“Seems she doesn’t want to listen to anyone, no matter how nice they try to be or … you know. And I see Calvin pouring out everything he’s got for her every day. So help her. Help her to see the truth of what she’s doing to herself, and help all of us know what we need to do for her.”
Calvin pressed his thumb and index finger into his burning eyes and muttered the only words he could get past his clamped-shut throat. “Yes, God. Please.”
“Amen.”
“Amen.” With his fingers still against his eyes, Calvin breathed in and out, waiting for the tension in his throat to ease up.
“Oh crud,” Flannery muttered.
What? Amen and oh crud? Calvin looked up.
Stacey stood in the workshop doorway, silhouetted against the afternoon sunshine. “Praying for me? Seriously?” She gripped the doorframe as if to hold herself up.
“Of course we’re praying for you,” Flannery said. “We’re worried about you.”
Oh no. No, no. Calvin closed his eyes against the coming train wreck. He grabbed two handfuls of hair and tugged hard. A wail passed through his clenched teeth. “God!”
No train wreck. No crashing, yelling, beating, or scratching. Just silence in the workshop and intense scalp pain. Calvin let go and looked up. Both girls stood where he’d last seen them, and both were staring at him. Stacey’s glare captured him.
“Uh, I should go.” Flannery’s voice sounded far away. “See you Monday, Cal.” She navigated the space between the motorcycle and Michael’s car and mumbled something to Stacey as she left the workshop.
Calvin spread his arms wide. “Yes, we were praying for you. If that’s wrong, I’m sorry. Well, I’m not sorry for praying, but—”
Stacey pointed toward the driveway, where Flannery had gone. “So, you told her?”
The answer stalled in his throat, came out as a pathetic squeak.
“What about Tyler? Did you tell him too?”
He inhaled and forced out the truth. “Yes.”
“Does the whole school know?”
“No! Stacey …” He walked toward her. “You talk to Zoe about stuff. I needed someone to talk to, to try and figure out what to do to help you.”
“I don’t need any help! Except with studying for my history quiz, which is why I came over here. Like we agreed. Or did you forget?”
He stopped next to his motorcycle, his tools, throttle cable, and the can of WD-40 at his feet. Yes, he’d forgotten. Flannery showed up with the cable and everything else went out of his head. Calvin let his chin drop to his chest. “Flannery brought my new throttle cable over. We were out here putting it on the bike.”
“And talking about me.”
No sense in arguing it. Calvin spread his arms again. “Fine. Guilty.” He stepped over the bike parts. “I won’t talk about our problems with anyone else ever again. I’m sorry.”
Stacey looked down, and her hair fell limply forward. She held her backpack at her knees. Her slender hands stuck out of the sleeves of a pretty green and blue top he remembered from last fall because it made her eyes look like jewels. Now the blouse hung on her like it was many sizes too big. And why was she wearing long sleeves in seventy-six degree weather anyway?
“Are we going to be apologizing to each other forever, Calvin?”
He rushed to her and wrapped his arms around her narrow shoulders. “I don’t want to,” he said into her hair. “Please, Stace, tell me what I need to do.”
She dropped her backpack on the floor and grabbed him. Her hands moved against his back and the neck of his T-shirt tightened against his throat as she tugged the fabric. “I just want you to love me,” she said against his shoulder. “Can’t we be like we were before?”
“That’s what I want too. That’s all I want.”
He squeezed her for a long moment, then took her hand and tugged her away from the workshop. They crossed the backyard to the gazebo his father had built for his mother years ago. The white paint on the posts and railings was chipping, but still caught the sunlight and dazzled his eyes. Calvin led Stacey up the steps and into the shade beneath the gazebo’s roof. They were far enough from the house that only the faint breeze rustling the leaves of the oak tree broke the quiet. Azaleas bordering the nearby woods bloomed in shades of pink, tulips still stood proud in the beds around the gazebo, and Mom had already hung fern plants from the hooks in the ceiling. A tiny paradise. Here they could pretend everything was okay. For a little while.
Calvin guided Stacey onto the bench. He sat close to her and started to put his arms around her.
She rested a hand against his chest and eased away. “Calvin, what do you want?”
“Wha? I want to spend a little time with you.”
“No, that’s not what I mean. What do you want with us? Where do you see us going?”
“Do we have to talk about it now?”
Stacey wrapped her arms about her ribs. “All the arguments lately … I don’t want to lose you. I’m scared. I mean, next year, when I go off to study fashion design somewhere, what’s going to happen to us?”
Calvin leaned back against the wooden railing and trained his eyes on the knobby trunk of an oak tree in the middle of the yard. Why was she worried about next year? What about next week? “All I want is to have a normal relationship with a girl who really likes me and who I really like back. That’s all.”
“In other words, I’m just too much drama for you.”
“I didn’t say that. I don’t know what’s going to happen in the future. I don’t even know where I’ll be going to college yet. What I mean is, I want to be happy now. I want you to be healthy and for everything to be okay with us. If we can get that working, then we’ll be able to deal with whatever comes later.”
Stacey lowered her hands, clasped them in her lap. “I don’t know what I’m doing anymore. I thought I knew. I had it all figured out, what I was going to do start to finish. Lose weight, go to college, be successful, get out of this place. I guess I thought it would be you and me, somehow. But everything seems to be falling apart. Calvin, I’m ruining things.” She sniffed and looked away. “I’m making things hard for you, and you haven’t done anything wrong.”
Calvin sucked in his lips. He had no answer for what she’d said.
“I don’t deserve you.”
“Stace, I’m right where I want to be.” He slipped his hands around her waist, and she let him. “I just want to be with you.”
A breath shuddered past her lips. Stacey opened her arms, let him in, and ran her fingers up his back. She hung on, her fingers like hooks over the tops of his shoulders. Stacey’s need wrapped around Calvin, swallowing him, until the rest of the world lost its meaning. Moment by moment as they kissed, Calvin’s thoughts and impulses hurdled further away from innocence.
Giving up his virginity would be worth it if he could take away all her doubts about how she looked and how he felt about her. Wasn’t that what she worried about? She wanted to be beautiful. He could prove it to her.
But not on the bench in the backyard gazebo, completely exposed to little brothers or a spying sister. Maybe they could go somewhere in her car—
What am I thinking?
Calvin straightened, laughed a little, and knocked his unscraped knuckles on the narrow bench. “Not very comfortable.” Stacey smoothed her blouse and hummed agreement. “But, man. That was intense.”
“Sweet,” she said over his assessment. She slipped her hand around his neck as if to pull him back. “With all my breath, I love you. With all my heart, I see you. With all my being, I need you, for all my life.”
Something inside Calvin quivered, fed by both confusion and amazement. He blinked, said, “Wow,” then blinked again. “Wait … did you just make that up, just now?”
Stacey tilted her head as if the question didn’t make sense.
“That’s poetry,” he said. “It’s a gift. You’ve got a gift, Stacey.”
Her smile trembled. “Calvin, this is one
thing I totally love about you. You see me. Most people don’t. That’s why I didn’t just make up words to be saying something romantic. I really do need you.”
The quivering sensation intensified and identified itself as fear. She needed him? Emotional connection, physical longing, sure. He got all that. But need? Her emphasis of the word eroded the passion he’d felt moments before.
She looked down and toyed with her impossibly clean fingernails. “And that’s why it hurts me so much when we argue. You’re the only person I can really talk to—well, there’s Zoe. But you know Zoe. She’s …” Stacey giggled and her whole body seemed to tighten.
“Yeah, I know,” Calvin said just to get past that part of the conversation.
“It hurts me that I can’t get you to understand about my weight. I feel like you’re judging me and suddenly you’re not really seeing me anymore. All you’re seeing is this … thing …”
Shoot the romantic impulses dead. Bang. Calvin sighed. But wasn’t this the conversation he’d wanted to have with her?
“I understand you want to be pretty, and that you had a really hard time in the past. I don’t even care if you want to stay away from junk food so you can stay thin. That’s cool. I’m just worried that you’re going about it the wrong way. I’m scared you’ll get really sick.”
Maybe even die. But he couldn’t say that much.
She sniffed. “I don’t want to get sick either. I feel like my life is out of control. You know?”
Calvin didn’t dare move or speak. Even breathing might disrupt the course of what Stacey was saying.
“Everyone expects me to behave a certain way, do certain things, say ‘yes, sir’ and ‘no, ma’am,’ and be this perfect little girl with no mind of her own. Ever since I was little, that’s the way it was.”
His shoulders relaxed. She wasn’t about to confess her eating disorder after all.
“But you’ve never been like that. You let me be me, and you get excited when I draw pictures for you, and you tell me I’m beautiful. I love you for that. But, the last few weeks …”
His throat tightening again, Calvin swung his head to look away. She slipped her hand over one of his, calling his eyes back to her. “Just love me, Calvin. Like you always have. If I lose your love, I’ll lose everything else too.”
The quivering fear turned into a rotating ball in his gut, like a gyroscopic sphere, rolling and rolling but going nowhere unless he could scream and let it out.
What exactly was she confessing to him?
Although Tyler’s guitar wasn’t plugged into his amplifier, Calvin could discern the soft notes and see his friend’s fingers fly over the fret board. The guy was getting good. His uncle, a former traveling musician, was teaching him. Even though Tyler wasn’t into the country music his uncle played, clearly he was getting a lot out of the mentoring.
Flannery sat on the floor near Tyler’s knee, glancing at him a little too often for her attention not to be obvious. The television in Tyler’s “media room” competed with his plinking guitar, but no one was that interested in the afternoon entertainment news program anyway.
Also sitting on the floor, Calvin stretched his legs out and leaned back on his elbows. He liked this room. Tyler’s mom had decorated it with a movie-time theme to go along with the big-screen TV. Framed posters for action/mystery films hung on the walls. The massive leather couch had its own drink holders. The windows of the room were covered with heavy drapes for optimal viewing. There was even a miniature theater popcorn popper in a corner.
The wide coffee table was covered with textbooks and class notes, but the studying hadn’t gone far.
“June tenth,” Flannery said. “It’s a Sunday. We figure the campground won’t be too busy on weekdays.”
Calvin stared at the television screen and held out his hand until the reporter’s head appeared to be between his thumb and forefinger. He squeezed. “I still have to ask my parents.”
“Better ask,” Tyler said. “My parents won’t let me go if you aren’t going too.”
Flannery grumbled and pulled her knees up to plant her chin on them. “Obviously I want both of you to come, but I don’t see why you can’t sleep on the couch in the RV if Calvin can’t make it. It’s not like you and I are going to be alone. My whole family will be about six feet away from wherever we stand.”
“I know, right?” Tyler made a circular gesture with his hand holding the guitar pick. “But I know they’re going to feel better if Calvin’s there too.”
“So all this is on me?” Calvin said. “If I don’t go, the whole deal is off?”
“Would your parents let you go if I wasn’t going?” Tyler asked.
Flannery threw her hands out and let them flop to the carpet beside her. “This is so stupid! If neither of you go, then I can’t go riding. I’ll have to, like, hang out with my little brother the whole entire time. There won’t even be any reason to go all the way to Badin Lake. My dad can go fishing a thousand other places.”
Tyler set his guitar lengthwise on the sofa and leaned toward the coffee table. “Let’s see what this place looks like, anyway.” He extracted his tablet computer from the books and papers and swiped his finger across the screen. Flannery scooted closer to him until her face nearly pressed against his arm. Calvin stayed where he was until Tyler announced that he’d found the website for Badin Lake.
“Dude, check this out. They got a map showing all the trails.” Tyler turned the computer so Calvin could see it, handing it to him as if it were a book.
Calvin’s eyes chased the red and blue sketched lines of miles of trails weaving through a large section of woods, crisscrossing each other, squiggling all around the terrain. Each trail had a name and a ranking, from easy to extremely difficult, and little symbols marking their purpose. Bicycle and horseback riding, and hiking. The red lines were for motorized vehicles only. This place put Calvin’s little cleared-out trail by his house to shame.
“Oh, yeah. I’m there, dude. This is sick.”
“So you’re gonna ask you parents, right?” Flannery slapped the coffee table in front of him. “Your dad has to give you some vacation time.”
“Yep.” Although as Calvin handed the tablet computer back to Tyler, it wasn’t getting his parent’s permission he was worried about. Stacey was not going to like this.
“Call them. Ask your dad so we can start planning this thing,” Flannery said.
Calvin scrunched his face up. “Impatient much?”
“No. But it’s like the first weekend after school lets out. The place might be booked up if we wait too long.”
Tyler simply pulled his cell phone from his pocket and passed it over to Calvin. Yeah, he knew better than to push against the force that was Flannery Moore when she got some idea stuck in her head.
Calvin took the phone and got to his feet. “I’ll be right back,” he sang.
Tyler’s house was as familiar as his own, and Calvin did not need permission to go anywhere on the property. The Victorian-era stairs creaked beneath his weight, in spite of their careful restoration. He passed through rooms where newer furniture mixed with antiques, and the paint colors and decorations were chosen with authenticity in mind. Tyler’s house always smelled like warm candles.
Calvin’s shoes waited for him next to the front door. He slipped them on without retying the laces, and went outside to the porch. A streetlight cast a gentle glow on the white railings and painted floor boards. He leaned against the carved post by the steps and negotiated the maze of options on Tyler’s smartphone.
The conversation with Mom took all of two minutes. Sure he could go camping with Tyler and Flannery’s family. Of course Dad wouldn’t mind if he waited a few days before going to help in the garage this summer. When and where were just formalities. Flannery’s parents were known and trusted, and it was all good.
The tough stuff would come with his second phone call. Calvin dialed Stacey’s number. He smiled at the sound of her voice, his heart
doing a little happy skip even after so many months of dating, and in spite of his worry over what she’d say about the camping trip.
“Whatcha doing?” she asked. “You’re using Tyler’s phone.”
“Yep. Came over to study and watch television. Um, Flannery is here too. I thought about inviting you, but it’s getting a little late …” Why should he have to apologize for this stuff?
“That’s okay. I’ve been studying too. Got a quiz in French tomorrow.”
“Uh-huh-huh, oui oui, I see, my cherie.”
She giggled. “You’re silly.”
“Yeah. Listen, I called you because we’re, um, I wanted to tell you about …” Yeah, make it seem like he was asking her permission. “Did you, like, have any plans for this summer, right after school lets out?”
“Mmm, no. Not really. I want to go to the beach sometime, but I haven’t made specific plans. Why?”
“Well, we’re trying to set up this camping trip. We’re going to Badin Lake, Uwharrie National Forest. Me, Tyler, and Flannery’s family. They’ve got these awesome trails where we can take the bikes. Now that I’ve got the Yamaha running again … It’s gonna be awesome.”
“Oh. Wh—where’s U-war—that place? Badin Lake?”
“West of here, past Raleigh. I’m not sure how far.”
“Camping?”
“Yeah. For a few days. I don’t think Dave can be away from his shop for too long.”
“With Flannery.”
“With her whole family. They’ve got that RV, but I think Tyler and I will use my tent. We’re just starting to plan the trip.”
This was ridiculous. In the two second pause while Calvin waited for Stacey’s response, he thumped his fist against the porch post. Why was he asking permission? He should just be able to say, “This is where I’m going. See you when I get back.”
“Stace? Look, I really want to go. I just wanted to tell you about it, so you’ll know we’re making plans for it.” Lame.
“So, I’m supposed to find something else to do while you’re gone?”
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