by Tricia Mills
“Talk to Lindsay, your mom, Mrs. Schuler. Someone.” He released my arm and stepped back, giving me room to breathe.
And allowing me to meet the piercing, crackling gaze of Patrice Murray.
Spencer stared at my Halloween costume, a frothy concoction inspired by Kirsten Dunst as Marie Antoinette that had taken me five months to complete.
“Well, what do you think?”
“It’s nice.”
I placed my hands on my hips. “If you were any less enthusiastic, you might actually be snoring.”
He turned and looked at Patrice Murray’s skintight, red she-devil costume.
“I am so not wearing something like that,” I said. “I’d look like a hooker.” So what if mine was a little conservative, even for me.
Spencer met my eyes. “No, you’d look beautiful.”
CHAPTER 11
After school, I made like a coward and hid in the restroom until most of the din of freed students faded. I stayed like that even after the quiet settled, trying to convince myself that Spencer’s death hadn’t irrevocably screwed up both my brain and my emotions.
Following several minutes of self-analysis, I realized I wasn’t going to figure anything out sitting in an empty girls’ restroom. But the time in there won me a solo walk along the path from the school—something I desperately needed.
By the time I approached the town square, however, I realized I couldn’t face the idea of going home. I considered sitting in the park for a while, or possibly doing homework at the tiny Tundra Library. As I entered the square, I glanced in the window of Oregano’s. Lindsay was behind the counter on the phone.
Hoping to avoid all the memories trapped in my room and hoping Linds and I could find a few minutes to patch things up some more, I stepped inside.
When Lindsay looked up and saw me, I thought maybe I’d made a mistake. I saw her expression grow more tired, her shoulders slump. But then she took a breath and gave me the hint of a smile and a small wave.
I exhaled with relief. With the loss of Spencer, I’d never been more aware of what Linds meant to me. I simply could not stand to lose my best girlfriend on the heels of losing the guy I’d given my heart to.
I took a moment to soothe my vibrating nerves. I intended to be there for Lindsay no matter how battered and empty I felt inside. I hoped I had the strength to deal with any lingering hostility she might harbor. I slid into a booth and pulled out my trig.
“You here to eat?” she asked, after finishing two orders.
I looked at her and propped my head on my upturned palm. “Don’t really want to go home. Plus, it smells good in here.” The smell of baking bread had always been a favorite of mine. Add the garlic, and if I closed my eyes, I could pretend I was in faraway Italy, perhaps designing costumes for some historic Roman epic.
The thought jerked me firmly back to the present. I couldn’t help the shame that washed over me. Here I was, thinking about my future, when Spencer would never have his.
Lindsay must have seen my sudden change in mood, because she slid a large Coke and a hot order of cheesy garlic bread sticks onto my table. She sat beside me and leaned her head on my shoulder. “Everyone keeps telling me it’ll get better someday.” She sounded as if she only half believed it.
“I can’t even imagine that day.”
We sat in silence for a couple of minutes, watching people walking around the square.
“What happened in English today?” Lindsay asked, startling me.
I considered lying to her the way I had with Jesse, but that really wasn’t the best way to repair our friendship. I swallowed against the dryness invading my throat. “I fell asleep, started dreaming. I thought I saw Spencer out of the corner of my eye, sitting in his seat. Linds, the strongest, purest joy I’ve ever felt shot through me.”
“Until you turned around and he wasn’t really there.”
I nodded, unable to verbalize the despair I’d then experienced.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” Lindsay said, after a pause. “Can you catch the phone if it rings?”
“Sure.”
When she was gone, I took two more to-go orders and seated a trio of tourists.
When Lindsay returned to the front counter, her normally dark complexion looked pale.
“Are you okay?”
“Just need to eat something,” she said.
“You can’t keep skipping lunch.”
“I know,” she said a little testily, then caught herself. “I just need some time to settle into the new schedule, that’s all.”
She was holding something back again, but I didn’t want to push too hard.
As the evening wore on, the restaurant grew busier and busier.
“I don’t want you to ride home this late,” I said, while Linds finally helped Casey Stone, the restaurant’s owner, close three hours later. “Just stay at my house tonight.”
I thought she might refuse at first, but instead, she nodded. After she called her mom, we headed home.
Once we’d both finished the last of our homework, eaten a late-night snack of orange sherbet, and slipped into bed, I stared at the ceiling and listened to Lindsay’s breathing. I could tell, from its rhythm, that she was still awake.
“Do you have nightmares?” she asked.
I didn’t have to ask the kind she meant. “Every night. I wake up crying every single night.”
A few more seconds ticked by.
“I’m sorry I’ve been so harsh,” she said. “Guess I have more of the sperm donor’s genetics than I’d like to admit.”
I turned toward her. “Why do you say that?”
“I lash out at the people who mean the most to me.”
“It’s hard, Linds. Too hard.” I bit my lip as thoughts of Spencer—his laugh, his smile, his teasing—flooded me.
“Yeah.”
She was quiet for so long that my eyes drifted closed.
“You know, he was jealous when you and I became friends.”
My eyes popped back open. “Really? Why?”
“Because he thought if I had a girl best friend, I wouldn’t be friends with him anymore.” She uttered a half-amused, half-heartbroken laugh. “Stupid boy.”
I smiled, despite the ache in my own chest. “I guess I was stupid, too. Part of me was always jealous of the time you two had before I knew him. Of the closeness I knew the two of you shared without me.”
Linds looked toward me for the first time. “Guess we were the stupid trio then, because when you started having non-friend feelings for him, I was so afraid if you got together, he’d be different with me. I was terrified he wouldn’t be there anymore, and I’d truly be alone.”
“You knew him, Linds. He’d never do that.”
She placed her lower arm across her forehead and looked at the ceiling again. “I wanted to believe that, but . . .”
She’d had a lot of experience with people letting her down. I reached over and squeezed her hand. “I’m here.”
She squeezed back and didn’t let go. We lay in silence until her breathing finally slowed. I continued to stare at the ceiling, hoping that my despair wouldn’t cause me to hurt her again.
His lips lowered, closer, closer. I could taste their combination of sweet and salty, feel their moist warmth, before they even made contact with my own.
Something shook me so hard that his face blurred before me, then disappeared. I whimpered as I reached for him.
“Winter, wake up.”
I jerked, coming awake with a gasp, shocked that the very real images and feelings had only been a dream.
“You were dreaming, thrashing around,” Lindsay said as she looked down at me with a questioning look on her face.
God, what had I said?
“Another nightmare?”
I rubbed my face, trying to wake up more and form a coherent response, a lie. “I guess. I can’t remember.”
“Really? Nothing? Dreams usually linger for a little bit when you wake
up.”
“No, nothing,” I said, hoping she would attribute my testiness to being abruptly awakened. “Maybe you shook it out of me.”
She slipped from the bed and went to the bathroom, leaving me to obsess about the dream now burned into my memory. To wonder again about my sanity. I sat up on the side of the bed and ran my fingers through my tangled hair. That’s how my thoughts felt—tangled.
“You said Jesse’s name in your sleep,” Lindsay said, when she walked out of the bathroom.
“Really?” I scrunched my forehead as if I was trying to remember, then shook my head, all while panic surged through me. She couldn’t find out what I’d really been dreaming. I didn’t even want to remember it, because it was all kinds of wrong.
That kind of dream, one that left me warm and breathless, should be about Spencer. Guilt and shame washed over me, punishing me for my betrayal.
I stood. “Don’t know what to tell you. Just wish I could forget all my dreams like that.”
I walked past her, closing myself in the bathroom. I tried to force myself to forget the dream. To forget how Jesse had held me and how much I’d enjoyed it. But no matter how much I tried, it didn’t work. If anything, it made the images clearer in my mind.
I stayed in the bathroom longer than necessary, hoping Linds would fall back asleep. But the effort was for nothing. She sat in my leather chair when I returned to the bedroom.
“Is something going on?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“With Jesse?”
“No! How could you ask me that? You know I love Spencer.” I choked on his name, sank onto the edge of the bed and hugged my pillow close.
“I know. I’m sorry.” She looked ashamed for asking, making me feel horrible for misleading her. “It’s just that Monica saw you two in the hallway yesterday, talking kind of close.”
“He just saw what happened in English and asked if I was okay.”
“When you thought you saw Spencer?”
I nodded. “I didn’t tell him that, though. I said I’d just fallen asleep in class and woke up suddenly.”
“Seems odd of him to ask you. It’s not like you two were ever close friends.”
“Not really that odd. We live next door to each other, and our parents are good friends. I’m sure his parents have asked him to keep an eye on me. I mean, you saw him the day of the cookout. I don’t think me running into him put us on the fast track to bosom buddy-dom.”
Did she honestly think I could replace Spencer so quickly? Ever?
The dream was just one of those crazy, random collections of images that made no sense once you left REM. That was all.
I would not focus on the fact that my body was still humming as a result of it.
Wonderful smells of freshly baked yeast rolls, succulent turkey, and yummy pumpkin pie wafted through our dining room as everyone around the table—my family, Spencer’s, and Lindsay and her youngest brother—took turns saying what they were thankful for.
“Your turn, Spencer,” my dad said.
“I’m thankful for two best friends,” Spencer said.
Was it my imagination, or did he hold my gaze longer than normal?
CHAPTER 12
Avoiding Jesse ended up being harder than I’d expected. This was one time I wished I went to one of those big high schools—the kind that held as many people as Tundra’s entire population. Much easier to hide from the star of your hot and totally inappropriate dream.
The past couple of days, I’d taken my lunch from home and eaten sitting on the bleachers in the gym. In the classes we shared, I timed my arrivals and departures before his. I firmly pushed memories of the dream, my breakdown in the backyard, him carrying me to my bedroom, and the dart lesson from my mind.
Still, I was jumpy anytime someone approached me from behind. How would I be able to face Jesse without my anxiety betraying me? I didn’t want him getting the wrong idea. Because I didn’t like him that way. I still longed for Spencer. A part of me still held out hope that the past couple of weeks had been a horrible mistake and he’d be found holed up on the mountain somewhere.
When I opened my locker after my last class on Thursday, a folded note fell down from behind the taped photos inside the door.
Since I expected it to be from Lindsay, my breath caught when I recognized Spencer’s handwriting.
“Hey. Want to grab a bite after school? S.”
I gripped the edge of my locker and scanned the faces as they flocked toward the exit, praying I’d see the one I thought I’d lost forever.
“Winter, what’s wrong?”
I hadn’t even noticed Lindsay stepping up next to me. I couldn’t speak, so I handed her the note.
Her face grew darker as she read. “Is this someone’s idea of a joke? I will totally beat the crap out of them.”
“Look at it, Linds. That’s Spencer’s handwriting.”
She examined it more closely before looking at me. Sadness crept into her eyes as she shifted her gaze to the inside of my locker. “It must have gotten stuck behind one of your pictures.”
“Yeah. It fell down when I opened the door.”
“Winter, I mean, it got stuck there . . . before.”
She might as well have punched me in the chest. Feeling my grip on reality waver, I spun back to face my locker. “Yeah. Of course.”
I heard the words she didn’t say. Spencer was gone, and he wasn’t coming back. Why did part of me refuse to believe that?
When I accompanied Lindsay to Oregano’s that afternoon, she didn’t comment on my presence there. She simply accepted that this was how it would be. Casey seemed to accept it, too. At least she didn’t seem to mind when I stepped in for Lindsay from time to time. I guessed this was one of those things that people thought would keep my mind off Spencer’s death. And for a minute or two here and there, it did.
But sometimes, during lulls, the loss hit me as real and sharp as it’d been the night my dad had come home with the news of death written on his face.
“Have you seen them? ” I asked Lindsay as we walked out onto the square Friday evening. When she looked at me, I nodded toward Tundra Books.
“Nothing beyond noticing them go in and out of the store.”
I should have been visiting Spencer’s parents, but I just couldn’t. I wasn’t ready. I doubted it would do them any good to see me break down in front of them.
Another week passed. I wasn’t the person I’d been before Spencer’s death, and probably never would be again, but at least my parents had stopped looking at me like I might shatter. My classmates had stopped staring, and miraculously I’d been able to avoid Jesse. I still caught myself sinking into thoughts of Spencer more often than not, watching out the windows as if he might suddenly walk into view. Rereading the snippets of prose and poetry he’d written.
All the time I was spending with Lindsay made me aware that something else was gnawing at her. I didn’t ask her about it for a few days, hoping she would eventually open up. I suspected it had something to do with her father again, but I hated the idea of bringing him up in conversation. Maybe she still wasn’t ready to be totally open with me like she had been with Spencer.
I waited to broach the topic until Oregano’s dinner traffic quieted one night, and she slid into the booth opposite me with a bowl of tortellini.
“Tell me what’s wrong.”
She didn’t deny it, simply sat staring into her bowl as she stirred the pasta in circles.
“Just dreading the inevitable talk with Coach Stevak. I’m quitting the team.”
“Quitting? Why?”
She raised her eyebrows at me and motioned around the restaurant. “Hello, I have a job.”
“I can fill in when you have practice or games. I’m here anyway.”
“You’re here when I’m here.”
“I’m here because . . . it doesn’t remind me of Spencer.” I took a deep breath and tried to put on a happier face. “Plus, I think I
can manage the starving hordes for a couple of hours.” As if Tundra could have a single horde, let alone multiple.
“Winter—”
I held up my hand. “So what if Casey lets me pour drinks and take orders because she feels sorry for me. I don’t care. Let me do this for you.” I looked down and fiddled with the edge of my notebook. “You love basketball. I don’t want you to give it up.” She deserved to have one thing in her life that fate hadn’t stomped beneath its heavy boot.
She eyeballed me for a moment before smiling. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” I finished my last trig problem before I asked my next question. “How’s your mom?”
“The same. She got a few days’ work cooking on a salvage boat. The latest batch of bruises has nearly cleared up.” She said it so matter-of-factly that my heart ached for her. But in a strange way, I was glad she was so forthright. It was the first time she’d said anything else about her family since the day of our fight, and her words now gave me hope that she was going to continue to confide in me.
When I saw movement on the sidewalk outside, we both looked out the window. Drew Chernov and Brock Robertson strolled by. Drew looked at Lindsay and gave her a smug smile and a two-fingered salute.
“Asshole,” she said, plain enough that he had to have heard. He laughed and kept walking.
“Um, am I missing something?”
“No. You know he’s a jerk.”
“True, but I’m sensing a new level of jerkiness.” Beyond the stupid, juvenile grudge he still held from our elementary school days. He was one of those guys who didn’t take well to being publicly punched by a girl.
She sat back and propped her feet on the other end of my side of the booth.
“The first night I was working here, Drew came in with Brock and some other guys.” She paused. “Caleb was with them. He seems nice, and I actually began to think I might have a chance with him the way he kept watching me.” A dreamy look softened the stress I’d seen on her face a lot lately. “He has a beautiful smile.”
I bit down on my desire to ask her why she hadn’t told me about this development with Caleb sooner. “You like him a lot.”