by Gina Ciocca
“I wanted to stay close to home too. I’ve always loved it here, so there’s no sense in leaving.” I fiddled with my sleeve. “Apple pie is overrated.”
I couldn’t tell if David grimaced or if the sun was in his eyes. “Speaking of home,” he said. “Why don’t you come back with me one weekend—to Norwood?”
“I don’t know, David.”
“I saw Maddie the last time I was there. She asked about you. Lots of people ask about you. We could all go out to dinner or something.”
“I’m not really interested in being in the same room with—” I clamped my mouth shut before I could say it.
David stepped in my path, making me stop short. “With who?”
Maddie, or any of her college freshman friends who might be home for the weekend.
I looked up at him. Neither of us spoke, but neither of us dropped our gaze.
“Kerrigan!” David and I both turned at the sound of Steve Koenig’s voice. He stood in the distance, waving his baseball glove at us. “We were ready to send out a search party. Get your ass down here!”
David glanced back at me. “Go,” I said. “Run.”
Phew, I thought as he turned and sprinted off. I strolled down the hill in his wake, gripping the straps of my book bag as all the things he’d told me swirled around in my head.
I felt relieved that he had his act together concerning college, unlike my boyfriend. But at least now Ryan could stop acting like a sore loser and concentrate on taking the next step.
“Hey! Look who decided to grace us with her presence,” Candy shouted as I approached the bleachers where she and Violet sat huddled together in their skimpy cheerleading practice shorts. Spring had definitely sprung early, but it was still only March and not warm enough to be bare-assed on a metal bleacher.
“Sorry, I forgot to use my mind-reading abilities to know I’d find you here. What did I miss?”
“We were just saying how cute Crowley’s butt looks in those pants.”
Violet looked Candy up and down. “You were just saying. Like, repeatedly.”
I raised an eyebrow. “For someone who claims not to like him . . .”
Candy rolled her eyes. “I never said I don’t like him. I’m playing hard to get. But let’s be serious, ladies. What could possibly be cuter than that butt in those pants?”
Violet sighed. “My boyfriend, that’s what. I swear, his biceps, like, haunt me.”
I looked over at the diamond and spotted Ryan out in left field, and then David on the pitcher’s mound. He rolled his shoulders back, wound up, and sent a fastball hurtling at Steve Koenig. Steve caught it, then took off his glove and shook his hand, like catching it had hurt. It probably had; David threw a mean fastball.
And he did look pretty frigging amazing while doing it.
I must’ve stayed quiet a beat too long, because I felt Violet’s and Candy’s expectant eyes on me.
“What?” I said defensively.
“Um, insert moony comment about Smurf-Man here?” Candy prompted.
Again, oops. “I didn’t realize it was a contest.”
“If I catch you checking out my boyfriend again, I’ll cut you,” Violet said, only half joking.
“Sheesh, chill,” I mumbled.
Though, from that point on, I made a concerted effort to keep my eyes on my own boyfriend. It wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be. While Ryan looked delicious trotting through the field and stretching his arm to catch fly balls and adjusting his cap over his blond curls, David drove me to distraction. I thought I saw him turn once and wink at me—well, probably at Violet—the way he used to before his best pitches. Like a silent code for Watch this. More often than not, the crowd used to erupt into cheers after one of those pitches.
I wanted to see if he’d do it again, and whether he’d look at Violet or at me. But he didn’t. Every now and then he’d glance back and smile, to which Violet would wave frantically, but that was it. After a while I convinced myself I’d imagined it.
When the girls took off for cheerleading practice, I stood up too, wanting to get home and make a dent in my history assignment. I tried to catch Ryan’s eye to let him know I was leaving. He didn’t see me, so I hopped down from the bleachers and waited a second to try again. That’s when, through the corner of his eye, David spotted me on the sidelines. He rolled his shoulders, prepping for another pitch. As he turned his head to wind up, he looked over at where I stood.
And winked right at me.
Twenty-Four
Connecticut
Summer before Junior Year
No one came up to me for a final hug as I cleaned out my locker on the last day of school. Nor did anyone thrust their yearbook at me and ask me to sign it like their life wouldn’t be complete unless I did. No one even told me to have a nice summer. Or a nice life. All around me, people were acting like they’d never see each other again, when as far as I knew, I was the only one aside from the seniors who was actually leaving for good.
A whooping ruckus startled me into looking down the hall toward one of the exits. Jared Rose literally came flying out of nowhere screaming, “SUMMER, BABY!” as he landed in front of the doors in the most acrobatic fist pump I’d ever seen. Eric followed close behind, carrying Maddie on his shoulders. Then David emerged, with Isabel on his. Both girls were waving their arms and squealing as the guys grunted like celebratory apes.
I tried to ignore the way my heart instantly felt waterlogged and heavy. But then David turned his head, and his eyes locked with mine. For an infinite second, neither of us looked away. Until his gaze dropped to the floor and he ducked out the door with Isabel’s arms around his neck.
I slammed my locker shut, gulping the lump in my throat into submission. Let them act like I didn’t exist. Once I walked out those doors, it would be like I never had.
“Mom?” I said as I brushed my hair in the bathroom mirror. It was one week before our final move—the one where, unlike all our other trips to Rhode Island in the past few weeks, we wouldn’t be coming back to Norwood—and I had an idea.
“Yes?” I heard my mother’s distracted response amidst the sound of bubble wrap being wound around something in her bedroom, followed by the squeal of tape ripping off the roll.
“Can I do something different with my hair when we get to Rhode Island?”
My mother appeared in the bathroom doorway. “Like what?”
“Maybe highlights or something? I don’t know. I want a new look.”
She smiled. “New life, new look?”
“Exactly.”
Mom stood behind me and put her chin on my shoulder. We looked at each other in the mirror and she stroked my hair. “I think you’re old enough,” she said. “I’ll make an appointment for both of us. We can have a mommy-daughter day before your first day of school.”
“It sounds so sophisticated when you put it like that,” I teased.
The sound of the phone ringing sent my mother back to her bedroom, but two seconds later she stood in the bathroom doorway again. “David is on the phone for you,” she said.
My eyebrows pulled together. “He is?”
Things hadn’t been the same between David and me since our tiff in the hall. He and I would exchange a few brief, strained words, and then I’d have to watch him with Isabel, walking and talking and laughing like she hadn’t snatched up my self-confidence and my best friend from right under my nose.
I never did tell him what she’d said to me, how she’d accused me of milking my illness to get his attention. There never seemed to be an opportunity where I wouldn’t look petty or childish, and after the way he’d eaten up her apology for the tissue incident and the way he’d defended her the last time we talked, I wasn’t so sure he’d care anymore, anyway. It made the weight of everyone’s stares and whispers that much heavier, and that much more un
bearable.
By the time the warm weather had rolled around, I couldn’t wait to get out of Norwood for good. Dad had accepted the teaching position in Rhode Island, and even Miranda had started to show semi-excitement about it. I’d been mostly excited all along, with only a tiny bit of trepidation about leaving the place where I grew up and, of course, David. Once he chose Isabel over me, though, the trepidation disappeared and all sorts of possibilities replaced it.
I planned to completely reinvent myself. My brush with death might’ve been a fluke, but that didn’t mean it hadn’t driven home the message that life as you knew it could be snatched away in the space of a heartbeat—and that maybe it was time to start living a little. Moving to Rhode Island was a second chance. To loosen up, do things differently, even if it meant not necessarily doing them right. No one at Clayton High would have to know that I wasn’t the type who made friends easily, that I was actually pretty shy. I could pretend I wasn’t, and they’d be none the wiser. I could pay more attention to my clothes and the way I looked—“try new things,” like Maddie had supposedly wanted—and I wouldn’t be seen as a poser or a sellout.
I’d be me—but better.
Most important, no one at Clayton High would ever judge me for what happened the night of the Winter Swirl dance, because no one there would ever know. My brand-new start was close enough to taste, and I couldn’t wait to make a clean break.
“I think you should take the call,” my mother said, holding the phone out to me.
At the same time I had the most unshakable feeling that making things right with David would be the one and only way to make me wish I weren’t leaving.
I took the phone from her and walked into my bedroom, closing the door behind me. “Hello?”
“Hi,” David said. He hardly ever called me anymore. My palms were sweating a little.
“Hi, yourself. Why didn’t you call my cell?”
“I did. You didn’t answer.”
“Oh.”
“I hate this, Kelse.”
I wanted to respond, but only a small croak came out. Luckily, he kept talking, taking the pressure off me.
“I never see you anymore. We don’t hang out, we hardly talk, and I don’t want you to leave when things are crappy like this.” He paused for a breath. “I miss you.”
My heart cracked open like an egg and I felt my insides flood with warmth.
“You do?” I said quietly.
“A lot.” I heard the smile in his voice. “I want to see you before you leave. Just me and you, one last time.”
“David. You say that like we’re never going to see each other again.”
“For a while there, the way things have been . . . I was afraid we wouldn’t.”
So much for a clean break. But hearing him say he missed me, I couldn’t have cared less.
David came to pick me up the night before we left for good. We’d planned to move at the beginning of summer, so my father would have time to set up his classroom and my mother could start her new paralegal job and my sister and I could get settled in before school started. The days had seemed to drag between the time we bought the house in Rhode Island and the time we could actually live there. But now I couldn’t tell if the butterflies in my stomach were from the day finally arriving, or from nerves over having to say good-bye to David.
My bedroom door opened as I sat on the floor, zipping the last of my clothing into my overnight bag.
David poked his head into the room, smiling. “Ready to—whoa.” His eyes swept over the barrenness of my bedroom, and he stepped inside, letting out an awed whistle. “This is weird.”
“I know. It’s really starting to hit me.”
“No, I mean this is the cleanest I’ve ever seen your room.”
I grabbed Wilma, the one thing I hadn’t packed, and chucked her at his face. He caught her with a laugh and helped me up from the floor, pulling me into a hug.
“I’m teasing, Kelse. You know I’ll miss you.”
I nodded against his chest, afraid I’d cry if we started exchanging mushy-gushies. The sting of how much I’d missed him, how much I was going to miss him, hit me as I reveled in the familiarity of his hug.
Damn him.
“Ready to go?” he asked.
I nodded again. “You still haven’t told me where we’re going.”
“Close by. I know you have a big day ahead of you tomorrow.”
We piled into his car after disengaging Miranda from a leechlike hug around David’s waist and giving a quick assurance to my parents that we weren’t going far. And that I wouldn’t be overexerting myself, even though I hadn’t felt sick or tired in ages, thanks to the megavitamins I’d been taking.
“It is weird, isn’t it?” I said, fingering the Saint Christopher medal clipped to the visor above my head.
“What’s that?”
“That we met in Newport, but neither of us lived there. And then you ended up living down the street from me, and now I’m leaving. For Newport, of all places. For good.”
“Well, it’s not exactly Newport. You’ll be on the outskirts.”
“Close enough. But you know what I mean.”
“Yeah,” he conceded. “It is weird. Who knows? Maybe I’ll end up there one day too.”
“I’d like that.”
“So would my grandfather,” he grumbled. “He’d have a full-time cleanup crew.”
I suddenly realized our surroundings were awfully familiar, and I sat up and looked out the windshield. “We’re going to your house?”
David grinned. “Not exactly.”
“Um, it looks like that’s where we’re going to me.” But I trailed off as he drove past his house, right into the open field that sat alongside it, and then into the woods past that. “All right, I know you don’t want me to go, but let’s discuss options that don’t involve killing me and stashing my body in the woods, m’kay?”
He rolled his eyes, but I barely saw it before something else caught my attention. “Oh my God, David, there’s a fire! Look! Right over there, something’s burning—”
I stopped, perplexed. David threw the car into park right in front of the fire, which I could now see was a carefully constructed campfire.
“I did that,” David said. “I thought we could stay here and chill out for a little while.”
“In your car?”
He smiled as he cut the ignition. “Give me some credit.” He got out of the car and I followed suit, standing by the passenger door as he rummaged around in his trunk. David came forward with arms full of pillows and blankets, and arranged them on the hood of the car, propping the pillows against the windshield. I giggled as he helped me up onto the hood.
“Where are you going?” I asked as he disappeared into his backseat. He emerged holding a package of chocolate, a bag of marshmallows, and a box of graham crackers.
“What good is a fire without s’mores?”
“You thought of everything, didn’t you?”
“Don’t I always?”
With the s’mores fixings sitting on the roof of the car, we settled under the blanket. It felt strange to be under a blanket with a boy, even if it was only David. Or maybe because it was David. We were so close, and I was hyperaware of his body next to mine. It was oddly intimate and completely natural all at once.
“So,” I said quietly. “Does Isabel know you’re here?”
David stared up at the sky, his hands cradling his head. “I don’t see why she would. I haven’t talked to her in a while.”
“You’re not with her anymore? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because you barely looked at me the past couple of times I saw you. Besides, I don’t know if we were ever really ‘together.’ We didn’t have much in common. She didn’t even like baseball.”
“Or me,” I snorted.
“She was jealous of you. There’s a difference.”
“No, David, the girl hated me. I never told you what happened.” And then I proceeded to tell him about what she’d said at my locker after I got sick.
David sat up and looked down at me, a mix of anger and confusion on his face. “I can’t believe you never said anything. I never would have bothered with her again if I’d known.”
“I was afraid I’d sound like a jealous baby.” I twisted the blanket around my hands. “Kind of like I did when I thought she started those rumors about me. Which, by the way, I still think she did. But I’m so sorry for taking it out on you.”
He lay back down, his mouth twisted in a frown. “You know, if you weren’t so stubborn, we could’ve had this conversation a long time ago.”
“I know. But I was also afraid you’d take her side. You bought every crap line that came out of her mouth.” I rolled a piece of fuzz from the blanket between my fingers and sneaked a glance at him out of the corner of my eye. “Why couldn’t you see through her like I could?”
David looked at me. Then he reached over and took my hand. “I’m sorry, Kelse.”
I pulled my hand away and looked down. I’d been angry about Isabel for a while, but I’d never admitted to myself how much it hurt. Confessing had the effect of putting it under a microscope; every pang felt magnified in clear, sharp focus.
We stared at the sky through the silhouettes of the treetops for a moment, listening to the snap of twigs and the chirp of crickets and the babble of the nearby brook. The longer the silence stretched, the sadder I became.
“Will you come visit me?” I said softly.
“Of course. You’re not going that far.” David thumped the hood of his car. “She may not be too pretty, but my old girl’s a trooper. She’ll survive a few trips up your way.”
“And you could always stay with your grandfather.”
“I guess,” David mumbled.
You would have thought I’d suggested using a porcupine as a loofah.
“Or me!” I propped myself up on my elbow. “What am I talking about? You could stay with me!”