by Sarah Dessen
As I stumbled again, I started to catch myself, then stopped, instead just letting my body go limp, hitting knees first, then elbows, in the leaves. Up ahead, I could see the edge of the clearing, and Aaron looking at me, but it suddenly felt right, even perfect, to be alone. So as I lay back on the ground, the sky already spinning above me, I tried to focus again on the idea of that wave I’d thought of earlier, wiping everything clean, blue and big and wide enough to suck me in. Maybe it was a wish, or a dream. Either way, it was so real that at some point, I could actually feel it. Like a presence coming closer, with arms that closed around me, lifting me up with a scent that filled my senses: clean and pure, a touch of chlorine. The smell of water.
The first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was Roscoe.
He was sitting on the empty seat beside me, right in front of the steering wheel, facing forward, panting. As I tried to focus, I suddenly smelled dog breath—ugh—and my stomach twisted. Shit, I thought, bolting forward, my hand fumbling for the door handle. Just in time, though, I saw the Double Burger bag positioned between my feet. I’d only barely grabbed it and put it to my lips before I was puking up something hot and burning that I could feel all the way to my ears.
My hands were shaking as I eased the bag onto the floor, then sat back, my heart thumping in my chest. I was freezing, even though I was now wearing a USWIM sweatshirt that looked awfully familiar. Looking outside, I saw we were parked in some kind of strip mall—I could see a dry-cleaner and a video store—and I had no idea how I’d gotten here. In fact the only thing familiar, other than the dog, was the air freshener hanging from the rearview, which said: WE WORRY SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO.
Oh my God, I thought as these things all suddenly collided. I looked down at the sweatshirt again, breathing in that water smell, distant and close all at once. Nate.
Suddenly, Roscoe let out a yap, which was amplified by the small space around us. He leaped up on the driver’s-side window, nails tap-tapping, his nub of a tail wriggling around wildly. I was wondering whether I was going to puke again when I heard a pop and felt a rush of fresh air from behind me.
Immediately, Roscoe bounded into the backseat, his tags jingling. It took me considerably longer to turn myself around—God, my head was pounding—and focus enough to see Nate, at the back of his car, easing in a pile of dry-cleaning. When he looked up and saw me, he said, “Hey, you’re conscious. Good.”
Good? I thought, but then he was slamming the back door shut (ouch) before walking around to pull open the driver’s-side door and get in behind the wheel. As he slid his keys into the ignition, he glanced over at the bag at my feet. “How you doing there? Need another one yet?”
“Another one?” I said. My voice was dry, almost cracking on the words. “This . . . this isn’t the first?”
He shot me a sympathetic look. “No,” he said. “It isn’t.”
As if to punctuate this, my stomach rolled threateningly as he began to back out of the space. I tried to calm it, as Roscoe climbed up between our two seats, sticking his head forward and closing his eyes while Nate rolled down his window, letting in some fresh air.
“What time is it?” I asked, trying to keep my voice level, if only to control the nausea.
“Almost five,” Nate replied.
“Are you serious?”
“What time did you think it was?”
Honestly, I didn’t even know. I’d lost track of time on the walk back to the clearing when everything went fluid. "What—? ” I said, then stopped, realizing I wasn’t even sure what I was about to ask. Or even where to begin. “What is Roscoe doing here?”
Nate glanced back at the dog, who was still riding high, his ears blowing back in the wind. “He had a four o’clock vet appointment,” he said. “Cora and Jamie both had to work, so they hired me to take him. When I went to pick him up and you weren’t at home, I figured I’d better go looking for you.”
“Oh,” I said. I looked at Roscoe, who immediately took this as an invitation to start licking my face. I pushed him away, moving closer to the window. “But how did you—?”
“Olivia,” he said. I blinked, a flash of her driving away popping into my head. “That’s her name, right? The girl with the braids?”
I nodded slowly, still trying to piece this together. “You know Olivia?”
“No,” he said. “She just came up to me before fourth period and said she’d left you in the woods—at your request, she was very clear on that—and thought I should know.”
“Why would you need to know?”
He shrugged. “I guess she thought you might need a friend.”
Hearing this, I felt my face flush, suddenly embarrassed. Like I was so desperate and needing to be rescued that people— strangers—were actually convening to discuss it. My worst nightmare. “I was with my friends,” I said. “Actually.”
"Yeah? ” he asked, glancing over at me. “Well, then, they must be the invisible kind. Because when I got there, you were alone.”
What? I thought. That couldn’t be true. Aaron had been right there in the clearing, and he’d seen me lie down. Now that I thought about it, though, it had been midday then; it was late afternoon now. If Nate was telling the truth, how long had I been there, alone and passed out? Are you surprised? I heard Peyton say again in my head, and a shiver ran over me. I wrapped my arms around myself, looking out the window. The buildings were blurring past, but I tried to find just one I could recognize, as if I could somehow locate myself that way.
“Look,” Nate said, “what happened today is over. It doesn’t matter, okay? We’ll get you home, and everything will be fine.”
Hearing this, I felt my eyes well up unexpectedly with hot tears. It was bad to be embarrassed, hard to be ashamed. But pitied? That was the worst of all. Of course Nate would think this could all be so easily resolved. It was how things happened in his world, where he was a friendly guy and worried so you didn’t have to as he went about living his life of helpful errands and good deeds. Unlike me, so dirty and used up and broken. I had a flash of Marshall looking over his shoulder at me, and my head pounded harder.
“Hey,” Nate said now, as if he could hear me thinking this, slipping further and further down this slope. “It’s okay.”
“It’s not,” I said, keeping my eyes fixed on the window. “You couldn’t even understand.”
“Try me.”
“No.” I swallowed, pulling my arms tighter around myself. “It’s not your problem.”
“Ruby, come on. We’re friends.”
“Stop saying that,” I said.
“Why? ”
“Because it’s not true,” I said, now turning to face him. “We don’t even know each other. You just live behind me and give me a ride to school. Why do you think that makes us somehow something?”
“Fine,” he said, holding up his hands. “We’re not friends.”
And now I was a bitch. We rode in silence for a block, Roscoe panting between us. “Look,” I said, “I appreciate what you did. What you’ve done. But the thing is . . . my life isn’t like yours, okay? I’m messed up.”
“Everybody’s messed up,” he said quietly.
“Not like me,” I told him. I thought of Olivia in English class, throwing up her hands: Tell us about your pain. We’re riveted! “Do you even know why I came to live with Cora and Jamie?”
He glanced over at me. “No,” he said.
“Because my mom abandoned me.” My voice felt tight, but I took a breath and kept going. “A couple of months ago, she packed up and took off while I was at school. I was living alone for weeks until my landlords busted me and turned me in to social services. Who then called Cora, who I hadn’t seen in ten years, since she took off for school and never contacted me again.”
“I’m sorry.” This response was automatic, so easy.
“That’s not why I’m telling you.” I sighed, shaking my head. “Do you remember that house I brought you to that day? It wasn’t a friend’
s. It was—”
“Yours,” he finished for me. “I know.”
I looked over at him, surprised. “You knew?”
“You had the key around your neck,” he said quietly, glancing at it. “It was kind of obvious.”
I blinked, feeling ashamed all over again. Here at least I thought I’d managed to hide something from Nate that day, kept a part of me a secret, at least until I was ready to reveal it. But I’d been wide open, exposed, all along.
We were coming up on Wildflower Ridge now, and as Nate began to slow down, Roscoe jumped onto my seat, clambering across me to press his muzzle against the window. Without thinking, I reached up to deposit him back where he’d come from, but as soon as I touched him he sank backward, settling into my lap as if this was the most natural thing in the world. For one of us, anyway.
When Nate pulled up in front of Cora’s, I could see the kitchen lights were on, and both her and Jamie’s cars were in the driveway, even though it was early for either of them to be home, much less both. Not a good sign. I reached up, smoothing my hair out of my face, and tried to ready myself before pushing open the door.
“You can tell them he got his shots and the vet said everything’s fine,” Nate said, reaching into the backseat for Roscoe’s leash. Seeing it, the dog leaped up again, moving closer, and he clipped it on his collar. “And if they want to pursue behavioral training for the anxiety thing, she has a couple of names she can give them.”
“Right,” I said. He handed the leash to me, and I took it, picking up my bag with the other hand as I slowly slid out of the car. Roscoe, of course, followed with total eagerness, stretching the leash taut as he pulled me to the house. “Thanks.”
Nate nodded, not saying anything, and I shut the door. Just as I started up the walk, though, I heard the whirring of a window lowering. When I turned around, he said, “Hey, and for what it’s worth? Friends don’t leave you alone in the woods. Friends are the ones who come and take you out.”
I just looked at him. At my feet, Roscoe was straining at his leash, wanting to go home.
“At least,” Nate said, “that’s been my experience. I’ll see you, okay?”
I nodded, and then his window slid back up, and he was pulling away.
As I watched him go, Roscoe was still tugging, trying to pull me closer to the house. My instinct was to do the total opposite, even though by now I’d left, and been left, enough times to know that neither of them was good, or easy, or even preferable. Still, it wasn’t until we started up the walk to those waiting bright lights that I realized this— coming back—was the hardest of all.
“Where the hell have you been?”
It was Cora I was braced for, Cora I was expecting to be waiting when I pushed open the door. Instead, the first thing I saw was Jamie. And he was pissed.
“Jamie,” I heard Cora say. She was at the end of the hall, standing in the doorway to the kitchen. Roscoe, who had bolted the minute I dropped his leash, was already circling her feet, sniffling wildly. “At least let her get inside.”
“Do you have any idea how worried we’ve been? ” Jamie demanded.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Do you even care?” he said.
I looked down the hallway at my sister, who had picked Roscoe up and was now watching me. Her eyes were red, a tissue in her hand, and as I realized she, like Jamie, was still in the clothes she’d had on that morning, I suddenly remembered their doctor’s appointment.
“Are you drunk?” Jamie said. I looked at the mirror by the stairs, finally seeing myself: I looked terrible—in Nate’s baggy sweatshirt—and clearly, I stank of booze and who knew what else. I looked tired and faded and so familiar, suddenly, that I had to turn away, sinking down onto the bottom stair behind me. “This is what you do, after we take you in, put you in a great school, give you everything you need? You just run off and get wasted?”
I shook my head, a lump rising in my throat. It had been such a long, terrible day that it felt like years ago, entire lifetimes, since I’d been in this same place arguing with Cora that morning.
“We gave you the benefit of the doubt,” Jamie was saying. “We gave you everything. And this is how you thank us?”
“Jamie,” Cora said again, louder this time. “Stop it.”
“We don’t need this,” he said, coming closer. I pulled my knees to my chest, trying to make myself smaller. I deserved this, I knew it, and I just wanted it to be over. “Your sister, who fought to bring you here, even when you were stupid and resisted? She doesn’t need this.”
I felt tears fill my eyes, blurring everything again, and this time I was glad, grateful for it. But even so, I covered my face with my hand, just to make sure.
“I mean,” Jamie continued, his voice bouncing off the walls, rising up to the high ceiling above us, “what kind of person just takes off, disappears, no phone call, not even caring that someone might be wondering where they are? Who does that?”
In the silence following this, no one said a word. But I knew the answer.
More than anyone in that room, I was aware of exactly the sort of person who did such a thing. What I hadn’t realized until that very moment, though, was that it wasn’t just my mother who was guilty of all these offenses. I’d told myself that everything I’d done in the weeks before and since she left was to make sure I would never be like her. But it was too late. All I had to do was look at the way I’d reacted to what Cora had told me that morning—taking off, getting wasted, letting myself be left alone in a strange place—to know I already was.
It was almost a relief, this specific truth. I wanted to say it out loud—to him, to Cora, to Nate, to everyone—so they would know not to keep trying to save me or make me better somehow. What was the point, when the pattern was already repeating? It was too late.
But as I dropped my hand from my eyes to say this to Jamie, I realized I couldn’t see him anymore. My view was blocked by my sister, who had moved to stand between us, one hand stretched out behind her, toward me. Seeing her, I remembered a thousand nights in another house: the two of us together, another part of a pattern, just one I’d thought had long ago been broken, never to be repeated.
Perhaps I was just like my mother. But looking up at Cora’s hand, I had to wonder whether it was possible that this wasn’t already decided for me, and if maybe, just maybe, this was my one last chance to try and prove it. There was no way to know. There never is. But I reached out and took it anyway.
Chapter Nine
When I came down the next morning, Jamie was out by the pond. From the kitchen, I could see his breath coming out in puffs as he crouched by its edge, his coffee mug on the ground by his feet. It was what he did every morning, rain or shine, even when it was freezing, the grass still shiny with frost all around him. Just a few minutes spent checking on the state of the small world he’d created, making sure it had all made it through to another day.
It was getting colder now, and the fish were staying low. Pretty soon, they’d disappear entirely beneath the leaves and rocks on the bottom to endure the long winter. “You don’t take them in?” I’d asked him, when he’d first mentioned this.
Jamie shook his head. “It’s more natural this way,” he explained. “When the water freezes, they go deep, and stay there until the spring.”
“They don’t die?”
“Hope not,” he said, adjusting a clump of lilies. “Ideally, they just kind of . . . go dormant. They can’t handle the cold, so they don’t try. And then when it warms up, they’ll get active again.”
At the time, this had seemed so strange to me, as well as yet another reason not to get attached to my fish. Now, though, I could see the appeal of just disappearing, then laying low and waiting until the environment was more friendly to emerge. If only that was an option for me.
“He’s not going to come to you,” Cora said now from where she was sitting at the island, flipping through a magazine. The clothes I’d been wearing the night
before were already washed and folded on the island beside her, one thing easily fixed. “If you want to talk to him, you have to take the first step.”
“I can’t,” I said, remembering how angry he’d been the night before. “He hates me.”
“No,” she said, turning a page. “He’s just disappointed in you.”
I looked back out at Jamie, who was now leaning over the waterfall, examining the rocks. “With him, that seems even worse.”
She looked up, giving me a sympathetic smile. “I know.”
The first thing I’d done when I woke up that morning—after acknowledging my pounding, relentless headache—was try to piece together the events from the day before. My argument with Cora I remembered, as well as my ride to school and to Jackson. Once I got to the clearing, though, it got fuzzy.
Certain things, however, were crystal clear. Like how strange it was not only to see Jamie angry, but to see him angry at me. Or catching that glimpse of my mother’s face, distorted with mine, staring back from the mirror. And finally how, after I took her hand, Cora led me silently up the stairs to my room, where she’d stripped off my clothes and stood outside the shower while I numbly washed my hair and myself, before helping me into my pajamas and my bed. I’d wanted to say something to her, but every time I tried she just shook her head. The last thing I recalled before falling asleep was her sitting on the edge of my mattress, a dark form with the light coming in the window behind her. How long she stayed, I had no idea, although I vaguely remembered opening my eyes more than once and being surprised to find her still there.
Now the door behind me opened, and Jamie came in, Roscoe tagging along at his feet. I looked up at him, but he brushed past, not making eye contact, to put his mug in the sink. “So,” Cora said slowly, “I think maybe we all should—”
“I’ve got to go into the office,” he said, grabbing his phone and keys off the counter. “I told John I’d meet him to go over those changes to the campaign.”
“Jamie,” she said, looking over at me.
“I’ll see you later,” he said, then kissed the top of her head and left the room, Roscoe following. A moment later, I heard the front door shut behind him.