I walked down the stairs on the other side of the stage, looking at my feet until they were on the grass, then up into the stands with hope in my chest that he was here. That like a scene out of an eighties teen movie, Porter Creed would be spotted, maybe high up in those empty seats, standing alone, eyes on me—only waiting for me to lock eyes with him.
But the empty seats were just empty, and the only person I immediately recognized was my dad, in a shirt so bright orange he could have used it for traffic safety, and my new baby brother, Mountain Stream Robinson, strapped to his chest in a sling. His hands were over his head as he waved at me before cupping them over his mouth to yell—which must have upset the baby because then he looked like he’d made a mistake, and Derry stood up and was trying to get Mountain out of the carrier contraption while my dad continued to wave at me one-handed.
For God’s sake, what a frickin’ disaster that cluster was. In the hospital, Mountain Stream had been Derry’s bright idea for a baby name, but my dad had beamed at her like it was the most inspired thing he had ever heard.
“He’s going to get his ass kicked.” I thought they should know.
“We’re not going to send him to a school with kids like that,” Derry informed me.
Right. “Oh . . . well.” I said holding the poor thing in my arms, already pretty sure I was going to have to spend years running interference for him with both of his parents and every typical kid that crossed his path. “If normal kids won’t be at his school, it’s probably perfectly fine to give him an asshat name.”
What the hell was he supposed to put on a resume when he was older?
In the attempt to lay some normal foundations for the kid, I called him Robinson, Rob for short—Derry corrected me every time. “Ruth, please. His name is Mountain.” She didn’t seem to understand that I was absolutely going to win this power struggle. With the parents he’d been dealt, someone had to give this kid a fighting chance.
Back on the field, in my folding chair, I waited while Roosevelt High filed through the rest of the graduating class. “Eli Tanner,” the principal announced.
I stood up and clapped for my best friend and when he came down from the stage, he defied all the pregraduation rules we’d been given, stepped out of line, and gave me a hug so big he lifted me off my feet.
“We did it, you big bitch!”
I laughed and kissed his cheek, but Ms. Harris was coming over to break up the disruption of order we had created. I pushed him back to his line so we wouldn’t get yelled at. “See you after!”
After Tom had told me Porter was being moved from Tennyson to God knows where, I had broken down and simply begged Eli, Please, this is me on my text knees—I’m sorry, I suck, I miss you, and I really, really, need you right now.
When he didn’t text me back, I imagined him showing the depths of my desperation to Bella and them both having a good laugh—but five minutes later, my doorbell rang.
When I opened the door and saw him standing there, I burst into tears and fell into his arms.
“You are the most stubborn person I know,” he said.
I nodded. “I know.”
“I don’t ever want to do this again.”
I shook my head. “Me either.”
“Where the hell have you been?”
“Suspended.”
Eli looked like I had slapped him. “You?!”
Upstairs in my room, we lay on my bed and stared at my ceiling, eating cold chicken lo mein and telling each other everything that had happened since we hadn’t been speaking.
“I have no idea where Porter is.”
“Bella Blake is as deep as a rain puddle.”
“My dad is trying to act like a human.”
“Jordan moved to New York.”
“I missed you.”
“Me too.”
So my world sucked, but at least it sucked with Eli back in it.
At my house, after Eli and his parents left for their own post-graduation family celebration, I was left with a cake shaped like a graduation cap, too many hoagie sandwiches, my mom and Derry making awkward small talk, my dad feeding Rob a bottle—and my stupid hope that the doorbell would ring and Porter would show up.
He never did.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Princeton was hard.
Harder than hard.
The end of high school had introduced me to my first Bs, but the beginning of college was a new low—all Cs. This new reality made my inner perfectionist squirm. Made me doubt myself, my abilities, my choice to come here in the first place.
School had always come so easy for me. In high school, I’d been the best of the best—at least until the Porter thing had thrown me off the tracks—but here, I was surrounded by students just as smart.
And smarter.
In the middle of all these brains, I suddenly felt very average.
Just like my dad had at Harvard.
At home one weekend, I shared this with my mother over leftover lasagna.
“So I’m thinking about getting pregnant so I can blame dropping out of college on the kid.”
My mother didn’t look up from her fork that was trying to cut through the huge wedge of noodles, cheese, and meat. “That’s funny. Can I take this to mean that you are dating someone?”
“Now who’s the funny one?” I asked before taking a bite of my garlic bread. I was not dating anyone. I had been out, as a group, with people from my dorm. And there was a regularly scheduled study session with Brian Cardwell, who I highly suspected would like us to be more than friends if I ever gave him even the barest hope that I wouldn’t verbally castrate him should he suddenly gather the nuts to ask me.
And I had no intention of ever giving him hope in that department.
But there were plenty of good-looking, very smart guys at Princeton. And not a single one of them was Porter.
My mother was thoughtfully mopping up the remaining sauce on her plate with her wedge of bread. She was thinking about something she wanted to say before she said it.
“What?” I asked.
She looked up at me, wide-eyed, faking confusion over my question.
“I know you’re going to ask me something. I can tell by the look on your face.”
Her mouth twisted to the side in the way that told me she was almost ready to spit it out.
I sighed and took a sip of my water—really, I already knew what she was going to ask.
“Don’t you think it’s time?” she finally blurted.
“Yes.”
“You don’t even know what I’m talking about yet,” she added.
“Yes, I do. You think it’s time I let go of Porter, get past it, move on, find someone new, open my heart to another, finally use some of those condoms you can’t get rid of upstairs.”
“Ruth!”
I smiled and put down my fork. “Yes, I do think it’s time. I’m just waiting for the rest of me to get on board with my brain.”
Her eyes shifted out the window and she picked up her glass of wine. She sat there, quiet, not drinking, not eating, just staring out the window.
My mother should never, ever play poker.
“What else?” I asked her.
Her gazed shifted to me and her eyebrows raised.
“There’s something else,” I said.
“It’s like sitting with a detective,” she balked. “Why are you studying neuroscience instead of criminal justice?”
“I’ve lived with you a long time. I know all your tells. So what else?”
She took a deep breath and let it out through her nose. “I can’t decide if I should share this with you or not.”
“Well, there’s absolutely no way you’re not telling me now that you’ve said that.”
She nodded. “Yes. I’m familiar with your level of persistence.”
“It’s one of my greatest strengths,” I added.
“And faults,” she countered.
“It’s about Porter,” I guess
ed.
“We got a request for his records yesterday.”
I let this information sink in, not entirely sure what it meant.
“I wasn’t sure if I should tell you. If it would possibly start you all over at square one. Maybe it was better to just let you keep moving on.”
“Wait, someone requested his academic records from the school . . . so you know where he is?”
She hesitated, then nodded.
If I asked her, she would tell me.
Now it was my turn to stare out the window and think about this. It was true: ever since those days I’d driven up to Tennyson, and Porter had refused to come down, I had desperately hoped to see him again. Talk to him again. Make sure he was okay. When they moved him, and I had no idea where he was or how I could find him, my desperate hope had shifted. Every ring of the phone, every knock at the door, every day the stupid mail was delivered—opportunities for Porter to be contacting me.
Because it occurred to me, I didn’t know where Porter was—but he knew exactly how to find me. My house hadn’t moved. And when I did go to Princeton, less than half an hour from my mom’s house, it’s not like I had flown to the other side of the world. Porter knew where I was going to school in the fall.
He could have contacted me anytime—and didn’t.
“No,” I said, even though the word, and what I meant by it, caused me physical pain. I was closing the door on what I really wanted. “I don’t want to know.”
My mother watched me from across the table, then nodded. It was the right decision. Yes. It didn’t matter how much I wanted her to tell me, to jump in Vader right now and race off to wherever he was. The reality was that a relationship takes two, and the other side of our sad equation was a Porter that didn’t want to see me back.
The clarity of that thought was a bullet piercing my heart.
I gave her a weak smile and looked back to my half-finished lasagna. I suddenly couldn’t eat another bite.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
By mid-November it happened. Brian Cardwell asked me if I would go out with him that Saturday. We had just finished reviewing chapter ten of our organic chemistry textbook at our usual table near the back of the campus library. Packing up our things, books, notebooks, stray papers, Brian had taken a deep breath and I swear to God I knew it was coming. Once he managed to fumble out the initial question, forever altering our current arrangement, a deep and uncomfortable silence settled around us while he waited for my answer.
Seconds ticked.
Brian shrugged. “It’s just a house party . . . my friend said . . . if, you know. I mean . . .”
Christ, make it stop. “I’ll go,” I suddenly blurted. Whether it was to make him please shut up or whether some deep unacknowledged part of me actually did want to go, I had no idea. Whatever the reason, it was good enough for Brian. His entire face lit up. “Great!”
I gave him my now-signature weak smile.
“I’ll walk you to your car.”
Ugh. “Thanks.”
By the time we were halfway to the parking lot, I realized I’d made a mistake. It’s not that there was anything wrong with Brian; he was a really nice guy. He was also really, really smart. Even good-looking in a squeaky-clean, ultra-wholesome way. One look at Brian, and you just knew he had a million friends back home in Iowa, a sweet ex-girlfriend, and a fully intact family that went to church every Sunday and ate dinner together every night.
One look at Brian and you knew there were too many facets to my screwed-up personality that his background had simply not equipped him to understand. To date Brian, seriously, would be to never be myself. Being with him was being forever careful to keep the ugliest parts of myself hidden from his view.
Honestly, as messed up as it was to think, he was too good for me.
Plus, I hadn’t gotten as far as I should have with the whole “moving on” thing. Brian’s biggest flaw, as far as I could tell, was that he was not Porter. For the hundredth time, I thought about calling my mother and telling her I had changed my mind—I was wrong, please tell me where he is.
I turned my head to look at Brian. His mouth was moving but I had no idea what the hell he was saying.
It was November. I hadn’t seen or spoken to Porter since April. How much longer? Would I be over him by Christmas break? New Year’s Eve? Next April?
Ever?
Was I ever going to get over Porter?
“Ruth?” Brian asked.
I looked at him. “What? I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you.” We had just pushed through the double glass doors that led out to the parking lot where Vader had been parked all day.
The space between his eyes wrinkled—he knew I wasn’t listening to him. “Before the party,” he repeated. “I thought we could grab something to eat?”
I was about to give him another, sure, then stopped. Why? To make him feel better? To make the situation worse than it was already going to be because I’d said yes to the first question. Still, I didn’t have a good reason to say no. I needed some time to think of a nice excuse. “Let me see, okay?”
It was so passively lame, I hated myself for even uttering the words. I didn’t want to go anywhere with Brian—why not just say so?
Because, despite his major flaws of being practically perfect in every way, I still didn’t want to hurt Brian’s feelings.
Sometime in the last year I must have accidentally become a human being.
“Oh, yeah. Sure,” Brian said, the hurt in his voice glaring.
Thankfully we were almost to my car. “I’m just a few rows over,” I said. “You don’t have to walk me the whole way.”
Brian looked up at the sky. Pink streaks colored the soft blue that was fading with the setting sun. One of the parking lot lights hummed to life. “It’s getting dark,” he said. “I’ll feel better if I know you’re safe.”
It was sweet. Really, it was. “Thanks,” I said again.
When I had first parked earlier in the day, I’d had a hard time finding a space, but now most of the cars had cleared out. Not many people, even at Princeton, chose to hang in the library past five on a Friday. I lifted my eyes toward Vader. “I’m just parked—”
I stopped dead.
Two steps later, Brian stopped too and looked worriedly at my face. “Ruth?”
My eyes—they were making a mistake. It wasn’t what I thought.
Was it?
The blood drained from my limbs.
“Ruth, are you okay?”
My heart worked hard in my chest to keep me upright.
My head felt light. “I might pass out,” I whispered.
Brian lunged for my arm to hold me up just in case.
I couldn’t even feel him there.
My eyes were locked on one thing—the person sitting on the hood of my car.
The heels of his black boots used my bumper as a foot rest so he could lean forward, his elbows rested on his knees, while he locked eyes with me from under his mop of disheveled brown hair.
He didn’t move.
I didn’t breathe.
And Brian stood at my side, holding my forearm up like I was a Victorian lady aiming for the swoon couch. “Ruth?” he asked as his eyes eventually followed mine and noticed what had frozen me in place. “Is that your car?” he asked.
I gasped, “Yes.”
“Should we call the campus police?” he asked.
I shook my head. “It’s okay.”
“You know that guy?”
I nodded. “You should go. I’ll be okay.”
Brian didn’t want to. Maybe he thought I was in danger. Maybe he realized there was probably no hope in hell of me going to a house party with him on Saturday now—but he must have eventually taken a clue and evaporated into the background.
I didn’t even remember him leaving, but by the time I was able to take a step, he was gone.
Porter watched me walk the entire distance between us. His hands hanging between his knees. When I was only
a few feet away, his eyes moved to the ground. “I thought I’d stop by,” he said. “See how college was treating you.”
When he looked back up, his questioning eyes on mine, my heart stopped as a million emotions fought for space inside me. I wanted to kiss him, slap him, throw myself into his arms, pull his hair, and shake him hard.
I wanted to hold his face. Punch his chest. Was this real?
I had no words to start with, nothing that made sense would come.
So instead of the logic of words, my body defaulted to tears. It started with my chest, hot and tight, then all the relief and confusion of seeing him here clawed its way up my throat, warped the shape of my mouth until the whole hot mess of emotion found its way to my eyes and finally spilled down my face.
Porter stood up. “Ruth . . .” Watching me, seeing me fall apart, he was trying to figure out what to do. He stood with his arms limp at his side while I cried.
I swallowed hard and found a single point of mental clarity to throw at him. “Where the hell have you been?”
He searched my face then fell back against Vader’s hood. For the first time, I noticed the piece of paper he had cupped in his hand, and I watched as he unfolded the tight square one section at time. When he finished, he flattened the worn sheet of notebook paper against his thigh then handed it to me like it was an answer.
I recognized my handwriting immediately.
Porter,
I know your life sucks right now.
One day, you will make it better.
I believe in you, Porter Creed.
And I love you,
Ruth
I held the letter and shook my head at him.
“I couldn’t . . . I needed to make my life better. At least start to. Ruth, I needed to do that first. For me. For Paige.” He stood up and moved toward me. He reached out his hand, unsure, waiting for me to let him know it was okay. “For you.”
I stared at his waiting hand, then reached out, touched the tips of his fingers.
His shoulders sagged. He curled my fingers into his and pulled gently until the space between us disappeared. His other hand reached up and cupped my face and his thumb brushed the wetness from my cheek.
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