by Alexis Bass
Fifty-eight
Jasper leaves me alone at the top of the hill. He takes the path back to the boys’ dormitory. I’m supposed to meet Theo and Mrs. Mahoney on campus. That’s what we arranged when I gave him back his computer last night and he agreed to do something for me. But I send Theo a text telling him never mind.
I need to be alone. I need to clear my head. I walk to the entrance of Rutherford and start down the paved drive toward the heart of Cashmere.
The frustration I feel is insurmountable. I’m mad that I couldn’t go through with Rosie’s plan—but at the same time, I don’t know why I wanted to; why I thought I could. What drove me to do this and why can’t I see another solution? And I’m alone in this entirely. Rosie doesn’t care about getting my father away from Mrs. Mahoney anymore since Robames is going under. But I still care.
Theo keeps texting me, confused that we’re not meeting when I was so adamant about it last night. So I turn off my phone.
I’m rounding the first corner on the path when a black car pulls up next to me. From the back seat, Theo rolls down the window.
“What are you doing?” he says. He notices I’m crying and frowns. “Get in.” The car stops, but I keep walking.
“I want to be alone.”
“It’s only me,” he says. “Come on, tell me what happened. Get in, Collins.”
“I feel like walking.”
The car creeps up closer and then stops. I move past it. Behind me, I hear the sound of a door opening and closing. The car drives away. I don’t turn around, even though I know Theo’s gotten out. He jogs until he’s next to me.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I say.
“Okay,” he says.
He walks beside me down the winding road, not saying a word. The fog starts to clear and the sky gets patchy with clouds, the glow of the sun peeking through. Soon more cars are traveling along the private driveway connecting Rutherford to downtown Cashmere. Theo reaches out his arm every time a car passes, to make sure the cars see us in the curves of the road. We’re keeping a good pace, and it gets hot after a while. Theo removes his jacket, and I do the same. He offers to hold mine for me, and that pushes me over the edge.
“Stop being so nice to me!”
He puts his hands in the air. “Sorry,” he says.
“I’m mad at you.” I resituate how I’m carrying my jacket, and the annoyance of holding it eggs me on. “I never should’ve given back your computer,” I shout at him. “Now I have nothing to show my dad so he’ll know the truth. Why did I care about getting caught with drugs? Who cares if I get kicked out of Rutherford? I don’t even want to be here anymore now that Jasper hates me.”
A car takes the corner a little tight and Theo and I are smashed together against the brick lining. I have to grab hold of him to steady myself.
“I can promise you, my brother does not hate you,” he says.
“I told him what I was going to meet with your mother about.”
But Theo doesn’t know why I wanted to meet with her either, only that it was part of the deal when I returned his computer.
“Does he know you canceled the meeting?” he says.
“That’s not going to matter to him.” The damage is already done. Like Jasper said, it’s the loss that I was willing to risk.
“What were you going to say to my mother?”
I sigh. Here we are on the side of the road, the morning sun beating down on us, making us sweat even in this cool morning weather. Jasper might not ever forgive me now that he knows the truth. I had the proof to get my dad away from Mrs. Mahoney, and I gave it up in order to stay at Rutherford. What do I possibly have to lose anymore?
“I was going to threaten her—tell her that if she didn’t leave my father alone, I was going to break Jasper’s heart.”
“Are you serious, Collins?” His jaw drops open, and he studies me like he’s waiting for me to tell him I’m kidding. It’s quiet around us, until a car swerves past, the noise of its engine roaring then fading. “I didn’t think you’d involve him. I thought he mattered too much.”
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” I say. I start to cry. He opens his arms and waits, asking if it’s okay for him to hug me. I let myself fall against him.
“What’s wrong with all of us?” he says.
I can’t help it. I start to laugh. Theo smiles at me.
We walk together down the drive and through downtown Cashmere, into the square, the morning sun shining down on us as the clouds give way. When we approach my dad’s hotel, we see him having his morning coffee and reading the paper, alone on the patio. There’s a chill in the air, which must be why there’s no one else out there except him.
I approach him and Theo follows. He smiles when he sees us, but he’s also confused by our appearance. Theo and I are sweaty and warm from the walk, and we’re holding our jackets.
He offers us a seat and asks if we’d like to order anything.
“I thought we weren’t meeting for another hour,” he says to me, checking his watch. “Is everything okay?”
Theo and I exchange a look.
“I want you to stop seeing Mrs. Mahoney,” I say. “She’s using you, she always has been. She’s only involved with you for what you can do for her financially. And she’s not being honest.”
My dad frowns. He glances at Theo, and I think it must alarm him that Theo isn’t jumping to her defense. “Collins—this isn’t appropriate.” He clears his throat. “I know it must be uncomfortable for the two of you, given how close you are to each other, and because of what’s going on between you and Jasper—”
“That’s not it,” I say. “I’m worried about you—”
He shakes his head and folds his paper, slamming it down on the table. “Rosie’s been speaking to you about this?”
“You should listen to her, Dad.”
“Damn it, Collins—” His voice is stern and his face is turning red.
“She’s telling the truth,” Theo says, interrupting him.
“This is none of your business,” he says, evening out his tone.
“She’s been asking lately about some of your other investments—about specific companies, right?” Theo asks.
My dad doesn’t answer, but he clenches his jaw. A subtle tell that Theo’s made him uneasy.
“And she recently suggested you unload stocks from a certain digital media group, like she did?”
My dad still doesn’t move. But he doesn’t protest either. He lets Theo finish.
“Their CEO is about to check himself into a recovery program and cash out the business. We know about this, that’s why she’s cutting her losses. But she’s been investing according to your information, too. Though you must know, that’s not enough. Has she already started talking to you about helping alleviate the funds we’ll lose when the Robames lawsuit kicks in and the company dies?”
“We help each other out, your mother and I.” But he’s looking down, into his coffee cup.
“But you shouldn’t be helping her at all,” Theo says. “It’s not equal, and she doesn’t care about you the way you care about her. You’re not her only arrangement, though I’d guess she hasn’t shared that detail with you.”
My dad shifts in his seat. I know he doesn’t like this, us talking to him about this private part of his life. I don’t know if he’ll have any reason to believe us, the way he didn’t believe Rosie, or if the things Theo’s saying are actually reaching him.
“You kids stay, have breakfast,” he says, standing. “I’ll see you later, when we meet up with your Mimi and Rosie,” he says to me.
He walks across the street to the hotel next to the park with the tall windows and blue awning out front.
“Is that where your mother is staying?” I ask.
“Yes,” Theo says.
“You know, you didn’t have to do that. You didn’t have to throw her under the bus.”
“Yes, I did,” he says.
“Ar
e you nervous about what’s going to happen to your family if my dad’s not around to help?”
“Yes,” he says. Small birds gather under the table next to us, scurrying for crumbs. They scatter as quickly as they arrived, and we watch them fly into the air, disperse in different directions. Theo sighs. “For now, breakfast is on your dad, and I earned it. I’m going to enjoy having pancakes and tea with my friend, and be glad we aren’t threatening to send each other to jail anymore.” He reaches across the table and squeezes my hand.
Fifty-nine
My father misses breakfast with Mimi and Rosie and me, and he’s not there to wish them farewell when they leave to catch their flight. But I go back to the hotel and wait for him on the curb, watching the blue awning, waiting for him to exit.
Finally, a little after noon, he comes out. He looks terrible. Everything from the way he’s standing to the way he keeps checking his watch and running his hands through his hair tells me that it’s over between them. I’m relieved. I wasn’t sure he’d do the right thing. I haven’t believed this about him since the moment I learned he was keeping something from me. This is my fault. I have to start by trusting him with the past.
“Dad.” I pick up my pace as I walk toward him. I hug him when I reach him, and even though it surprises him at first, I feel him squeeze back and bury his face in my shoulder.
I glance up at the tall windows above the awning across the street and see Mrs. Mahoney, Jasper, and Theo. They’re standing at the windows, looking down at us. My father follows my gaze and looks up at them, too. I think they’ll back away from the window at first, now that we’re staring. But they don’t. And we don’t.
Jasper is the first one to turn away.
I wonder what will be said about us. Maybe he’ll get the whole story. Maybe he won’t. Maybe it won’t matter and he’ll only remember what I confessed to him and he’ll question how he could ever even begin to trust me again—if he thinks I was worthy of trust in the first place. And he’ll know the moment he told me the key to his undoing.
Will it be enough that I never used it?
I hold my dad’s arm as we walk to the curb, get in the car service. He stares straight ahead as we drive away. He’s heartbroken, but I know it won’t be forever. I think of Mimi, wanting me to understand where I came from and what I was born into. How showing me photos and recording clips was enough because a love like that is easy to understand. It’s the simplest thing.
“Do we have some time before your flight?” I ask.
“I have an eternity,” he says. “You want to have lunch? I’m not very hungry, but it’s about that time.”
“Yeah,” I say. “And I want us to talk.”
He deserves his own chance to explain it to me. And I deserve to hear it from him. I know that no matter what we say about it, I won’t lose him.
There are some things that are too complicated to understand unless you know the whole of it. The entirety. What came before and what comes after. The broken-down parts, each piece making both the foundation and the destruction. A moment-by-moment recount until the abhorrent conclusion.
I can read my father’s face right now—sad and broken, but hopeful, even if slightly weathered. He’s thinking that what’s been done can never be undone. He’s wondering how he’ll explain it to himself. He’s running through all the possible ways this backfired on him so badly, counting the ways everything’s already been ruined.
He comes to the right conclusion, though.
After we cut over toward the other side of Cashmere, start moving straight on toward the water, he wipes his hand over his face, taking extra care in rubbing his eyes. He rotates his shoulders. He looks out the window at the tall trees sliding past him under the skyful of clouds. He clears his throat. And then he turns to me.
“What do you want to talk about, Collins?” he says.
I lean back, resting my head against the seat, finally relaxed.
Some things are very simple.
Four Months Later
He finds me standing on the shore of Lake Mendota, exactly where I’m supposed to be. I’m on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus, having just finished lunch with Mimi at the Memorial Union.
In the fairy tale version of this story, the boy pines for the girl. He wishes he could’ve said goodbye to her before he left Rutherford so suddenly.
But, Theo told me, those were the last things on Jasper’s mind.
In the fairy tale, when he turns himself in for cheating to win the decathlon, he’s rewarded for his honesty. He’s not stripped of his medal and kicked out of the prestigious boarding school he was attending months before he was supposed to graduate; Dartmouth doesn’t revoke their acceptance.
But when I wave to him, and he comes toward me, he smiles. He doesn’t look quite the way I remember him. He’s missing the heavy drag in his gait, the concern living in his brow, the guilt of the secrets he kept, the way he let all the wrong things dictate his life.
I hope he notices everything I’m missing, too.
In the fairy tale, we probably waited for each other; we probably talked every day. Supported each other through it all. But there are some battles you have to fight alone, and honesty doesn’t always come with the reward you think it will.
“Jasper,” I say, pointing to his name tag.
He rubs his hand over it and smiles to himself. “Surprised to see me?” he says.
I nod. It was strange when I heard him call my name. It was a sound so familiar that at first, I wasn’t startled at all. But then there he was, crossing the grass to reach me, dressed casually in shorts and a T-shirt, looking out of place in my life, but perfectly in place to his surroundings.
“I’m on a campus tour,” he says. “Or—I was.” He doesn’t say, until I saw you. He doesn’t have to. And for that moment we are part of the fairy tale.
“Mimi’s enrolled in summer courses,” I say.
“Amazing,” he says. “So how does she like it? Would she recommend it overall?”
“Wait—are you thinking of going here?”
“To be honest, I’d be lucky to get in. But they’re looking at me for the lacrosse team, and if that comes with a scholarship, then I’ll be here in a heartbeat.”
Next, we talk about mundane things. The beauty of the campus. How it’s not supposed to be as crowded in the summer, but we’ve never seen it in the fall, so we have no comparison.
I admit that I’ve kept up on what he’s been doing because of Theo, and he admits the same thing. But there’s still plenty to catch up on.
We walk as we chat, through the campus, through the downtown streets, around the capital building. We walk as the sun beats down on us and the sky stays clear.
For him, last year was a gift, even though it was full of turmoil; it was a fall from grace. But he’s better off now, happier than before. For me, last year was an experiment, and the results were that you can let people get close to you; you can trust them with the fragile parts of your being.
I wish most that one day Rosie tallies these results herself, that she believes them. That she’ll be brave enough to reap the rewards. Jasper wishes that his parents will learn how to endure the financial loss, that they’ll find jobs they can enjoy, even through the rough parts, even though they’re not used to it and it’s not what they thought they wanted.
“In the fairy tale, we get exactly what we want,” I tell him, letting him in on my thoughts.
“But I wanted all the wrong things,” he says, and we laugh as I say, “So did I.”
“Present company excluded,” he says. He blushes, but his stare doesn’t waver.
“Me too,” I say. And since he’s being so brave, I say, “I’m sorry.”
He nods and says, “Collins, it’s okay,” like he knows it’s what I need to hear.
“You never told me,” I say after a while. “Where’s the best view at Rutherford?”
He smiles. “The roof of the auditorium. Someone from the the
ater department can lend you the keys. Go up around sunset, right before dinner.”
I picture myself at Rutherford, racing up the concrete stairs leading from the loading dock of the auditorium to the roof. Pushing open the metal door at the top. The sun starting to lower, the sky growing dim but still putting on a show. The way the forest becomes ten different colors of green, and the ocean sparkles.
I’ll be standing there, looking at that view. And where will he be?
Right now, with him next to me, it’s like before. He’s the part of the story that makes you want to stay up all night reading. The first full breath after a long sprint. The light at the end of the tunnel. The cozy cabin after a long road home.
Is he someone who comes back even after you let them go? Am I?
These thoughts float away, dissolve, and disappear. I’m excited for everything I don’t know, for whatever happens next.
I smile at Jasper, and he smiles at me.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to my editor, Melissa Frain; Lucille Rettino, Isa Caban, Anthony Parisi, Saraciea Fennell, Elizabeth Vaziri, Lesley Worrell, and everyone at Tor Teen.
To my agent, Suzie Townsend; Joanna Volpe, Pouya Shahbazian, Mia Roman, Veronica Grijalva, Dani Segelbaum, and the entire team at New Leaf Literary.
Thank you to the community of writers near and far, who kept me company with dinner, retreats, and advice while I worked on this book, especially: Virginia Boecker, Kim Liggett, Kara Thomas, Jessica Taylor, Stephanie Garber, Shannon Dittemore, Adrienne Young, Kristin Dwyer, Demetra Brodsky, Joanna Rowland, Tamara Hayes, Jenny Lundquist, Jennieke Cohen, Jeanmarie Anaya, Shelley Batt, and Tanya Spencer.
And to my family and friends: Bob and Jennie, Tom and Sheri, Sarah and Lucas and Zoella and Ira, Rowdy, Stefanie, Brienne, Crystal, Jen, Val, Leslie, Liz, Andrew, and Ryan. Lea, Karisa, Brittany, and Kelsey for brainstorming with me. Lyndsey, my first writing partner, for lending the main character’s first name. And, always, Justin.
also by ALEXIS BASS