by Beth Reekles
She pauses. “Would you rather hang out with him than us?” There is no blunt accusation in her voice, though; she seems curious more than anything else.
“No!” I insist hastily. “I just—I can’t ditch him. I promised we could work on the project tonight and … I can hang out with you guys anytime.”
“Fine. We were thinking of going to see a movie tomorrow, by the way—I forgot to tell you earlier. You up for it?”
I grimace. “My sister’s coming to visit this weekend. Sorry.”
“Oh, God, yeah, I totally forgot. Well, okay. If you can spare a couple of hours from your busy schedule for us tomorrow, then let me know, ’kay?”
“Okay.”
“Awesome. Have fun working on your project,” she says pityingly, though I’m not totally sure if she’s being sincere or not.
“Have fun at the beach,” I reply. The weather’s great outside right now; the sun is refusing to come close to setting, there are clear skies, and it’s comfortably hot. Perfect for hanging out at the beach. But I still don’t sound like I wish I could be there. “Say hi to everyone for me.”
“Will do.”
Once I hang up, I finish gathering up my things into my backpack and then text Dwight to say I’m on my way over. I call a quick goodbye over my shoulder as I leave, and follow it with an “Okay!” when Mom tells me to call for a ride home if it gets too late.
I do my best to forget how worried I am that Tiffany is mad at me. Dwight keeps glancing at me with a crease in his forehead, like he knows something’s up, but he understands I don’t want to talk about it.
I try to concentrate on the project, I really do. But I have this nagging feeling in my gut that Tiffany is mad at me for blowing them off, and for hanging out with Dwight to do our project instead of going to the beach.
I know it’s stupid. I’m allowed to have other friends—and we’re doing schoolwork, so that should give me the best excuse in the book to be with Dwight instead of them.
But I’m so worried about it that I can’t focus.
I remember all the time I spent being the social outcast and how miserable my life was, and I realize how much I don’t want to give up this new life, how badly I don’t want to mess up. And I push out those thoughts about wanting to ditch my friends to hang out with Dwight instead. Maybe I should’ve just blown Dwight off and gone to the beach …
“Madison? Everything okay?”
I look at Dwight. “Huh? Sorry, I totally spaced out.”
“Are you sure everything’s all right? If you want to go home or something, or take a break, just say. I don’t mind.”
I shake my head adamantly. It’s too late now to reverse things: I’m with Dwight, so we may as well work on the project. “It’s fine,” I insist, and he drops it.
At some point we order a pizza to keep us going, and it’s about nine o’clock when I throw myself back from my scattered notes. “Can we stop now? I’m exhausted.”
Dwight laughs. “Sure. We haven’t actually got much left to do. Two more experiments and the write-ups, and then we just fine-tune the presentation and we’re done.”
We sit there for a few minutes, tidying our things and sorting out papers. We both go to pick up the same sheet, and his fingers close over mine. “Sorry,” he says, and pulls his hand away.
I sit back against the sofa, and cross my legs underneath me, watching him crumple up a sheet on which he drew some rough diagrams. “Dwight.”
“Yeah?” He turns his head to look at me.
“Can we … Can I see the tree house?”
We stand at the base of the tree, which I see now is a sycamore, with lots of the bottom branches cut to stumps so that the tree doesn’t intrude on the rest of the yard space too much; these stumps make the tree great for climbing.
I look up to where the little wooden hut is nestled amongst the branches. Where the window is, I can make out faded green drapes.
“There,” he says, and steps back. I know he didn’t look up once at the tree house; only at the base of the trunk. He steps back again, but I turn and catch his arm.
“We’re not going up?”
He looks at me with an indefinable expression in his eyes, his mouth a line, jaw clenched. Then his dark eyebrows tug together until they almost meet, and he says, “Why?”
“To see it properly,” I explain, calm and quiet.
His brow furrows even more.
“Dwight …” I take a half-step closer to him. “Why not?”
I know why not.
He takes a while to answer. Or, at least, it feels like a while. It may only be a few seconds that drag out slowly, but it may be minutes.
“I haven’t … I haven’t been up there since my dad died.”
I remember what he told me that first time we hung out, working on the project: Do you ever get that feeling: one day, you just wake up and you’re suddenly not a kid anymore? One morning—I remember it was mid-April, when I was twelve, and it was a really sunny day. Well, that morning, I just woke up, and for the first time I didn’t want to play in the tree house. And that was it … My dad died five years ago.
I can do the math.
I squeeze Dwight’s hand, and give him a tiny smile. “So what’s stopping you?”
With a heavy sigh, he pulls his hand from mine and runs his fingers back and forth through his hair, messing it up. “Dice, it’s not that simple.”
I know he doesn’t want to, and I can guess at his reasons, but I don’t want to let this drop. There’s something tugging in my gut that makes me want him to go up there and face it.
And then I’m talking, and the words are spilling out even though I don’t want them to. I can’t stop. I can’t control my mouth, make myself stop. I don’t want to tell him, and I especially don’t want him to look at me differently because of this, but it won’t stop.
“You know,” I say quietly, “back in Maine, my life was a nightmare. I got bullied all the time. I was fat. I had braces, and these thick glasses that made my eyes look the size of tennis balls. I cried before I went to school, and I cried when I got home. I didn’t want to tell my parents how bad it was, because they’d only call the school, and that’d just make everything worse. People called me names. They ripped up my homework. Threw my books in the school pool. Filled my locker with ketchup. I have this scar on my wrist from when I was little and burned it on the stove—they used to make fun of me for that too. I didn’t try in class, because I knew that if I did, they’d only shoot me down for it. So my teachers thought I was useless, and stupid, and a waste of space. I got the feeling that if I stopped going to school altogether, nobody would miss me. Nobody would care if anything bad happened to me.”
Dwight doesn’t say anything for a while.
“I told Jenna how bad it was, once. She heard me crying in the middle of the night, when she was sneaking in from going to see this guy she knew our parents didn’t approve of—she liked doing things like that. She made me tell her everything, but I made her promise not to tell Mom and Dad, because I didn’t want to worry them. She kept a close eye on me after that; tried to make people stop bullying me, even though both of us knew it didn’t do much good.”
There’s a silence, and it’s too long for comfort.
“Why are you telling me this?” His voice is hushed and his eyes are mournful, but they hold my gaze steadily, unwavering.
“Because it made me realize something,” I said. “That there’s always someone who’s going to help you out, whatever it is. Even if you don’t want to notice that they’re there. There’s always someone who, even if they don’t understand exactly, is going to be there for you. And you just have to let them help you.”
There’s a long pause, and the only sound is Gellman walking across the kitchen to his bowl of water, back inside the house. He laps noisily, then returns to his dog basket. A car goes past on the street on the other side of the house. A TV is playing loudly from one of the neighbors’ open windows.
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Then Dwight lets out a heavy sigh. “All right. Just be careful on the way up, okay?”
And with that, he takes two large, loping strides past me and begins to climb the tree. I watch for a split second before scrambling clumsily up after him. My feet and hands slip a couple of times—it’s harder than I expected—but somehow I manage to make it all the way up to the tree house.
Dwight lingers in the branches before pulling himself into the wooden building, though. Once he’s in, he leans down to offer me a hand, and he’s surprisingly strong, hauling me up effortlessly into the hut.
It’s oddly chilly in the tree house, without the sunlight to keep it warm. It’s dark too. Dwight crawls over to open up the blinds that block the one window. I look around, and see all kinds of things the twelve-year-old Dwight left here before he stopped playing in the tree house.
There are a couple of action figures, and a pack of cards; some old empty soda cans. A wooden apple box to sit on, and a threadbare, worn beanbag that sags in the corner. A string of lights is hung around the window, attached to a large battery pack. A pile of books lie against the one wall, and don’t seem to have been too beaten up by the weather over the years.
Dwight starts to stand, but stops when he realizes he’s too tall now. I straighten, though, because I’m short enough. I shoot him a smug smile at that, and he smiles back a little. Then he tosses me the beanbag, and sits on the apple box. His legs stretch out across the floor.
“See,” I say quietly, making myself comfortable on the beanbag. “That wasn’t so bad.”
“I forgot I left all this stuff up here,” he says quietly, picking up the book on the top of the stack and thumbing through it. It’s one of the Alex Rider series by Anthony Horowitz. He looks around nostalgically, and then says, “I didn’t realize it was so dark out.” He fiddles with the battery pack, smacking his palm on the top of it until the lights flicker to life. They cast a soft golden glow over the tree house.
Dwight is quiet then. Very quiet. I see him swallow hard, and his eyes are closed.
I don’t ask if he’s okay. Instead, I just stretch my leg out until I can press it against his a little. It’s a small gesture, but I know he appreciates it by the way the air gushes out of his lungs in a long, quiet exhalation.
I don’t know how much time passes before he says, “What you told me, before …” He trails off, like he’s not sure how to carry on.
“Yeah?”
“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,” he begins, and then I know where he’s going with this. I’m the one who looks away first; my gaze drops to my hands, where my fingers are knotted together. But I’m not clammy and I don’t feel shaky and scared like I usually do whenever the threat of talking about the old Madison approaches.
“You want to know more about the old Madison, right?”
He nods, and I take a deep breath.
“Just don’t look at me differently, okay?”
“I’ll do my best,” he says, and I know that’s all I can hope for.
I take a deep breath and let the words pour out before I can second-guess myself: I hear myself telling him what it used to be like, back in Pineford, in much more detail. He doesn’t “Mm-hmm” or nod or “Oh, really?” in all the right places; that’s how I know he’s really listening. He just captures me with that intense stare as I look down at my hands and tell him my story.
When I’m finished, he’s silent.
“Say something,” I whisper. Now I’m scared; what if he thinks I’m a freak, that I’m weird, that I’m not the Madison he knows? What if he doesn’t want to know me anymore?
“Oh.”
I laugh, but it sounds kind of empty. “That’s all you can say?”
“I don’t know what you want me to say,” he admits. “Saying I’m sorry doesn’t change things or make it better.”
My mouth twists up in a smile at that, remembering he said something similar after telling me his dad died. “I know.”
“Now it makes sense, though,” he says. “Why you hang out with them.”
“What?” I frown slightly. “No, it’s not … It’s not exactly like that. They’re my friends.”
My words sound like lies even to my own ears. Desperate lies I want to be true, to believe.
I clench my fists at myself. Stop it, Madison. Stop it.
He doesn’t say anything, and he doesn’t look at me. I know he’s disagreeing with me.
“It isn’t,” I tell him stubbornly. “They’re good people. They’re my friends. They didn’t know anything about me and they took me in and accepted me without question.”
He gives me a look, and the corner of his mouth twitches. I know exactly what that expression’s trying to tell me: that they might not have accepted me if they had known everything about me, like he does.
I stand up. I don’t know why this is making me feel so mad, but it is, and I have to argue it. “You don’t even know anything about them. They’re my friends.”
“Are you really sure about that, Madison?” he replies dubiously, raising his eyebrows at me. “Really?”
My scowl deepens. “I don’t have to explain myself to you.”
I don’t have to explain myself to Dwight. Whatever he says, and whatever I think sometimes, those guys are my friends. Tiffany and Summer and Melissa. I’m not a huge fan of Kyle, but even he’s not so bad, when he’s not being a jerk; and Ricky and Adam are great, and Marcus. Bryce is so sweet and wonderful, and he’s always so nice to me.
“Forget it,” I mutter. “It doesn’t even matter.” And I start to clamber down from the tree house.
My limbs are trembling from being angry, and my feet carry me clumsily down the tree. Near the bottom, I miss my footing and fall a short way to the ground. I land badly on my ankle but I ignore it, and start to walk back through the house.
All the while, Dwight’s calling after me, telling me to be careful.
Gellman barks sleepily to me, and I pet him quickly before moving through to the family room, grabbing up my stuff. I don’t check to see if I’ve got all my notes. I just want to get out.
I just spilled everything to Dwight and he should’ve understood. He should have at least tried to understand. But he didn’t. He just made an assumption. I think that’s what made me so angry.
I don’t want to fight with Dwight. I don’t want to do anything to damage our friendship. I don’t want to be mad at him. What I want is someone who understands. I need Dwight.
“Madison, come on,” he says, and I feel his hand on my shoulder. “Dice, you know I didn’t mean it in a bad way … it’s just—I’m sorry.”
Too little, too late, I want to tell him, but I’m afraid that if I open my mouth I might end up crying. So I fumble with the latch on his front door and shove my feet into my Converse. My grand exit is losing its effect since I can’t storm out, but I don’t care. I just want to leave.
“I’m sorry,” he says again, following me down the road. “You know I’ll just follow you the whole way home.”
I stop then, and turn back to him, hiking my backpack higher onto my shoulder.
I’m about to argue when he pulls me into a bear hug.
It’s awkward and hesitant. He’s towering over me and I lean my forehead onto his chest, looking down at our feet. My thudding heart gradually returns to its normal, steady thump-thump, thump-thump.
“Okay?” he says quietly.
“Hugs don’t make everything better.”
“They make most things better,” he argues. “And sometimes you just need a hug.”
“I’m going home,” I tell him.
“All right.” Then, “I am sorry.”
“I thought sorry didn’t make everything better?” I can’t help but crack a tiny smile at my own joke, and he shakes his head at me, chuckling quietly under his breath. “Okay.”
He nods. “Say hi to Jenna for me tomorrow.”
I smile hesitantly. “Will do. See you, Dwight.”
And with that, I carry on walking home, because even though he’s apologized, I just can’t stay.
Chapter 26
Jenna doesn’t shut up the entire weekend.
It’s nice to have her back. It’s almost like old times, but it’s so different. Not because we’re in Florida now, and she’s a seasoned college student—at least in her eyes. But because she’s interrogating me about things and making me talk, rather than us talking mostly about her. Despite our talking a couple of times a week on the phone or over Skype, she still wants to know absolutely everything about my new life here.
Her boyfriend, Henry, is really nice. He’s a total gentleman—pulling Jenna’s chair out for her at dinner, showing up with some flowers for our mom, putting up with all the questions—Dad is clearly trying to work out if he’s good enough for Jenna. He totally wins Dad over by helping him fix the printer, which has been broken for about three weeks now.
We’re going to some fancy restaurant for dinner, and the doorbell rings when we’re getting ready. I don’t know who it could be at this time, but then I hear Dad shouting, “Dice, it’s for you!” and I sigh, trying to fix my earrings as I go down the stairs. Maybe it’s Tiffany or Summer.
It’s not.
It’s Dwight.
“Oh. Hey.”
“Who is it?” Jenna yells down the stairs.
“Gentleman caller for Madison!” Dad yells back, and winks at me, laughing at his own terrible “joke” as he goes back to the kitchen.
I tug at my black skirt uncomfortably. I’m wearing a thin green blouse with a low neck and three buttons at the top of the neckline. It’s pretty, and not exactly my thing. But Mom and Jenna suggested I wear it, so I gave in and wore it to pacify them.
“What’s up?”
“You left this,” he tells me, holding out the blue hoodie I took to his house yesterday. It’s one of the ones I like to curl up in at home, so I’m glad he brought it back. I didn’t realized I’d left it behind—my mind was too preoccupied yesterday.
“Thanks,” I say, smiling, taking it from him. “But you didn’t have to come all the way over here. You could’ve just given it to me Monday.”