by Tricia Mills
He leaned in closer. “I swear I’ll stop talking to you.”
I tilted my head and pursed my lips, like I was weighing my options.
He made like he was going to tickle me, causing me to squeak and back up into an alcove next to the snack bar, which hid us from most of the people leaving the rink. My breath caught in my lungs when he lifted his hand to my cheek. This time I wasn’t going to pull away. I needed to know, one way or the other.
The buzzing of my phone startled me, breaking the moment. “Sorry,” I said, giving Jesse a please-forgive-me smile as I pulled the phone out of my pocket. But it wasn’t a call. It was a text. Lindsay, most likely. I’d scold her later for her incredibly bad timing.
But when I looked at the display, it wasn’t from Lindsay. My heart missed a beat, and I lifted my hand to my mouth to stifle a gasp.
“What is it?” Jesse asked.
I stepped around him and looked wildly around the lobby.
“Winter? ”
I hurried back into the rink, but almost everyone was gone. None of the remaining faces were Spencer’s.
Maybe instead of a miracle, I was hallucinating. But when I looked back at the phone, the word “PERSUASION” stared back at me, sent from Spencer’s cell number. An answer to the question I’d asked him the night before he died: what to read, The Tempest or Persuasion?
Jesse took my arm until I looked up at him. “What’s wrong?”
I swallowed against the dryness invading my throat. “Spencer.” I held up the phone. “It’s a text from Spencer.”
His eyebrows knotted, as if I were talking nonsense. Was I?
No, this had to be a sign. Spencer was out there somewhere, trying to reach me. The only other explanations were that this message had floated around out in the satellite ether for two months, or I was totally crazy.
“Winter.” Jesse shook his head as if it were the latter.
But the message had to mean something. Why else would it show up right at the moment when I was about to cast aside Spencer for someone else? Had I allowed Jesse, Lindsay, and my parents to persuade me to do exactly that?
I knew it sounded absolutely nuts, but what if there was the slimmest chance Spencer was alive? As I looked up at Jesse, at his eyes so filled with confusion and hurt, I wasn’t sure how I felt about Spencer’s reappearance.
I turned away as guilt slammed into me full force. How could I even think such a thing? I loved Spencer.
Without looking back at Jesse, I ran toward the doors into the cold, snowflake-laden night.
I looked at every face I passed on the way home, down every street, behind every building. By the time I got home, fear that I really was losing my mind had begun to grip me. Did I need to tell someone—my parents—just in case? As soon as I had the thought, I knew how it would sound coming out of my mouth. My parents would look at me the way Jesse had. As if I needed professional mental help.
But I couldn’t say nothing. I had to know what this message meant. I took a deep breath and ran downstairs.
I found Dad in his office, looking over patient records.
“Hi, honey,” he said, when he looked up to see me standing in the doorway. “What’s up?”
I had to take another deep breath before I could move forward and speak. “I need your help.”
He set down the file he was holding. “Is something wrong?”
“Yes. No.” I shook my head. “I don’t know.” I pulled out my phone, just to make sure the message was still there. “I got a text message tonight . . . from Spencer.”
It took a couple of seconds for the stunned look on his face to dissolve into one of pity. “Sweetie, that’s not possible.”
I extended the phone to him. “He answered a question I asked him the night before the crash. No one else could have done that.”
Dad took the phone and looked at the display. His forehead wrinkled. “You’re sure this came from Spencer’s number? ”
“Yes.” I sank into the chair across his desk from him. “I know it doesn’t make sense, but . . . what if somehow he’s still alive and trying to ask for help?”
Dad placed the phone atop the file he’d been reading. “I know this has been hard, honey. It’s a loss someone your age shouldn’t have to go through, but you have to accept that there’s no way he could have survived.” He said it with his gentle tone he used to deliver bad news to patients. “No way, sweetie.”
He didn’t delve into the details of the crash scene, but I knew he was thinking about finding the mangled, charred remains of the plane. Deep in my heart, I knew he was right. A hollowness opened up inside me.
“But the message?”
Dad looked at me with kind eyes. I could tell he wanted to get his point across without hurting me. “If he were alive and could send you a message, why wouldn’t he text ‘Help,’ or some clue where he was?”
I stood, paced, tried to slow the insane beating of my heart. “But no one’s found Spencer. How can we be sure?” I knew I sounded desperate, verging on insane.
Dad stood slowly and rounded his desk. I backed up, not wanting comfort. I wanted the truth to not be the truth. I wanted Spencer to be alive. I wanted to talk to him again, to be able to tell him how much he really meant to me.
“The details would only hurt you, but trust me. There were no human footprints leading away from the wreckage.”
Before I could say anything, Dad took the steps necessary to wrap me in his arms. I clung to him and didn’t fight it as the hollowness yawned wider.
“How bright, how clear this light, . . . this love that shines out in a shadowed world.”
—Pam Brown, Quote-a-Day calendar
CHAPTER 31
The overwhelming need to get out of the house propelled me toward the front door. Once I was sufficiently bundled up, Mom came into the room. She didn’t attempt to stop me or pull me to her. Instead, she gave me a sad smile.
“Don’t go far, okay? The air has a bite in it tonight, and your dad saw a big bull moose down by the river earlier.”
I nodded, then walked out into the frigid air. I’d lay money on this upcoming winter being even longer, darker, and colder than usual. Seemed fitting.
Keeping the moose in mind, I walked toward the river, but not all the way to it. I took my time, because it felt better to be outside, breathing fresh air. How could fate be so cruel? The text had plummeted me back into the same sorrowful spot I’d been in those days following Spencer’s death. What had I done to deserve being dragged through this misery again, just when I’d begun to see bright patches in my life?
When I reached the Langleys’ little split-log house at the end of the street, I turned back. I didn’t want to venture into the more intense blackness closer to the river. Instead, I retraced my steps at much the same pace, even though my cheeks stung from the cold.
I was nearly at my house when I saw the bulky shape of someone walking in the opposite direction. Too late, I realized it was Jesse. I braced myself and tried to think of something plausible to say about my hasty departure from the rink and for the fact that he might not want to have anything to do with me anymore.
We stopped a few feet from each other. His face showed no expression, and that made my stomach queasy.
“Jesse . . . I’m sorry about earlier.”
“Whatever.”
His single-word response broke my heart even further. It seemed that no matter how broken, the heart could always shatter even more.
“Please let me explain.”
He said nothing, just stood there with his hand wrapped around the handle of his bag.
I swallowed. “You probably think I’ve lost my mind, but I did get a text from Spencer. Only problem was, it was two months old. He had to have sent it the night before the crash, and I guess somehow a satellite has been hanging on to it for some unfathomable reason.” That was the only sane explanation. It wasn’t, after all, a message from the beyond.
Jesse didn’t move or say a
nything, so I filled the uncomfortable silence by telling him about what the text had said and what it meant.
When I finished, Jesse finally took a couple of steps forward. “He’s gone, Winter. You have to accept that.”
“I know.”
He didn’t touch me, but his face held an intensity I’d never seen.
“I haven’t pushed because of what happened to Spencer, but it should be obvious that I like you. I like how comfortable I am with you, how I never feel like I have to live up to some standard. Not to mention, you’re beautiful.” He paused, letting that statement sink in. “If you don’t want to or can’t be with me, tell me. If you do, you have to stop holding on to the past.”
I’d known this already, but I was still stunned to hear the words spoken aloud. It made his feelings real, not just a product of my imagination.
“Think about it,” he said, then passed me on his way to his house.
I stood there, letting his words ring in my ears, until even my thick Alaskan blood forced me inside.
The mountains in the distance were cloaked in jet black tonight, but I stared out my bedroom window in that direction anyway, thinking, until long after I heard Mom and Dad go to bed. When I glanced at Jesse’s house, the pang in my heart made me press my hand to my chest. I’d hurt him—the last thing I’d wanted to do. Not so long ago, I would have said that was impossible.
But he did care. The words he’d spoken earlier proved it. And he was here, alive, wanting to be with me. He was right. I had to let Spencer go. Even though that thought hurt, I also acknowledged the thrill of excitement when I considered giving in to my attraction toward Jesse.
Despite the late hour, I texted Jesse. “R U AWAKE?”
After a few moments, a single “Y” popped onto my phone’s display.
I called him, hoping I didn’t wake his parents.
“Hey,” he said. I wondered if he were lying in bed. That image made my skin warm all over. I might as well have been in Hawaii, not Alaska.
“Hey.”
Silence hung between us. “You still there?” he asked.
I looked out the window, placing my hand on the cold pane. “I’m sorry . . . for everything.”
The sound of rustling, distinctly bed-like rustling, met my ear. “I’m sorry if I was too mean earlier.”
“No. You were right.”
“So?”
I searched the hidden crevices of my brain for an appropriate response. “Do you still want to go to the Snow Ball? If you don’t, I understand. I mean, I’ve—”
“Yes,” he said. I thought I heard a slight laugh, too.
“I was babbling, wasn’t I?”
“A little.”
“Sorry.” I pressed my forehead against the window and felt like banging some sense into myself.
“It’s okay. It’s kind of cute.”
I smiled, stupidly fond of the way he said “cute.”
“You really want to go?” I asked.
“As much as any guy wants to dress up and go to these things.”
I did laugh then. “Wow, I’m overwhelmed by your excitement.”
Even after we said good night, I sat next to the window and watched the inky night sky. Talking to Jesse had given me a sense of relief. Of hope. Like if I could just get past the Snow Ball, I could get past the lingering ties to Spencer.
I hoped I could keep my promise to myself to let go.
“When love beckons to you, follow him, Though his ways are hard and steep.”
—Kahlil Gibran, Quote-a-Day calendar
CHAPTER 32
I stared at the application in front of me and continued to flip the pen in my right hand over and over.
“You look like you’re trying to figure out the meaning of the universe,” Jesse said, next to my ear.
I jumped. I hadn’t even heard him come up behind me. I’d retreated to the school library during my lunch break to fill out the application for the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in Los Angeles. I’d already applied to the University of Alaska in Anchorage, but this . . . this was a step toward my long-held dream. I told myself I didn’t have to fully commit to it unless I got in. I’d tackle that decision when (and if) I needed to.
Jesse slipped into the chair next to me and pointed at the admission form. “You know that won’t complete itself, right?”
“Considering how long I’ve been staring at it, I was beginning to come to that conclusion.”
Jesse grabbed the pen mid-twirl, positioned it in my hand, then guided my hand so the end of the pen pointed to the line next to the word “Name” on the application.
“You know you want this. Don’t let anyone or anything stand in the way of going after it.”
I looked into his eyes: those deep, dark, beautiful eyes. “How did you get to be so smart, Jesse Kerr?”
He gave me a crooked grin, one I’d seen often in the weeks since we’d agreed to go to the Snow Ball together. “I hang out with this smart girl who also happens to be kinda cute.”
I smiled back and enjoyed the giddy feeling that was making my skin tingle. “That so?”
“It is.” He wrapped his hand more fully around mine and squeezed.
He hadn’t made a move to kiss me since the night of the text message from Spencer, but it seemed right. And I didn’t get the feeling that it irritated him anymore. There was no doubt that the desire was still there, but I got the impression maybe he didn’t want to push again. I thought he wanted to be sure I was really over Spencer before we did more than occasionally touch and exchange long glances across our classrooms.
I still thought of Spencer every day. Though it seemed a bit more of the darkness inside me drifted away as the days passed. I could finally focus more on the happy times we’d shared, and not his death.
I turned my hand over and squeezed Jesse’s back. I liked this feeling of looking to the future instead of dwelling in the past, and I hoped it continued to get easier.
A shuffling noise from a table opposite the bookshelf caught my attention. When Patrice came into view, I stiffened for an attack. But, though she must have heard our conversation, she didn’t even look at Jesse and me. Instead, she walked out of the library without a spiteful backward glance.
“Okay, odd,” I said.
“Maybe she didn’t notice us.”
I gave him a “Seriously?” look.
He lifted his hands in surrender. “Okay, so that’s not likely. I don’t know—or care—what she’s thinking.”
In that moment, I felt as if I’d slipped through a crack into Bizarro Tundra again. Jesse and me going to the Snow Ball. Patrice studying alone in the library, then passing up an opportunity to be nasty. Was I dreaming?
Jesse used his forefinger to push several strands of hair behind my ear. “Don’t think about her so hard. You’ll give yourself a brain cramp.” He pointed at the application again. “Focus on this instead.”
I gave him a mock salute. “Yes, sir.”
He rolled his eyes and stood. “See you in class.”
I watched him as he left, appreciative of how he moved with a combination of ease and power. Even after he disappeared, I stared at the empty doorway. Again, Patrice’s reaction puzzled me. When I thought about it, I realized she hadn’t tortured me in weeks. In fact, we actually hadn’t crossed paths that much. Was she avoiding me?
That should be a good thing, right? But I couldn’t shake the feeling that when she’d left the library, she’d left a palpable trail of sadness in her wake.
“What’s past is prologue.”
—William Shakespeare, The Tempest
CHAPTER 33
Mother Nature evidently wanted the world outside to match the decor inside the school’s gym on the night of the Snow Ball. When I lowered my copy of The Tempest, I watched the real-life tempest blowing white and wild outside my bedroom window. Winter had arrived full force, Alaskan style, and well ahead of the calendar’s designated “first day of winter.”
Thankfully, Jesse and I didn’t have far to drive to the school.
I glanced at the clock, then rose from the chair. I walked to my full-length mirror and checked my dress one more time. The blue-and-white Regency-style gown—as well as the elbow-length white gloves and light-blue ribbon around the hair piled on top of my head—made me smile. I could almost hear Spencer’s laughter at my homage to Jane Austen. I didn’t know if Jesse would get the connection, but it didn’t matter. I couldn’t compare the two of them. They were different people who both meant a lot to me at different times in my life. Maybe I was a different person now, in some ways, than I’d been with Spencer.
I heard a knock on the door downstairs. Jesse. Before going down to meet him, however, I indulged in one private moment of fantasy. I closed my eyes, positioned myself as if holding a partner’s hand and shoulder, and danced a few steps around the room, imagining Spencer as my invisible date. We would have had a good time tonight. I swallowed the lump in my throat and told myself to focus on the evening as it was, not as it might have been.
I stopped spinning and faced the mirror again. I looked like a winter princess. Would Jesse prove to be my prince? I took a deep breath and pictured the look on his face as I came down the stairs, a moment straight out of a classic romance.
I had to laugh under my breath when I appeared at the top of the stairs to find no one waiting for me. The sound of dishes told me Mom was in the kitchen. Dad sat in his chair in front of the TV, and Jesse leaned on the back of the couch, both of them absorbed in the Canucks-Stars game.
I took a moment to appreciate the sight of Jesse in his black suit. I let the thought of my grand entrance fade away as I descended the stairs and walked across the living room. As I stepped up next to Jesse, I asked, “Who’s winning?”
“The Can—”
His words died mid-answer, and his eyes widened as he looked at me. I found myself struggling for words, too. If I’d thought Jesse looked nice from the back, I was totally unprepared for the very nice things a dark suit did for him from the front. My heart beat faster than normal, and I felt a little weak. Cliché, but true.