always forgot how beautiful she was. Ryan finally decided that Leah could only truly be appreciated in person.

But even then, when they were talking and laughing and everything was going well between them--even then, Ryan was afraid. She was still intimidating. She amazed him constantly, and he often thought that maybe his whole life would be perfect if only she were in it--you know, as a more permanent fixture--as if she was so wonderful that she could smooth out all the rough patches, she could make up for all the bad things in Ryan's life all by herself, with her blue, blue eyes and confident smile. Later on, looking back, he realized that this was very naive of him, but it just seemed to him that Leah could do anything--even fix Ryan.

-----

The shadows cast by the huge maple tree planted squarely alongside the driveway left patches of dappled sunlight on the hood of Ryan's car as he pulled into Leah's driveway. He got out of the car before he could even consider chickening out and briskly strode up the front walk to the front door, and rang the doorbell. He heard the metallic click of the door unlocking before he saw the handle twist and the door give way, and his insides flew into spasms of fear and anticipation.

But the head that poked through the large crack between door and doorframe was not Leah's.

Leah lived with her grandparents. Her mother had died when she was very young, and her father was some sort of nomadic hippie--he traveled from place to place, never staying anywhere for more than a few weeks at a time before moving on to sell his biowave-improving magnetic bracelets elsewhere. She said she didn't miss them, but Ryan caught the contradiction in her eyes as she shrugged off his concerns; it was the only time she had ever seemed unsure to him.

Now, Leah's grandmother told him, without being asked at all, that Leah was around back. Ryan nodded shortly and managed some generic response and walked around the side of the house, in the direction her grandmother's gaze had traveled. As he rounded the corner of the house, he saw her lying in the grass beneath a large apple tree, her pale blue eyes focused on an open book before her. He took special care to be very quiet, and he probably would have succeeded in sneaking up on her, had he not stepped in a large hole and twisted his ankle painfully, which, inevitably, led to lots of loud profanity.

Leah glanced up from her book, amused. "Ruthie likes to dig holes," she explained, as if she had been discussing this with Ryan for hours, and he hadn't just randomly shown up and possibly broken his leg in her backyard. "We're always falling in them. I think she does it on purpose. She thinks it's funny."

"Yeah, and so do you," grunted Ryan bitterly, glancing back at the murderous hole as hobbled closer to her.

Her smile grew imperceptibly wider. "Yeah. But I don't dig the holes."

"I would be sort of worried if you did." Ryan lowered himself gingerly onto the grass beside her; Leah never once bothered to get up, or even ask him if he was alright. He sort of liked that about her, though--there were no pretenses, no struggling to convince him that she cared about him. She figured that either he knew or didn't know, but that he should know without her having to pretend to be concerned about a twisted ankle. She didn't appreciate embellishments much; she was almost brutally to-the-point, that girl.

She laughed a little, a tinkling, soaring laugh, and then stretched out a hand to summon Ruthie, the white-yellow spaniel mutt dog who apparently reveled in the misery of others. Ruthie lay down in the grass, too, and Leah scratched her head; Ryan eyed the dog resentfully, partly out of irritation at his hurt ankle, and partly out of jealousy that Leah's hands were on her, and not him.

Leah didn't notice. "So," she said.

"So." Ryan looked about for a moment, gathering his courage; there was wet laundry hanging up on a line, a tire swing in a tree about ten feet away. Handmade stained-glass windchimes dangled in the kitchen window in the back of the house, which was open, and leaking the strong scent of roasted chicken. Leah had set down her book: it was a collection of Emily Dickinson's greatest works. He was not surprised by any of this.

"Um." He decided to get right to the point; it was how she liked things done. "I don't really know anyone like you."

Leah stopped petting the dog (Ruthie nudged her hand with her nose, which was black and wet looking, but Leah ignored her) and looked up at him, a strange little half smile playing across pink lips. "What about you?"

It was a strange question, one he hadn't been expecting at all. Ryan stared at the grass briefly, where an ant was, miraculously, carrying some sort of breadcrumb that was about four times its size, and then said, "Well, I don't really know myself that well."

It was a very Leah sort of answer to give, and she smiled.

But it was clear that she wasn't going to say anything, not yet, and so he took a deep breath to steady his racing pulse, and went on. "Do you... I mean, would it--would it sound completely stupid if I said that sometimes I think we were made for each other?"

All of these words came tumbling out in a rush of exhaled breath, and for a moment, he was afraid he would have to repeat himself, which would of course be impossible. But then she smiled--and then frowned, and said, puzzled, like she was sort of shocked by what she was saying, "No. No, it's not stupid at all."

She was lying on her stomach on the ground, and she raised up, and shuffled awkwardly over to him on her knees. She put both hands--soft, cool hands--on either side of his face and kissed him, like no one had ever kissed him before, and there were grass stains all over the knees of her jeans, but Leah never cared about those sorts of things anyway.

-----

Leah kissed Ryan in the grass in her backyard, with the hot desert sun blazing on their backs, and she kissed him in the tire swing, and she kissed him as he coaxed his car to life and prepared to drive back home. And then she never kissed him again.

It wasn't that she didn't like Ryan, and it wasn't that they weren't good together. It was just that Leah was very smart and very practical, and of course it was obvious from the first, what with his band preparing to go on tour and all, that their relationship could not last. And no one who was very smart and very practical would put themselves through that heartache when they could see it barreling towards them so clearly.

But sometimes Ryan wished that Leah would have let herself get hurt a little. Sometimes he wished she would have kissed him again, some time or another--because, like everything else about her, her kiss was as evasive and intangible as smoke through clumsy fingers, and he had forgotten the feel of her lips against his by the next morning.

-----

Ryan went on tour and got famous, and there were other girls. None of them ate string cheese (too high fat content), and none of them gave enough thought to nature or humanity to have any sort of discussion about them, and none of them had ever read an Emily Dickinson poem in their entire life.

And sometimes all he wanted was to call her, to hear her voice, to picture her tinkling laugh, her quirky smile. And sometimes he was sure he'd heard her voice, or felt her smooth skin brush against his in the dark of the night. But of course she was gone, and his mind was replaying these memories because he was used to them. She was gone, and he missed her; and the hollow aching in his chest, the phantom limb, was getting to him.

But all those other girls didn't matter, because Ryan didn't love them, and he knew it. And he didn't love the girl who had been so perfect for him, either, but he was confident that he would one day. One day, he knew, he would go back to Vegas, and she would be there waiting for him, smiling with grass stains on her jeans under the apple tree in her backyard. And he would look at her, and he would love her. And everything would be perfect.

And he had told her this. As they loaded suitcases into the van they were driving to the airport, to go record their first ever album, Leah stood by and squinted her pretty blue eyes against the sun. And Ryan said, "I'll be back soon, and then we can be together."

And she smiled and said, "I know." Because Leah knew everything, of course.

But she didn't know Ryan. Not really. Not yet.