Light as a Feather

by Zoe Aarsen

  I could see what she was trying to do. The uncomfortable truth about Trey was that I doubted he’d have any romantic interest in me even if our wildly different friends wouldn’t have made it socially awkward for us to be together. After all, he knew where to find me. The thought made me strangely sad because I’d crushed on him pretty hard in elementary school when he’d acted like an older brother toward me. I had no idea what kind of girls he was into, but I was pretty sure I wasn’t cool enough for his liking—which didn’t even matter, because I had Henry Richmond on my mind.

  “He’s a total freak, Mom. Girls avoid him.”

  My mother started the car’s engine and then told me coolly, “Freak? I don’t like this new habit of yours of looking down on everyone else at school. Ever since you started spending time with Olivia and Candace again, I don’t think you’re aware of how critical you’re being. You weren’t like this when you hung out with Cheryl.”

  Ugh, of course my mom wouldn’t understand that I couldn’t both be popular and retain strong ties with my unpopular friends. And she’d never in a jillion years understand why I, a normal, functioning teenager, could never be in a romantic relationship at Willow High School with Trey Emory, even though, as Candace had rudely pointed out the day before, he was really hot if you could overlook his strangeness. I remembered him being a serious smart-ass when he was a kid too. A long time ago, he’d put a lot of effort into making me laugh.

  While we were at Bobby’s eating, I felt a buzz emerge from my purse and checked my phone to find a text from a number I didn’t recognize. It included a photo attachment. The photo was of an X-ray, and accompanying it was a message that said, Cleared for dancing. Henry.

  Saturday nights in September served as my reminder that I hadn’t completely escaped my previous life. Everyone at school knew I didn’t have a boyfriend, but I was still relieved not to have been observed by any witnesses driving home from the diner with my mom as the sun was setting. While Friday nights so far that school year had been girls’ nights—sleepovers, trips to the movie theater—Saturday nights seemed to be reserved for boyfriends. Candace and Isaac were surely bumping around town in Isaac’s truck, probably up to no good. Probably even Matt and Mischa had plans to go to the movies or split a pizza at Federico’s.

  Olivia was the kind of girl who enjoyed constant social stimulation, so even though she was out on a romantic birthday date with Pete, she texted me, Candace, Mischa, and Violet throughout the night with updates, including a picture of the gold necklace that Pete had given her as a gift with a pendant in the shape of an O for “Olivia.”

  A year ago it would have been ridiculous for me to have thought there was a chance I’d have a boyfriend before the end of high school, but now I had started wondering if I might have my own Saturday-night dates in the near future. Maybe by July, when my seventeenth birthday rolled around, there would be some cute guy in the picture with a sparkle in his eye, like Henry, who’d surprise me with a romantic gift. After all, a year ago it would have been crazy to think I’d ever be invited to a party at Olivia’s house. I lay on my stomach across my bed reading a magazine, when my attention was caught by a flash of light outside my window. I got up and raised my blinds for a better look, and once my eyes adjusted to the dark, I saw Trey sneaking around in his own backyard with a flashlight. His bedroom light was still on, and I could see directly into his room across from my own bedroom window. Lights were still on in the front of the house, where his parents and younger brother were probably watching late-night Saturday comedy shows. Trey crouched down, and appeared to be digging for something beneath the bushes that lined the fence separating the Emorys’ yard from our own.

  Unable to suppress the urge to talk to him—even though I couldn’t remember the last time we’d had an actual conversation—I raised my window and whispered, “What are you doing?”

  I heard rustling, and then suddenly Trey was standing upright again, his flashlight dancing across the aluminum siding of my house until it came to rest on my face. Instinctively, I shielded my eyes.

  “One of the stray cats my mom feeds had kittens back here,” he whispered back loudly. I could barely hear him over the crickets chirping.

  “Hang on,” I called out quietly, suddenly really wanting to be a part of whatever he was doing. I pulled a cardigan off the back of the chair at my desk and slipped out the back door of our house through the kitchen. Outside, I opened the gate to our own backyard and then opened the gate to the Emorys’, joining Trey in the chilly dark next door. He was crouching again, leaning over with his flashlight on but resting in the grass, pointed away from whatever he was inspecting. His black faded T-shirt rode up his back, revealing his bumpy spine and just the tiniest bit of the top of his butt. I caught myself blushing for even absentmindedly checking his body out like that, grateful that at least it was dark enough that he wouldn’t notice my shame.

  “There are six of them, I think,” he whispered at me without turning to face me. I squatted down next to him to try to get a look. Sure enough, a small calico cat was stretched out beneath the Emorys’ white azalea bushes, which were still oddly in bloom since warm weather had stretched so far past the end of August. “Look at the little gray one.”

  There were six furry blobs, possibly more, snuggled up against the mother cat, nursing. The calico cat blinked at us with bored gold eyes.

  “How did you know they were back here?” I asked quietly, not wanting to alarm the mother cat.

  “I heard meowing from my room,” he replied. “I thought about bringing some cat food out here, but it might freak out the mother cat if I get too close.”

  We watched in silence for a few minutes, mostly relying on the light of the nearly full moon. I thought about how odd it was that we were inches from each other, our elbows ever-so-slightly touching, actually interacting after years of carrying on our acquaintance in silence. The strangest thing was that it felt like years hadn’t passed since the last time we’d hung out like this. Like it was the most natural thing in the world for us to both be peeking under his mother’s flowering bushes at midnight.

  “You should leave a can of food back here for her,” I urged him finally. “Just don’t put it too close under the bushes.”

  “Good thinking,” he agreed, and slowly stood up. He walked across his backyard and silently entered his own house through the back door. When he returned, he had already opened a small can of fancy cat food, and rejoined me near the bushes to set it down a few feet away from the mother cat. The smell of salty salmon caught the mother cat’s attention, but she made no attempt to abandon her tiny kittens to investigate its source.

  “I’m afraid to leave them out here alone for the night,” he admitted finally with a small laugh.

  “Cats have kittens in suburbia all the time and they’re just fine,” I assured him, not really believing my own words. Wisconsin was filled with plenty of nocturnal wildlife that might pose a threat to a mother cat with six kittens to defend. Before our dog, Moxie, got old, she was constantly killing invaders in our yard and dropping their carcasses on our back stoop: a dead possum, a dead raccoon, a dead squirrel, or a dead chipmunk.

  “I might sleep out here,” Trey announced suddenly. “Just to scare critters away, you know? I tried to move the mother cat earlier, and she flipped out. I don’t think I can get her and the kittens into my house.”

  There were scratch marks on both of his hands, presumably from his attempt to pick up the mother cat. I was amused, but touched, that he went back into the house again and returned with a sleeping bag and a pillow.

  “Aren’t your parents going to think it’s weird that you’re sleeping outside?” I asked. I was starting to get really cold, and I had seen my mom shut off the light in our living room, most likely signifying that she was turning in for the night.

  “My parents already think I’m really weird,” he said matter-of-factly with a shrug.

  We stood eye to eye, and I was bursting with thing
s to say. Trey Emory cared enough about a feral cat and her newborn kittens to sleep outside in the yard. It was totally weird of him. But also totally endearing. What else did I not know about the boy who slept fewer than fifty feet from my own bedroom every night? We stared at each other in silence for a long moment, during which I wondered if he was working up the nerve to say something to me just like I was trying to find the right way to tell him that I wished we hadn’t grown so far apart over the last few years.

  Then, without warning, he reached toward me and brushed my hair back from my face, tucking a lock behind my ear. “Good night, I guess,” he mumbled.

  My face must have betrayed my shock at feeling his fingers graze my cheek, because he smiled bashfully and apologized. “Sorry. That was weird, wasn’t it?”

  “No, not weird,” I assured him, although the unnaturally high pitch of my voice exposed my lie. My thoughts ran wild; had he meant that to express that he liked me? Or as more of a big brotherly way of saying good-bye? A formality? I assumed the latter, but I couldn’t tear my eyes away from his.

  “Nah, it was weird. I should have totally gone with a handshake.” That was the sarcastic side of Trey that I remembered from when I was a little girl, the way he had of teasing me that made me tingle from my head to my toes.

  I rolled my eyes at him. “A handshake would have definitely been weird.” Without thinking through the implication of my words, I added, “A salute might have been better. Next time, maybe a salute.”

  “Right,” he agreed, holding my gaze and nodding. “Next time.”

  I looked back over my shoulder on my way toward the gate leading me out of the Emorys’ yard just once, and saw him already busying himself with the task of spreading out his sleeping bag a few feet away from the bushes. My heart swelled before I remembered that I had an actual, real text message from Henry Richmond on my phone in my room. I was going to the Fall Fling with one of the cutest boys to ever graduate from Willow High School. I couldn’t be bothered with any kind of silly crush on my next-door neighbor.

  * * *

  In the morning, my first impulse of the day was to peek out the window to see if Trey was still outside. But I had slept in a little late; and there was no sign of Trey in his yard.

  I spent the day trying to banish him from my thoughts, but couldn’t stop wondering what the chances were that he was thinking about me, too. There had been something between us that I couldn’t explain exactly, just like I couldn’t explain what had happened in Olivia’s basement on Friday night.

  The only thing I knew for sure that weekend was that even though I was excited every time my phone buzzed with a new text from Henry, I couldn’t wait to see Trey again.

  CHAPTER 4

  SOMETHING FELT DIFFERENT ABOUT MY walk to school on Monday morning.

  Perhaps it was because the summer heat had subsided, or because I was hopeful that I might run into Trey in the hallway. For the first time that year, there was a spring in my step, as if I couldn’t wait to fall back into the routine of classes and put the strangeness I’d experienced at Olivia’s party behind me.

  Before classes began, Olivia approached me in the hallway.

  “My brother said he’s taking you to the dance,” she said, and I couldn’t tell if she was happy or upset about that. “It’s cool.”

  I breathed a sigh of relief. “Really? Because if it’s not, I can ask someone else. Honestly, Olivia. If it’s going to be awkward for you, I’ll ask Dan.”

  Dan, with his buzz cut and endless freckles, was all the way at the end of the hall, out of earshot. He had already gathered up his books for first period and told me to have a good morning.

  “Don’t be silly! Of course it’s cool. You and my brother make a cute couple. Candace might be a freak about it, but ignore her. Henry thinks she’s a windbag.”

  Having Olivia’s blessing made me feel much more at ease about going to the dance. “What about Mischa?” I asked delicately. “Do you think she and Amanda might think I’m stepping on Michelle’s toes?”

  Olivia wrinkled her nose. “Michelle already has a new boyfriend at the University of Minnesota. I wouldn’t worry about that.”

  In the cafeteria at lunchtime, conversation had returned to the football game on Friday in Kenosha and whether or not we’d all take the bus across the state to cheer for our team. The verdict was that we would go to Kenosha because Candace was insistent that we support Isaac, but we would not stoop so low as to ride the bus with the gross freshmen and unruly sophomores.

  “I can drive,” Pete offered. “We can fit five in the Infiniti.” He looked around our table and counted heads with his finger. “One, two, three, four, five,” he said, pointing first to his own chest and then to Olivia, me, Candace, and Jeff. Although Jeff was tall and played basketball with Pete, he wasn’t especially cute or funny. I had a feeling that by the middle of the week, Olivia would pressure Pete to make Jeff ask Violet to the dance just so that no one would be left out.

  “Amanda and I have to ride with the cheerleaders on the bus,” Mischa informed Violet. “You can ride with us if you’d like. It’ll be fun.” Violet was sitting at the far end of the table eating yogurt, and she nodded.

  I had never been to a football game as a spectator before. As a member of the color guard, I had always sat with the band in my unattractive blue uniform, waiting for performances on the field. It had never really occurred to me before that I might one day sit up in the stands eating hot dogs and popcorn with the cool crowd from school. While I wasn’t much of a sports fan, the thought of the game and riding to Kenosha in Pete’s car put butterflies in my stomach.

  After lunch, I walked back to my locker with Candace, who had been uncharacteristically quiet for the past hour. Of our small group of friends, I was probably the least close to Candace, but our lockers were along the same wall in the same hallway, so from time to time I found myself walking alongside her, usually with little to say.

  “I’ve been meaning to tell you something,” she said in a low whisper as soon as the others had walked down the hall in the other direction toward their own lockers to exchange books for the afternoon session of classes, “about Friday. There was something weird with the story Violet told about me when we were playing that game.”

  I stopped walking for a second, so startled by the abrupt way in which Candace had gone from cheerfully making plans in the cafeteria for Friday night to instantaneously serious when she brought up Olivia’s party, returning me to the state of discomfort I had experienced in Olivia’s basement. Maybe I hadn’t been the only one who’d felt a little too scared to have fun during the game.

  “Yeah?” I asked, not wanting to volunteer my own unpleasant memory of the party.

  “Violet said during all that stuff about being in the water that I went out into the waves far away from my brothers. I don’t have any brothers. I have two half brothers from my dad’s second marriage, but I’m pretty sure I’ve never mentioned anything about Dylan and Jordan to Violet. I mean, they live in Green Bay. I barely ever see them.”

  I frowned. I had known Candace since kindergarten, and I didn’t even know that her dad had two sons with his new wife. Both of Candace’s parents had remarried, and I only knew about her younger half sister, Julia, who was in eighth grade.

  “That is weird,” I agreed, wondering if I should confide in Candace about my own astonishment surrounding Violet’s knowledge of the red Prius that had been parked in the Richmonds’ driveway the night of the birthday party.

  Just then, I looked up to see Trey approaching us. My involuntary reaction was to smile and raise my hand to wave, but a nanosecond after we made eye contact, he looked away and walked past me as if I didn’t even exist. I blushed, completely humiliated. I had definitely overestimated whatever we had shared in his backyard, and I was ashamed at the force with which my heart was beating inside my rib cage. Fortunately, Candace hadn’t noticed my momentary distraction; her eyes followed Trey down the hall.
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br />   “Nice,” she whispered to me conspiratorially with a wicked grin. We reached my locker, and Candace lingered while I twisted my combination open, her books pressed against her chest. Her focus returned to Violet and the events of Friday night. “Do you think Violet’s been like, spying on us? I even went through my Instagram to see if maybe she saw pictures of them, but I don’t have any up there.”

  I realized that Candace’s concerns about Violet were rooted in regular everyday life, not in the realm of supernatural powers, as mine were. It was ridiculous of me to think that maybe Violet had ESP or some kind of special communication with ghosts.

  “Maybe someone just told her,” I suggested. “Like Olivia.”

  Candace frowned, unconvinced. I could understand why. Olivia didn’t concern herself with the details of anyone else’s life. She existed in her own little perfect world, blissfully ignorant of the trivialities of everyone else’s plights. “I don’t know. I just think it’s weird.”

  * * *

  Violet was in my first class after lunch, US History, taught by Mr. Dean.

  “Class, I know that around this time of year the only election on anyone’s mind is for homecoming court. But I’d like to remind you that Student Government nominations are due this Friday, and I’d like to encourage all of you to consider running for class office,” Mr. Dean said. He was the faculty administrator for Student Government, overseeing the elections and assigning tasks to the four officers of each class. Student Government was something that rarely crossed my mind; Olivia was always our class president, and Michael Walton, a brainiac on the Mathlete team who everyone knew would eventually be our class valedictorian, was always vice president. Tracy Hartford, the biggest gossip in the junior class, was always secretary, and Emily Morris had been treasurer since freshman year.