A Straw Man (The Clay Lion Series Book 3)

by Amalie Jahn

  “I love you too,” I told him, placing my head on his chest. “But not because you’re tough. I love you because you’re not nearly as tough as you look.”

  C HAPTER NINETEEN

  SUMMER BREAK - SECOND to THIRD YEAR

  What remained of summer seemed to drag on endlessly. To fill the hours outside my babysitting responsibilities, my mom encouraged me to focus on doing things that would bring me joy. My first inclination was to go to a concert with some friends from high school, but I was disappointed to discover we no longer shared the same interests, ambitions, or taste in music. I came away feeling as though we were no longer companions but just a random group of people I used to know.

  Disillusioned but undeterred, I racked my brain for other possible activities, eventually remembering a conversation with Senator Turner about an event she was hosting at the country club. After initially declining her invitation, I ended up attending the fundraiser I privately dubbed ‘November’s Coming Campaign Gala (No Special Interest Groups Allowed).’ Although it was exactly as boring as I expected it to be, I impressed myself with my ability to make small talk and even managed to establish a few new connections.

  At his request, and because it had always been my favorite summer tradition, I snuck in a morning of kayaking and a picnic lunch with Charlie on one of his rare days off. When we finished eating, Brooke arrived with Vicki, and after slathering her with copious amounts of baby zinc oxide, we dipped her toes into the water, much to her delight. She didn’t even seem to mind our ineptitude when her diaper absorbed half the lake and ended up weighing more than she did.

  When I could think of nothing left to do, I indulged my mom in a shopping expedition for pots and pans and a coffee maker to outfit the apartment I’d be sharing with Lesley and Kara when classes resumed. She’d pestered me for weeks about needing to prepare, but like everything else I was trying to avoid, I let it go until the last minute. As we perused nonstick and stainless steel, she commented that having my own place signaled the final leg of my transition into adulthood. I didn’t know why but the thought of it made me sad. Perhaps it was because my future seemed so vague and undetermined.

  While I crammed a lot of diversions into the final weeks of my vacation, I didn’t do the one thing I was actually trying to do.

  Despite my best efforts, I wasn’t able to forget about Nate.

  As much as I tried not to, I thought about him constantly. The more I tried to think about other things, the more he squeezed his way into my psyche. Every song I heard reminded me of him; if not the words themselves than the memory of us hearing the song together. I couldn’t eat without being reminded of our time together - when we stopped at an all-night diner for waffles after a concert at 3am, or how much I loved his famous grilled Swiss cheese and tomato sandwiches, or the time he snarfed soda so badly through his nose that he couldn’t swallow properly for a week.

  The hardest part was watching Brooke and Charlie together, the way his hand would brush against her hip as they passed by one another – a touch that spoke volumes without a word being spoken. I envied their secret language of facial expressions and subtle mannerisms. It reminded me of how it might have been for Nate and me, if only…

  I began packing for school no less than ten times but every attempt left me bleary eyed, surrounded by memories of all the days we’d spent together. I realized, as I packed away a photo of the two of us sharing a sundae, that I’d only spent five days at school without him - the five days before we met. Now I’d be facing all of them without him. No being walked to class. No surprise visits in the middle of the afternoon. No security of someone always having my back.

  It was of little comfort knowing that my decision to break up with him had no bearing on his absence from school. His grades were so low he’d been academically dismissed from not only the football team but from classes as well, so regardless of how we ended, he wasn’t coming back. Not this year. Probably not ever.

  With less than 12 hours before it was time to leave, I buckled down and forced myself to focus on doing what needed to be done. I knew I would be fine. I had wonderful friends and a solid career path. And as everyone was quick to remind me, there were plenty of other fish in the sea.

  As I packed up the last of my shorts and t-shirts, I heard a gentle knock on my bedroom door.

  “Come in,” I called absently.

  My mom opened the door, only a crack at first, and peered into my room, which was still purple and full of entirely too many stuffed animals.

  “Need any help?” she asked.

  I contemplated whether I needed to take all three of my jeans shorts and returned my oldest pair to my closet.

  “No,” I replied, “I don’t need any help, but I wouldn’t mind the company.”

  Mom didn’t throw the door open but instead slid carefully into my room as if she was entering a sacred space. She lingered just beyond the doorway and rocked nervously on her heels while I continued to make important wardrobe decisions.

  “Are you excited? About school starting, I mean?” she asked as she skimmed her finger across the accumulated dust on my dresser.

  “I guess,” I replied without giving her question much thought.

  She took another step into the room and began rearranging knickknacks – a picture frame here, a flower vase there.

  “Are you looking forward to any of your new classes?”

  I tried to remember what I was taking. “Honestly, Mom, I don’t even know what I signed up for any more. It feels like a lifetime since enrollment so I guess it’ll be a surprise when I get there.” I folded my favorite ‘Save the Tree Frogs’ shirt and laid it in my bag.

  “Oh,” she said, clearly upset that she hadn’t hit upon a topic I was willing to discuss. “Do you have any big plans with Lesley and the others?”

  “Not that I know of. I haven’t really thought about it.” I closed my underwear drawer and watched her, still milling about the periphery of my room. Although she pretended to peruse my bookshelf, I knew she had no interest in my choice of literature, and the reason for her visit was suddenly clear.

  She was worried about me.

  “Are you here because of Nate?” I asked.

  She returned a book to the shelf and spun to face me, a small smile playing on her lips.

  “Is it that obvious?”

  I hoisted my bag off the bed and chucked it on the floor to make room for us both to sit down. I motioned for her to join me.

  “We broke up, Mom. A few weeks ago.”

  I watched her face carefully for signs of relief or perhaps even joy. Instead, she leaned in to gather me into her arms.

  “I’m so sorry, Melody,” she said. “I know how much you cared for him.”

  Until the moment she touched me I hadn’t realized how desperately in need of human contact I actually was. I yielded to her, folding myself into her embrace, and before I knew they were coming, tears began streaming down my face. She smoothed my hair, as she’d done when I was a child, and whispered words of consolation.

  “It’s going to be okay,” she said.

  “I know I’m going to be okay, but Mom, I feel like I abandoned him. It’s been awful. I keep going back and forth between being relieved that it’s over and being miserable because I’ve let him down. He was counting on me.”

  She lifted my chin to brush a tear off my cheek. “What about you counting on him? The street goes both ways you know.”

  “I know. And that’s why I ended it. But I can’t help being sad about what might have been.”

  “It’s a loss that needs to be mourned,” she said wisely.

  I wiped my eyes with the bottom of my t-shirt. “It feels obnoxious to cry when I was the one who ended things.”

  “No, honey, you didn’t end things. Things ended when Nate made a choice to take the easy way out.”

  The last rays of evening sun cast long shadows across my floor and caused dust to sparkle in the air. When I was a child I’d believ
ed the dust was magic. Now I knew that dust was just dust.

  Like pain was just pain.

  “That’s just the thing. I don’t think he chose to feel the way he felt or react the way he did. It was never a conscious decision. In his own head he feels obligated to ruin his life, and I’m convinced that even though it doesn’t make sense to us, it makes perfect sense to him. I just wish there was a way that I could make it better. If only Sam had never gotten benched.”

  “What’s done is done,” she said.

  “What’s done is done,” I repeated.

  She kissed me gently on the head and left me to finish my packing. As I gathered my makeup and toiletries from the bathroom, I kept thinking about how unfair it all was; Sam’s hurt wrist, Nate’s poor performance with Sam and stellar performance with Barnes, and the coach’s decision to sit Sam out. If only Sam hadn’t blamed Nate outright, perhaps Nate wouldn’t have felt so responsible for his death.

  It wasn’t the first time the thought had crossed my mind, but it was the first time I allowed myself to speculate about how I might be able to change Nate’s fate. Perhaps what was done wasn’t actually done after all.

  ********

  On the night of my 18th birthday, Brooke and Charlie gave me a special gift - a watch with the face of a lion on it. While I thought the timepiece was beautiful, its significance was initially lost on me, and it wasn’t until later in the evening, as I headed out the door to meet my friends for dinner, that Charlie approached me with his heartfelt request.

  “I wanted to talk to you about the watch…”

  “It’s really nice, Charlie. I love it,” I told him, glancing at my wrist to confirm not only that I was wearing it but also that I was late.

  “Brooke picked it out. The lion has special meaning for her.”

  “I’ll be sure to say something to her,” I replied as I shrugged my jacket over my shoulders.

  In one swift motion he glided across the foyer and positioned himself in front of the door. He obviously didn’t want me to leave.

  “What is it?” I asked, defeated.

  “It will only take two minutes, but I promised her I’d say something to you today and I can’t lie to her when she asks. Cuz you know her, she’s gonna ask.”

  I sat on the bottom step of the foyer staircase, resigned to the fact that I would be the last to arrive to my own birthday dinner. Everyone knew, once my brother had you in his crosshairs, avoiding him was not an option. He sat beside me, mollified and began his monologue.

  “You know how she and I feel about time travel, with all the problems we both had. I don’t think we ever told you, but during her second trip the changes she made led to Mrs. Cooper’s death as well as her parents’ divorce. Not to mention that she broke up with me. She really ruined things trying to save Branson. And of course, we all know how I would have ended up if Victoria hadn’t used her own trip to keep me out of jail. So what I’m saying is this, now that you’re old enough to take your trip, remember how dangerous it can be. I can’t forbid you from using it and I certainly can’t prevent it, but I can keep reminding you that it’s not worth risking everything you have for a chance to go back. The watch is that reminder. When you look at it, remember time only goes forward. The present and the future are all you have. No good can come from venturing to the past.” He hesitated briefly and I could tell he was going over his speech in his head to be sure he hadn’t left out any important details.

  He was nothing if not thorough.

  “Oh yeah, and the lion…”

  I glanced down at its golden mane.

  “What about the lion?”

  “It’s from Brooke. Apparently, on her trips, she took a little clay lion she made for Branson when they were kids. It was kind of a talisman or good luck charm or something, but anyway, she sees the lion as a source of strength and bravery. And that was her gift to you. Be brave in your decisions. Let the lion be a source of strength for you like it was for her.”

  I continued gazing at the watch, focusing solely on the time. If I hit every traffic light green I would only be ten minutes late.

  “Is that all you needed to tell me?” I asked.

  He ran his fingers through his hair, tousling it beyond its already disheveled state.

  “Yeah. I guess that’s it. Sorry to keep you from your friends.”

  I popped up off the step and hurried to the door.

  “No big deal,” I called over my shoulder as I turned the handle, “and thanks for the watch. I like it a lot. Tell Brooke thanks too.”

  ********

  After our initial conversation, Charlie only mentioned the watch and its symbolism a handful of times, and I, for my part, always blew him off. Brooke and Charlie were notoriously overprotective, and when it came to their dislike of time travel, they could be complete zealots. They both used their trips and they both made mistakes, but Brooke was purposefully trying to change the past and since Charlie had no idea his parents’ deaths were linked – it was no wonder things didn’t work out for them.

  I wouldn’t make the same mistakes.

  I fished through my jewelry box and quickly located the watch in the drawer with my other bracelets and trinkets. The lion’s golden face shone up at me and I ran my finger across the beveled crystal.

  “Hello, Lion,” I whispered.

  Brooke intended for the lion to serve as a reminder of strength and bravery, but I felt much more like a coward as I looked into its eyes. Since the moment I left him in the police station parking lot, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d abandoned Nate. I thought, quite naively, I could walk away from the relationship without looking back, but as I cradled the watch in my hands there was no way I could go on pretending I was still the person I was before.

  With Nate I discovered that love was messy, like the piles of clay I played with as a child. We showed up to the relationship as individually colored globs, and in the beginning it was still possible to make out our distinct colors, where one shade stopped and the other began. He was orange. I was green. But over time, as our relationship grew, the clay got smooshed and shaped, causing our colors to swirl together so thoroughly that it was impossible to pull them back apart. It took breaking up with him to realize I couldn’t cut that new glob in half and shove the two pieces back into their original containers. There was no more green. There was no more orange.

  We were just two messy globs of brown.

  Nate’s love changed me, for whatever it was worth, and I knew for a fact I had changed him too. I kept thinking about the year I spent wandering in the darkness after my dad died, and I considered how fortunate I was that Charlie saw fit to pull me out of the cave I was in. If he had never returned to save me, would I have graduated? Lost my friends? Been out on the street?

  I shuddered to think.

  Now I worried, if I continued to absolve myself from any responsibility, would there be anyone left to save Nate from his dark place? He was out there, alone and afraid, a messy glob of brown just like me, and there was no way I could live with myself if I didn’t make one last attempt to bring the old Nate back.

  “I’m gonna need some of that courage,” I whispered to the lion, “cuz it looks to me like there’s only one option left.”

  C HAPTER TWENTY

  FALL SEMESTER - THIRD YEAR

  Lesley jabbed me on the back of my arm. “Mel, you’re totally distracted. What the heck?”

  “Huh?” I mumbled, looking up from the notebook on my lap.

  “Groceries! I was asking about groceries for the tenth time. I’m going to the store after class. Do you need anything?”

  I quickly mulled over a mental inventory of my stash in the fridge. “Nah. I think I’m good. Thanks for asking though.”

  She threw her backpack over her shoulders, stepping out of the galley kitchen into the den where I was sprawled out on the sofa. “What in the world has you so preoccupied these days? And don’t tell me school because we’ve barely even started.”
>
  “It’s nothing important,” I said, closing the notebook with a loud slap.

  “You’re a bad liar, Melody Johnson, but it’s fine. Have your secrets.” She winked at me. “I’ll be back before dinner,” she called over her shoulder as the door closed behind her.

  I was relieved to finally have the apartment to myself because she was right - I wasn’t working on homework, although I’d already finished the handful of projects my professors assigned the week before. Instead, I was making a detailed list of the events leading up to Sam and Nate’s fight. I’d already spoken with most of their friends, including each of the players who witnessed their confrontation in the locker room on the day of the accident. There was only one other person I still needed to hunt down.

  As soon as Lesley’s car was safely out of the parking lot, I grabbed my bike and headed across Grounds. It was going to take a little luck with the traffic lights and some fast pedaling if I was going to make it to the gym before football practice was over so I could ambush the coach before he left. It was time to grill him for information.

  “Who did you say you were again?” he asked as he hurried across the pavement.

  I raced behind him, towing my bike along beside me. “I’m Melody Johnson, Nate Johansen’s girlfriend. Or ex-girlfriend I guess.”

  He turned sharply on his heel, stopping in the middle of the road. “I banked on that kid, you know that?” He was angry now, irritated to irate in just under a second. “When I recruited him I expected he would play all four years.”

  I wanted to tell him that he didn’t hold the monopoly on people Nate let down, but I thought better of it as I psyched myself up to deliver the speech I’d prepared.

  “I know he disappointed a lot of people with his behavior over the past year, but I’m trying now to get to the root of his problems. I just wondered if you wouldn’t mind telling me exactly what happened during practice in the days before Sam’s death.”

  “Stupid kid,” he mumbled under his breath as he fumbled for his keys and continued walking toward his truck. I didn’t know to which kid he was referring – Sam or Nate or me.