“It’s okay,” I said, even though it wasn’t.
“Look, I know you told your father that you didn’t find out anything at school. But I’m not so old that I can’t remember what it’s like to be your age. To feel more connected to your peers than to your parents.” He looked the same as he had back at my father’s place—worried, sad, and frightened. Nothing at all scary about him. He reached into his pocket. “Trisha’s mother wrote this last night,” he said. He pulled out an envelope. “She can’t sleep for all the worry. So she wrote Trisha a letter. I told her there was no way to get it to her, but she said she had to put things on paper. If there’s any chance at all that you can get this to her, I’d be so grateful. We both would be.” He held the envelope out to me. “Take it,” he said. “If you can’t deliver it, fine. I understand. But her mother. . . .” His voice broke. He turned his head away from me and raised a hand to his eyes. He was wiping away tears. “Take it. Please. If you can get her to send a note back—or just call, so that we know she’s all right—it would mean everything to her mother. If you see her, even if you can’t get her to call home, you could let us know how she is.”
I looked at the envelope in his hand.
“I don’t know where she is,” I said. And that was true. “I don’t know how I could get it to her.” Or maybe I did.
He was still holding the envelope out to me, like a piece of bright hope in an otherwise dark night.
“Even the slightest chance,” he said.
I stepped forward and took it from him.
“Mr. Hanover, I really don’t know if there’s anything I can do.”
“Thank you,” he said, as if he hadn’t heard me. “Thank you.” He stood there for a moment. I thought he was going to say something else, but he didn’t. He nodded at me and thanked me again in a quiet voice. Then he got into his car and drove away.
I carried the envelope over to the gym door and stepped into the light to inspect it more closely. The envelope was cream-colored, smooth—and heavy. There was something besides paper inside. Something round and flat. I could feel it. I wondered what it was. I tucked it into my backpack and pushed open the gym door. As soon as I did, I heard the thump of a basketball being dribbled. Then a roar filled the air. Basket, I thought. I peeked through the little round window in the inner gym door as a whistle shrilled. Another roar went up from one end of the bleachers. Game over.
I looked along the bench for the coach of the winning team—a smallish, balding man with a pink face and gold-rimmed glasses. He looked surprised to see me but smiled and waved. When he finished talking to his team, he jogged over to me.
“Robyn, what are you doing here?” he said. He looked behind me, as if he were hoping to see someone with me. As if he were hoping to see my mother.
“Hi, Ted,” I said. “I was in the neighborhood.”
“Oh, I get it,” he said. “Mac.” Ted knows that my father lives in the area. To my mother’s chagrin, Ted even likes my father. Ted is like that. He likes everyone.
“Can we talk?” I said.
He looked around again and still seemed disappointed that I was alone.“Sure, Robyn.As long as you don’t mind waiting.”
It took a few minutes for both teams to settle down and for everyone to shake hands. The players and coaches retreated to the locker room and the gym began to empty of spectators. By the time Ted reappeared in his street clothes, I was alone.
“How about I drive you home?” he said. “We can talk on the way.” When I hesitated, he sighed and said, “I see.”
“See what?”
“Your mom doesn’t know you’re here, does she?”
I shrugged.
“Okay,” he said. “How about if I drive you most of the way home?”
We went out into the parking lot together. For the first part of the drive, we talked about how the basketball game had gone, who the best player on his team was, what the team’s chances were for the city championships. Finally, Ted said, “How’s your mother?”
I said she was okay.
He glanced at me. Maybe to see if I was telling the truth, maybe to figure out what I knew.
“What happened, Ted?” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“Between you and Mom.”
“I think your mother is the best person to ask about that.”
“She won’t tell me.”
He shrugged. “Well, then—”
“Did you dump her, Ted?”
The car swerved a little. I grabbed at the dashboard while he straightened the steering wheel. “Is that what she told you?” he said.
“She didn’t tell me anything. But I can tell she’s upset. I know it’s none of my business, but. . . .”
Ted stole another glance at me. He was taking extra care with his driving now. We covered a dozen or so blocks before he said, “I asked her to marry me.”
If I had been driving, the car would have swerved again, probably right off the road. “Really?”
He looked pretty grim for a man who had just proposed.
“She said no, huh?” I said.
“She said she’d have to think about it. Frankly, she looked stunned when I asked her. Not pleasantly surprised. Not even plain, old-fashioned surprised.” He shook his head. “I have to tell you, Robyn, it wasn’t the reaction I’d hoped for.And since then. . . .” He shrugged. “Since then I’ve talked to her secretary and left messages on her voice mail, but I haven’t talked to her. Not that I haven’t tried. She isn’t returning my calls.”
“Oh.”
He glanced at me again. “So, how is she?”
I wasn’t sure how to answer. “She said you two had decided to take a break from each other.”
“A break?”
“I thought you must have dumped her, but she didn’t want to come right out and tell me. She’s miserable,Ted.”
He glanced at me as he digested what I had said. I think he was trying to look appropriately upset, but he was working hard to suppress a genuine smile. I had a pretty good idea what he was thinking: If she’s miserable, then she must care about him. Maybe she’s even considering his proposal. If she had already made up her mind not to marry him, then why was she upset?
“I guess she needs time,” he said.“Sometimes I forget.”
“Forget what?”
“What she went through with your dad.”
I looked out at familiar streets and houses. “You can drop me here, Ted.”
. . .
My mother met me at the door. “I tried to call you, but you must have shut off your cell phone again,” she said. “I had to call your father to find out where you were. I also called Morgan.”
Uh-oh. I’d forgotten to ask Morgan to cover for me. No wonder my mother had a pinched, worried look on her face.
“Where were you?” she asked.
“I’m almost sixteen,” I said, which, if you know anything at all about lawyers, was the absolute worst answer I could have given her. Lawyers are maniacs for precision. When they ask a question, they expect that question to be answered, not some other question.
My mother’s blue eyes narrowed to laser points. “Where. Were. You.”
“It’s not like I disappeared off the face of the earth, mom. I’m not a baby.”
“Are you going to tell me where you were or am I going to have to ground you?”
“Ground me? For what?”
“For lying to your father.”
“If I lied to him, he should be the one to ground me.”
“That can be arranged.”
“Right. Like you would even bring yourself to have a conversation with him.”
Her face changed from anger to shock to hurt to I don’t even know what. But my mother is good at her job. She’s been in court hundreds of times, and she’s been handed a few nasty surprises. She always recovers.
“Last time. Are you going to tell me where you were?” she said.
“You’re not the only pers
on who has a private life, Mom.”
“Fine. You’re grounded for the weekend.”
“Mom!”
“Want me to make it for a whole week?”
“That’s not fair!”
“Don’t push me, Robyn.”
If I could have cleared everything up by telling her exactly where I had been, maybe I would have done it. But I couldn’t. If I told her the truth, she would probably get even madder. I could just hear her: “How dare you talk to Ted behind my back. How dare you pry into my private life. How would you like it if I—”
I turned and went up to my room. I wanted to slam the door, but I held back. I dug my cell phone out of my pocket and called my father.
“Robbie, thank goodness,” my father said. “Your mother called—twice. She said you didn’t go to Morgan’s. She was worried when she couldn’t get hold of you.”
If she’d called my father, she really must have been beyond worried.
“I’m sorry, Dad.”
“I hope you apologized to her too.”
I hadn’t, but I didn’t admit that.
“Look, Robbie, I know she’s a little overprotective of you. In the future,” my father said, “maybe you want to keep your phone on. You know, so she won’t worry.”
I told him okay. I added, “She grounded me for the whole weekend.”
There was a moment of silence on the other end. “You want me to talk to her?”
I knew that wouldn’t make things better, so I said no. Then I said, “Dad? I ran into Mr. Hanover on the way home. He gave me a letter. He said if there was anything I could do to get it to Trisha, he’d appreciate it.” No response. “Why would he do that, Dad? I already told him I didn’t know anything.”
More silence—hesitation? “He’s probably just hoping there’s a chance you can.” He didn’t ask the next logical question: “Can you?”
So, just for the record, I said, “But I don’t know anything.”
“The man’s desperate, Robbie. He told me that Denise has taken a turn for the worse.”
“What do you mean?”
“The cancer has spread. I can’t even begin to imagine how Carl feels.” Then he told me he loved me. I noticed that, unlike my mother, he didn’t demand to know where I had been. I concluded that he trusted me. I concluded that my mother didn’t.
I stared at the ceiling for awhile. Then I called Morgan, whose first words were, “I screwed up. Sorry. When your mom asked for you, I should have said you were on your way home or in the bathroom or something. She took me by surprise. As soon as I thought about it, I tried to call you. Everything okay?”
“You’re not mad at me?” I said.
“Why should I be mad at you?”
I waited.
“Well, okay, I was mad at you,” she said. “It was the way Billy looked at you. I thought you’d encouraged him. Then, after I calmed down, I thought, ‘Robyn would never have put Billy up to asking me out.’ That was just Billy being needy.”
“Needy?” That was news to me. “He’s your friend.”
“You’re my friend too, but I don’t want to go out with you, either.”
“Are you saying you think I’m needy?”
I heard a long sigh on the other end of the line. “I’m saying that friendship is one thing, chemistry is another.”
“Have you talked to him?”
“Not yet.”
“Are you going to?”
More silence, followed by another, deeper sigh. “I guess I should. I guess I owe him that. I probably could have handled it better, but he ambushed me.”
“He didn’t mean to. He was just nervous. Whatever you think of what he did, Morgan, he’s still Billy.”
“I know,” she said. “I’ll call him. I promise.”
“Let me know if I need to administer emotional first aid—to either of you,” I said.
It looked like the next day was going to be overwhelming. And I hadn’t even decided what I was going to do about the letter Carl Hanover had given me.
Ilay in the dark, listening for my mother, wondering if she would stop by my room on her way to bed, maybe even apologize to me (a stretch, I know). I heard the house grow quiet. I heard rustling as she came up the carpeted stairs. Then I heard the click of her bedroom door closing at the end of the hall and I felt angry all over again.
Eventually, my thoughts drifted back to the letter Carl Hanover had given me. I wondered what Trisha’s mother had written. If it was something that Trisha would want to hear, like, “Honey, I love you, I miss you, whatever it is, come home and we’ll work it out.” Or was it something that she wouldn’t want to hear, like, “How dare you treat me like that, how dare you cause me all this worry, if you love me, you’ll come home.” I wondered what kind of person Trisha’s mother was and how she was facing her illness, especially now.
I wondered even more about Trisha. About what I would do if my mother married a guy I couldn’t stand. Would I be so mad that I’d run away? If my mother got sick, would I stay away?
And what about Carl Hanover? Let’s say that he wasn’t the world’s greatest stepfather. Trisha’s mother still loved him. She married him, right? And obviously he cared enough about his wife to do everything he could to find Trisha. That had to earn him a few bonus points, didn’t it?
I took the letter out of my backpack and turned it over and over in my hands. Trisha’s mother must have tucked something inside for her. But what? I thought about the kettle in the kitchen and how well steam works to loosen glue. Then I dropped the letter back into my backpack and thought some more.
. . .
The next morning when I woke up, I found a note at the kitchen table instead of my mother. Early meeting, it said in her neat, square printing. Back by 8 P.M. I gulped down some orange juice and packed my backpack. The envelope Carl Hanover had given me was still inside. I decided to leave it there until I figured out what to do about it. I locked the door behind me as I left the house and set off for school.
Billy was waiting for me at the end of my street, his thin body half-draped around a lamppost, a solemn expression on his face. When I asked how he was, he said, “Do you ever wish you could go back in time?”
“Permanently, you mean? To live in a whole different era?”
“I mean, go back twenty-four hours,” he said. “To relive one day without making a colossal mistake.”
“Oh,” I said. “Sure. I wish that all the time.”
He fell into step beside me. “I blew it with Morgan.”
“I wouldn’t say that.”
“She hates me, Robyn.”
“She likes you—as a friend.”
“That’s just what every guy wants to hear.”
“Maybe there’s no chemistry,” I said.
“No chemistry for her.” He trudged in silence beside me for a few steps. “Robyn? I think I’m in love with her.”
“Billy, I don’t know what to say.”
“What’s wrong with me? Why doesn’t she like me?”
“She—”
“I mean, why doesn’t she like me as more than a friend?”
“I don’t know what to say. But she’s still your friend. That means something, doesn’t it?”
He nodded glumly. “You’re lucky. You’ve got Nick.” Right.
. . .
I got through the day. I even got through a pop quiz in history, although I wouldn’t have bet much on getting a decent grade. The whole time, I was thinking about the letter Carl Hanover had given me.
I left school the minute the bell rang and headed across town to Somerset. I got there in time to see some of the guys who lived there coming back from school. I recognized one of them at the same time that he recognized me.
“Hey, Antoine.” I hadn’t seen him since the summer. He didn’t go to the same school as Nick. He smiled when he saw me, though.
“You looking for Nick?” he said.
I nodded.
“He went to a meeting wi
th his social worker and Ed.”
Antoine is tall like Nick, but bulkier, with close-cut hair and big clothes. He has light brown skin and stunning blue eyes. I didn’t like him when I first met him.The feeling was mutual. Now I think he feels better about me, but that doesn’t make it easy to read what’s going on behind those eyes of his. My father has a theory about guys like Antoine. He says they’ve been disappointed one time too many, so they hide whatever they’re feeling. They act like they don’t care what happens, because if they don’t care, they can’t be disappointed again. If you want to know what’s going on with Antoine, you have to ask. It’s a toss-up whether or not you get an answer.
“Is everything okay with Nick?”
And there it was, the straight-on blank look. “What do you mean?” What he meant was, “How much do you know?”
“I met Glen,” I said. “I know he’s a cop.”
Antoine’s face relaxed a little, but he shook his head. “You know I can’t talk about Nick. It’s up to him what gets said about him.”
“I don’t want you to talk about him. I just want to know whether you think he’s going to get out of here in a couple of weeks like he’s supposed to, whether he’s going home.”
“I think he’s going to get out of here okay,” Antoine said. “But home?” He shrugged.
“Do you know when he’s going to be back?”
He shook his head. “I gotta go. I gotta be inside.”
I watched him shamble up the walk and disappear inside. I retreated half a block to the bus stop and dropped down on a bench to wait. It was a beautiful autumn day. The foliage on the oak and maple trees that lined the street had already started turning red and orange and yellow. Halfway up the block, a man was raking leaves on his front lawn. Down the other way, another man sat in a gray car, reading a newspaper. Somerset is located in a residential neighborhood, and it’s on a bus route, so there was a fair amount of traffic. I turned my head every time I heard a car coming. It was nearly an hour before I saw one that I recognized. When it made the turn into the driveway at Somerset, I walked toward it.
“Hello Robyn,” Ed Jarvis said as he got out of the car. He sounded surprised and not surprised, both at the same time.
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