Where I Want to Be

by Adele Griffin

Lily

  Through a doze of dreams, I think I hear panting. Then my face is licked.

  “Oh, nasty! Caleb!” I reach out a hand to swat him off. “Gross. I think I preferred it when you had your bad-breath phobia after all.”

  But when I open my eyes, I see nothing but grass, electric green in the morning sun. I lift my head. Caleb is on the other side of me. At the sound of my voice, he stirs and rolls over.

  “Did you lick my face?” I ask, although now I can see that it would have been an impossible feat. I must have imagined it.

  “Mmm. Do you want me to?” He moves closer, flops an arm over my hips, pulling me in.

  “No, thanks. I don’t think I need it.” Dew has soaked through my clothes. I am totally waterlogged. How could I have slept an entire night on bare grass, with no pillow? Not only that, but it was the deepest sleep I’ve had in months.

  “Gee, I hope Georgia wasn’t counting on a ride back,” I say, remembering.

  There’s a moment of silence as we mull this over, and then we break up laughing.

  “There’s something I want you to do,” I say once we’re laughed out. I press myself against Cay’s back. I can smell skin and sweat on his neck and T-shirt.

  “What’s that?”

  “I want you to take my car,” I say, “and go see the world.”

  “It’s official.” Caleb yawns. “You’ve lost your last marble.”

  “No, I mean it.” I sit up. “Go. Leave. Hang with your uncle Rory and teach kids how to play guitar. Check out the Grand Canyon or the Great Lakes. Drive up to Canada or down to Mexico. School’s over. You’re free, and you’ve been socking away money, Caleb. I know you.”

  “I’m not going to leave you.” He pulls one of my hands to his mouth and lightly bites the ends of my fingers. “Not till you’re better.”

  “I don’t want you to leave me,” I say honestly. “You’re the only perfect thing in my life. But I can’t live in a cocoon, pretending that every day will be safe just because you’re in it.”

  Caleb shakes his head, frowning. “You haven’t thought this through yet. You gotta have a car for work.”

  “I quit my job, remember? Right before I was quote fired unquote.”

  The echo of a frown stays on his face, but I’ve caught Caleb’s attention. “If I drove away to see the world, wouldn’t you want to come see it with me?” he asks.

  I’m silent. Leave school, get away from home. No more answering to school or parental rules. Best of all, no giving up Caleb. In other words, paradise.

  I don’t say a word. Instead, I stand up and toss him the keys.

  It’s a quiet drive until we arrive at my house. By then all I want is fifteen minutes of quality time with warm water, soap, and a toothbrush.

  “I’ll park your car right here and walk home,” says Caleb. “And I’ll come by tonight after work. Burritos okay? Or something else?”

  “Burritos.” He’s letting me off the hook for now. Offering me one more perfect day.

  He kisses me and I kiss him back, hard and quick, like a passport stamp on his mouth.

  Before I lose my nerve, the first thing I do when I get inside the house is pick up the phone and get train schedules.

  And then I call Maine.

  “Hello?”

  “Aunt Gwen?”

  “Oh, Lily!” Her voice is almost exactly like Mom’s. The differences are so subtle, but at the same time so obvious, that I can always tell one sister from the other. Jane’s and my voices sounded like that. Thinking that, my eyes get unexpectedly hot. I’m just touching the beginning of this, I realize. Life without Jane will be filled with these kinds of painful surprises. Life without Jane will take a lifetime to get used to.

  “We’d been hoping to hear from you,” Aunt Gwen is saying. “Your mom will be so thrilled. Let me put her on.”

  From the moment I hear my mother’s voice, I know that this was the right call to make. They need me. I love them. It’s that simple.

  I spend the rest of the morning getting some stuff together. When I take one last trip into Jane’s room, it’s only to scoop her stack of clothes off the bed and put them in her drawer. Then I shut the door behind me, and I go outside to water Mom’s trees.

  That afternoon, I call Caleb at the Pool & Paddle. Kids are splashing in the background. “I’m on the 8:18 train tonight,” I tell him. “Think you can drive me to the station after dinner?”

  A pause. “You’re sure you don’t want to drive yourself?”

  “Yeah, I’m sure.”

  “If your folks decide that they need that car back, you should—” but I can’t make out his voice from the chaos of kids screaming in the background. “Caleb, look! Caleb, watch! See how long I stay under!”

  “Talk to you later!” I yell over the noise, and hang up.

  When he arrives early that evening, I’m sitting on the front step, pretending to read.

  He raises the paper bag. “Still hot.”

  But we don’t even get to the burritos. Tonight, food isn’t really the priority. And even though we have the whole house, we lock ourselves in my bedroom. I want Caleb so much. I want to multiply every kiss, every second, into a thousand more. I want to keep my face buried in the warm curve between his jaw and collarbone. And I want, more than anything, to drive across the country and see the world with him.

  We indulge in the fantasy, a little. Sleeping under the stars and all that stuff. It’s not that far-fetched. Who’s to say next summer it won’t happen?

  “What is it your buddy Thoreau once said, about riding waves?” I ask. “You put it in as your yearbook quote.”

  “Live in the present.” Caleb kisses my nose. “Launch yourself on every wave.” He kisses my mouth. “And find your eternity in each moment.”

  “Right.” I like that quote. It’s so Caleb. “We kinda did that this summer, don’t you think?”

  “I hope.” His voice sounds a little scratchy, but when I look up at him, he turns his face to the wall. Caleb doesn’t like to be openly emotional.

  He hasn’t broken off his strand of thought from earlier this afternoon. He starts up as soon as we’ve left the house and I’m turning out of the driveway.

  “If your folks decide they need that car back, you should—”

  “They’ll understand everything once I explain it.” I wave him off. “They’ll have to understand. That’s a tiny advantage mixed up in all the problems of suddenly being the only child.”

  “What about the insurance—?”

  “Hey, Caleb,” I answer, “stop worrying about everyone else except for yourself.”

  It’s one of those rare moments when Caleb is uncertain of his next move.

  So am I. All I know for sure is that a next move has to happen.

  The train station is almost empty except for the bench, which holds an old man and a scraggly girl in headphones who mouths lyrics over faint, tinny music. I buy a one-way fare from the AutoTix. Caleb walks up and down the platform, along the train tracks. His fists are bunched in his pockets, jingling change. When my ticket prints, I join him.

  “So this is it. Lily Calvert’s dumping me.” He sighs, looking down at the empty track. “Everyone’ll ask what took you so long.”

  “You are not going to get me to feel sorry for you.”

  “Just joking.”

  “Funny, funny. So how about this—why don’t you go ahead and say good-bye? Then you’re the one who leaves me behind.”

  Caleb looks skeptical. “Are you the one joking now?”

  “You don’t think this is hard for me, too?” I ask. “You think I want to watch you drive away? Caleb, I’m hardly breathing, it hurts so bad.”

  He shrugs helplessly. You and me both, say his eyes.

  “Give me a coin.”

  His brows quirk, but he digs a hand into his pocket. He drops a nickel into my cupped palm.

  “Okay. Heads, you say good-bye to me,” I tell him. “Tails, you wait for my train so that I s
ay good-bye to you.”

  “We’re gonna flip a coin for who gets to leave first?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “Practical. Call it in the air.”

  When he smiles at me, though, I see everything. I see each moment Caleb and I have spent together, unfolding back to the first time he ever smiled at me. And I figure that if I can carry that smile inside me, maybe I get to keep a piece of him forever. This is what I’m going to believe. I have to.

  Then I toss the coin high in the air as I listen for his call, and I brace myself for the catch.

  Turn the page for a discussion guide to

  where i

  want to be

  where i want to be

  DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

  1. Why do you think the title of the book appears in all lowercase letters on the cover and title page? What do you think the title means in relation to this book?

  2. The author tells Jane’s story in the third person, yet Lily’s story is in the first person. How does this difference work in revealing the two characters?

  3. “Imagine. Sometimes when Jane used that word, like she did now, it made me shiver” (p. 43). Why was Jane happier in the world of pretend? Why was Lily uncomfortable in that world?

  4. How did Jane’s mental illness affect family dynamics? Describe what it was like for Jane when she was not taking her medication. Why did she stop taking her meds before the Senior Dance?

  5. Jane’s idea of a perfect day was at Orchard Way with Augusta and her grandfather. What made that so? What made Lily feel safe and happy?

  6. Lily tells about the pit bull attack that Caleb suffered, Jane’s obsession over that attack, and Caleb’s change afterward. Why is this story important to Lily? What is Caleb like now?

  7. “Jane died this past spring, but we can’t talk about it. In fact, we kind of gave up on talking” (p. 4). What did Jane’s death do to Lily’s relationship with her parents, her friends, and Caleb?

  8. Lily says, “But if we’d failed each other, I’d been the one to fail her first…. What else could I have done though? I had to grow up” (p. 125). Jane thinks, “It wasn’t Lily’s fault that she hadn’t been able to come to Jane’s rescue, that she hadn’t heard the help me that lived inside her head. They had lost each other equally. They’d had to grow up” (p. 142). Why do both of the sisters believe that they have failed each other?

  9. Caleb is a fan of Henry David Thoreau and used a quote of his in the yearbook, “Live in the present. Launch yourself on every wave. And find your eternity in each moment.” What does this quote mean to you and why do you think the author included it in the last chapter of the book?

  10. The last sentence of the book leaves the reader waiting for the results of the coin toss. What do you think happens next?

  Turn the page for

  an excerpt of Adele Griffin’s

  thejuliangame

  one

  “This is the craziest idea you ever had,” said Natalya.

  “My idea?” My heart was racing. “What are you talking about? It was your idea.”

  “Fine. Our idea. Do you think we’ll get caught?”

  “Don’t be a baby. Nobody can trace us.”

  “And it’s not like we’re even breaking the law,” Natalya added. “Right?”

  “Right. We’re not doing anything illegal.”

  Not illegal, but maybe a little bit wrong—although tonight had started as tame as every other Saturday at the Zawadski house. First a sit-down dinner of political debates while the meat loaf got cold, followed by Natalya and me whipping up a pan of Duncan Hines milk chocolate brownies, then enjoying a warm square of brownie à la mode while watching back-to-back-to-back episodes of Island of the Undead on the Syfy channel.

  The third episode was about a zombie who collected the bodies of her victims. That’s when we decided to do it—to make Elizabeth, our very own man-eater. A girl who’d lure in all the guys we’d never dare approach for real.

  “Only we won’t really kill them,” Tal said. “Unless, of course, they deserve it.”

  The whole thing was a joke. Or a dare wrapped in a joke, but with each layer we added to Elizabeth’s profile, she became more human.

  Now it was past midnight. Natalya’s house was dark except for the glow of her laptop in her bedroom. The casts of Lost, Star Trek, and Battlestar Galactica stared down on us from their posters as we put our last touches on Elizabeth. From her nationality (Krakow, Poland) to her school (we made her a freshman at Moore College of Art, in Philadelphia) to her picks and preferences.

  Slowly, Elizabeth breathed life. She liked Coldplay and Anne Hathaway and Van Gogh and shrimp scampi. She missed her kid brothers Boris and Drugi, who lived in Poland—and we’d even found stock images of two gap-toothed grade-school boys to stick in her photo album. We’d set up her e-mail from Natalya’s mom’s Yahoo account that she checked about twice a year. The final task was to find her profile photo, which was why we were browsing modeling websites.

  “Elizabeth needs to be cute,” I said, “so that guys sit up and pant.”

  “But not too cute or they’ll think she’s a lie.” Natalya clicked through images like a Hollywood casting agent. You could never tell what sort of random project might catch Natalya’s interest, but this one had. “Girl-next-door pretty. Like how you could look, Raye, if you weren’t always rocking the double ex-el sweatshirt.” She paused. “Hey, what if I snapped a—”

  “—that would be a no.” I yanked up the neck of my sweatshirt so it hid my face. “Don’t even think about it.”

  “Why not? It’s not like any prime MacArthur guy would recognize you.”

  I peeked out. “Gee, thanks.” But I knew what she meant.

  Socially, we were both pretty much invisible, though Tal did stake one claim to fame as the older sister of Thomas Zawadski, MacArthur Academy’s varsity-letter freshman, All-American lacrosse goalie, and unofficial Duncan Hines milk chocolate brownie pig.

  “How about her?” I pointed. Heart-shaped face and skinny black tank.

  Natalya nodded. “And she even kinda looks like you.”

  We watched in silence as her photograph uploaded.

  “It probably is illegal to borrow someone else’s face,” murmured Natalya. “This whole thing is insane.” But I could tell she was enjoying herself.

  “Insanely brilliant, maybe.”

  “Whatever. Okay. Now for the personal message.” Natalya rubbed her hands together. “Here we go. ‘Hello, I am Coach Fernier’s niece and just came to this country for art school. Want to please to make some American friends?’”

  “That’s good. Now. Who’re we friending?”

  “Who’s on your wish list?”

  “I guess anyone the Group dies for. The best guys. Chapin

  Gilbert and Julian Kilgarry and Frank Senai.” My cheeks burned to say their names.

  Natalya nodded, but she was chewing the edge of her pinkie. We’d raised the ante and we weren’t going back. “So we’ll start with them. Nobody’ll deny Coach Fernier. Thomas says he walks on water. And then we’ll mix it up with some of Nicola’s friends, for authenticity. Nic won’t care.” Nicola was Natalya’s cousin, who really did go to Moore College of Art.

  “Sounds good.” My heart was still pounding. Elizabeth Lavenzck excited me. She was us but not us, she was real and a lie, and soon she’d be friends with guys we’d only dreamed of talking to. “This is more fun that I’d thought.”

  “Uh-huh.” Though Tal didn’t sound convinced. “But Raye, what are we going to do with her? If she works?”

  “I’m not sure,” I answered honestly. I really couldn’t think about it past this point. Now I stared into Elizabeth’s heart-shaped face, her Mona Lisa smile. The options seemed endless. “First let’s see who we can get.”

  two

  If your spring sport at Fulton wasn’t tennis or lacrosse or crew, then you took Health & Fitness. This was not coo
l. It could have been inked into the school ledger: Any student participating in Health & Fitness is hereby decreed, for the duration of this scheduled activity, to be kind of a Loser.

  But Health & Fitness was no joke. You could get suspended for blowing off the timed bar hangs or fencing parries or whatever was on the menu three afternoons a week in the north gym. Almost worse than taking H&F was the H&F uniform: blue nylon short-shorts and a maroon T-shirt with our antiquated class mascot—Hooter the Snowy Owl—cupped unironically over the left boob.

  Non-athletic Natalya and I put in a major effort to keep a low H&F profile, so when Tal’s shorts’ elastic snapped right in the middle of kickboxing that following Thursday, she panicked.

  “S.O.S. and Coach says you can come with,” she whisper-yelled as she jogged up, her hands cinched at her waist. “I don’t want to run around dealing with this alone.” In my lame-ass H&F uniform, she meant.

  My turn at boxing had made me really sweaty, and I was conscious of my shiny face and the wet circles under my pits as we swung past the Administration desk for safety pins before bolting to the locker room. All my friends at my old school had joked that I wouldn’t care how bad I looked in a school of just girls, but that had turned out not to be true. Girls looked and judged, same as guys. Sometimes worse.

  “If I pin on each side and one in the back, I think I’m okay.” Tal sighed. “Hey, are you still coming over this weekend?” she asked. “We can update Elizabeth.”

  “Yeah, sure.” Although the Elizabeth experience had been sort of a dud. Every guy we’d asked had accepted, even Tal’s crush, Tim Wyatt, who was captain of MacArthur’s debate team. But then everyone had declined to answer more than a few words.

  I didn’t know what I’d been expecting, but I know I’d been hoping for better.

  “Hang on. Now that I’m pinned in, I need to pee.” Tal ducked into a stall. “Stay?”

  I dropped on the bench outside the showers. A few more minutes sweating in my Hooter uniform wouldn’t kill me.