“Hello?” Aunt Leigh said, already sounding suspicious.
“Aunt Leigh?”
“Elliott? Are you all settled in? How’s things?”
“Not good. I’ve been grounded pretty much since I got back.”
She sighed. “When does football practice start?”
“How’s Mr. Calhoun?” I asked.
“I’m sorry?”
“Catherine’s dad. Is he okay?”
She got quiet. “I’m sorry, Elliott. The funeral was last week.”
“Funeral.” I closed my eyes, feeling a heaviness in my chest. Then the anger began to boil.
“Elliott?”
“I’m here,” I said through my teeth. “Can you . . . can you go to the Calhouns’? Explain to Catherine why I left?”
“They’re not seeing anyone, Elliott. I’ve tried. I brought a casserole and a batch of brownies. They’re not answering the door.”
“Is she okay? Is there any way you can check?” I asked, rubbing the back of my neck.
Dawson was watching me pace, equal concern and curiosity in his eyes.
“I haven’t seen her, Elliott. I don’t think anyone has seen either of them since the burial. The town sure is talking. Mavis was very strange at the funeral, and they’ve been cooped up in that house since.”
“I’ve gotta get back there.”
“Isn’t football about to start?”
“Can you come get me?”
“Elliott,” Aunt Leigh said, remorse weighing down my name. “You know I can’t. Even if I tried, she wouldn’t allow me to. It’s just not a good idea. I’m sorry.”
I nodded, unable to form a reply.
“Bye, kiddo. I love you.”
“Love you, too,” I whispered, tossing the phone to Dawson.
“What the heck?” he asked. “Someone died?”
“Thanks for letting me use your phone, Dawson. I have to get back before my parents get home.” I jogged outside, the heat blasting my face. I was sweating by the time I reached my porch, closing the door behind me with just a few minutes to spare before the truck pulled back into the driveway. I retreated into my room, slamming the door behind me.
Her dad was dead. Catherine’s dad had died, and I’d just disappeared. As worried as I was before, panic was making me want to crawl out of my skin. Not only was she going to hate me, no one had seen her or her mom.
“Look who’s alive,” Mom said as I burst through my door and crossed the living room, passed the kitchen, stomped down the hall, and out the garage door. Dad’s weights were out there, and I wasn’t allowed to leave the house. The only way to blow off steam was to lift until my muscles shook from exhaustion. “Hey,” she said from the doorway. She leaned against the doorjamb, watching me work. “Everything okay?”
“No,” I said, grunting.
“What’s going on?”
“Nothing,” I snapped, already feeling my muscles burn.
Mom watched me finish a set and then another, the wrinkles between her brows deepening. She crossed her arms, surrounded by bicycle tires and shelves holding various crap.
“Elliott?”
I focused on the sound of my breath, trying to make Catherine understand through sheer will that I was trying.
“Elliott!”
“What?” I yelled, dropping the weight in my hand. Mom jumped at the noise and then stepped down into the garage. “What is going on with you?”
“Where’s Dad?”
“I dropped him off at Greg’s. Why?”
“Is he coming back?”
She tucked her chin, confused by my question. “Of course.”
“Don’t act like y’all haven’t been at it all day. Again.”
She sighed. “I’m sorry. We’ll try to keep it down next time.”
“What’s the point?” I said, huffing.
She narrowed her eyes at me. “There’s something else.”
“Nope.”
“Elliott,” she warned.
“Catherine’s dad died.”
She frowned. “How do you know that?”
“I just know.”
“Did you talk to your aunt Leigh? How? I have your phone.” When I didn’t answer, she pointed at the ground. “Are you sneaking around behind my back?”
“It’s not like you give me much of a choice.”
“I could say the same to you.”
I rolled my eyes, and her jaw ticked. She hated that. “You drag me back to keep me locked up in my room to listen to you and Dad yell at each other all day? Is that your master plan to make me wanna stay here?”
“I know things are hard right now—”
“Things suck right now. I hate it here.”
“You’ve barely been back two weeks.”
“I want to go home!”
Mom’s face flashed red. “This is your home! You’re staying here!”
“Why won’t you just let me explain to Catherine why I left? Why won’t you let me find out if she’s okay?”
“Why can’t you just forget about that girl?”
“I care about her! She’s my friend, and she’s hurting!”
Mom covered her eyes and then let her hand fall, turning for the door. She stopped, peering at me from over her shoulder. “You can’t save everyone.”
I looked at her from under my brows, keeping my anger on a tight leash. “I just want to save her.”
She walked away, and I bent over to pick up my weight, holding it over my head, lowering it behind me, and pulling it back up slow, repeating the motion until my arms shook. I didn’t want to be like my dad, swinging my fists every time something or someone set me off. It was so natural to want to attack that it scared me sometimes. Keeping my anger reined in took constant practice, especially now that I had to figure out a way to get to Catherine. I had to keep my head. I had to figure out a plan without letting my emotions get in the way.
I dropped to my knees, the weights hitting the floor a second time, my fingers still curved tightly around the grips, chest heaving as my lungs begged for air, arms trembling, knuckles grazing the cement floor. Tears burned my eyes, making the anger that much harder to conquer. Keeping emotion out of the plan to find my way back to the girl I loved was going to be as impossible as getting back to Oak Creek.
Chapter Six
Catherine
Rusted hinges on the outer gate creaked to announce my return from school. I was less than two weeks into my senior year, and already my bones ached and my brain felt full. I slugged my backpack across the dirt and the broken, uneven sidewalk that led to the front porch. I passed the broken-down Buick that was supposed to be mine on my sixteenth birthday, stumbling to my knees when the tip of my shoe clipped a piece of concrete.
Falling is easy. The hard part is getting back up.
I brushed off my skinned knees, covering my face when a gust of hot wind blew stinging sand against my legs and into my eyes. The sign above creaked, and I looked up, watching it swing back and forth. To outsiders, this place was JUNIPER BED AND BREAKFAST, but unfortunately for me, it was home.
I stood up, brushing at the dirt that was turning to mud against the bloody scrapes on the heels of my hands and knees. There was no point in crying. No one would hear me.
My bag felt loaded down with bricks as I lugged it up the steps, trying to get inside the latticed porch before I was sandblasted again. Oak Creek High School was on the east side of town—my house was on the west, and my shoulders ached from the long walk from school in the hot sun. In a perfect world, Mama would be standing at the door with a smile on her face and a glass of sweet tea in her hand, but the dusty door was closed and the lights were dark. We lived in Mama’s world.
I snarled at the oversize door with the rounded arch. It frowned at me every time I came home, mocking me. I pulled on the handle and dragged my bag inside. Even though I was angry and fed up, I was careful not to let the front door slam behind me.
The house was dusty, dark, and hot, but s
till better than outside with the cruel sun and the screaming cicadas.
Mama wasn’t at the door holding an iced tea. She wasn’t there at all. I stayed still, listening for who was.
Against Dad’s wishes, Mama had used most of his life insurance money to transform our seven-bedroom house into a place where the road weary could rest for a night or the weekend. Just like Dad had predicted, we rarely saw a visit from someone new. And the regulars weren’t enough. Even after we’d sold Mama’s car, the bills were overdue. Even after the social security checks, if we rented every room every night for the rest of my high school career, everything would still get taken away. The house would get taken by the bank, I’d get taken by DHS, and Mama and the regulars would have to find a way to exist outside of the walls of the Juniper.
I choked on the stale, humid air, deciding to open a window. The summer had been miserably hot, even for Oklahoma, and autumn wasn’t offering much relief. Even so, Mama didn’t like to run the air conditioner unless we were expecting guests.
But we were. We were always expecting guests.
Footsteps scampered down the hall upstairs. The crystal chandelier rattled, and I smiled. Poppy was back.
I left my backpack at the door and climbed the wooden steps, two at a time. Poppy was at the end of the hall, standing by the window, looking down on the backyard.
“Do you want to go out and play?” I asked, reaching out to pet her hair.
She shook her head but didn’t turn around.
“Uh-oh,” I said. “Bad day?”
“Daddy won’t let me go outside until he gets back,” she whimpered. “He’s been gone a long time.”
“Have you had lunch?” I asked, holding out my hand. She shook her head. “I bet your dad will let you go outside with me if you eat a sandwich first. Peanut butter and jelly?”
Poppy grinned. She was practically a little sister. I’d been taking care of her since the first night she visited. She and her father were the first to come after Dad had died.
Poppy walked clumsily down the stairs, then watched as I rummaged through the cabinets for bread, a knife, jelly, and peanut butter. The corners of her dirty mouth turned up while she watched me slather together ingredients and then add a banana for good measure.
Mama use to sneak in something healthy when I was Poppy’s age, and now, five months from my eighteenth birthday, I was the adult. It had been that way since Dad died. Mama never thanked me or acknowledged what I did for us, not that I expected her to. Our life now was about making it through the day. Anything more was too overwhelming for me, and I didn’t have the luxury of quitting. At least one of us had to keep it together so we didn’t fall apart.
“Did you eat breakfast?” I asked, trying to get a sense of when she’d checked in.
She nodded, stuffing the sandwich into her mouth. A ring of grape jelly added to the dirt and stickiness already spotting her face.
I fetched my backpack and brought it to the end of our long, rectangular table in the dining room, not far from where Poppy sat. While she chomped and wiped her sticky chin with the back of her hand, I finished my geometry. Poppy was happy but lonely like me. Mama didn’t like for me to have friends over, except for the occasional visit from Tess, who mostly talked about her house down the street. She was homeschooled and a little weird, but she was someone to talk to, and she didn’t care about the goings-on at the Juniper. It wasn’t as if I had time for things like that anyway. We couldn’t allow outsiders to see what was happening inside our walls.
Bass thumped outside, and I pulled aside the curtain to peek out the window. Presley’s pearl-white convertible Mini Cooper was full of the clones, now seniors like me. The top was down, the clones laughing and bobbing their heads to the music as Presley slowed at the four-way stop in front of our house. Two years ago, jealousy or sadness might have seared through me, but the discomfort of numbness was the only thing I could feel. The part of me that wished for cars and dates and new clothes had died with Dad. Wanting something I couldn’t have was too painful, so I chose not to.
Mama and I had bills to pay, and that meant keeping secrets for the people who walked the hallways. If our neighbors knew the truth, they wouldn’t want us to stay. So we were loyal to her patrons, and we kept their secrets. I was willing to sacrifice the few friends I had to keep us all happy and lonely and together.
As soon as I opened the back door, Poppy bolted down the wooden steps to the yard below, planting her palms on the ground and kicking over in an awkward cartwheel. She giggled and covered her mouth, sitting on the crispy golden grass. My mouth felt dry just hearing it crunch beneath our feet. The summer had been one of the hottest I could remember. Even now, in late September, the trees were withered and the ground was made of dead grass, dust, and beetles. Rain was something the adults talked about like a fond memory.
“Daddy will be back soon,” Poppy said, a tinge of nostalgia in her voice.
“I know.”
“Tell me again. The story about when you were born. The story about your name.”
I smiled, sitting down on the steps. “Again?”
“Again,” Poppy said, absently pulling bleached blades from the ground.
“Mama wanted to be a princess her whole life,” I said with reverence. It was the same tone Dad used when he recounted the story at bedtime. Every night until the day before he died, he told me the Story of Catherine. “When she was just ten, Mama dreamed about fluffy dresses and marble floors and golden teacups. She wished for it so hard she was sure it would come true. She just knew when she fell in love with Dad that he had to be a secret prince.”
Poppy’s eyebrows and shoulders lifted as she became lost in my words, and then her expression fell. “But he wasn’t.”
I shook my head. “He wasn’t. But she loved him even more than she loved her dream.”
“So they got married and had a baby.”
I nodded. “She wanted to be royalty, and bestowing a name—a title—on another human being was the closest she would ever get. Catherine sounded like a princess to her.”
“Catherine Elizabeth Calhoun,” Poppy said, sitting tall.
“Regal, isn’t it?”
Poppy’s face scrunched. “What does regal mean?”
“Excuse me,” a deep voice said from the corner of the yard.
Poppy stood, glaring at the intruder.
I stood next to her, raising my hand to shield my eyes from the sun. At first, all I could see was his silhouette, and then his face came into focus. I almost didn’t recognize him, but the camera hanging from a strap around his neck gave him away.
Elliott was taller, his frame thicker with more muscle. His chiseled jaw made him look like a man instead of the boy I remembered. His hair was longer, now falling to the bottom of his shoulder blades. He hitched his elbows over the top of our peeling picket fence with a hopeful grin.
I glanced over my shoulder to Poppy. “Go inside,” I said. She obeyed, quietly retreating to the house. I looked to Elliott and then turned.
“Catherine, wait,” he pleaded.
“I have been,” I snapped.
He shoved his hands into the pockets of his khaki cargo shorts, making my heart ache. He looked so different from the last time I’d seen him, and yet the same. Far from the lanky, awkward teenager just two years earlier. His braces were gone, leaving a perfect smile behind his lying lips, bright against his skin. The deepness of his complexion had faded, and so had the light in his eyes.
Elliott’s Adam’s apple bobbed when he swallowed. “I’m, um . . . I’m . . .”
A liar.
The camera swayed from the thick, black strap hanging from his neck as he fidgeted. He was nervous, and guilty, and beautiful.
He tried again. “I’m—”
“Not welcome,” I said, slowly retreating up the steps.
“I just moved in,” he called after me. “With my aunt? While my parents finalize the divorce. Dad is living with his girlfriend, and Mom
stays in bed most of the day.” He lifted his fist and gestured behind him with his thumb. “I’m just down the street? Do you remember where my aunt lives?”
I didn’t like the way he ended his sentences with question marks. If I were to ever talk to a boy again with even a smidgen of interest, he would talk in periods, and only sometimes in exclamation points. Only when it was interesting, the way Dad use to talk.
“Go away,” I said, glancing down at his camera.
He held up the boxy contraption with his long fingers, offering a small smile. Elliott’s new camera was old and had probably seen more than he had. “Catherine, please. Let me explain?”
I didn’t respond, instead reaching for the screen door. Elliott dropped his camera, holding out his hand. “I start school tomorrow. Transferring my senior year, can you believe it? It would . . . it would be nice to know at least one person?”
“School has already started,” I snarled.
“I know. It took me refusing to go to school in Yukon for Mom to finally allow me to come.”
The hint of desperation in his voice softened my resolve. Dad had always said I would have to put a lot of effort in to cover my soft center with a hard shell.
“You’re right. That sucks,” I said, unable to stop myself.
“Catherine,” Elliott begged.
“You know what else sucks? Being your friend,” I said, and turned to walk inside.
“Catherine.” Mama balked as I walked face-first into her throat. “I’ve never seen you behave so rudely.”
Mama was tall, but she had soft curves that I’d once loved to snuggle. There was a time after Dad died when she wasn’t so soft or curvy, when her collarbones stuck out so far they created shadows, and being held by her was like being hugged by the lifeless branches of a dead tree. Now her cheeks were full and she was soft again, even if she didn’t hold me as much. Now I held her.
“I’m sorry,” I said. She was right. She had never witnessed me being rude. It was something I did when she wasn’t around to keep persistent people away. Mama’s profession was hospitality and rudeness upset her, but it was necessary to keep our secrets.
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