The date finally comes back to me when Ramani says it, and I remember where I’ve seen it written before. In the trophy case by the principal’s office, beneath the photograph of Jesse. My stomach sinks.
“It’s the anniversary of Jesse’s death.” Ramani’s voice quavers. I nearly forgot that she went with Jesse to homecoming last year, that they’d been dating. She mourns him perhaps nearly as much as Jasper does.
Adalyn shifts at Ramani’s tone, finally involved in the conversation, and she drops her pen and reaches over to hold Ramani’s hand, giving it a squeeze.
“Oh, crap,” Linc mutters, reminded not only of Jasper’s pain, but maybe also a little of his own romantic angst. “I should call him. Maybe we should ditch and go find him.” He looks at Grayson for confirmation.
“We’ve got a chemistry test after lunch,” Grayson reminds him. “It’s worth twenty-five percent of our grade. Skip that and you’ll be benched for the season. Not to mention your parents will kill you and ban you from your fan-fiction sites for the rest of your life.”
Linc grimaces. “Well, when you put it like that . . .”
“I don’t have chemistry,” I offer. “I’ll go look for him.” I’ll have to miss class, which Mia won’t like, but I have to know that Jasper is okay.
Ramani looks relieved. “I don’t think I can do it,” she admits, wiping at her eye.
“It’s fine,” I tell her. “I’ll find him. Good luck on your chemistry test, guys.”
Adalyn sends me a grateful look across the table, and she nudges Ramani. “Come on,” she says. “Let’s go get something chocolate from the vending machine and sit outside for a few minutes. Some fresh air sounds good.”
“Check the cemetery first,” Grayson tells me as I leave. “If he’s not there, he’s probably at home.”
“I’ll tell Mama you might be late when I get to the shop today,” Ember offers with a small, encouraging smile.
Outside the school, I call Jasper’s phone. It rings three times and then goes to voice mail. The fact that he doesn’t answer worries me even more. I think back to the last time I saw him, yesterday afternoon, replaying our conversation in my head. Had he seemed distant? Was there something that I should have noticed, some sign that would have prevented him ghosting me?
It’s a thirty-minute walk to the cemetery near the edge of town. I hug my jacket close to me, wishing I had a car. There was public transportation in the city, so I never learned how to drive. But out here it seems like a necessity.
The cemetery is a sprawling, hilly maze flanked on every side by tall, ominous-looking evergreens. I open the rusty gate and let myself in. There are all kinds of gravestones. Massive monuments, among them an angel standing six feet tall, staring down at me like I’m an intruder; tiny stones barely visible beneath the fallen leaves; new mounds of dirt with only a white cross to mark them until something more permanent arrives. A windmill creaks in the distance with every shift of the wind, the sound echoing and ghostly.
Around one hill, I find the McCabe family plot. A lot of them are so old that I can barely read the names, but there’s one new enough to decipher. Connor McCabe. Beloved brother and son. He lived thirty years. He died when I was only eight. Of course it doesn’t say beloved father. He had never been a father. I wonder if he would have been a good parent. If he would have taught me how to ride a bike like that picture of Ember and her dad on the mantel at home. I wonder if he would be showing up to watch me get picked up by my date at homecoming too.
One story that no one has ever bothered to tell me is why my father was never in my life. Not Mom, before she left. Not Mia, nor Auntie. Nobody. But the fact that no one has offered that tale, when there are so many they are willing to share, makes me wonder if my entire life has been wrapped in secrets. The only question is whether it was Mom keeping me secret from Connor, or Connor was not so perfect, and he kept my existence from the McCabes.
It’s easy for the McCabes to put it all on Mom. After all, she’d abandoned me. How could their perfect Connor have neglected his own child?
With every little bit of Connor that I am given from others in Rocksaw, I get a clearer picture of him, but the truth is, I’ll never know him. I’ll only ever have shadows of him, bits of anecdotes, gray-green eyes, and our mutual love of drawing. We didn’t share any of our years. Any of our chapters.
I lean into the wind and keep walking. The Ruiz family plot is near the back of the cemetery, almost all the way to the evergreens. There’s no Jasper here, but there are several bouquets: sunflowers, a sheaf of wheat, a handful of yellow roses, and a pot of dark-red chrysanthemums on the elaborate stone that is clearly the newest of the plots. The gravestone is black granite with gray writing: Jesse Eduardo Ruiz. We’ll keep you in our hearts, unchanged, perfect forever.
I stand there for a few moments, imagining what Jasper must have felt as he stood here. Wondering which of the flowers are from him. “He really loved you,” I tell Jesse, even though he can’t hear me. “I’m sure he’ll take good care of Cleo for you.” I pause another moment. “I think Ramani misses you, too. But she might not be ready to visit yet. Don’t take it the wrong way.”
The Ruiz family farm is five miles from town, so before I hike all that way, I do a quick search on my phone for Jasper’s home number. I find it and bolster my courage because I might have to talk to one of his parents if they answer, knowing that they are probably struggling with this day as much as Jasper.
It rings three times before someone picks up. Crap. His mother. “Hello?” she says.
“Hi, um, I’m sorry. Is, uh, Jasper there? Could I talk to him?”
“Jasper? No, he’s at school. Can I take a message?”
“No. Thank you.” I end the call. Maybe Grayson and Linc don’t know Jasper as well as they think they do.
By the time I walk back to school, it’ll be over for the day, so I decide to walk back to the tea shop instead. Mia looks up when the bell on the front door jingles. “Wow,” she says from behind the glass display counter, where she’s been adding in her afternoon’s baking of Lucky Lime. With the homecoming game coming up, there’s been a big run on it. Girlfriends of football players have been buying it for delivery to their boyfriends. Hell, even the mayor was here buying some, but I heard that’s because he’s got a fair bit of money on the game. Auntie’s been reading the fortunes of quarterbacks and linebackers and tight ends to see if any of them can reveal any tidbit about the upcoming game. They’re great customers because they can each order half a dozen muffins and eat them in one sitting.
“You’re here early today.” Mia straightens up. “You must’ve flown.”
“Something like that,” I mumble, not wanting to tell her I ditched school. I have a feeling Mia might think that’s a more serious offense than I do. Of course, I ditched about six months of school last year, so I guess one afternoon doesn’t feel like that big a deal to me. All I care about right now is where Jasper might be.
“So that’s all?” she prompts.
I flick a glance over at her, and I can see that her mouth is tight.
“That’s all.”
She gives a small sigh but lets the subject drop. “Ms. Troy is coming for her home visit tomorrow,” she reminds me. Ms. Troy was supposed to come earlier, but she’d been sick with some mysterious illness and had to placate herself with another phone interview about my activities, behavior, and general progress.
“I know,” I tell Mia. “It’s not a big deal. She’ll just want to see that you keep your meds and sharp objects locked up.” I throw out the last part as a joke to try to ease the tension, but Mia doesn’t laugh.
When Ember finally appears, she tells me Jasper never showed up at school after I left, either, and he hadn’t answered when Grayson called him after the chemistry test.
I spend the rest of the afternoon thinking about Jasper, worrying about where he might be and if he’s okay. He’s never said it outright, but I think there’s a lot more to h
is story and Jesse’s than what he’s shared with me. I get that. I do. There are parts of my story that I don’t want anyone to know, sketches that I don’t want anyone else to see. My darkest chapters belong only to me.
And that’s when I remember what he said when we were up on Cedar Mountain. It was the best view in town. He liked it up there, looking at all the tiny lights of Rocksaw below. I glance out the window. It’s starting to get dark.
“Mia?” I call into the kitchen. “I’m going out.” I snatch my backpack because I know I won’t be back before we close.
“What? Where are you going?” she calls back, but I’m already out the front door.
I jog all the way back to the school. Football practice is over, so the field is empty. The sun is setting, and Cedar Mountain is silhouetted against the bright oranges and pinks streaking the sky. I climb the hill with way less speed than the football team, careful to keep to the packed dirt of their well-worn path.
Sure enough, there’s Jasper at the top of the giant hill, sitting in one of the empty lawn chairs. He doesn’t look surprised to see me. He leans back in the chair, his hands cupped gently over the ends of the armrests like he’s completely relaxed, just some guy watching a sunset on the top of Cedar Mountain, not a boy on the first anniversary of the death of his big brother. There’s a bottle of cheap watermelon wine next to him.
I drop my backpack and sit down in the chair beside him. Picking up the bottle to see how much is left, I give it a sniff. “This smells gross,” I say by way of greeting, handing the bottle back to him.
Jasper nods. “It is. I stopped sipping on it about an hour ago. It was all my parents left out of the locked liquor cabinet. Obviously they left it out because they hoped it would get stolen.”
I nod sympathetically.
“So what are you doing here?” he asks, setting the bottle down and leaning back in his lawn chair. He crosses his boots at the ankle.
“Just hanging out.”
“You come up here a lot to hang out?”
“I do when you’re here.”
His mouth twitches, but it’s not a smile, not a frown. It’s not anything.
We sit in silence for nearly an hour, watching the sky grow purplish and then black. Far below in the small town of Rocksaw, lights begin to appear, like tiny stars in the twilight.
Jasper shifts, and his lawn chair squeaks in protest. “Jesse and I used to come up here and get roaring drunk.” He pauses, like he’s remembering. Like he’s going somewhere else, like I do sometimes. He rubs a finger over his lips before he continues, looking away from me, into the distance. “We’d bring our sleeping bags and stay out all night. And Grayson and Linc would come, and a couple of older guys from Jesse’s class. We’d light a bonfire, and Grayson would bring his guitar and pretend he was Ren Rogers from Ren and Reckless.” He smiles to himself. “Jesse would tell him to play rock music or shut the hell up.”
“Sounds like a good time.”
“It was.”
Another pause, and I reach over and put my hand on top of his.
“He didn’t have a hunting accident, you know,” Jasper murmurs.
I take a breath before I give a small nod, waiting for him to tell me how all those little pieces of Jesse’s story fit together.
Another pause. “He was unhappy. So unhappy. He stopped going to school, going to football practice. I had to drag him to homecoming because Ramani would have been devastated if he didn’t show. She knew something was up, too. We both did. My dad kept saying, ‘Man up. Shake it off. There’s nothing wrong with you.’ And then one night he didn’t come home. I looked all over town for him. Mom and Dad called the cops. They thought maybe he’d run away to LA to become an actor like he talked about before he became depressed. I don’t think they ever suspected, not even a little, how badly he wanted out of the life they had planned for him.” Jasper’s voice breaks. He takes a few ragged breaths, like he’s trying not to cry.
I hold his hand tighter.
“So when I felt like I was sinking, like everything was getting darker and it was hard to breathe, hard to get out of bed in the morning, I kept thinking, this is what happened to Jesse. Next it’s going to be me they find out in the woods. And there’ll be some story about my hunting accident, about what a tragedy it was to lose someone so young.”
“But it’s not,” I tell him. “It’s not you. You’re not Jesse.”
“Because I went and got some pills. That’s why. Otherwise that could have been me, too. He wasn’t broken; he needed help. I needed help. My dad doesn’t even know about the antidepressants, or that I went to talk to a doctor about how I felt. Mom took me once to see our family doctor, and she signed some forms and told me never to say anything to my dad. If he knew, he’d say the same thing to me that he said to Jesse. Man up. Gut it out. Shake it off.”
“You don’t know that. Maybe your dad changed after Jesse.”
“You don’t know him. He hasn’t,” Jasper says fiercely.
“So then tell him to fuck off,” I say, furious that his father would treat him that way.
“I can’t just tell him off. He has the keys to the kingdom. I’ve always wanted that farm, even when Jesse thought it was the end of the world. Even when it was the end of the world, for him.” His eyes are haunted, like he feels guilty for wanting something that his brother hated so much.
“Jasper, this is serious. You can’t hide this from your dad forever. You need help right now. That’s okay. Maybe someday you won’t. But what are you going to do if your dad finds out? Stop taking the antidepressants before your doctor says it’s okay?” All my thoughts are reeling, and deep in the back of my darkest corners, I realize that I was scared when Jasper went missing because I didn’t know if he had hurt himself. If he had gone off the meds or taken a turn for the worse without me seeing it. Just like with my mom in the Good Year. It hurts to think of him putting himself in danger to make his dad happy. “Are you willing to risk everything for that stupid farm?”
“It’s not any of your business, is it?” he shoots back angrily. “You’ve been here, what, two months, and now you think you know better than anyone else?” He stands up. “We needed to keep it all a secret. Jesse’s suicide would have ripped this town apart. He was the golden boy. Everybody loved him. Class president, team captain. Could you imagine looking at Ramani and telling her that her perfect boyfriend killed himself? Could you tell my dad?” He almost laughs, a strange, choked sound, and it’s the saddest thing I’ve heard in a long time. “Yeah, that’s the best part. He doesn’t even know. My mom didn’t tell him. She let him believe that it was an accident because she knew the truth would kill him. Suicide is a sin, you know. So she threw away the goodbye letter in Jesse’s room before he could find it. But not before I could.”
“I’m sorry, Jasper,” I say softly, trying to imagine how much that must have built inside him in the year since Jesse’s death, secrets weighing him down until he could barely move.
“You should go,” he says, sitting back down.
“All right,” I tell him, standing up and grabbing my bag. I didn’t know how much it would hurt to be pushed away again, to be reminded that my chapters in Rocksaw have barely begun, to be told that I am still an outsider. To not be able to help the people I’ve started to care for.
I walk all the way back to the farmhouse with only the cows along the road to keep me company. Inside, I toss my backpack carelessly on the dining table. I don’t give a crap about my homework tonight. Mia is in the kitchen, and she calls to me, but I ignore her. The thing about being pushed away is that it feels a little bit better when you get to do it to someone else, too. That way you’re not hurting alone.
Twenty
THE NEXT MORNING, I REMEMBER that Ms. Troy is coming for a home visit. I get to miss the first two periods of school. At least I can avoid seeing Jasper for a little longer.
I come downstairs and find Mia standing at the table, looking down at something, transfi
xed. I know I should apologize for blowing her off last night, but something inside me is still hurt, still raw. And it wants to stay that way a while longer.
Mia turns a page of what she’s looking at, a long curl of her red hair falling against her cheek.
I stop at the edge of the dining room when I see what’s on the table. My backpack is open, my pens and papers and books spread everywhere. There’s a roll of paper towels at the edge of the table, an overturned teacup. I recall that I threw my bag on the table last night without thinking of anything but my homework inside. I didn’t remember what else was in there.
Mia isn’t checking my homework. She’s looking at my sketchbook. My secret one, the one that has my whole life inside it.
“What are you doing?” It comes out more like an accusation than a question.
Mia jumps. “I’m so sorry, Trix. I spilled my cup of tea on your backpack. I took everything out to dry it off, and I saw this . . . and I . . .” Her face is pale, her eyes moist. “Connor loved to draw. Did you know that?”
“Is it ruined?” I ask, my voice shaky, hurrying around the table to look at it. Everything is in that book. It’s the inside of my heart, as if I’d ripped it out of my chest and smeared it on each page.
Mia shakes her head no, takes a small step aside so that I can look more closely at the sketchpad.
Mia holds the corner of a picture of Mom. Vines of cigarette smoke curl up around her face as she sits outside our room at the Starlite in one of the rusty wrought-iron chairs. “Is this your mother?” Mia asks.
“Yes.” The word almost chokes me. Because that is also my face. That is the face I see every day in the mirror and wonder if I am her. Or if I am only seeing her because I can never forgive her and she can never forgive me for what I did.
“And this is where you lived?” She points at the Starlite sign that hangs over the parking lot. I don’t respond.
She flips to another page. Wendy and me sitting in a booth at the Jasmine Dragon.
A Constellation of Roses Page 20