by Cynthia Hand
“Hey, you okay?” Billy asks.
“Almost done.” I cough to cover the catch in my voice, then fold up the last sweater, lay it in a box, and glance around. Even though I didn’t pack everything, even though I left my posters on the walls and some of my stuff out, my room looks emptied, like I’ve already moved out of this place.
I can’t believe that, after tomorrow, I won’t live here anymore.
“You can come home anytime you like,” Billy says. “Remember that. This is your house. Just call and tell me you’re on your way and I’ll run over and put fresh sheets on the bed.”
She squeezes my hand and then heads downstairs to load boxes into her truck, which she’ll be driving to California tomorrow, me following along in my car.
I go out into the hall. The house is quiet but also seems to have some kind of energy, like it’s full of ghosts. I stare at Jeffrey’s closed door. He should be here. He should have already started his junior year at Jackson Hole High School. He should be well into football practice and his disgusting early-morning protein shakes and tons of mismatched stinky gym socks in the laundry basket. I should be able to go to his door right now and knock and hear him say, Go away, but I’d go in anyway, and then he’d look at me from his computer and maybe turn his throbbing music down a notch or two, smirk, and say, “Aren’t you gone yet?” and maybe I’d think of something smart to fire back, but in the end we’d both know that he would miss me. And I would miss him.
I miss him.
The front door bangs shut downstairs. “You expecting company?” Billy calls up.
I become aware of the sound of a car pulling up in the driveway. “No,” I holler back. “Who is it?”
“It’s for you,” she says.
I book it down the stairs.
“Oh, good,” says Wendy when I open the door. “I was afraid I missed you.”
Instinctively I look around for Tucker, my heart speeding up.
“He’s not here,” Wendy says gently. “He, uh—”
Oh. He didn’t want to see me.
I try to smile while something in my chest squeezes painfully. Right, I think. Why would he want to see me? We’re broken up. He’s moving on.
I make myself focus on Wendy. She’s clutching a cardboard box to her chest like she’s afraid it might float away from her. She shifts from one foot to the other. “What’s up?”
“I had some of your stuff,” she says. “I’m headed to school tomorrow, and I—I thought you might want it.”
“Thanks. I’m leaving tomorrow, too,” I tell her.
Once, when her brother and I first got together, Wendy told me that if I hurt Tucker she’d bury me in horse manure. Ever since we broke up some part of me has been expecting her to show up here with a shovel and bean me over the head with it. Some part of me thinks that maybe I’d deserve it. Yet here she is looking all fragile and hopeful, like she missed me this summer. Like she still wants to be my friend.
“Thanks,” I say again. I smile, reach for the box. She smiles shyly back and hands it over. Inside there are a couple DVDs, magazines, my dog-eared copy of Vampire Academy and a few other books, a pair of dress shoes I loaned her for prom.
“How was Italy?” she asks as I set the box down next to the door. “I got your postcard.”
“It was beautiful.”
“I bet,” she says with an envious sigh. “I’ve always wanted to backpack around Europe. I want to see London, Paris, Vienna . . .” She smiles. “Hey, how about you show me your pictures? I’d love to see them. If you have time.”
“Um, sure.” I run upstairs to get my laptop, then sit down with her on the living room sofa and cruise through my photos of this summer, her shoulder pressing into mine as we look at pictures of the Coliseum, the Roman arches, the catacombs, Tuscany with its vineyards and rolling hills, Florence, me making that dumb “I’m holding it up” pose at the leaning tower of Pisa.
And then up flashes a picture of Angela and Phen at the top of St. Peter’s.
“Wait, go back,” Wendy says as I click past it.
I reluctantly press the back button.
“Who’s that?” she breathes.
I get it. Phen is hot. There’s something magnetic about those brown eyes of his, the manly perfection of his face and all that, but sheesh. Not Wendy, too.
“Just a guy we met in Rome,” I tell Wendy. That’s about as close to the truth as I can come without going into the gory details of Angela and her secret, “swear you won’t tell anybody, Clara” boyfriend. Who is, according to her, a summer thing only. She’s been all “Phen who?” ever since we returned to Wyoming, like she never even met the guy.
“Did I mention that I want to go to Italy?” Wendy says, raising her eyebrows. “Wow.”
“Yeah, there are a lot of hot guys in Italy,” I admit. “Of course, then they become beer-bellied middle-aged men in Armani suits with their hair slicked back who look at you like ‘how you doing?’” I give her my best pervy Italian grin, tilt my chin up, blow an air kiss at her.
She laughs. “Ew.”
I close my laptop, glad to get the subject off Phen. “So, that was Italy.” I pat my stomach. “I gained like five pounds in pasta.”
“Well, you were too skinny before, anyway,” Wendy says.
“Gee, thanks.”
“I hate to be the party pooper, but I should go,” she says. “I’ve got loads to do at home before tomorrow.”
We stand, and I turn to her, instantly choked up at the idea of saying good-bye. “You’re going to do awesome at Washington State and have all kinds of fun and become the best vet ever, but I am so going to miss you,” I say.
Her eyes are misty, too. “We’ll see each other on breaks, right? You can always email me, you know. Don’t be a stranger.”
“I won’t. Promise.”
She hugs me. “Bye, Clara,” she whispers. “Take care.”
When she’s gone I gather up the box, take it to my room, and close the door. I dump the box out on my bed. There among the things I’d loaned Wendy, I find some items from Tucker: a fishing lure that I bought him at a tackle shop in Jackson—his lucky Carrots lure, he called it, a pressed wildflower from one of the wreaths he used to make for my hair, a mix CD I made him last year, full of songs about cowboys and songs about flying and songs about love, which he listened to a bunch of times even though he must have thought it was mostly corny. He’s giving it all back. I hate how much this hurts me, how much I’m clearly still hanging on to what we had, so I put it all carefully back in the box, and I seal the box with tape and slide it into the shadows at the back of my closet. And say good-bye.
Clara.
I hear the voice in my head, calling my name, before I hear it out loud. I’m standing in the quad at Stanford University, in the midst of more than fifteen hundred teeming freshmen and their parents, but I hear him loud and clear. I push through the crowd, looking for his wavy dark hair, the flash of his green eyes. Then suddenly there’s a break in the people around me and I see him, about twenty feet away, standing with his back to me. As usual. And as usual, it’s like a bell chimes inside me in a kind of recognition.
I cup my hands around my mouth and call, “Christian!”
He turns. We weave toward each other through the crowd. In a flash I’m by his side, grinning up at him, almost laughing because it feels so good to be together again after so long.
“Hey,” he says. He has to talk loudly to be heard over the people around us. “Fancy meeting you here.”
“Yes, fancy that.”
It doesn’t occur to me until right this minute how much I’ve missed him. I was so busy missing other people, my mom, Jeffrey, Tucker, Dad, caught up in all that I was leaving behind. But now—it’s like when part of you stops hurting and suddenly you’re yourself again, healthy and whole, and only then do you understand that you’ve been in pain for a while. I missed his voice in my head, in my ears. I missed his face. His smile.
“I missed
you, too.”
About the Author
CYNTHIA HAND is a native of southeastern Idaho and currently lives with her husband and two children in Southern California, where she teaches writing at Pepperdine University. She has graduate degrees in creative writing from Boise State University and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Instead of a muse, Cynthia has a guardian angel named Buster. He wears a Stetson in place of a halo, prefers a beat-up pickup truck to flying, and loves to correct Cynthia’s grammar. Find out more at www.cynthiahandbooks.com.
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Credits
Cover photo © 2012 by Howard Huang
Lettering by Peter Horridge
Cover design by Sasha Illingworth
Copyright
Copyright © 2012 by Cynthia Hand
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.
Epub Edition © NOVEMBER 2012 ISBN: 9780062258571
ISBN 978-0-06-225857-1
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First Edition
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