by Shana Norris
“Did you ever call your dad?” Aunt Lydia asked.
I avoided her gaze. “I’ll call him tomorrow.”
“Hannah,” Aunt Lydia said. “You have to speak to him at some point.”
I shrugged. “I don’t really have anything to say.”
“Then let him do the talking. He owes you an apology, at least. Give him the chance to give you that.”
I pulled my hands from her grasp and stood. “You should go paint,” I told her.
“Yes, Mom,” Aunt Lydia joked. “Promise me you’ll call your dad.”
“I promise,” I told her.
But I didn’t tell her that keeping promises had never been something I was good at. Maybe I was too much like my parents.
#
“You really don’t have to do this if you don’t want to,” I said softly.
Jude sat in the driver seat of his truck, his hands gripping the steering wheel. He stared out the windshield at Porky’s Last Stand Barbecue, where Ashton, Kate, Carter, and their friends were already waiting for us inside.
I was surprised that Jude was even there, after the way we left things the night before. But when I’d turned my phone on again, I had a text from him asking where we were eating. He’d come by to pick me up, but we hadn’t spoken much during the ride over to the restaurant.
“I know,” Jude said. “But I probably should do it.”
I waited, but still Jude didn’t move. The fact that he had made it all the way to the restaurant was a big step. We hadn’t talked about the shirt, or his cold reaction, but I wasn’t ready to ask him about it.
“How well do you know all of them?” I asked instead.
Jude shrugged. “They were a grade below me in school. Liam was the outgoing one who made friends with everyone. I just kind of knew people by association.”
“Didn’t you have any friends of your own?” I joked.
“Not really.” Jude’s expression was still solemn. “My friends were all Liam’s friends. Everyone really liked him. They just put up with me because of Liam.”
“That can’t be true,” I said. “I never met your brother and I like you.”
My words hung in the air between us in the silence of the truck cab. A car rumbled as it passed by in search of a parking space, the lights flashing across Jude’s face.
“I mean,” I said, clearing my throat. “I’m your friend, and you got to know me all on your own.”
Jude rubbed his bottom teeth across his lip. He seemed to be considering my words as he studied the barbecue restaurant. At last he nodded. “Okay. Let’s go.”
The evening was still warm, and our feet crunched over the tiny rocks and broken glass in the parking lot of the restaurant. The smell of smoked pork drifted in the warm air around us.
Ashton spotted me first. “Hannah! Over here!” She stood up, waving, as if I might not see her bright orange hair through the crowd. We passed families, couples at other tables, and a huge fiberglass pig statue that wore a chef’s hat and grinned vacantly.
I held my shoulders back, trying to channel the Cohen confidence into me. I knew I wasn’t supposed to follow the rules this summer, but sometimes they were useful.
“Hi,” I greeted everyone.
“Hey,” Kate said. Her eyes darted to Jude, who stood just behind me. “Hey, Jude.” She smiled awkwardly at him.
Jude nodded. “Hi.”
“Hannah, you remember Carter?” Ashton asked. Carter sat so close to her, they could have been sharing the same drink. She widened her eyes at me for a moment, then went on. “And Syke, Nadia, and Trent.”
Other than Syke’s blue-tipped faux hawk, I barely remembered the other three from the party in the valley.
Before I could say anything, a waitress came by to take our orders. As soon as she was gone, the table fell silent until Carter turned to me and asked, “Hannah, where did you say you’re from?”
Ashton cast a grateful look at him.
“Willowbrook,” I answered. “It’s in the eastern part of the state. Little town between Greenville and New Bern. Don’t feel bad if you’ve never heard of it.”
Nadia nodded. “I think I’ve been through there on the way to—”
“The beach,” we said at the same time.
I laughed. “That’s the only time anyone goes through it. Not a lot to see in Willowbrook. Thankfully, we’re not too far of a drive to other places.”
Silence descended on the table again. Ashton swirled her ice around her glass with her straw. Kate shifted in her seat. Syke crunched on a cracker. Jude kept his eyes on his lap, and as the minutes ticked by, I kept glancing at the door to the kitchen, hoping that our food would magically appear.
Ashton nudged Carter. He coughed and then said, “Um, so, Jude, you working anywhere?”
Jude looked at Carter as if the question startled him, and everyone else at the table exchanged worried looks.
“No,” Jude answered, his gaze locked on Carter. “I’m still looking.”
“There’s our food!” Ashton exclaimed, as the waitress carried a big tray toward us. Ashton’s grin was too wide, as if she could smile away the tension in the air.
“So, um, has anyone started applying to college?” I asked, trying avoid another awkward silence.
Syke groaned. “I don’t even want to think about that right now.”
“This is our last summer of freedom,” Nadia said, pushing her blonde hair behind her ear. “Can you believe that next summer we’ll be getting ready to go off to college? Everything will be so different. Who knows how many more times we’ll have nights like this, just hanging out with nothing else to do.”
“If we even get in to college, you mean,” Ashton said with a loud sigh, wiping red sauce off her chin.
“You’ll get in,” Carter told her. “You’re an amazing artist. They’d be stupid to say no.”
Ashton’s cheeks turned red and she ducked her head as she smiled. “Thanks.” She cleared her throat. “Where are you applying to, Hannah?”
I took a sip of my water before answering. “I haven’t decided yet. My parents want me to go to Yale.”
“I’m applying to UConn,” Trent said with a wide grin at me. “We’d be almost neighbors. We could hang out some on weekends.”
I nodded. “That would be great. I’m not sure if I’m applying there though. Maybe I’ll change my mind. Somewhere small and quiet, less pressure to be the best.” I nudged Jude’s foot under the table. “What about you? Any college plans in your future?”
No one said anything as we waited for Jude to respond.
Jude chewed his barbecue sandwich silently for a moment, then wiped his mouth. At last, he met my eyes, which contained a sad, haunted look in them, and said, “I haven’t decided yet.”
After that, the conversation ended. The tension was back, and no amount of small talk could make it go away.
“Dessert?” Syke asked once we had all finished our meals, raising his eyebrows.
“The banana pudding here is so good,” Nadia said.
I looked at Jude, who looked like he was on the verge of making a dash toward the door. “I promised my aunt I wouldn’t be out too late,” I said.
“I’m sure she won’t mind,” Ashton said. “Lydia’s cool like that. I’ll call her.”
I shot Ashton a quick look and said, “No, that’s okay. I’m pretty tired anyway.”
“Let me take you home,” Jude said, standing so quickly that his chair screeched across the brown tile floor.
I smiled at everyone. “It was fun. We should do this again.” If I ever want another hour of torture, I added silently.
Ashton gave me a half smile, but she said, “Thanks for coming. It was great to see you again, Jude.”
Jude nodded, tossed down some money for our meals, and then led the way out of the restaurant.
He let out a deep breath once we were back in his truck.
“That bad?” I asked, grinning at him.
He raise
d his eyebrows. “Were you not sitting at the same table I was?”
I rubbed my forehead with my fingers and sighed. “I know, I was just trying to make the best of the situation.”
“Sorry,” Jude said.
“It’s not your fault.”
“Trust me, it is.” He started the ignition and pulled away from the restaurant, back onto the two-lane road. Jude didn’t seem to be driving anywhere in particular, but I was becoming used to our aimless drives. I rolled the window down and let the warm breeze and the grassy smell of the mountains fall over us.
“What was with the weird feeling I got when I asked you about college?” I asked. “It felt like I had stepped into a war zone.”
“Oh.” Jude shrugged. “I’m not going to college.”
“Why not?”
“I’m just not.”
I stared at him in the dim light that filtered through the windows. “You should go to college, Jude.”
“Yeah, well, I’d need money for that, wouldn’t I?”
I bit my lip. Why didn’t I think before I spoke?
Jude sighed. “I was going to enlist in the army to get money for college. But . . . I didn’t.” He chewed on his thumbnail as he drove, his whole body tense. I thought about my ex-boyfriend Zac, and how he was constantly in motion, words tumbling out of his mouth like a waterfall. Around him, I didn’t have to talk or put on a show because Zac was always the center of attention. He moved so fast, I was happy to let him do all the thinking in our relationship.
Now I had silence, but it felt normal. I didn’t feel the need to fill the space with words, the way Zac used to.
Finally, he spoke again.
“I stopped spending time around other people because of that back there,” he said. “The way they acted.”
“Do they always act weird?” I asked.
“After Liam . . . after he died, they all acted weird.” Jude ran a hand through his hair, blowing out a long breath. “It got to the point that I couldn’t stand it. I didn’t want to see the looks they gave me. Or hear them stop talking whenever I walked in the room. It was better to not be around them at all.”
“Are you going to avoid people forever?” I asked.
Jude shrugged. “You see how they still are. You’re the only person who doesn’t act weird around me.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Do you want me to act weird?”
“I’d prefer you didn’t.” He glanced at me and smiled a little, the corners of his mouth twitching. “That’s why I started hanging out with you, you know. Everyone else sees Liam when they look at me. They see who they think I should be. But you just see me. It’s . . . It’s a nice change.”
My heart thumped hard against my chest as I absorbed Jude’s words.
“Okay,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady. “Rule #6: No acting weird.”
Jude nodded. “That’s a good one.” He looked at the clock on his dashboard. “Too bad we’re too late for Chimney Rock. There’s nothing like standing on top of that rock, with your arms stretched out,” Jude lifted his arms from the steering wheel and spread them as far as he could inside the truck, “and yelling all your frustrations.”
I grabbed the steering wheel as the truck veered off the road. “Yeah, sounds nice. But for now, can we keep our hands on the steering wheel and frustrations safely bottled inside?”
Jude put his hands back on the wheel, his right hand landing on top of my left. Something tingled across my skin and my eyes met his for a moment.
Then he looked back at the road and I pulled my hand away, moving back to my side of the truck.
No acting weird, I reminded myself.
Chapter Ten
“Hannah?”
I looked up from the book I was reading to find Aunt Lydia standing in the doorway of the guest room, dressed in a big paint-spattered shirt and cutoff jean shorts. “If you’re not busy, could you help Ashton go out and pick up a few things for me? I have a long list and I feel bad sending her out on her own.”
I hadn’t talked to Ashton since Jude and I had left the barbecue place the night before, but I nodded. “If Ashton doesn’t mind.”
Aunt Lydia raised her eyebrows, but all she said was, “I’m sure she won’t mind.”
A few minutes later, I was in the passenger seat of Ashton’s car as she drove toward town. She played with the radio for a bit, biting her lip.
“So,” I said, smoothing down the wrinkles in my skirt, “was last night a disaster, or was it just me?”
Ashton laughed, giving me a relieved look. “It wasn’t just you. It was a disaster.”
“I didn’t think it would be that bad,” I said.
She shook her head. “Neither did I. Jude has been weird ever since his brother died, but I thought maybe he’d be getting back to normal now. I guess he’s still weird.”
I felt a flash of annoyance at her criticism of Jude. “Well, your friends didn’t exactly help things. You guys barely even looked at him.”
Ashton’s mouth dropped open. “What are we supposed to do, Hannah? The guy pissed off a lot of people with the things he’s done and said. Did you know he used to work for Carter’s uncle? One day a bunch of money went missing from the register, and all signs pointed to Jude.”
“Did Jude steal it?” I asked.
Ashton shrugged as she turned into the parking lot of a small art supply store. “I don’t know. There was no proof that he did, but never denied it, and everyone knows he barely has any money. His mom blows through all of the money she gets from Liam’s military benefits.”
“You can’t sentence him for something you can’t prove he did,” I said, as we got out of the car. “He might be innocent.”
“Then why doesn’t he just say so?” Ashton asked. “Instead of standing up for himself, he hid away for almost a year. He let all his friendships die, it’s like he’s a different person.”
“His brother died. Don’t you think that has a huge effect on him?”
Ashton stopped just outside the door of the art store and looked at me with a hurt look in her brown eyes. “Of course,” she said softly. “We all liked Liam, Hannah. We all mourned him. But at some point, you have to start taking responsibility for your own life.”
It was easy for her to say that. It was easy for Mark to tell me those same words, and to believe I could be someone other than the person my parents expected me to be. But actually following through felt impossible.
Inside, the store was cluttered with paints and canvases. Ashton consulted her list as we made our way through the maze of stuff.
“Look,” she said, sighing, “it’s not that we hate Jude. I’d love for him to be the person he was before. And I think it’s good that the two of you are friends. He’s been out of the house a lot more these last weeks than he has in the past ten months. I don’t know what exactly is going on between you two, but whatever it is, it’s good for him.”
“We’re just friends,” I told her.
Ashton examined a display of paint tubes and then handed me a few. “Fine, whatever. It’s not my place to question it. Dinner was a disaster, but maybe Jude would do better in a smaller group.”
“I don’t know if I can convince him to go out again.”
Ashton added a stack of canvases to my arms, as well as several paintbrushes. She began picking up pints of paint and other things that I couldn’t even guess what they were used for.
“We could go to the Fourth of July fireworks together,” Ashton said as she led the way toward the checkout counter. “Very casual, no pressure to create conversation. We’ll just watch the show. Me, you, Jude, Kate . . .”
I raised my eyebrows. “And Carter?” I prompted.
Ashton’s cheeks reddened. “Maybe.”
I helped Ashton load the items into the trunk of her car, and then we started on the way to our next destination.
“Carter is really cute,” I said. “You need to ask him out before someone else does.”
A
shton groaned and slumped over the steering wheel. “I know. But every time I try, I freeze up. It’s like my tongue stops working and I don’t know how to talk anymore.”
“I don’t believe you could ever stop talking,” I said, shooting her a smirk.
Ashton tossed an old napkin from her console at my head. “Shut up. Haven’t you ever had a guy you couldn’t speak to?”
I’d had two boyfriends in my life. Zac was the most recent, and talking to him was never an issue. The guy before that, during freshman year, was a friend I knew through math club and student council. I had never gotten tongue tied around him either.
So what exactly did it mean that I’d never felt this anxiety that Ashton felt around Carter? That I had never really liked either of those guys after all?
“No,” I answered her. “I’ve never felt that way around a guy.”
Ashton looked like she didn’t believe me. “Tell me your secret. I could use your confidence.”
I wanted to tell her that I was the opposite of confident. After Avery, I had never opened myself up to anyone. Like my parents, I hid behind a mask, so no one could see how broken and messed up we were.
But telling her about my family would go against the rules Jude and I had made up.
Rule #1: Don’t complicate things.
I didn’t want Ashton and Kate to act weird around me, like they did with Jude. I liked how simple everything was between us.
“Just be the person you want to be,” I said, borrowing Mark’s advice.
Ashton snorted. “Easy for you to say.” She turned the car into the gate of a recycling sorting center. Beyond the gates, I could see piles of trash and junk. I wrinkled my nose and looked at Ashton.
“This is where Aunt Lydia wanted to send us?” I asked.
“No,” Ashton said as she unbuckled her seat belt. “This is a side trip for me. I figured we could search for something good for my own art while we’re running errands.”
Ashton waved to the guy inside the gatehouse as we walked toward the piles of trash. He didn’t stop us, just waved back, as if he was used to seeing teenage girls wading through trash.
When we reached the first pile, Ashton pulled some thick gloves out of her back pocket, bent over, and began digging through the junk. I watched her for a moment, unsure of what to do.