Chapter Ten
To her word, they only practiced for another hour. Ajax had explained that they had simply just run out of songs, which the rest of the group attested to. Regardless, the group was finished and putting away their instruments and shutting off their sound equipment. I made it my job to clean up the trash from the water bottles to the other snacks that Nate had brought out at another small break since I wasn’t part of the band. And before I knew it, we were ready to go.
“So, I will head back with you then?” Nate asked, confirming previous plans.
"Sure. But I am not sure why we all can't go together since my house is on the way," I suggested, feeling suddenly nervous to be alone with Nate again. His band performance had ramped up my feelings for him once again, and I wasn't sure being alone with him would be a great idea while he and Korina were fighting.
Meredith, however, looked panicked at my suggestion, which basically told me that she was arranging this situation for precisely the purpose of Nate and me being alone together.
“I’m afraid that we have to get back to my house right away. My mom puts Jesse, Ajax, and myself to work. You know, setting the table, putting out the food. That sort of thing.”
I raised my eyebrows at her in disbelief, and I saw Nate's lips twitched from the corner of my eyes. He was not buying her story either, but he kept his mouth shut.
“Tell you what, why don’t you guys go ahead and I will leave a note for my parents in case they come home early, and lock up,” he amused.
Meredith's face lit up from his suggestion, and she pulled on Ajax' arm. "What a great idea! Come on, guys."
She headed out the garage door, while the other two followed behind; Jesse was shaking his head, and Ajax rolled his eyes.
“Why do you encourage her?” I asked Nate as soon as they were out of hearing range.
"Sometimes it's easier to deal with her if she thinks she has won," he said as he wrote something on the workbench by the door that led inside to the house. Going through the drawers of the workbench, he pulled out some tape and taped his note to the inside door.
"Alright. I'm ready." He headed out of the garage, and I followed him. Punching the button to make the garage door go down and then punching in another code probably to set the alarm, he motioned me to continue to follow him down his driveway and to the left.
Standing side by side, walking down the sidewalk, we were silent for a while. I know Meredith was trying to set us back up, and it was a little cute, given everything I knew about Korina. But I had made the promise to just be friends, and I had never broken a promise no matter how strongly I felt. So I was not going to veer any conversation that way. I was about to open my mouth to ask him some innocuous, light question when he beat me to it.
“So I know that you are new to Erie, but where’d you live before?”
This wasn’t a question that really had surprised me. It was harmless and all part of the “getting to know you” background. But I was prepared to have a little fun with it.
“I lived in Jackson Township,” the corner of my mouth twitched.
“What’s there?”
“The country,” I replied, squinting at him.
“So you are originally from Jackson,” he stated.
"No, not ‘originally.' We lived somewhere else before Jackson."
“Where did you live before Jackson,” a smile danced on his lips, understanding dawning on him that I was playing with him.
“Columbiana.”
His ghost of a smile turned into a full out grin, and his eyes twinkled. “And what’s that like?”
I smiled openly back at him. “More country,” to which we both laughed.
“So then, you are really a country girl.”
I loved the grin on his face. It was so open and honest, and I couldn’t help the butterflies that fluttered in my chest as I had gotten the chance to play with him.
"I wouldn't say that we are ‘country,' but I guess we have lived a lot in the country. Our parents couldn't ever really get settled anywhere. My mom said that she liked to consider us ‘nomadic' and ‘going to where we were needed.'"
I saw something shift in Nate. It wasn’t exactly stiffness or agitation, but there was a change in him. It seemed something that I had said struck a chord within him. Again, I was about to ask, but he beat me with another question.
“So, that’s why you are in Erie? Because that’s where your mom said you guys are needed?” He asked cautiously.
I shrugged, suddenly feeling uncomfortable about where this conversation was heading. I didn’t know how to bring up the topic of my parents and that part of my past without feeling like a killjoy.
“I didn’t mean to make you feel uncomfortable,” he replied softly as if he was reading my mind.
I shrugged again, thinking of a way to bring it up without turning our conversation into something depressing. I looked around, hoping to draw inspiration from somewhere, and that's when I noticed the gated mini-mansion tucked between two average houses not far from my home. It was difficult to explain how it could look so huge with a decent amount of lawn in front and on the sides, but not seem scrunched in the lot by the smaller houses on either side. By its dimensions and size, it should have looked squished in the lot, but it didn't. It seemed to defy all logical laws of space.
“Wow,” I murmured.
Nate looked around to see what drew my attention. “Huh. I never actually noticed that house before.”
We stopped in front of the black gate, looking at this red brick mammoth. It seemed like the enormous entrance swallowed the houses on either side of it, adding to its vastness.
"You guys never saw a house before?" A gruff-voiced mocked.
I scowled, glancing at the wrap around porch. A guy in his early twenties with dark hair was sitting in a chair outside, shadowed by the porch’s awning. It was difficult to make out any details other than he was really, really pale.
"You ever seen the sun before?" I rebutted, which drew a harsh laugh from him.
“I admit that it’s been a while,” he replied.
Well, that’s a strange thing to say, I thought, but before I could articulate such a response, Nate nudged me in the side.
“Come on, let’s go.”
I heard the strange guy snicker, but I ignored him, turning away from the house and stepping in line with Nate, picking up the pace toward my house to pick up Sera.
“What a weirdo,” I remarked when we were a few houses away.
Nate dismissed my comment with a roll of his shoulders. "I would have said an ‘ass,' but yeah."
We walked a few more steps in silence before Nate remembered our previous conversation and where explaining my life might turn into more of a complication.
“So, Sera is your mom?” Nate inquired.
I sighed, closing my eyes. “No. Sera is my sister. Our parents were killed in a car accident a few years ago. And we moved to Erie because Sera found a better job. Flora was really the only one who felt that we moved where the universe told us we were needed.”
“So, Flora was your mom?”
“For everything that matters, she was my mom.”
Nate looked at me a little strangely.
“I’m adopted,” I clarified. “I never met my mom . . . or dad for that matter.”
Nate gave me an indiscernible look. “You are complicated.”
I laughed. “Says the guy that dislikes his own girlfriend.”
Nate gave me a resigned look, but before we could get on that topic again, we reached my house, and I slowed down. It was a small ranch style home with brick layering the bottom and then light tan siding covered the rest of the house. The tan color made the house look a little dirty, but it was Sera and my first house since our parents died, so it didn't bother us.
“This is our home,” I announced, feeling happy about sharing something personal with new people.
"You are more than welcomed to come in while I look for Sera," I men
tioned as we headed toward our front entrance, which was white, making the house look "dirtier."
I walked in with Nate following behind. I glanced back at him and noticed his awed expression as he was looking around at the mass of boxes everywhere.
“I see you guys just moved in,” he remarked.
I snickered. "Yeah, we did. We got here a few days ago. But really, everywhere we have gone has looked like this."
“It must be kinda sad and lonely to be uprooted all the time.”
I shrugged. “It never really bothered me before. I never really had a reason for caring whether we stayed or not.”
Until now, I finished in my head and tried to dismiss the thought, reminding myself that I really shouldn't become attached to anyone in Erie in case we had to move again. I again wondered if that was the reason Ajax nicknamed Meredith "Red," to remind himself not to get too close so that he wouldn't feel like he was losing someone he cared so much about. Thinking that also made me realize that even though there were ups and downs all throughout the day regarding my feelings toward Nate, and how much I wanted him, even though I told him we would be friends, that Nate was not for me. I wouldn't have broken up his relationship anyway, but I knew in that moment that I would never act upon my feelings for him. I wouldn't want to cause any heartbreak in one form or another.
It was also in that moment that I decided I would try to treat every day as if I was moving the next. These revelations caused tears to spring to my eyes, and I slowly took a breath.
“Stay here,” my voice scratched as I made him wait in the foyer; rather symbolic to where I had planned to keep everyone. “I’ll find Sera.”
I found her in her room, pulling out some clothes from an open box surrounded by other boxes. Like all the rooms in the house, it was painted beige; and like all our previous residences, it was sparse, only filled with the barest of furniture and our boxes.
“Hey,” I called out to her, walking into her bedroom.
“Hey!” She greeted me back, putting a dark green blouse on a hanger in her closet.
“You ready?”
She looked back at me from her closet, and then looked pityingly at the boxes.
“Yeah,” she sighed and then turned her back on the cardboard mess. “Let’s go.”
We headed out of her room into the kitchen. One of the things that I had loved about this house beyond the fact that it was a house and not an apartment was that our rooms were on either side of it. We both got the privacy we needed and our own bathrooms.
“This feels strange,” Sera said as we entered the open concept living room.
“What does?”
“The dinner thing with other people.”
“When was the last time we got together with other people?”
We both stopped in our tracks to think.
“I think the last time I remember was cousin, Cornelia’s, coming of age party,” Sera brought a finger to her chin as she recalled.
“When was that?”
“I was sixteen, so you had to have been seven. I only remember because I got so mad at mom. I couldn’t understand why Cornelia got a Proditus Etatis party and I couldn’t have one for my sixteenth birthday.”
“What was the reason?”
“Mom said it was dad’s sister-in-law that believed in celebrating Proditus Etatis.” Sera shrugged. “Whatever.”
We picked up walking again.
"Whatever happened to Martin's side of the family?"
Sera rolled her eyes. She hated it when I referred to our parents by their first names. But Flora had instilled in me to call them by their first names. She had said that they could never replace the love that my biological parents had had for me, and by calling them "mom" and "dad," she felt it was an act of replacement. Regardless, they still were "mom" and "dad" for all that I remembered. When they died, Sera had tried to get me to call them "mom" and "dad," but it had become too much of a habit.
“I really don’t know. Mom liked to move around too much, and she never kept any numbers or addresses on paper. So I couldn’t tell you. I was surprised when so many had shown up for our parents’ ash scattering. I didn’t have any numbers to call them. But somehow they knew.”
"From being part of a nomadic tribe to strange ‘coming of age parties,' we find a simple personal dinner invitation strange."
We both laughed.
“Yeah, I guess that does make us odd. Perhaps we should socialize more often.”
The minute we entered the foyer and Nate came out of the alcove near the front door, Sera looked surprised.
“You brought a boy home,” she teased, which only made me blush.
"Oh, you like this boy, then," she whispered so that only I could hear her. Of course, this made me redder, and I shushed her. She grinned mischievously at me.
“Nate, this is my sister, Sera. Sera, this is Nate. A friend,” I tried to convince Sera, as she snickered in response.
Sera approached Nate and extended her hand, which Nate shook.
“Caden has never brought any of her friends home. So you must be special.”
Nate smiled kindly but didn't blush or react in a way telling that the situation was embarrassing. Me on the other hand, I elbowed my sister's side, to which, she just chuckled.
“I had to have friends first to bring them home, genius. Let’s go.”
“Do we need the car?”
“Not really,” Nate answered. “The Webers actually live on the other end of Crabtree. They are on the side closer to the woods by O’Brian’s Cemetery. From your house, it really shouldn’t take that long. For me, from my house, it is about twenty minutes. But you guys are in the middle.”
“Alright, then. Sounds good.” Sera grabbed her keys as I ushered Nate out the door, following him. I heard the door shut, and turned to watch Sera lock it before we walked on.
“So, Nate, I met Meredith early, but I don’t really know much about her. Tell me a little bit about her and her mom,” Sera pried as we continued down Crabtree toward Meredith’s house.
"They are pretty awesome. Meredith's mom, Joanna, is like a second mom to the guys and me. She's a nurse and works with my parents at the local hospital, Summa Western. My mom is a doctor, and my dad is a surgeon, so I am home alone often. Ms. Weber usually has me over for dinner most nights when she isn't working. Her hours are more convenient than my parents' hours. My mom, especially, pulls a couple of twelve-hour shifts. Once a month, she has to pull a twenty-four-hour shift or a forty-eight-hour shift. And my dad is usually on call for emergency surgeries. It's crazy at my house. Since they have a surplus of nurses at the hospital, Ms. Weber only has to pull a twelve-hour shift every other week. And once in a blue moon, a twenty-four or forty-eight." He smirked. "She also vouches for me to my parents when she sees them at work."
“How are they able to pull shifts like that? Isn’t that illegal?” I questioned.
"They have a room for the doctors and surgeons to get some shut-eye when they can. It's not really a complete ‘twenty-four' or ‘forty-eight' hours. Really, they are more or less on call for that time, and it just makes it easier, since they both work in the emergency section of the hospital."
“It sounds like you are home alone a lot,” Sera interrogated, and I elbowed Sera again.
Nate just shrugged. “Sometimes. But not as much as you think. I am fifteen. And I practice with my band after school most days. Meredith is in the band. And you are going to meet the rest of the guys. And Ms. Weber usually has me over when she’s home. And then sometimes I’m over at my girlfriend’s house. So, I am very rarely alone.”
Sera cocked an eyebrow to study him. I could tell she wanted to pry some more. She and I were similar in that regard. But I didn’t want to make my new friend uncomfortable around my sister, so I changed the topic to our shared math class, and made sure to keep the rest of the conversation light and innocuous. And Nate was right, in ten minutes we had arrived at Meredith’s house.
Chapter E
leven
The Weber's house was quite large, a little bit larger than Nate's house, but not as large as that mini-mansion I had seen earlier. Like the mini-mansion, they had a covered porch as well; unlike the mini-mansion, the house didn't seem to have swallowed two other houses on either side of the entrance. In fact, a nice sized two-story garage was on the right side of the main entryway and porch. It was a quite comfortable looking bluish-white, two-story, farmhouse with the wooded acreage to spare.
We followed Nate toward the front door, pausing right before it, expecting Nate to knock or ring the doorbell. But then Nate just opened it and walked in, motioning for us to follow him in. Moments like that left me feeling nervous and a little anxious, unsure what to expect in social settings. And I felt jittery as Sera, and I followed him into the house.
Nate looked back to reassure me that everything would be okay. I am not sure how he knew that I was feeling nervous, but he was able to pick up on it. It was perhaps the twisting of my hands or maybe the look on my face when he glanced back. Sera always said that my emotions were easily detected by the expressions on my face even though I tried very hard to keep my face blank most of the time. Regardless, to Nate, I was easily readable.
Going through the hallway, passing stairs to the floor above on the right, we heard voices and music coming from somewhere in the house. And soon the corridor opened up into a comfortable, yellow, country chic dining room with the kitchen on the right.
There was a flourish of activity within the kitchen and the dining room. And the music that was playing was from a radio in the kitchen, which put a little bit of dance into the guys’ steps as they set off on their tasks. Ajax and Jesse were grabbing plates, dishes, trays, and silverware, and putting them on the dining room table. Meredith was in the kitchen with a middle-aged woman who had to be her mother, helping with the food.
Joanna Weber had the same build as Meredith, lean, but curvy. However, she was about six inches taller than her daughter, making her about three inches taller than me. And Meredith most definitely got her blue eyes and curls from her mother, but Joanna had strawberry blonde hair, not the burnt orange that haloed Meredith's head. And even though they both had freckles everywhere, Joanna's skin took on a sun-kissed look; whereas, Meredith's skin looked like she should avoid the sun at all cost with its Scottish coloring.
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