by Alexis Bass
“Let’s go over here, in the booth, out of everyone’s way.”
Contrary to what one would suspect about the owner of a shop selling primarily baked goods, Antonio is much taller than he is wide. We follow him through the cluster of mismatched chairs and tables to the back of the shop, proving that this store is actually bigger than the storefront indicates. Henry and I sit at a blue vinyl booth. Antonio sits across from us, resting his arm over the top of the backrest.
Antonio is obviously as bored with our questions as we are and tosses out short answers to the usual suspects, i.e., how long have you been in business? He’s more interested in telling us about the product, capping off every sentence with, “If only you would try it,” and then pausing to grin at us, like surely one of his descriptions is going to make us change our minds about our mutual aversion to doughnuts. Like we’re this close to exclaiming, “A bacon doughnut with a maple-syrup glaze, you say? That I have to try!”
“We have a seasonal Garfield High football doughnut. The Chocolate Touchdown. We could do one for soccer.” He nods at Henry, who, per usual, is sporting his Garfield High Soccer Windbreaker.
“An Out-on-Injury éclair.”
I find myself hanging on every word as Henry describes the summer pickup game that messed up his knee.
“We even have a scone in honor of Grace Marlamount,” Antonio says. “You both went to school with her, didn’t you?”
“You do?” Henry asks. How he’s found his voice after this revelation, I’m not sure.
“Yeah,” Antonio says. “The Boo-Berry scone.”
“The—” Henry starts, glancing at me. “What?”
Antonio laughs, but he’s got this distant look in his eyes, a sad smile on his lips. “She used to come in here all the time when she was a kid. Hell, even when she was a newborn. I grew up with her mom, so I’d always throw in a free coffee. Gracie loved anything blueberry, but she couldn’t say it. Boo-berry muffin. Boo-berry bagel. Boo-berry scone. Maggie and I thought it was so funny, we never corrected her.”
Maggie. Margaret Marlamount. Grace’s mom.
“One day they came in,” he continues, “when she was around six, I think, and she started saying it the right way. Figured it out on her own. That’s what happens, though; kids grow up.”
It’s visible on his face, the passing thought that kids grow up, but Grace will not. Not anymore.
“She didn’t come in here much when she got older,” Antonio says. “Occasionally, she’d stop by with a friend or two. I’d tease her about the boo-berry, and she’d tease me right back, rolling her eyes and telling me to find a new joke.”
There’s joy in his soft laughter, even though his eyes are welling with tears.
“Aw, hey, man, I’m sorry,” Antonio says, nodding at Henry before getting up briefly to retrieve napkins from the counter.
I glance at Henry. He has his fingers pressed into his eyes. He moves them away and sniffles. Tears are streaming down his cheeks.
Antonio drops a small pile of napkins in front of Henry. “I shouldn’t have—I mean, it wasn’t that long ago that she . . .”
“It’s okay,” Henry says, wiping his cheeks, rubbing out the tears that have latched onto his eyelashes. “It’s nice to hear stories about her.” He pauses for a moment to grab another napkin from the stack. “She used to have sleepovers with my sister, and they would sometimes make blueberry pancakes in the morning.” A smile passes over his lips but doesn’t stay long. “They never turned out very well.”
The image I get from this, Sutton and Grace, two girls braiding each other’s hair, hiding behind their pillows watching scary movies, their pajamas getting covered in flour while they baked in the morning—is wrong, I think. It must be. Sleepovers in their case followed parties that lasted until sunrise. They were more like crash pads, somewhere to sleep it off. I forget that they were regular friends, too. Friends before the party, after the party, during the party, away from the party. Friends first, all the rest second.
“I bet she ate them anyway?” Antonio says. “Too much pride, that one—she never would have admitted they were bad.”
“She picked out the blueberries,” Henry says.
Antonio is still shaking his head at the loss. Still smiling at her memory. And now his cheeks are wet, too.
My throat constricts, like I might join them in crying at what’s turned out to be a very depressing breakfast, but instead I manage a sympathetic smile.
“It breaks my heart,” I say, being especially careful not to look at Henry.
It’s not safe for me to cry here. Because what if Antonio remembers our last names, and any second now he realizes who I am? What if Maggie still comes in here all the time? I can’t be caught crying, I have to be ready to offer condolences.
We wrap up the questions quickly after that, and Antonio sends us home with a box full of doughnuts to share with our class.
All I can get out of Henry as we leave Ludwig’s are one-word answers, sometimes not even full words, just hmms and mms, practically grunts.
“I can drop the doughnuts off with Mr. Scott,” I offer, holding out my hands, ready to take the box from him. “My first class is right by his room.”
Henry sets the box on top of his car while he opens the door, ignoring me completely now.
“Fine,” I say, turning away. “See you at school, then.” I don’t even make it a step before his voice has me spinning back around.
“That was some performance, Amanda.” He’s standing there, one elbow resting on his open door, squinting against the morning sun. “I know you’re not that cold.”
I give him a loose shrug. “Just because I didn’t cry?”
He bites down on the corner of his lip and concentrates his gaze on his forearm. “Didn’t,” he says, “or wouldn’t?”
“Couldn’t.”
His eyes flash up at me. After a moment he’s shaking his head, opening his mouth with a couple of false starts. He wants to speak but doesn’t know what to say.
“Why won’t you cry?” he finally asks.
No one ever questions why I’m not crying, and they shouldn’t. I’m the comfort, I’m not the tears. Their sadness is heavier than mine, and they know it. Everyone lost someone. I’m the only person who got someone back nearly intact. And since Jonathan appears remorseless, I have to be the face that repents.
“Would it make you feel better if I cried?”
At this, his expression switches from confused to stunned. “Yes,” he says. “Okay? Yes.”
“And how do you think that would’ve made Antonio feel?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Come on, Henry,” I say calmly, because getting angry over this makes me defensive, and I cannot be that either, not when it comes to Jonathan. I won’t make that mistake again, like I did when he cornered me the night of homecoming. “The poor man was sitting there passing out napkins, reminiscing about Grace when she was a baby, and the sister of the guy who ended her life sits across from him crying—do you think he’d believe my tears were for Grace?”
“Yes.”
“No,” I say at the same time. “He’ll think they’re for my degenerate sociopath of a brother.” I borrow words from articles used to describe Jonathan. Degenerate. Sociopath. They never used the word brother. “He’ll think they’re for the crappy way I must feel being related to someone like that. And then it’s no longer about Grace, is it?”
“That’s—that’s preposterous.”
“It isn’t, though. And you proved my point when you told me to cry.”
“I told you to cry because you looked like you wanted to fucking have a cry!”
I shake my head. My stiff upper lip has been perfected to appear as empathy and nothing more; I don’t believe he saw through it.
“You wanted me to cry because it would make you feel better. You. Most people are the opposite; most people don’t want to see Jonathan Tart’s little sister hamming it up over the
accident that he was entirely responsible for.”
“You’re for real, aren’t you?”
I can’t fathom why he’s looking at me like he thinks I’ve lost it.
He shrugs and shakes his head, but keeps his voice calm, too. “So . . . what do you think they want, then? From you?”
“An apology.”
“An apology for . . . who? For him?”
I nod, and he comes toward me, leaving his door wide open, and not stopping this time until he’s standing right in front of me. “No one has to be sorry for what Jonathan did except Jonathan.”
“You’re lucky,” I say, staring into his eyes. “You actually believe that.”
He doesn’t try to stop me when I walk away.
CHAPTER
SIXTEEN
Sutton always wore a miniskirt and a pout, and people fought to make her smile, though only two were ever successful: Grace and Jonathan. Grace was the envy of everyone in the room, made worse because she didn’t seem to have any idea. Jonathan was at the center of it all.
There was champagne, and whiskey—Jonathan’s favorite—and an entire bathtub full of beer cans. There were games. Kings cup and flip cup and quarters and hockey and asshole and high or low. There were shots; a line to the bathroom that extended all the way into the living room; voices singing “Sweet Caroline” at the top of their lungs; couples that had formed within the hour making out in the basement. There was a pyramid of empties on the counter; someone throwing up in the bushes; solo dances on the dining room table; filthy phrases drawn with marker on those who were unfortunate enough to have been among the first to pass out.
It could have been any night.
I was pacing in the hallway at Sylvia’s graduation party, waiting. He arrived quicker than I thought he would, but also not fast enough.
“What are you doing over here all alone?” he’d said. “Not in the party mood?”
I was sure he knew that if it weren’t for him, I’d have left hours ago. The moment Blake put his arm around Dawn and her face lit up, full voltage, and I heard Jonathan’s whiskey-soaked laugh, too smug and too clever for anyone’s good, I would’ve gone home and put myself to bed with my laptop and a movie.
I wasn’t afraid of missing anything at the party. I was afraid of missing him.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I thought alone was exactly how you wanted me.”
I liked watching the shock pass over him at my flirty comment, complete with popping eyes and a jaw-dropping smile. I’d never been so brazen in my whole life.
“Touché,” he said. There was nothing else for him to say.
“So, now what?” I cooed, laying it on thick now that I knew what it would do to his face.
“Oh, no—nice try. I’m not playing this game.”
“What game?” This time my overstated pout and eyelash batting made him roll his eyes a little.
“The game where I offer up a suggestion and you shut it down.” It was a game we played often—I had to give him that.
We could hear Jonathan in the other room, “Baby, stop . . . come here, you—” undoubtedly calling to Sutton, because they always laid it on thick, especially when there was an audience. She responded just as loudly, but what she was saying back to him was indecipherable except for the word bastard. Like all their fights, this one lasted two seconds and ended in Sutton giggling and Jonathan laughing, with Grace in the background saying something to them we couldn’t quite make out, but knew from past encounters was probably either Get a room! or Get a therapist.
“I don’t want us to be like them,” I blurted out. I was no longer the girl who could shock him, and he was no longer the boy who made my stomach flip. We were ourselves again.
Henry joined me where I leaned against the wall, slouching down so our shoulders were pressed together. “We won’t.”
We won’t be as bad as Jonathan and Sutton, we declared that night. We won’t call each other baby. We won’t grind on each other in public. We’ll trust each other. We’ll have real conversations. We’ll have the kind of passion that doesn’t override us—though that night, we forgot about the last one.
The first time we dared kiss we were alone in that hallway with the party, our siblings laughing and shouting on the other side of the wall, my head pressed uncomfortably against the side of a picture frame, Henry’s hands tentatively on my shoulders. We got better at it.
“I want to get out of here,” I said.
“For once, we agree.”
We left the party, running and sliding on wet pavement, on our way to Henry’s car as the rain poured on us.
It felt like we were the only two people left in the whole world once we got back to my empty house and headed upstairs to get out of our wet clothes. I made Henry turn around while I changed, and he undressed right in front of me, since being brazen was nothing new to him.
“I think I’ve probably wanted this for a very long time,” he confessed when we were both in dry sweats and nestled in my bed, in the dark quiet, with just the sound of our voices and the rain beating against the window.
“Me too.”
“Really? Since when—?”
“Henry. I don’t know the exact moment.”
“You should think about it,” he said. “Then, when it comes to you, I’ll tell you mine.”
“You know the exact moment?” Immediately, I got combative. “No, you don’t.”
He found me in the darkness and pulled me closer. “I do too, and one day I’ll tell you. But only when it’s an even trade.”
He kissed me before I could tell him that he had a deal.
We kissed the rest of the night, all night, until we fell asleep tangled together under the covers of my bed.
I woke up the next morning to hazy light, my phone vibrating against the nightstand, and Henry nowhere in sight.
Like it had all been a dream.
CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN
I tell Graham I want to skip sixth period. And in true Graham fashion, he gets us out of class by telling the school administrator we’re a part of the Clean Up Campus program, and we need notes to be excused to collect trash by the tennis courts. Which is exactly what we end up doing, as it’s impossible for Graham to lie.
I hold the bag, Graham picks up the trash. We both wear bright-green sanitation gloves. Still, it’s better than being in class with Henry after what happened at Ludwig’s this morning.
“What would I do without you?” I say, watching him smile. I slowly step closer and closer to him, and his smile gets bigger; he knows what I’m doing.
“You don’t have a personal space bubble at all, do you?” he says when my foot brushes against his.
“Not when it comes to you I don’t.” I take another step in sync with his, and since it’s not possible for him to bend forward to pick up trash with me right here, he stops walking. I step in front of him and kiss him, and pull him toward me until his hands end up around my waist.
“Do you remember our first kiss?” he says, turning red as I nod. “Under the stars,” he says.
It was three days after we dropped Jonathan off at prison, and I was a mess of snot and tears, and wearing my ugly winter fleece pajamas, but Graham remembers the stars. I would spend this entire hour kissing him just for that, but we said we would pick up trash, so that’s what we continue doing.
Two gusts of wind later, he asks, “So how are things at home?”
It feels a bit like he’s following a protocol for how to deal with your girlfriend when her brother returns from prison and she hasn’t wanted to talk about it with you, but is more than happy to fight about it with Henry Crane. Step One: relax girlfriend by returning her kisses; Step Two: bring up a happy memory; Step Three: broach the subject again carefully with a broad statement.
“You mean, how are things with Jonathan?” I call him out.
He nods, looking at the grape soda he’s dumping out instead of at me. When he finally does look at me, his stare is
so caring and sincere, I feel bad that I haven’t brought it up with him sooner.
“Do you remember what he was like before . . . everything?”
Graham shakes his head. “I didn’t really know him. I mean, he was older. . . .”
And the only underclassman Jonathan hung out with was Grace. Graham doesn’t say it, but I know he’s thinking it.
“But you knew what he was like.” Everyone did.
“Yeah, I guess. He was supposed to be fun, sort of crazy . . . wild.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“Well, what do you mean?”
“He was . . .” Thoughtful, I think. So thoughtful that when he told you a joke it was as though it’d been tailored just for you. And genuine—he said something to you, he meant it, he was good for it, he’d fight for it and for you, too. And warm. He was inviting in a way that no one in my family is, including me.
Sociopath is the word the article in Time used to describe him.
I want Graham to see more than that, more than someone who was able to manipulate his way into everyone’s heart. I want to explain to Graham that “things at home,” the way Jonathan is now, are bleak, and growing worse every day because he doesn’t act like his old self—except for the times when he shouldn’t.
“Hey.” Graham peels off his gloves so he can tuck his hand under my chin and force me to look at him when he tells me, “It’s not your fault,” for the billionth time.
This time I say, “But I was there.”
“Jonathan was going to do whatever he wanted. His decisions are his own.” He goes on. It’s the same spiel he’s given me many times before, one he knows so well he could even slur it at me when he was wasted at the homecoming after-party.
It piggybacks off Dawn’s reasoning: I was with Blake and you were with Henry, and how could we have known? And thinking about all of it together, and my fight with Henry, presents me with the haunting thought that this front I put up, it might be for me more than it is for other people.