by Sarah Dessen
Back home, I sat down with my calculus notes, determined to study, but within moments my mind wandered past the numbers and figures and across the room to the picture of Jamie’s family, still up on the wall over my desk. It was the weirdest thing—I’d studied it a thousand times, in this same place, the same way. But suddenly, all at once, it just made sense.
What is family? They were the people who claimed you. In good, in bad, in parts or in whole, they were the ones who showed up, who stayed in there, regardless. It wasn’t just about blood relations or shared chromosomes, but something wider, bigger. Cora was right—we had many families over time. Our family of origin, the family we created, as well as the groups you moved through while all of this was happening: friends, lovers, sometimes even strangers. None of them were perfect, and we couldn’t expect them to be. You couldn’t make any one person your world. The trick was to take what each could give you and build a world from it.
So my true family was not just my mom, lost or found; my dad, gone from the start; and Cora, the only one who had really been there all along. It was Jamie, who took me in without question and gave me a future I once couldn’t even imagine; Olivia, who did question, but also gave me answers; Harriet, who, like me, believed she needed no one and discovered otherwise. And then there was Nate.
Nate, who was a friend to me before I even knew what a friend was. Who picked me up, literally, over and over again, and never asked for anything in return except for my word and my understanding. I’d given him one but not the other, because at the time I thought I couldn’t, and then proved myself right by doing exactly as my mother had, hurting to prevent from being hurt myself. Needing was so easy: it came naturally, like breathing. Being needed by someone else, though, that was the hard part. But as with giving help and accepting it, we had to do both to be made complete—like links overlapping to form a chain, or a lock finding the right key.
I pushed out my chair, and headed downstairs, through the kitchen and out into the yard. I knew this was crazy, but suddenly it seemed so crucial that I somehow tell Nate I was sorry, reach out to him and let him know that I was here.
When I got to the gate, I pulled it open, then peered in, looking for him. But it was Mr. Cross I saw a moment later, walking quickly through the living room, his phone to his ear. Immediately I stepped back, around the fence, hiding as he slid open the glass door and came out onto the patio.
“I told you, I’ve been out of town all day,” he was saying as he crossed by the pool, over to the garage. “He was supposed to be doing pickups and check-ins. Did he come by and get the cleaning today?” He paused, letting out a breath. “Fine. I’ll keep looking for him. If you see him, tell him I want him home. Now. Understood?”
As he went back inside, all I could hear, other than my breathing, was the bubbling of the nearby pump, pushing the water in and out, in and out. I thought of Nate swimming laps that night, his dark shadow moving beneath the trees, how long it had been since I’d seen him alone in the pool.
Mr. Cross was inside now, still looking as his pace quickened, moving faster, back and forth. Watching him, I had a flash of Nate at school the last time I’d seen him, suddenly realizing why his expression—distant, distracted—had been so familiar. It was the same one on my mother’s face the last time I’d seen her, when I walked into a room and she turned, surprised.
And this was why, as Mr. Cross called his name again, I knew his searching was useless. There’s just something obvious about emptiness, even when you try to convince yourself otherwise. Nate was gone.
Chapter Eighteen
“Here,” Jamie said. “For luck.”
I watched him as he slid his car keys across the table toward me. “Really?” I said. “Are you sure?”
“Positive,” he replied. “It’s a big day. You shouldn’t have to start it on the bus.”
“Wow,” I said, slipping them into my pocket. “Thanks.”
He sat down across from me, pouring himself his usual heaping bowl of cereal, which he then drowned with milk. “So,” he said, “what’s your state of mind. Confident? Nervous? Zen?”
I made a face at him. “I’m fine,” I told him. “I just want to get it over with.”
His phone, which was on vibrate, suddenly buzzed, skipping itself sideways across the table. Jamie glanced at the caller ID and groaned. “Jesus,” he said, but answered anyway. Still, his voice was curt, not at all Jamie-like, as he said, “Yes?”
I pushed out my chair, taking my own bowl to the sink. As I passed him, I could hear a voice through the receiver, although the words were indistinguishable.
“Really,” Jamie said, and now he sounded concerned. “When was the last time you saw him? Oh. Okay, hold on, I’ll ask her.” He moved the phone away from his ear. “Hey, have you talked to Nate lately? His dad’s looking for him.”
I knew it, I thought. Out loud, I said, “No.”
“Did you see him this weekend?”
I shook my head. “Not since school on Friday.”
“She hasn’t seen him since Friday,” Jamie repeated into the phone. “Yeah, absolutely. We’ll definitely let you know if we do. Keep us posted, okay?”
I opened the dishwasher, concentrating on loading in my bowl and spoon as he hung up. “What’s going on?” I asked.
“Nate’s gone AWOL, apparently,” he said. “Blake hasn’t seen him since Friday night.”
I stood up, shutting the dishwasher. “Has he called the police? ”
“No,” he said, taking a bite of cereal. “He thinks he probably just took off for the weekend with his friends— you know, senioritis or whatever. Can’t have gone far, at any rate.”
But I, of course, knew this wasn’t necessarily true. You could get anywhere on foot, especially if you had money and time. And Nate hadn’t had a fence to jump. He’d just walked out. Free and clear.
And I was too late. If I’d just gone over there that night I’d seen him swimming, or talked to him on Friday at school, maybe, just maybe, I might have been able to help. Now, even if I wanted to go after him, I didn’t know where to start. He could be anywhere.
It was weirder than I’d expected, driving myself to school after so many long months of being dependent on someone else. Under any other circumstances, I probably would have enjoyed it, but instead it felt almost strange to be sitting in traffic in the quiet of Jamie’s Audi, other cars on all sides of me. At one light, I glanced over to see a woman in a minivan looking at me, and I wondered if to her I was just a spoiled teenage girl in an expensive car, a backpack on the seat beside her, blinker on to turn in to an exclusive school. This was unnerving for some reason, so much so that I found myself staring back at her, hard, until she turned away.
Once at school, I started across the green, taking a deep breath and trying to clear my head. Because of my certainty that Nate had taken off—even before I knew it for sure— I’d actually ended up following Gervais’s Zen-mode plan, if only because I’d been too distracted to study the night before. Now, though, calculus was the last thing on my mind, even as I approached my classroom and found him waiting outside the door for me.
“All right,” he said. “Did you follow my pre-test instructions? Get at least eight hours sleep? Eat a protein-heavy breakfast? ”
“Gervais,” I said. “Not right now, okay?”
“Remember,” he said, ignoring this, “take your time on the first sets, even if they seem easy. You need them to prime your brain, lay the groundwork for the harder stuff.”
I nodded, not even bothering to respond this time.
“If you find yourself stumbling with the power rule, remember that acronym we talked about. And write it down on the test page, so you can have it right in front of you.”
“I need to go,” I said.
“And finally,” he said as, inside, my teacher Ms. Gooden was picking up a stack of papers, shuffling them as she prepared to hand them out, “if you get stuck, just clear your head. Envision an empty roo
m, and let your mind examine it. In time, you will find the answer.”
He blurted out this last part, not very Zen at all, as he rushed to fit it in as the bell rang. Even in my distracted state, as I looked at him I realized I should be more grateful. Sure, we’d had a deal, and I had paid him his twenty bucks an hour when he invoiced me (which he did on a biweekly basis on preprinted letterhead, no joke). But showing up like this, for a last-minute primer? That was above the call of duty. Even for a multipronged, proven method like his.
“Thanks, Gervais,” I said.
“Don’t thank me,” he replied. “Just go get that ninety. I don’t want you messing up my success rate.”
I nodded, then turned to go into my classroom, sliding into my seat. When I looked back out the door, he was still standing there, peering in at me. Jake Bristol, who was sitting beside me looking sleepy, leaned across the aisle, poking my shoulder. “What’s up with you and Miller?” he asked. “You into jailbait or something?”
I just looked at him. Jerk. “No,” I said. “We’re friends.”
Now, Ms. Gooden came down the aisle, smiling at me as she slid a test, facedown, onto the desk in front of me. She was tall and pretty, with blonde hair she wore long, twisting it back with a pencil when she got busy filling up the board with theorems. “Good luck,” she said as I turned it over.
At first glance, I felt my heart sink, immediately overwhelmed. But then I remembered what Gervais had said, about taking my time and priming my brain, and picked up my pencil and began.
The first one was easy. The second, a little harder, but still manageable. It wasn’t until I got to the bottom of the front page that I realized that somehow, I was actually doing this. Carefully moving from one to the next, following Gervais’s advice, jotting the power rule down in the margin: The derivative of any given variable (x) to the exponent (n) is equal to product of the exponent and the variable to the (n-1) power. I could hear Olivia saying it in my head, just as I heard Gervais’s voice again and again, telling me the next step, and then the one following, each time I found myself hesitating.
There were ten minutes left on the clock when I reached the last problem, and this one did give me pause, more than any of the others. Staring down at it, I could feel myself starting to panic, the worry rising up slowly from my gut, and this time, no voices were coming, no prompting to be heard. I glanced around me at the people on either side still scribbling, at Ms. Gooden, who was flipping through Lucky magazine, and finally at the clock, which let me know I had five minutes left. Then I closed my eyes.
An empty room, Gervais had said, and at first I tried to picture white walls, a wood floor, a generic anywhere. But as my mind began to settle, something else came slowly into view: a door swinging open, revealing a room I recognized. It wasn’t one in the yellow house, though, or even Cora’s, but instead one with high glass windows opposite, a bedroom to the side with a dry-cleaned duvet, sofas that had hardly been used. A room empty not in definition, but in feeling. And finally, as my mind’s eye moved across all of these, I saw one last thing: a root-beer cap sitting square on a countertop, just where someone had left it to be found.
I opened my eyes, then looked back down at the one blank spot on my paper, the problem left unsolved. I still had three minutes as I quickly jotted down an answer, not thinking, just going on instinct. Then I brought my paper to the front of the room, handed it in, and pushed out the door onto the green, heading toward the parking lot. I could just barely hear the bell, distant and steady, as I drove away.
In a perfect world, I would have remembered not only where the apartment building was, what floor to take the elevator to, but also the exact number of the unit. Because this was my world, however, I found myself on the seventh floor, all those doors stretching out before me, and no idea where to begin. In the end, I walked halfway down the hallway and just started knocking.
If someone answered, I apologized. If they didn’t, I moved on. At the sixth door, though, something else happened. No one opened it, but I heard a noise just inside. On instinct—call it Zen mode—I reached down and tried the knob. No key necessary. It swung right open.
The room was just as I’d pictured it earlier. Sofas undisturbed, counter clutter-free, the bottle cap just where it had been. The only difference was a USWIM sweatshirt hanging over the back of one of the island stools. I picked it up, putting it to my face as I breathed in the smell of chlorine, of water. Of Nate. And then, with it still lingering, I looked outside and found him.
He was standing on the balcony, hands on the rail, his back to me, even though it was cold, so cold I could feel the air seeping through the glass as I came closer. I reached for the door handle to pull it open, then stopped halfway, suddenly nervous. How do you even begin to return to someone, much less convince them to do the same for you? I had no idea. More than ever, though, right then I had to believe the answer would just come to me. So I pulled the door open.
When Nate turned around, I could tell I’d startled him. His face was surprised, only relaxing slightly when he saw it was me. By then, I’d already noticed the marks on his cheek and chin, red turning to blue. There comes a point when things are undeniable and can’t be hidden any longer. Even from yourself.
“Ruby,” he said. “What are you doing here?”
I opened my mouth to say something in response to this. Anything, just a word, even if it wasn’t the perfect one. But as nothing came, I looked at the landscape spread out behind him, wide and vast on either side. It wasn’t empty, not at all, but maybe this could inspire you as well, because right then, I knew just what to say, or at least a good place to start, even if only because it was what Cora had said to me back when all this began.
“It’s cold,” I said, holding out my hand to him. “You should come inside.”
Chapter Nineteen
Nate did come in. Getting him to come back with me, though, was harder.
In fact, we’d sat on the couch in that apartment for more than two hours, going over everything that had happened, before he finally agreed to at least talk to someone. This part, at least, I didn’t even have to think about. I’d picked up his phone and dialed a number, and by the time we got back to my house, Cora was already waiting.
They sat at the kitchen table, me hanging back against the island, as Nate told her everything. About how when he’d first moved back, living with his dad had been okay— occasionally, he had money problems and issues with creditors, but when he took out his stress on Nate it was infrequent. Since the fall, though, when Rest Assured began to struggle, things had been getting worse, culminating in the months since Christmas, when a bunch of loans had come due. Nate said he had always planned to stick it out, but after a particularly bad fight a few nights earlier—the end result of which were the bruises on his face—he’d had enough.
Cora was amazing that day. She did everything—from just listening, her face serious, to asking careful questions, to calling up her contacts at the social-services division to answer Nate’s questions about what his options were. In the end, it was she who dialed his mom in Arizona, her voice calm and professional as she explained the situation, then nodded supportively as she handed the receiver over to Nate to do the rest.
By that night, a plane ticket was booked, a temporary living arrangement set. Nate would spend the rest of the school year in Arizona, followed by working the swim-camp job in Pennsylvania he’d already set up through the summer. Come fall, he’d head off to the U, where he’d recently gotten in early admission, albeit without his scholarship due to quitting swim team midyear. Still, it was his hope that the coach might be open to letting him try for alternate, or at least participate in practices. It wasn’t exactly what he’d planned, but it was something.
Mr. Cross was not happy when he found out about all this. In fact, at first he insisted that Nate return home, threatening to get the police involved if he didn’t. It wasn’t until Cora informed him that Nate had more than enough cause t
o press charges against him that he acquiesced, although even then he made his displeasure known with repeated phone calls, as well as making it as difficult as he could for Nate to collect his stuff and move in with us for the few days before he left town.
I did my best to distract Nate from all this, dragging him to movies at the Vista 10 (where we got free popcorn and admission, thanks to Olivia), hanging out with Roscoe, and taking extended coffee trips to Jump Java. He didn’t go back to Perkins, as Cora had arranged for him to finish the little bit of work he had left via correspondence or online, and every afternoon as I came up the front walk, I was nervous, calling out to him the minute I stepped in the door. I finally understood what Jamie and Cora had gone through with me those first few weeks, if only from the relief I felt every time I heard his voice responding.
All the while, though, I knew he soon wouldn’t be there. But I never talked to him about this. He had enough to worry about, and what mattered most was that I was just there for him, however he needed me to be. Still, the morning of his flight, when I came downstairs to find him in the foyer, his bags at his feet, I felt that same twist in my stomach.
I wasn’t the only one upset. Cora sniffled through the entire good-bye, hugging him repeatedly, a tissue clutched in her hand. “Now, I’ll call you tonight, just to make sure you’re getting settled in,” she told him. “And don’t worry about things on this end. It’s all handled.”
“Okay,” Nate said. “Thanks again. For everything.”
“Don’t be a stranger, all right?” Jamie told him, giving him a bear hug and a back slap. “You’re family now.”