Chapter 13

CHAPTER

13

FIFTEEN YEARS AGO

“Stop looking at it,” Izzy ordered. “You’re making me antsy.”

It was an especially dark and blustery November, the sidewalk cold where we sat with our backs against the stucco wall outside Baltimore Premier Cinemas. That year, I’d gotten my driver’s license, finally convinced my parents to add me to the cell phone plan, and Izzy had dragged me to the midnight premiere of The Twilight Saga: New Moon. We’d camped out since two that afternoon, until only the lights in the parking lot and the orange glow of a Fantastic Mr. Fox poster illuminated this side of the building.

I closed the sliding keyboard on my phone with a sheepish smile. “Sorry.”

“Seriously,” Izzy said, but it was very hard to take her seriously when her arms were folded over a Team Edward shirt, Robert Pattinson’s pale face peeking out from behind her colorful jelly bracelets. She’d flat-ironed her thick black waves until they were pin-straight just for the occasion, with a side part so dramatic that a chunk of hair kept falling over her right eye. “Didn’t Einstein say in his theory of relativity that the more time you spend waiting around for something, the longer it takes to actually happen?”

“I’m pretty sure the theory of relativity has nothing to do with waiting on a text message,” I pointed out, unzipping my backpack to tuck my phone away. Out of sight, out of mind. “I won’t check it again until we’re in the theater, and then I’ll mute it. Promise,” I tacked on, because she didn’t look convinced.

Teddy was nearing the end of his second semester at Northampton Community College, and between that and working to graduate high school a year early, the past few months had kept him incredibly busy. Texting had made things easier—instead of needing to boot up the computer to log into Myspace, we’d send messages throughout the week, but his responses grew less and less frequent. We’d had to put The Long-Distance History Club on hold because he said he couldn’t keep up. A paperback waited patiently on my dresser, pages marked with colorful sticky flags. He swore he’d make time over winter break, and he’d already asked whether I could fit a few of my favorite books in my suitcase for him to borrow this summer, but that was a long way off.

Whatever feelings I’d started to develop for Teddy, I’d shoved them down for the sake of preserving our friendship. Sort of like packing my suitcase for camp every year: slightly overfull of unvoiced thoughts and words and emotions, but if I rolled some of them into a tight little ball and threw my weight against them, I was able to make it all fit long enough to zip it closed. But I still found myself checking my phone a little too often, my heart skipping a beat whenever I got a text message notification.

They didn’t let us into the theater until half an hour before showtime. While Izzy extracted contraband bags of Sour Patch Kids and Flaming Hot Cheetos from places I didn’t even know they could fit, I unzipped my backpack and checked my phone. No notifications. Which meant he still hadn’t answered the message I sent over fourteen hours ago, but I opened my texts anyway.

“You’re obsessed,” Izzy hissed, shoving a box of Mike and Ikes at me.

“Am not,” I muttered, even as I reread our messages from this morning.

Teddy: Good morning. What are you doing today?

Clara: Meeting Izzy in Baltimore! We’re going to the mall and then we’re going to see the new Twilight movie

Clara: I know it’s kind of silly but Izzy’s read all the books

Clara: Speaking of reading I was wondering what have you been reading for school? Anything interesting? I was thinking we could restart Long-Distance History Club(1/2)

Clara: if I read some of the same books that your teachers are assigning you. That way you don’t have to do a bunch of extra work. What do you think?(2/2)

The lights dimmed around me as I stared at the bright screen. Why hadn’t he replied? Perhaps my last couple texts simply hadn’t gone through. That sometimes happened with the longer texts—only one half of the message would find its way to the other end, the other half lost in cyberspace. I typed out a follow-up text asking whether he’d received the messages, but hesitated before hitting send. Would it look desperate if I texted him again?

I deleted the drafted message and silenced my phone before shoving it in my backpack. If he didn’t answer by tomorrow, maybe I’d text him again then. Or maybe I wouldn’t—at least, that’s what I told myself. It wasn’t like he was my boyfriend, and the last thing I wanted to be was obsessed. We were friends. Nothing more.

We filed out of the dark theater, moviegoers chattering excitedly around us. I fished my phone out of my backpack. I had several missed calls from Mom, but more importantly, Teddy had finally texted back.

Teddy: Sorry for the delay, have a paper due tomorrow

Teddy: That sounds good. I’ve got a bunch of assigned reading. Just a minute

Teddy: How was the movie?

He followed this with a grainy photograph of a course syllabus, packed with unfamiliar articles on early American history. The texts were hours old already, so there was a very good chance he’d already gone to bed, but I typed out a quick reply.

Clara: No worries! Movie was pretty good.

Clara: I haven’t read any of those. I’ll have to see if I can find them

“I can’t decide who’s hotter: Robert Pattinson or Kristen Stewart.” Beside me, Izzy was chattering happily about the movie as we made our way across the chilly parking lot. “I mean, did you see that moment when Edward was about to expose himself to all those people? Goose bumps just thinking about it. Goose bumps. Look at my arm.” She shoved the arm in question out in front of me, nearly clotheslining me because my eyes were glued to the phone screen.

“I’m not sure ‘expose himself’ is the right choice of words,” I said, pushing her arm down.

“Whatever, you know what I mean.” She scrunched her nose. “And can you please stop obsessing over your phone? Staring at it isn’t going to make him text you back any sooner.”

“I know,” I said with a sigh, tucking my phone in my pocket so that I could feel if it vibrated. We climbed into my car, a 1999 Volvo S40 that I’d bought with money earned babysitting for the next-door neighbors, the peeling blue paint tinged greenish by the warm glow of the streetlight. I’d left the volume turned up on the stereo and it blasted a Taking Back Sunday song as soon as the engine turned over. I turned the dial to low and drove to the nearest McDonald’s because it was the only fast-food place still open. The air inside the car was thick with tension and cheap pine-tree air freshener. Izzy had her hands in her lap, twisting and stretching a pale pink jelly bracelet she’d pulled from her wrist.

“You need to just talk to him,” she said after we placed our orders and I pulled up to the first window. “Like, tell him you want him to text you more often or something. That way you’re not just sitting around”—she made a vague gesture at me, jelly bracelet still in hand—“obsessing.”

I opened my door to dump out the remnants of an iced coffee. “I’m trying to talk to him.” I tossed the cup over my shoulder and into the back seat, where it would join the rest of my hoard because I hadn’t cleaned my car out since the day I bought it off some guy on Craigslist. “But I can’t just ask him to text me more. It’s not like that.”

“Okay, then you need to do something about it,” she argued instead. “It’s like Bella with Jacob, right?”

I was a little distracted as I accepted my change from the cashier. “I’m not following.” I dumped the coins in one of the drink holders.

“They’re friends, right? Practically best friends. But then they’re more than friends, or Bella thinks maybe they could be more than friends, and she has to decide whether she wants to be more than friends or not. You know?”

“Okay,” I said slowly. My phone buzzed in my pocket and I resisted the temptation to check it.

“And sometimes when you’re not totally sure how you feel, you have to just”—another indecipherable wave of her jelly band—“ do something. Try your feelings on for size. See whether it all makes sense.”

I wasn’t sure when or how Izzy had become an expert in feelings—I suspected it had something to do with the tutelage of one Stephanie Meyer—but I gave her a blank look, shaking my head. My feelings were supposed to stay packed away and zipped up tight, and I was terrified that if I unboxed them, tried them on and found that they didn’t quite fit, I’d never be able to go back to not knowing.

“That’s it,” she said. “I’m loaning you the books. You’re all into vampires anyway, about time you actually read them.” I opened my mouth to protest—I wasn’t sure I counted the vampires in Twilight among actual vampires—but Izzy cut me off, pointing a finger in my face. “And don’t you dare tell me you’re not going to read them. You have your whole book club thing with Teddy. You can make time for my book club, too.”

My phone vibrated again and this time I couldn’t resist the urge to check it. My heart sank into my stomach where it sat, a dead weight.

Parental Unit: Why aren’t you answering your phone?!

Parental Unit: you need to come home and watch Reagan. NOW.

Parental Unit: it’s your father. There’s been an accident

“See?” Izzy said, self-satisfied. “I told you. As soon as you stop staring at your phone, he texts back.”

“It’s not Teddy,” I breathed, turning the screen to show her. Her face was illuminated whitish-blue in the dark car and her eyes widened as she scanned the messages. “It’s my mom.”

A fall. That was how Mom explained it as she hurried out the door, keys jangling. He fell while he was on a job. The eventual discharge paperwork was more descriptive: Dad had fallen from a boom lift while away on a weekend job near Richmond, suffering a pelvic fracture in two separate places. Mom made the three-hour drive down to Chippenham Hospital that night. His recovery would be a long and arduous one, filled with surgeries and lots of uncertainty, but one thing was certain: he wouldn’t be going back to work any time soon. There was a chance he’d be able to get worker’s comp, if he could prove that the fall was the fault of his employer and not an error in judgment, but there were no guarantees. Mom sat me down in the living room the week of Thanksgiving and explained, as delicately as she could, that she was going to have to look for a job.

“You can’t get a job,” I said, like it was simple, a matter of fact. She’d always been at home. I knew that she had taken night classes when I was younger and earned a bachelor’s in childhood development—she was still paying back the loans—but that was because she thought it would help with the homeschooling. It wasn’t like she ever planned to work.

“Yes, I can,” she told me. “You have a year left of school—”

“A year and a half,” I corrected.

“—which you’re more than capable of finishing on your own. I’m not sure I’ve taught you anything since you discovered Wikipedia.”

I stared, only half-seeing, at the unfinished puzzle scattered around the coffee table—a picturesque cottage fractured into a thousand pieces. She wasn’t wrong. As I’d gotten older, I’d spent fewer days hunched over the kitchen table with Mom hovering over my shoulder and more days cross-legged on my bed, surrounded by textbooks with my music blaring. “What about Reagan?” I asked, changing tactics. “I can’t sit around babysitting her all day. I still have schoolwork to finish, and I’m supposed to start thinking about what colleges I want to apply to in the fall.”

Mom shrugged. “She’s old enough. We’ll just have to enroll her in public school.”

She applied to every opening she could find, but with fifteen plus years out of the workforce, she only earned a call back for a sales associate position at the Bath & Body Works in Salisbury. It was surreal, how quickly it all changed. My parents had fallen in love young, the perfect, cookie-cutter life practically falling into their laps, and in a second, it was all ripped out from under them.

They argued more. Shouting matches over bills and debts and the future. I’d always thought of them as a cohesive unit, a model of what love was supposed to look like, but I started to see them more as two separate people—a begrudging alliance, tolerating the other’s presence, but there wasn’t any joy in it. I had trouble remembering if there ever was. Maybe if they had taken things slow, I thought, planned their lives a little better… maybe it all would’ve been easier on them.

Maybe, if you were careful, you wouldn’t have to struggle to hold it all together, even as your life was coming apart at the seams.

For my part, I focused on finishing out my junior year. I binged all the Twilight books in less than a week. I also found PDFs of the same papers Teddy was assigned, texting him my thoughts as I went and asking what his professor and classmates had had to say. We talked on the phone a couple times over winter break, on Christmas and his birthday, like always, and he broke tradition by calling me shortly before midnight on New Year’s Eve to wish me a happy new year and promise that things would balance out once he was finished with his senior year of homeschooling and could focus on college full time.

Long-Distance History Club once again fell by the wayside during the spring, which was fine, because both of us were busy. But as the months wore on, I started to feel lonely being at home for the first time in my life. I spent a lot of time blasting music in my room, flipping through books I’d already read, nothing quite holding my interest. Mom worked long hours, Reagan was enrolled in first grade, and Dad mostly stayed in bed watching daytime television, except on the days he had physical therapy.

I missed camp. I missed my friends. I managed to tough it out until spring break, at which point I knew I needed to get out of the house, at least for the day, as a matter of self-preservation.

Clara: What are you doing this weekend? I could use a distraction right about now.

Teddy: My schedule’s wide open.

Clara: Meet in Middletown on Sat for lunch?

It shouldn’t have felt like anything out of the ordinary—we’d hung out before, texted often enough that I counted him among my closest friends, if not the closest. But with my phone lying on the quilted comforter next to my calculus textbook, the hours wearing on, I started to get nervous. Maybe I overstepped, made it sound too much like a date. He’d made it clear he was busy, at least until summer. When he finally texted back, it was curt, to the point.

Teddy: I have another idea.