Chapter 7

CHAPTER

7

SIXTEEN YEARS AGO

We kept in touch.

Mom was wary when I flashed her my forearm on the drive home from camp, the first week of October. She wrinkled her nose at the phone number like it was a new tattoo. “No boyfriends until you’re eighteen,” she reminded me. Her voice had a special sort of twang to it, impossible to pinpoint, which always prompted strangers to ask where she was from: half Tennessee, half Eastern Shore.

“He’s not a boyfriend,” I said, tugging the sleeve of my sweatshirt back over my wrist.

“Why?” Reagan asked from the car seat behind me.

I pivoted to look at her. Her blond hair was chopped into a lopsided bowl cut—the handiwork of our mother and a pair of dull sewing scissors—and a packet of Annie’s Organic Bunny Snacks were crushed in her tiny fist. The bunnies in question were strewn around the back seat of the car, burrowing between the seats. She’d celebrated her fifth birthday while I was away at camp, and though I didn’t mind missing out on the mermaid-themed bounce house, I was sort of bummed that I didn’t get any of Mom’s famous red velvet cupcakes. “Because he’s not,” I said.

“Why?”

“Because I said so.”

“Have some patience with your sister, please,” Mom interrupted. “This ‘why’ thing, it’s very normal at this age, part of natural childhood development. It’s their way of showing that they’re curious about the world around them.”

I faced forward and folded my arms, sinking into my seat. “Well, she doesn’t need to be curious about my personal life.”

In the end, I had to promise not to hog the phone line all day, and to only make one phone call a week, and a whole heap of other rules Mom had never bothered enforcing when I wanted to call Izzy—maybe because Izzy and I rarely talked on the phone. But worst of all, she insisted I use the green wall-mounted phone in the dining room, where the coiled cord prevented me from wandering any farther than the kitchen.

It took me a couple weeks to work up the courage to call. Mom was washing dishes by hand in the kitchen, the faucet running and silverware clattering around the stainless-steel sink. Reagan was playing with a See ’N Say (she kept winding the arrow back to the same place, to the same refrain of the cat says meow every few seconds). I plugged my free ear with a finger so I could hear better.

A deep voice answered on the second ring. “Harrison residence.”

“Hi, um, my name is Clara Fernsby. I went to camp with your son and I was wondering if—”

“Clara,” the voice said flatly, “this is Teddy.”

“Oh.” Warmth colored my cheeks; I was relieved he wasn’t here to see it. “You sound older on the phone.”

“I know,” he said with a sigh. “Telemarketers are always trying to sell me things.”

It was a far cry from the Are your parents home, sweetie? that I got every time the pollsters called to ask who we planned to vote for. I knew it wasn’t his intention, but it made me feel a little silly and childish by comparison.

“How old are you, anyway?” I asked.

“Fourteen.”

“When’s your birthday?” I demanded, because I was certain he was older than me, if only by a few months.

“December twenty-ninth.”

My mouth dropped open. “Shut up.”

From the kitchen sink, my mom shot me a disapproving look.

“What?” Teddy asked.

“My birthday is the thirtieth.” This seemed like a very significant discovery, more than mere happenstance. He was older than me… by one whole day.

“It sucks, doesn’t it?” he lamented. “December birthdays. Everyone always forgets. Especially when it’s right after Christmas.”

“I’ll remember your birthday if you’ll remember mine,” I promised, and I marked it on my Pirates of the Caribbean calendar—like I’d ever forget.

We didn’t see each other all year, but we tried to talk on the phone every couple of weeks. Teddy lived three hours away in Allentown, Pennsylvania, home to a life-sized replica of the Liberty Bell and Dorney Park where public-school students might’ve come home from a six-hour school day only to slog through hours of algebra homework or assigned readings, we lived by our own schedules. We still had curriculums to follow and independent study teachers that made sure our educations were up to speed, but there were days when I’d gotten all my work done early in the month, and so—with no friends nearby—I’d wake up and spend a random Tuesday binge-watching those ridiculous documentaries on the History Channel about aliens building the pyramids, or trying to teach myself how to crochet.

It was a special sort of freedom, one that gave me plenty of room to stretch my legs and grow into whatever I felt like growing into. I enjoyed being homeschooled. Teddy hated it. “Freedom doesn’t matter when you can’t even see your friends,” he argued during one of our many conversations about it. “And I suck at talking to people. If I went to regular school, I’d probably talk to people all the time. I’d have to be better at it.”

It was a stormy November evening and the weather had forced me inside. Rain beat against my dark bedroom window and I had the phone on speaker on the pillow next to my head, my arms burrowed beneath the blankets. “You talk to me just fine,” I pointed out.

“That’s different,” he mumbled, but he didn’t explain why it was different.

“What about your parents?” I asked. “You have to talk to them, sometimes.”

“My dad’s not really the talkative type,” he said, a little awkwardly.

“Oh.” I wasn’t sure what else to say. My own father was a man of few words, but I never felt like I couldn’t talk to him. And my mom was a great listener. So I tried to cheer him up the only way I knew how. “I guess that means you’re stuck talking to me.”

The week after Christmas, I remembered to call him on his birthday and he remembered to call me on mine. My mom even let me stay on the phone for an hour instead of the usual forty-five minutes because the holidays always put her in an agreeable mood. After the New Year, the days began to blur together. Dad worked as a lineman, which often took him out of state for weeks at a time, so when I wasn’t working on schoolwork, I’d keep Mom company—cold, gray afternoons huddled around the glass coffee table in front of the fireplace, drinking hot chocolate with marshmallows and working on jigsaw puzzles while Reagan played with Tinker Toys on the braided rug. Mom never asked me much about Teddy after that day in the car, but I had a feeling she listened in on my side of the conversation sometimes. “If you ever decide you’d rather enroll in public school, all you have to do is ask,” she told me unprompted one evening while we worked on the outline of a thousand-piece puzzle of La Grande Jatte by Georges Seurat.

It wasn’t the first time she’d given me a choice. I went to public school until third grade, but in a classroom with thirty other kids, I never really thrived. I was impatient and easily distracted, struggling with the pacing of the curriculum—I’d work ahead, get in trouble because I didn’t wait for instructions, and then turn around and fall behind. I came home one day to find my mom seated at the dining room table, my lackluster report card and a whole mess of paperwork spread in front of her. She had asked me if I’d rather do my schoolwork at home, at my own pace. I said yes and never looked back.

“I know it would be easier to make friends,” she said now.

I shook my head as I sorted out all the edge pieces on top of a coffee table book. 56 Landmarks to See before You Die. There was a photograph of Stonehenge on the cover. “I like the friends I have.”

In May, Izzy had a sleepover for her fifteenth birthday and invited a couple girls from her neighborhood; they listened to music I wasn’t allowed to listen to at home and teased me for not knowing the lyrics. “You should get bangs,” one of them told me. “You have a long face. Bangs would suit you better.” And then she exchanged a look with one of the other girls before bursting into a fit of laughter.

When I got home the next day, I called Teddy to complain about them. But that didn’t stop me from asking my mom to schedule an appointment with her hairdresser, or from sneaking onto Dad’s computer to use LimeWire to secretly download songs by Nelly Furtado and The Black Eyed Peas and burn them to CDs. I wasn’t even sure I liked the music, really; I just didn’t want to be put in the position of not knowing and embarrassing myself again.

June brought with it three straight weeks of rain, and the remainder of summer was too hot and humid to spend much time outside, except for the days my parents would drive us up to Oxford Beach.

And then, before I knew it, it was September again.

It had only been a few months since I last saw Izzy, but it felt like we had a million things to talk about. Her family had gone on a Princess Cruise in June to Cozumel, Mexico, and she’d met a girl onboard from Norway named Ingrid, whom she claimed to be soulmates with and messaged every day on MSN. (When she later moved to Portugal chasing after a college girlfriend, I reflected that it was part of a long pattern that perhaps started here.) Her parents had finally allowed her to get a cell phone, which made me a little jealous until I realized it was a pay-as-you-go phone and they had only loaded ten dollars onto it in case of emergencies, so she wasn’t allowed to make calls to friends.

I didn’t know why, but I hadn’t told her anything about my friendship with Teddy. She must have guessed, at least on some level, that I had kept my promise to be his friend after that day in the cafeteria, but she never asked about it. Maybe it was a simple oversight—it wasn’t like Izzy and I talked on the phone all that often, so when we saw each other in person for her birthday, we had so much to catch up on that mentioning my phone calls with Teddy didn’t feel all that important. But there was also a part of me that wanted to keep him to myself. I was convinced that Izzy wouldn’t understand him the same way I did, and there was the risk that if I welcomed her into our friendship, that illusion would be shattered.

But now that we were back at camp, it was impossible to keep my two friendships separate.

I interrupted Izzy’s story about swimming at the community pool to shout Teddy’s name when I spotted him over by the rec building. He was feeding dollar bills into the vending machine, a weighty-looking duffel bag hanging from a shoulder, but he turned and waved wide-armed when he saw me. I raced across the field and flung my arms around his waist. His duffel bag landed in the grass with a soft thump as he enveloped me in his arms, soft breaths rustling the top of my hair. We never hugged goodbye the previous autumn, but it seemed like the appropriate thing to do, given we’d been friends for over a year now. But even having never hugged him before, he was broader in my arms than I would’ve expected. He was already tall last year, but now he was less gangly, a little more filled out. He’d told me on the phone that he’d put on nine pounds since his birthday, but I didn’t realize the difference nine pounds could make.

“You were supposed to find me first thing,” I said, breathless, as we drew back.

“I wanted to surprise you.” He stooped to grab a Pepsi out of the vending machine, which he handed to me. I stared at it, nonplussed. “To pay you back for last year.”

I didn’t have the heart to tell him that he wasn’t supposed to pay me back, or that my family drank Coca-Cola like it was their religion. From this moment on, I was a Pepsi girl.

His brown eyes flitted over me, everywhere all at once. “You changed your hair.”

I combed my bangs out of my eyes with my fingers—they were long and side-swept, and they kept getting in the way. “What do you think?” I asked. “They’re kind of annoying, but—”

“I think they look great.”

We grinned at each other like idiots—or rather, I grinned like an idiot and he just grinned, because even at his happiest, Teddy’s smile was a little reserved. Like he was scared to let himself be fully happy.

“You’re Darvish’s friend,” a less-than-certain voice said at my shoulder. “From the cafeteria last summer.”

I hadn’t realized that Izzy had followed me over, but of course she had, because I’d left her standing alone in the grass mid-sentence. With a twinge of guilt at my poor manners, I reintroduced the two of them, adding, “He’s not just Darvish’s friend. He’s my friend, too.”

There was something a bit guarded in the way they greeted each other—for Izzy’s part, she was maybe understandably suspicious that I hadn’t mentioned Teddy all year, and even more suspicious that he was friends with Darvish, of all people. After a minute, Teddy offered up a quick excuse about needing to stow his things in the cabin and claim his bunk, and Izzy pinned me under a curious look, her amber eyes wide.

“What?” I asked, self-conscious.

“Nothing. He looks different,” she said, and I got the impression that her piercing amber eyes were seeing right through me.

“Vikings relied on the North Star to navigate, you know,” I announced. It was a warm September night the second week of camp, and I’d planted my butt in the dewy grass beside the telescope, checking items off a list titled “Celestial Bodies.” We’d already successfully located Saturn and Mars, and now I absently added Polaris to the list. It was the easiest to find and we probably should have started with it anyway. Ms. Fischer had given us a worksheet with planets and major stars we were supposed to locate; it would’ve been easy to cheat, I thought, except for the fear that if Ms. Fischer caught us in a lie—like claiming to have seen a planet that wasn’t actually visible—we’d never hear the end of it.

Teddy drew back from the telescope to consult the book splayed in his lap, borrowed from the rec room. “I’m pretty sure most people relied on the stars before they had modern technology.”

“They had already invented compasses in China, like, hundreds of years ago. By the eleventh century, I think it was.” I knit my brow and stared unseeing at the lights on the other side of the dark lake, trying to recall a particular chapter in A History of Maritime Technology —a hefty tome that I’d checked out of the library during a burst of interest in The Golden Age of Piracy. “Or maybe it was the tenth.”

Teddy laughed under his breath as he twisted the knob to adjust the focus. “Where do you learn all this stuff?”

I twiddled the cable to my headphones between my fingers. I’d brought my portable CD player out here with me, but we’d been talking so much that I’d left my headphones dangling around my neck, the music paused. “I read a lot. And I watch documentaries. One of the perks of being home all the time.”

“Why history, though?” he asked. “No offense, you just seem too…” He drew back from the eyepiece, frowning. “Interesting, I guess, to care about a bunch of boring names and dates.”

“But history’s so much more than names and dates,” I said. “It’s about people.”

“The one thing I don’t understand,” he muttered before returning to the eyepiece.

“You might understand them better if you read about them more. Humans haven’t changed all that much.” I meant to pause, to wait and see whether I’d piqued his interest, but excited words were already bubbling to the surface. “There’s graffiti in Pompeii that just says ‘Aufidius was here.’ And there’s this kid’s homework from Russia like eight hundred years ago that’s full of doodles of his teacher and stuff, the same way people doodle in their notebooks today.” I hesitated, then added, “I can lend you some books, if you want.”

His expression was doubtful. “You brought them with you to camp?”

“No. I mean, not all of them. Right now I’m reading this super old book by this Roman guy called Tacitus, all about emperors and politics and stuff.” Not that he had asked about any of that. My cheeks warmed; I was thankful he couldn’t see me blushing in the dark. “But I could maybe mail you some of them.” I had no idea how much it cost to mail books. The only thing I’d ever mailed was a letter to the president when I was nine, asking for his signature on a petition I’d written to get more books for my local library. “You could read them and then we could talk about them over the phone. It would be sort of like our own book club. Except I’d have to read them first before sending them to you. Or you’d have to convince your mom to let you buy your own copy.”

“That sounds sort of fun, I guess.” He grinned. “The Long-Distance History Club: transcending time and space.”

I beamed right back at him. “I’ve got a copy of Lectures on the Philosophy of History in my backpack. I’ll loan it to you later.”

“I’m looking forward to it already.” Teddy’s soft gaze lingered on me for a few seconds before he returned to the telescope. He scrunched up his face as he peered through the viewfinder and inched the telescope to the left. His glasses were hooked in the collar of his T-shirt.

I picked at a blade of grass. “My mom offered to let me switch to public school,” I confessed. “A couple months ago. I think she overheard us talking.”

“You’re lucky.”

“Yeah, but I don’t want to go to public school, so it doesn’t really make a difference.”

He pulled back from the telescope again, this time looking at me with an unreadable expression. “Why not?”

“Well, the girls are probably kinda mean, for one,” I said, thinking of the girls at Izzy’s birthday party. “Plus, if I went to public school, then I wouldn’t get to come here and see you. Or any of my other friends.” He didn’t say anything, but his thick eyebrows pinched together. “What?” I asked.

“Nothing,” he said, too quickly. He pretended to busy himself with the telescope, though I had a feeling he’d lost track of what he was looking for. “It’s just—” He straightened up. “It feels weird that you have other friends and I don’t.”

“Just Izzy,” I said. “And anyway, you have Darvish.”

“Yeah,” he mumbled, “I guess that’s true.”

But he didn’t seem entirely reassured, so I racked my brain for something else to say, and for some reason, one of my dad’s proverbs popped into my head. It felt apt, in a way. “My dad always says ‘A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.’” As soon as the words slipped out, I realized how odd they were. Was I the bird? I hadn’t meant to imply that he shouldn’t have other friends, no matter how much the thought inspired an odd sort of jealousy in me.

Teddy nodded sagely. “Abraham Lincoln.”

I choked on a laugh. “What?”

“It’s just this joke I found on the internet,” he said sheepishly. Even by the milky light of the moon, I could swear the tips of his ears were turning red, and he hunched his shoulders as he resumed his search of the night sky. “People always attribute quotes to the wrong people. So every time someone quotes something, I pretend Abraham Lincoln said it.”

I grinned, but the urge to correct him was strong. “It’s not a quote, it’s a proverb.”

“Proverbs can be attributed to the wrong people, too.”

“Proverbs can’t be attributed to anyone. That’s why they’re proverbs. They’ve been around so long that no one remembers who said them.”

“Found it,” he announced. I shot him a quizzical look. “Mercury. Do you want to see?”

I marked Mercury on the worksheet and pulled my headphones from my neck, setting my CD player aside. I pushed myself off the grass and brushed the butt of my jeans with my hands. Teddy’s eyes tracked the movement for a split second before he tore them away, Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat. He stepped aside so that I could peer into the eyepiece. It was all black, but then I blinked and shifted and it wasn’t: just slightly off-center in the vast nothingness was a pale white sliver, like a pinkie nail.

“It’s so blurry,” I said.

“You can adjust it—”

I knew full well that you could adjust the settings on a telescope, and I was about to tell him as much, but then he was standing right behind me, and my brain screeched to a halt. He guided my hand toward the knob. His face wasn’t far from my ear, and he was breathing through his nose—unsteady, wavering breaths, like he was trying to force himself to breathe normal, and suddenly I was aware that I wasn’t breathing at all. This wasn’t the first time we’d stood this close—we’d been tied together during the three-legged race, and that was only our second time meeting. We knew each other much better now, so this should have been less weird, but somehow, it wasn’t. “I see it,” I said, heart pounding in my throat, but he was already drawing back. I pulled my face from the telescope to find him sinking into the grass where I had been sitting.

“What are you doing?” I asked warily.

“I’m curious what you’re listening to.” He snapped my headphones over his ears and picked up the CD player, squinting at the buttons.

I couldn’t explain why, but as much as I’d been embarrassed not to know this music when I was at the sleepover, I was equally embarrassed to have Teddy catch me listening to it. “Just some stuff that Izzy’s friends showed me,” I said. “I don’t think it’s really your—”

He pressed play and a muffled, uncensored version of “I Wanna Love You” by Akon resumed mid-song, loud enough that I could hear it even without wearing the headphones. His eyes widened and his mouth went taut, like he was making a very conscious effort not to laugh. My face was on fire.

After a long couple of seconds, he took off the headphones, mussing his dark curls. “I’ll have to burn you a CD,” was all he said, handing me the player back.

I cracked a small smile. “You’ll send me music, and I’ll send you books.”