I’m both irritated and relieved that N. E. Endsley is actually just Nolan Endsley and that he doesn’t open portals to Orman, but I’m let down by how he seems incapable of carrying on even the smallest of conversations. He is entitled and grouchy and I’m desperately sad that all my imaginings of him don’t hold water, but even more sad that he will not play along with me like he did with the whale watching. And I am livid that he won’t share what he remembers of Jenna.
I’m mad at Jenna, at Nolan, at the lying books, and even the stupid whales.
“Look, I’m going to be honest,” I tell him. I feel myself gearing up to shout him into the ground. Wally snorts himself awake at my tone and shuffles over to sit by Nolan. “I’m pissed. You’re rude and unsociable and moody. Just because you wrote some of the greatest books the world has ever known doesn’t make you special or particularly tortured.”
Here, Nolan raises an eyebrow.
“Well, it doesn’t,” I say. “Make you special, that is. I mean, everyone is special, but you’re not special-er. And don’t you dare raise your eyebrow at me, because I know that’s not a word. And when I asked to see you today, I thought it would be a chance to get to know you better and to hear about Jenna—my best friend, who is dead, but what the hell do you care? Your best friend is alive and well and your biggest worry is that your precious third book isn’t finished because of your stupid writer’s block.”
Nolan is calmly petting Wally. They have their heads cocked to the side like they are examining me, an erratic migratory specimen of a girl, driven out of her mind by grief and confusion, who has come to rest in their private sanctuary.
“Anything else?” Nolan asks archly.
“I’m pissed,” I say.
“That has been well established,” Nolan says.
I stare at him for another beat, disbelieving the words even as they come out of my mouth.
“You know what? I don’t have time for this. I’m leaving.”
He shrugs. “Somehow I doubt that.”
Even though he is echoing my thoughts, I’m incensed enough to stop, hand on the surprisingly flimsy doorknob. If Nolan Endsley’s personality is any indication, I would have thought he would have nothing short of a fortress guarding his precious lakeside hideaway.
“And why is that?” I ask.
“Because of Orman.” He says it like it’s a curse, and I want to roll my eyes, so I do. “Because you’re just like everyone else.”
I wish I was like everyone else, I think. Everyone else our age is smuggling microwaves into dorm rooms while I’m here arguing with an antisocial writer and his batty dog.
“Think what you want,” I say. “I’m still leaving.”
I half expect him to come after me, to act like a human and show regret, and that I will hear the door open behind me by the time I’ve reached the sand. When it doesn’t, I redirect to the tree a few yards ahead.
Nolan doesn’t come.
When I am almost to the gate where Alex first dropped me off, I realize Nolan really isn’t coming after me, that he failed this small test, and I’m mad again.
I shouldn’t be. It’s not like we’re friends. It probably didn’t mean anything to him, the pictures last night or the whales this morning. But he did promise to tell me about Jenna. Maybe.
I stomp back down the beach toward his fort, because where else can I go? The dark storm clouds gathering over the lake personify my mood. How lovely to see the weather finally cooperating with the events of the day.
As I keep checking my footing in the rocks and sand, I imagine myself a powerful sorceress with the ability to bend the weather to her whims. I look down to my feet and let my clothes flutter and change until I am dressed in an emerald green cloak with golden trim. Too cheerful, I think. It changes to black, and with narrowed eyes I direct a lightning bolt to strike the little fort and command the storm to kick up a cresting wave that bashes the stairs.
I’m considering a tornado to get Nolan and his little dog, too, as I approach the door, but I stop when I hear the low murmuring of Nolan talking on the phone.
“I know,” he says, muffled. “Alex, I know.”
Not giving myself time to decide if it’s right or wrong, I creep beside the wooden stairs and press my ear as near to the insubstantial door as I dare.
He must be getting an earful from Alex, because it’s almost a full minute before Nolan says, “But I blew it. She asked so many questions and I didn’t know what to do, because I can’t tell her about what happened at the festival without telling her about … I know.” Another long pause and a sigh. “I know. I’ll try.… Alex, I said I’ll try. What more do you want? She’s leaving soon, right? She’s not my problem.”
I don’t want to hear any more. Serves me right for eavesdropping. I shouldn’t have gone back to the fort in the first place.
On the long, unavoidable walk back to the bookshop, I conjure snow, the desolate soaking kind that doesn’t make for good snowmen or snowballs and only messes up transportation and happy plans. It takes all my powers of fancy and I have no energy left for the whales. They fade away, one by one.
* * *
A memory: a visit from my father a year after he left.
I sit beside him in his new used car. (I know it’s new because he won’t shut up about it, but the odometer reads 63,075 and the seats are worn.)
He’s either oblivious to my silence or doesn’t care enough to stop yammering on and on about how great his life is now and how great his girlfriend, Bianca, is and how much I’ll like her when I meet her at Christmas.
When my phone rings, I gratefully dig it from my purse and it’s Jenna. We planned this yesterday, when my father randomly dropped by my house to tell me he was in town and he wanted to take me to lunch the next day.
It’s a quick call. Jenna talks loudly enough that he can hear her without being on speakerphone. She says we need to rework a part of our science project and she needs my help to do it.
“It’s our last day before it’s due,” she says. “You need to get over here, stat, got it?”
“But I have plans,” I protest, hoping my disappointment sounds genuine.
“This is about your future, Amelia,” Jenna stresses, and I almost laugh at how much she sounds like her mom.
“Fine.” I sigh. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
When I end the call, my father seems less concerned with me not going to lunch with him than he is intrigued with my cell phone cover.
Jenna had it made for me just a month prior, when she declared my old case “decrepit.” It’s a collage of pictures from our first year of friendship: us on jet skis at the lake, eating beignets in New Orleans, Moot curled atop my head as I sleep, the Williamses and me in a poorly angled selfie in front of the local mall’s huge Christmas tree.
“That your friend?”
I nod. “Yep.”
He looks over at me, gross, stale flecks of at-home self-tanner getting lost in the folds of his neck. We’re at a red light, so he leans forward to closely examine the phone case.
“Jet skis? Trips?”
I know what he’s asking, and my heart and head are quickly trying to erect a wall to keep him out, to keep his oily presence away from the Williamses.
“Was a gift.” I lob the words over the wall like grenades, half hoping they’ll hit him square on the head.
They don’t. He huffs and polishes the steering wheel with the bottom of his polo, oblivious to my clipped tone.
“Some friend,” he says. “Take what you can from them while you’re on their good side, you hear? Nobody who’s not kin will treat you like that forever. You’re not their problem.”
After everything he’s done, it’s silly that this angers me as much as it does. I want to yell at him and jerk his key ring with the terrible rectangular keychain that reads, “You’re my favorite Asshole <3 B,” from the ignition to scratch the paint on the side of his stupid car.
Whose problem am I, then
? I want to scream. Where am I supposed to go?
He drops me off at home because I don’t want him to see where Jenna lives, don’t want his gaze to defile my safe haven. Jenna and Mrs. Williams are there not five minutes later to pick me up and actually take me to lunch, where—halfway through the salad—I excuse myself to go to the bathroom because I can’t stop the flood of tears.
I refuse to open the stall for Jenna when she comes into the bathroom. I tell her that I’m feeling a little sick and I’ll be right out, but Jenna ignores me. She lies flat on the floor and scoots under the stall door. Her light blue dress is covered in God knows what now, but I don’t think about it as she wraps my head in a bear hug and my nose is filled with the smell of her perfume.
I tell her everything Dad said, about how terrible it was to hear that Bianca is already pregnant, about how I must have known things weren’t going to work out between him and Mom.
Jenna lets me dampen the front of her dress for a long while before pulling back and saying, “That’s not all.”
I shake my head, and more tears fall as I tell her what my father said about exploiting Jenna and her parents before they get rid of me. An ugly sob escapes my throat, and it clashes strangely with Jenna’s exasperated sigh in the echo chamber of the stall.
“Oh, for God’s sakes, Amelia. Is that what this is about? This is why I slid around on a dirty bathroom floor?”
She tears some toilet paper from the dispenser and roughly wipes it across my eyes and nose. As she mops my face, she mutters words like ridiculous and absurd and melodramatic.
When she’s finished, Jenna looks me in the eyes and enunciates, “Amelia Griffin: I hereby declare that you will be my worst and most persistent problem forever and ever. Now, can we go back to eating lunch? Please?”
“But how? How could you know?” I ask, and my words drip out watery and blue over my thick tongue.
Jenna rolls her eyes and juts out her hand, pinky extended. “I pinky promise, okay? Good? Good. Now stop crying. Of all the things to cry over. I thought maybe he told you that you were going to have to come live with him and his terrible hair in Florida. Now that would be something to cry about.”
I laughed easier for the rest of the day, easy in the knowledge that if I had to be a problem, at least I had somewhere to belong.
* * *
Valerie is teaching an adult student at the piano when I come into the shop. I hurry to run upstairs and hide in my borrowed bed, unseen, but she steps out from behind the piano and motions me over.
“Amelia, back so soon? Where’s that boy?”
“Still at the fort,” I say, trying to keep my voice neutral.
She stares at me over the rim of her glasses, her mouth quirked in thought.
“Was he rude to you?”
“No,” I lie. I’m not about to rat him out to Valerie. “No, he had some work to do, so I walked back.”
Valerie’s eyes narrow. “I am certain that is a fabrication. No matter, I will deal with him after I finish up this lesson. In the meantime, make yourself at home. I’d keep to the shop for the rest of the afternoon if I were you, dear. There’s a mighty storm coming this way and I’d hate for you to find yourself caught in it.”
I’m too emotionally wrought to try to deflect the oncoming rain with my imagined powers, too tired wondering where I belong now, so I head up the stairs and wrangle a lunch of tomato soup and grilled cheese from Mr. Larson. I sit on a worn couch and watch the sky darken alarmingly over the grove of trees surrounding the store, feeling—stupidly—a little guilty for causing the thunderstorm.
With my first mouthful of hot soup, a crash of thunder shakes the walls. By the last bite of my sandwich, the electricity has gone out, rendering the store eerily quiet as most of the customers flee to the safety of their homes.
I’m about to go upstairs and nap to the sound of rain pounding on the roof when, I swear on Jenna’s grave, I hear a distant shout.
Help!
“Valerie?” I call uncertainly. “Mr. Larson? Did you hear that?”
There’s some general clanging from the café and a muffled “Hear what, now?” from Mr. Larson. Valerie startles me with her close-in-proximity sigh as she makes her way up the stairs to the second floor.
“I didn’t hear anything,” she says.
“I thought I heard somebody calling for help.”
“Only the storm, girl. The wind plays tricks up here. Help me collect the emergency flashlights, won’t you?”
“Sure,” I say, but I’m conflicted.
I know I heard something, a cry for help carried on the back of a clever wind. I stand suspended between Valerie’s retreating form and the stairs, between reality and another realm, where imagination and actuality are nearly indistinguishable.
Anybody?
The voice is louder. Like it’s right by my ear.
I didn’t know when Jenna died. I didn’t feel a disturbance in the Force or have any kind of premonition, and I hate myself for it.
Help!
“Are you coming, Amelia?” Valerie calls.
I don’t answer; I just run.
It makes no sense, but I sprint down the staircase and out the front door, losing my worn-out flats in the squelching mud and not caring. What if I’m right? What if somebody needs my help?
I’ve never been athletic, but my legs are sure and strong as I race across the flooding two lanes of deserted road, down the hill to the beach that earlier today was filled with kids wading in the shallows. There is a pull inside me, a stirring that feels like intuition mixed with knowing how a story is supposed to end, chapters before the conclusion. The pull is telling me where to go. In the distance, a lighthouse lamp winks in and out of the torrents of rain and the high, high splashing waves.
I’m coming! I don’t say it aloud, but somehow the wind will carry it where it needs to go. Hang on. I’m coming.
The rain is falling in sheets and I’m soaked through when I reach the edge of the lake. The waves are diligent in their insistence that they could hold their own in the roughest of oceans. I can feel their spray through the rain. They crash against the base of the lighthouse with such ferocity that I’m sure it will go tumbling into the water. Even I, a keen whale watcher, cannot conjure any dorsal fins poking up from the choppy surf.
But I do see Nolan, a few yards away, standing in front of the narrow, rocky peninsula that juts out to the lighthouse. He’s hunched forward like he’s screaming or vomiting, the waves almost licking the toes of his shoes. He covers his ears with clenched fists, and in the eerie light of the storm he looks like he’s drowning on land.
“Nolan!” I yell. “Nolan, what are you doing?”
He jerks his head toward me, his eyes wild.
“Wally.” He points to the lighthouse. I don’t hear the words so much as see them. “I … I can’t. I can’t do it.”
I squint, and in a flash of lightning between one wave and the next, I make out Wally, huddled against the lighthouse, his tall body pressed flush against the bolted door.
“Can’t, can’t, can’t.” It’s a litany from Nolan’s lips, and I wonder if he even knows he is saying it.
My brain flashes to Jenna, to her explanations I refused to hear about her accidental meeting with Endsley at the festival. A panic attack, she called it, and I had doubted her; I wanted her to come and get me.
But, looking at Nolan, at the whites of his eyes, his distress, I know I couldn’t leave him here, even if it meant seeing Jenna again. It’s a startling thought, but the same wind that brought me the sound of Nolan’s terror through the storm lets me hear Jenna’s snort, and for one shining moment, her assured voice.
Don’t be stupid, Amelia. He’s your problem now.
“Wally!” I call. “Wally, come!”
It becomes very evident that Wally would rather die and haunt the lighthouse than let us miss the opportunity of retrieving his sorry tail ourselves. I groan.
“We can reach him!” I sho
ut to Nolan, grabbing one of his hands and pulling him toward the lighthouse. “Don’t let go.”
Nolan jerks away when I begin to tug us down the rough path, literally digging his heels into the beach.
“I can’t,” he repeats. “I can’t.”
I point to my feet. “I lost my shoes. It’s too slick for me to go it alone. I can guide us out there, but I need you to work as an anchor. I’ll go first and grab him by the collar, but I need you to not let go.”
Nolan’s eyes dart from me to the lighthouse, like an animal trapped in a corner with no means of escape.
“I … I can’t.” His voice sounds far away. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. God, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”
His voice fractures into a million sharp pieces, and he looks out at the waves like they will drag him under and kill him … like they already have once before and now he’s going to be made to drown again. His eyes are wet with tears and rain, but there’s something else there, too. Anger. The defeated kind. The kind that only comes after long nights of despair and bewilderment and wondering what you could have done differently, if you could have saved them.
It hits me all at once: Nolan Endsley has lost someone, too. And I’d wager it had something to do with water.
I squeeze his hand once, trying to catch his eye, but he’s unmoving, staring at the lake, and we’re running out of time. I’m worried Wally will try to move on his own and get swept out beyond reach.
I have to do it alone.
In all the stories I’ve read of kick-ass women who save the day, none of them have ever been short, muscularly puny, and devoid of magical abilities. Come to think of it, none of them risked life and limb to save a mongrel from a watery grave, either. They were all too smart for that.
Amelia Unabridged Page 11