He bit his lip and furrowed his brow, staring at where his feet disappeared into the water. It took a minute before he spoke. “You sound like you believe the people.”
“When you hear something enough times, you start to believe it.”
“I never believe things I hear over things I see.” His voice was so soft.
I tilted my head forward so my hair hid my face again, and didn’t respond.
“The things people say about you don’t match up with the Celia I know.”
My face grew hot, and I tucked my chin closer to my chest to make sure he couldn’t see. “So you do hear things.”
He cleared his throat. “There are four other senses aside from hearing, you know. He held up one finger. Let me tell you what I see. A few weeks ago, I saw you helping Abe carry his sleeping bag and pillow and a bunch of other stuff down the street.”
That would have been shortly after the big fight. He wanted to stay at Jeremy’s, and he needed to have a lot of his stuff around him. “Doesn’t count. Big sisters are required to help their little brothers.”
He lifted another finger. “I tasted the caramel brownies you baked as a gift for Malcolm’s mom. I got the last one, a corner piece, and I still have dreams about it.”
“Oh, good grief. That was not a big deal. She’s fed Abe and Fay a million times and those brownies weren’t nearly enough to pay her back.” Though I tried not to show it, I liked how it felt when Marigold saw me around town and mentioned the brownies.
He flipped up a third finger. “Sometimes, when you stand close enough to me, I catch the scent of a campfire on your hair.”
I smelled like wood smoke? Fantastic. “So?”
“People smell like campfires when they spend time around one with their family and friends.”
I swirled my feet in the puddle, the edge of the water tickling my ankles. “Okay then, what’s your little story to go along with the sense of touch?” I sat tensely. Ronan spread enough stories about that particular sense—most of them false or at least exaggerated.
“I have a lot of stories to choose from, believe me.” He tapped his chin thoughtfully. “One time last spring, Esta was crying in the hallway at school, and you hugged her. And then you wiped her face with a tissue.”
“Everybody hugs their best friend.”
He shook his head and groaned, frustrated. “Celia. Listen, please. To me, you are cold lemonade on a hot day. You are at the restaurant working shifts for your friends. You are petting dogs you pass on the sidewalk. You are baking brownies you’ll never get to taste. The people have it wrong.”
I swung myself quietly for a bit, thinking about what he’d said. I lifted my muddy feet out of the puddle and wiggled my toes.
“You work hard at making people think you’re tough,” he said.
“I am tough.”
“You’re strong, is what you are. Being strong is better than being tough. Marigold once told me that true strength is having a thin skin.”
I blinked. “Paul, you’re…”
I didn’t know if I should finish my thought. I could feel Paul practically vibrating beside me.
“I can’t take it anymore. What am I?”
I glanced over at him. I felt my palms prickle with sweat as I gripped the chain. I had been about to blurt out how he was the only person who had ever talked to me this way, how what he said made me feel good, but I caught myself in time. “You’re happy.”
His eyes turned downward. “I’m not always as happy as I seem.”
“Give me a break, Paulie. I think you would be happy even if piranhas were gnawing your feet off. You’d say something like, ‘Oh, this is actually excellent because now I won’t have to buy new shoes anymore and I can use that extra money for video games.’”
A laugh busted out of him, and he kept grinning until he looked over at me to see that I wasn’t even smiling. He straightened out his features. “That’s not being happy though, Celia, that’s trying to make the best of a bad situation. It’s just being optimistic.” He tugged on my chain, jostling me, and then lifted his feet out of the puddle. They were filthy, and his toes were starting to prune. “Good, there must not be any piranhas in there.”
I chuckled, but still felt lost in thought. I let go of my chain long enough to brush my hair away from my face. “Maybe having more optimistic friends will be good for me.”
“Are we friends, Celia?”
I rested my head against the chain, and studied his face. Who knew with him? He had about a million friends, and he treated them all the same. He seemed to trust with no boundaries. He had no boundaries at all, in fact. He punched all the guys on their arms, he laughed with everyone, he kissed girls on their foreheads, and held their hands for no reason. “Time will tell.”
The look he gave me when I said that did strange things to my chest. It was tight, like I couldn’t get enough air. Just then, Abe appeared over the crest of the hill and ran across the grass toward us.
“Thank God!” he said, leaning over and resting his hands on his knees, trying to catch his breath. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you.”
I jumped out of my swing, suddenly on high alert. I grabbed his shoulders. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing! Everything is great! Dad got home just as Mom was starting dinner, and he told her to put the ground beef back in the freezer. He wants to take us all to dinner in Bakerstown. He sent me out to find you.”
“Oh. Okay.” My pulse still pounded in my ears and I felt short of breath as I calmed myself. Nothing was wrong. I skimmed my shoes off the top of the puddle and slid them onto my filthy feet. “Bye, Paul.” I spun Abe around by his shoulders and we took off, quickly putting distance between us and the swings.
“Yeah, bye, Paul!” Abe shouted into the wind, arms spread out at his sides, spinning as we ran toward home.
Five days later, I had officially lost my mind. I stood in the kitchen and scanned my body, clad in cotton shorts and a tank top. And a sports bra—God help me. The water bottle was heavy in my hand. Where did runners keep their water? I took a huge swig and set it on the counter, figuring my stamina wouldn’t be so great that I’d require hydration. This was my first run, after all.
A run. I shook my head at myself and slipped the elastic off my wrist and used it to pull my hair into a tight ponytail. I was about to become a person who went on runs. Something was shifting in me. I had found some extra energy, some strange motivation that made me want to do things I hadn’t done in a long time.
Fay left two days ago after dinner, and I was at loose ends, unsure of what to do with myself. After she drove away, Mom and I went in the house and just stood there for a minute, in the strange silence. She said she was craving something sweet and I asked her to teach me how to make frosting roses. So we’d baked a cake to fill the time and the silence, but it also flung me back into a feeling from childhood—just my mom and me in the kitchen, nothing so wrong a sweet treat couldn’t fix it.
Though I was grumpy about Fay being gone, and I missed her most when I was working and she wasn’t there with me, Mom and I had both been full of a slowly expanding promise, riding the high of the last week of life in our house. Dinner in Bakerstown had been good. Mom and Abe and I had started out the evening a little wary, but Dad hadn’t ordered beer with his dinner, and he’d held Mom’s hand on top of the table while they had coffee and listened to Abe jabber on. The days since had been more of the same. It wasn’t unusual to have a time of peace after a time of turmoil, but it was unusual that he wasn’t drinking.
Now it was late afternoon, nearly five, and I stepped into the back yard. I hoped it would be a little cooler than it had been midday, but it wasn’t.
Dad and Abe were in the yard, bent over, looking closely at something. “That’s it, you’ve got it,” Dad said, his voice whisper-soft, urging Abe along.
“Am I blowing too hard?” Abe asked.
“No, no, keep going. You’re doing it just right. Look, it’s
about to catch!”
They parted and I saw a spark of fire erupt beneath Abe’s hands. He gasped in wonder.
Dad scrambled for the scraps of newspaper by his knees. “Here you go, son, feed that flame.”
Abe delicately pushed the paper into the flame, and as it grew, his smile grew too. “It worked! I can’t believe it worked.”
“The work’s not done yet,” Dad said, his smile as wide as Abe’s. “Get those little sticks and prop them up on the log like we practiced.” He watched as Abe set up the sticks, his tongue held between his teeth in concentration. Dad’s hands moved alongside Abe’s, not touching anything, but copying Abe’s movements as he made them.
The little sticks caught, and the fire rose higher. They put a couple larger logs on it, then sat back. The flame rose higher, and Dad laughed deeply. “You did it, son.” He ruffled Abe’s hair.
I took a step closer, wondering, because Abe had started fires many times. Abe noticed me then, and grinned. He held up a magnifying glass. “Celia, I started a fire with this! Can you believe it?”
“That’s a real thing? I thought that was something made up for cartoons.”
“No, no, it’s real,” Dad said. “Would you like to learn? It doesn’t take but a minute.”
I bit my lip, hard, to stop the tears in their tracks. I wished Fay was here to see this. I wished Fay was here, period. She’d make fun of my outfit and I’d roll my eyes at her, and we’d be happy. I smiled at my father. “Maybe some other time. Right now I’m going on a run.”
“Why would you want to do a thing like that?” Dad teased.
“I have legs, so I might as well use them.”
He waved as I jogged out of the yard, and I felt light as air, like I could run a hundred miles.
That feeling lasted about two blocks. Running didn’t feel the way I remembered when I was a kid. At eight years old, running down the sidewalk had meant my thighs bunching up under my skin as my feet pounded the pavement, the breeze blowing my ponytail side-to-side, my lungs straining like a morning stretch. This felt more like having the flu.
I’d planned to go to Esta’s and try to convince her to run with me. My new goal was to make it to Esta’s alive. I took a shortcut behind the stores on Main Street, hoping to shave a minute or two off this torture.
As I plodded past the hardware store, a wolf whistle sounded from the parking lot. Every muscle in my body clenched tight, and I refused to look to see who it was.
“Hey, Celia!”
Recognizing the voice, a smile found me and I looked over to see Nick and some other boys sitting on the trunk of an ancient blue Oldsmobile. I wound my way through the cars, slowing to a stop when I reached them. “You do realize you’re rude, crude, and socially unacceptable, don’t you?” I panted, leaning over and resting my hands on my knees.
He patted the trunk beside him. “Take a load off. There’s plenty of room on this beast.”
I hopped up onto the trunk, the expanse of which would allow for at least six people. “I hope you don’t whistle at the girls you actually like,” I said.
He shoved me on the arm. “Of course not. I’m only a heathen with my oldest and dearest friends.”
I stuck my tongue out at him.
“These are my cousins, visiting from Decatur. Ian and Noah.” Nick slugged each one on the shoulder as he introduced them.
“Cousins with a car, that’s pretty sweet. I’m Celia.”
“Why the heck are you out running in this heat, anyway?” Nick asked.
I shrugged. “I got it into my head that I should join the track team this year. Maybe even cross country this fall. Four blocks in, and I’m rethinking.”
Nick sighed dramatically. “That’s a relief. I was worried you were running from Ronan. I bet he’s been chasing you down, trying to get you back.” Nick had never liked Ronan. I appreciated that about him now.
“If I was running away from Ronan, I’d be running a whole lot faster than that.” The boys all laughed, and I looked up in time to see Paul and Malcolm going into the hardware store. Paul jerked his head away from us before I caught his eye, but he saw me. I was sure of it. And he didn’t even stop to say hello. He had his hands tucked in his pockets, and his shoulders were tight, his head angled away from me. I’d never seen him walk so stiffly. Was he mad at me?
I sighed. He probably was. I’d probably done something or said something to ruin whatever nice things he’d ever thought about me. I swallowed thickly, and hopped down off the trunk. It was just like me to be terrible in some way and not even know what it was.
“I better get back to it,” I told the guys. “It was good to meet you.”
Nick patted me on the shoulder. “Hey, take it easy, okay? Let’s hang out some time—just the old gang. You, me, Molly, and Esta. Sound good?”
“Yeah, that actually sounds great.” I walked to the edge of the parking lot, then picked up my pace, heading not toward Esta’s, but right back home. I suddenly didn’t have the energy for anything other than a cool shower and lying on my bed with the fan pointed directly on me.
5
Paul pulled his worn work gloves out of his back pocket and laid them on the tailgate of the truck. “We’ve been at this for ten hours, man. I’m dragging.” He sized up the yard before them—weeds, overgrown bushes, and tall grass. This place needed the works, and it was on the schedule for tomorrow morning, not tonight.
“You don’t have to stay. Heck, you can go and I’ll still split the profits with you,” Malcolm said, and roughly twisted the gas cap on the lawn mower.
Paul examined his friend. He didn’t like the tense set of his shoulders or the wrinkle between his eyebrows. He picked up his sweaty gloves again, and wrestled them onto his hands. He bent over and picked up the weed whacker. “Let’s do this last yard, then I’m going somewhere fun to hang out, and you’re coming with me. Derek and some of the guys are camping out at his house. We could dig up some sleeping bags and head over there.”
“Nah. I’d rather just go home.”
“You mean you want to throw yourself on your bed, call Fay, and moan about how much you miss each other until she has to go. Then you’ll just lay there in the dark, feeling sick, until you finally stop thinking and fall asleep.”
Malcolm stopped fiddling with the gas can and looked up at Paul. “You been peeking in my windows?”
“Let’s just say that maybe we spend a little too much time together.”
Malcolm gave a tiny chuckle.
“Celia misses her, too. We could all three go do something,” Paul said.
Malcolm leaned against the truck and crossed his arms over his chest. “How is Celia?”
She was acting distant, Paul knew that much. She was clearly sad Fay was gone, but Paul thought she was trying to push him away a little bit, too. It was one step forward and two steps back with her, and he guessed their walk the other day had been too big of a leap.
His mind tripped over the image that had been tormenting him the last hour. He and Malcolm had stopped at the hardware store right before it closed, to get a can of oil, and there was Celia in the parking lot, sitting on the trunk of some car with Nick and two guys he didn’t know, laughing. The unexpected jealousy that roared through him had been brutal, even as he realized he had no right to it.
He grabbed a rag out of the truck and wiped down the shield on the weed trimmer. “You haven’t noticed how she slams everybody’s plates down at the restaurant? We were sitting right there when Heidi griped at her for it this morning.”
Malcolm ran a hand over his face. “I guess I’ve been pretty wrapped up in myself. I’m sure she’s missing Fay pretty bad,” he said, his voice bereft. He turned and dug around in the toolbox by the cab of the truck.
“I know you are, too.”
Malcolm’s shoulders slumped, and he let out a large breath.
“So quit working so much and let yourself have a little fun. Come out with me, and help me convince Celia to come. It�
�ll make you feel better.”
Malcolm turned to face Paul, and finally stopped digging around absent-mindedly in the truck. “I’m not really in the mood to feel better.”
“So you’re just going to let yourself bleed out?”
“I’m just going to bleed out. And you’re going to let me. And if that’s what Celia wants, you should let her do that, too. Sometimes people just need to process their feelings, and let the bad ones exist without trying to make them go away. I know you like to cheer people up, but sometimes you have to let them be.”
Paul sighed, defeated. He couldn’t argue with words that had clearly come straight from Malcolm’s mother. “Alright, no problem. We work, you bleed.”
Paul yanked the cord on the weed trimmer and made his way over to the house and began obliterating the weeds around the foundation. He always found this part of the job immensely satisfying—turning a scraggly mess into a neat lawn. After a minute, the mower started up—a good sign. A little more than an hour later, he had hit all the weeds and also trimmed the hedges out front. He wiped down the equipment and stowed it in the truck. After Malcolm drove the mower up onto the trailer, he helped him tie it off.
Malcolm clapped him on the shoulder. “Get in the truck. I’ll drop you off at home.”
“You mean we’re actually calling it a day?” Paul studied him warily. “Is your mom home tonight?”
Malcolm chuckled. “You worried about me, Paul?”
“Just asking.”
“Well, it’s nothing to worry about. But yeah, Mom should be home. Maybe I’ll help her cook dinner.”
Malcolm dropped Paul off in front of his house, and as he bounded up the steps, he smiled to himself. Malcolm seemed better after some extra time riding the mower. He’d be fine. Malcolm didn’t have the kind of life where you didn’t end up fine. The worry that had draped itself around Paul’s shoulders slipped off as he stepped inside his stuffy living room.
He wanted a shower and then he wanted to knock right on Celia’s front door. He could almost feel the wood under his knuckles. No way was he letting her bleed out. He wondered what feelings would show on her face when she saw him there under her porch light.
Juniper Limits (The Juniper Series Book 2) Page 4