First Frost

by Sarah Addison Allen

  The soccer players from Hamilton High were all out there. Bay broke through the crowd to find that the swellhead soccer star of Hamilton High was on the ground with a player from Bascom High. It took her a moment to realize she recognized the number eight on the back of his jersey.

  Josh.

  Bay saw Riva’s bee costume and pushed her way over to her. “What happened?” Bay yelled over the din.

  Riva’s bee antennae were trembling. “That’s Cobie from Hamilton High,” she said, her voice high. “He and Steven were getting into it, so Josh stepped in to intervene. And then Josh just starts pummeling Cobie for no reason! He totally caught him off guard. But not for long. And now no one will help him!”

  Bay’s breath caught. Josh was quick and lean, but Cobie was much taller and heavier. He was trying to pin Josh to the hard pavement, sneaking in punches to his side as he did so.

  If no one else was going to help, then she had to. She had to do something. They wouldn’t hurt a girl, would they? They would part the moment she came up to them. Right?

  This was the first fight she’d ever witnessed in real life. There was something primal about it, filling the air with a charge. She was caught up in it and scared, scared for Josh, and scared for herself, because she’d always thought of herself as the person who would step up to help, who wasn’t like everyone else. But maybe Phin was right. Maybe she lived in a made-up world. Maybe in the real world, maybe deep inside, she was just like everyone else.

  Suddenly, something flashed by her in a gust of wind, blowing her hair and making the hem of her dress flutter.

  It happened so fast. In seconds Cobie was tossed into the air with a force that landed him on his backside, feet away. The breath was knocked out of him and the look on his face mirrored what they were all feeling. What on earth was that?

  The crowd began to hum, and people turned to see teachers and parents appearing at the back door of the gym, their faces illuminated by the ambient security lights.

  Everyone started to scramble. Cobie’s Hamilton High teammates pulled him up, dazed, and dragged him away as he kept asking, “What in the hell just happened?”

  In the chaos, Bay was jostled around and she fought against the surge, trying to find Josh. When she finally saw him, he was still on all fours, trying to lift himself up. Quick as a flash, she ran to him and helped him to his feet. Everyone else was running in a herd toward the security crossbar at the entrance to the parking lot, trying to make it around to the front of the building. The problem was that it would be very easy to head them off at the pass, and several teachers and parents had already disappeared back into the gymnasium, presumably to do just that.

  Bay put Josh’s arm over her shoulder and headed in the other direction, one that led them away from the gym and toward the academic buildings. She guided him around the back of those buildings, through the field of dogwood trees that had been planted by the alumni association years ago. The wind was blowing, making the bare limbs clack and scratch eerily.

  Josh was walking with a slight limp, favoring his rib cage on his right side. He had to lean on her as they finally walked up the far hill, the back way into the well-lit student parking lot. There wasn’t anyone there, proof that most had, indeed, been stopped at the front of the gymnasium.

  She looked around for the Pathfinder she knew he drove. If pressed, she could probably even recite his license plate, as many times as she’d watched him drive away.

  “Where is your car?” she finally asked.

  Josh’s head jerked up from where he’d been watching his feet, each step a focused effort. He immediately stepped away from her.

  He hadn’t known it was her. The look on his face was as if someone had come up behind him and said, Guess who? And he’d turned, geared for a pleasant surprise, only to find that it was the last person he’d wanted it to be.

  He looked around. She saw his relief that no one was there to see them together. She also saw his suspicion start to grow, as if she had planned this. “Why did we come this way?”

  “Because we would have been caught if we’d gone the other way. Where is your car?” she asked again.

  He stared at her for a long time. If she yelled Boo! he would probably jump a mile. “Over there,” he finally said. “I brought my dad’s Audi.”

  She looked at the car, then back to him, trying to judge whether or not he was capable of driving. “Can you make it?”

  “Yeah. He got me in the ribs, but nothing’s broken.”

  “How do you know?”

  He rubbed his side. “I’ve been hit with soccer balls harder than he can punch.”

  Bay turned to go, not able to stand the way he was still looking at her, as if she would … what? Bewitch him? What on earth did that mean, anyway?

  “Wait,” he called as she walked away.

  But she didn’t. She kept walking, her hands fisted at her sides. Insufferable boy. He was foolish and hardheaded and, now that she thought about it, had horrible taste in shoes. How could she belong with him? Why did she love him so much? Why couldn’t she just turn it off, like a switch?

  “Bay, wait,” he said as he galloped awkwardly after her.

  “What?” she whirled around and said.

  He wasn’t expecting her anger. Frankly, neither was she. They both looked a little startled. “At least let me take you home.”

  “No, thank you. Phin’s mom is picking us up.”

  He pressed his lips together. His white makeup and painted mouth were smeared and blurred from the fight. He looked like he had been blotted out and someone new was coming through. “So you and Phin…,” he said.

  “Me and Phin what?”

  “Nothing.”

  Bay turned away again.

  “Wait. You have my blood all over you.”

  She looked down to see that the fake zombie blood he was wearing was smeared all over the side of her great-grandmother’s beautiful dress. It made her want to cry. Her mom and aunt Claire were going to kill her.

  “It’s fake,” she said, trying to keep her voice even. “I can tell everyone I was going for a Stephen King Carrie look.”

  “Let me take you home.”

  She was feeling tender, that was all. That’s how she justified this moment of weakness. She pulled her phone out of her ankle boot and called Phin.

  It took a moment for him to answer. It almost went to voice mail. He finally answered, sounding breathless and shaky. “Hello?”

  “Phin, it’s Bay. Where are you?”

  “I’m in front of the gym. My mom will be here any minute. Where are you?”

  “In the student parking lot.” Bay looked at Josh, then looked away. “I’ve got a ride home.”

  “Oh,” Phin said, distracted. “Okay.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah.” He paused. “Yeah, I’m fine.”

  * * *

  Josh was quiet on the ride to Bay’s home. The inside of his father’s Audi smelled like leather, corn syrup, and a fresh, cologne-y scent she’d first smelled when Josh leaned against her as she’d helped him walk to the student parking lot. It was on her clothes now, that Josh-scent, but it felt stolen, not meant to be there.

  Being this close to him, in this confined area, made her chest feel quaky. The intimacy made her giddy, like when you’ve been awake too long or had too much caffeine. She found herself impressed by silly things. He drives so well! Look how easily he steers! He doesn’t even take his eyes off the road as he turns up the heater! It occurred to her then that he’d mistaken her nerves for cold chills.

  She focused on his hands on the steering wheel, willing herself to be still. He had nice hands, sun-browned and thick. His forearms were ropey, muscles tight.

  Hopkins Dairy was a little out of the way, but every kid in elementary school had gone there on a field trip, so everyone knew where it was. She didn’t have to tell Josh how to get there. The moment before she was about to tell him to turn right or turn left, he wa
s already doing it.

  It was over too soon, this bubble ride. As they neared the turn to the dairy, Bay cleared her throat and said, “You can stop at the entrance. I’ll walk down the driveway to the house.”

  To which Josh said, taking the turn off the highway, “That’s okay.”

  As he drove down the bumpy gravel driveway, Bay felt herself getting more uptight. It wasn’t like he hadn’t seen the Hopkins farmhouse before. But it suddenly seemed unbearable to her, with as little as he proved he knew about her, for Josh to see the farmhouse and think it was really where she belonged.

  When she and her mother had fled from Bay’s father in Seattle, they had stayed in the Waverley house with Claire, but they’d moved to the farmhouse next to Henry’s dairy when Sydney and Henry married. Bay liked the farmhouse. She knew the first time she saw it that it was where her mother belonged, even though her mother considered herself an urban soul and didn’t care for the quiet. It made her jumpy, like back in Seattle, waiting for someone’s temper to flare and something bad to happen. But Bay didn’t belong there. She belonged at the Waverley house.

  She wasn’t embarrassed by the farmhouse. Not exactly. But she’d seen Josh’s house, and she hated that she felt even the slightest need to explain where she lived.

  He pulled in front of the small, white, two-story house. The bare-bulb porch light was on. There was also a light on behind the living room curtain.

  She didn’t get out immediately. She sat there and waited, thinking he was going to say something. This was what her parents did after going out. They came home, but then stayed in the car—engine off, windows down in the summer; engine on, heater running in the winter—and talked, something about being in a car at night provoking one last conversation, one last kiss, before getting out.

  It was a date thing, she realized.

  And this wasn’t a date.

  Josh stared straight ahead.

  Without another word, Bay got out and walked stiffly to the door, telling herself not to look back.

  * * *

  “I can’t believe I missed her going to her first dance,” Henry said hours earlier, after Sydney came home from dropping Bay and Phin off at the gymnasium. Sydney had tried to reach him on the phone to tell him, but he’d missed the call.

  Sydney had just swept in with a gust of perfumed air, her cheeks alight with happiness at this unusual turn of social events in their daughter’s life. She’d bought Chinese on her way home, and she was now setting the takeout boxes on the kitchen table. Henry stood there, fresh from his shower, and rubbed a pink and white towel over his hair to dry it. Pink and white. Sydney said that she and Bay had slowly but surely girl-ified this place. But he didn’t mind.

  A house isn’t a real house without a woman in it, his grandad used to say.

  “I’ve been saving up all these things to say to Bay when she started dating,” he said from under the towel. “I even wrote a few down. Seriously, I think I have notes in my office.”

  Sydney laughed, as if touched by this knowledge. “How about I send her to you first thing in the morning, and you can lecture her about how terrible boys are and how they only want one thing.”

  Henry draped the towel around his neck and sat at the table as Sydney put down plates. She touched his face before she sat across from him.

  The first time Henry met Sydney was on the monkey bars at school. Some people come into your life and change it forever. Sydney did that with Henry. He’d loved her from the moment he set eyes on her. He became her best friend in elementary school. But she began to drift away from him as they got older. Hunter John Matteson had fallen in love with her, too, and actually had the balls to tell her. Henry had lost her in increments in high school, then lost her for good when she went away when she was eighteen. He’d never expected to see her again. His grandfather had still been alive then, though the stroke had slowed him down. He’d taken to spending his days trying to fix Henry up, wanting to see him settled and married. But nothing ever took. When Sydney came back, it felt like Henry had been running in circles, setting trees on fire, until there was nothing left but a barren landscape. Then she’d appeared and he finally stopped running in circles and ran to her like she was a cool, soft field.

  That’s what it feels like to finally find her, his grandad had said.

  Henry didn’t believe his luck at first, when they’d started dating. To this day, he would still find himself stopping in the middle of yet another story about his granddad (he knew he talked too much about him), thinking, How could someone like her find this remotely interesting? He wanted to give her the world. But even that didn’t seem like enough. It paled in comparison to everything she’d given him, this life together, this family, these pink and white towels, this fifteen-year-old daughter who was now going to dances.

  “How did this happen?” Henry asked, giving up trying to use chopsticks on his shrimp and snow peas. He picked up a fork. “How did she get to be fifteen? She’ll be leaving us before we know it.”

  Sydney suddenly went still. Henry could feel by the change in the air what was about to happen, and he slowly set his fork down and waited for it. He could almost see new red streaks popping out in her hair. This had become a common occurrence lately. It was first frost anxiety. Henry and Tyler had compared notes long ago and realized it happened every year around this time, their wives always doing something crazy. This year, Sydney was all over him. Not that he minded. Anything to help. But he kept worrying over the whys of the thing. What was really going on in that mind of hers?

  She dropped her fork and leaned across the table and kissed him.

  She pulled him out of his seat, and they were all over each other, shirts off, pants unbuttoned. Then they were on the kitchen floor, where they squeaked against the floorboards and knocked against the cabinets. The world tilted and time flew. Before he knew it they were straightening their clothing and going back to eating, giving each other googly smiles over their Chinese takeout.

  The pink and white towel, still damp from his shower, was forgotten on the floor.

  Somewhere in the back of his mind, Henry wondered if this kept happening because there was something she wanted that he wasn’t giving her, so she was forced now to take it.

  He didn’t like the thought. He would give anything to her. Anything he had.

  All she had to do was tell him.

  * * *

  Sydney kissed Henry again before he went to bed. His internal clock always slowed his steps around eight o’clock every night, as if he were a wind-up toy losing speed. If he stayed up too late, Sydney would sometimes find him standing on the staircase, halfway upstairs, his hand on the railing, fast asleep with dust settling on his sharp cheekbones.

  Henry smiled, sleepy and satisfied, as he walked to their bedroom. He had lines around his eyes from years of squinting against the sun. The sun. That’s exactly what he felt like to her, giving her light and nourishment, always there, predictable. He rode out her restlessness and went wild with her when she needed it, but he always got up the next day the same man, the same heart, the same light.

  Sydney waited up for Bay, not knowing quite what to do with herself. She finally put on her kimono, twisted up her hair with her unused chopsticks from dinner, then watched Molly Ringwald movies from the eighties on her laptop, the movies where the odd girl always got the happy ending.

  When she heard a car come up the driveway, she slapped her laptop closed. Bay was right on time. Sydney had never had to give her a curfew before, so she’d made it ridiculously early, but Bay hadn’t batted an eyelash. Grandmother Mary had never given Sydney a curfew, though there were times Sydney now wished she had. More often than not, she’d let Sydney sleep over at her friends’ houses, where she’d always felt free to sneak out and meet her boyfriend at all hours of the night.

  She got up quickly, thinking she should turn off the living room light so Bay wouldn’t know she was waiting up for her. When she heard the car stop in front o
f the house, she realized it was too late for that. Maybe she should run to the kitchen and make hot chocolate so they could sit and talk about the night. No, Bay would hate that.

  She hadn’t heard a car door close yet, so she sidled up to the living room window, leaned her back against the wall, and lifted the curtain slightly. It took her a moment to make out the car, a dark Audi. Not Phin’s mother’s Chevy. Who was that at this hour? The car seemed familiar, and she knew why when the passenger side door finally opened and the interior light came on. There was her daughter, getting out of a car driven by Josh Matteson.

  Sydney’s cell phone suddenly rang, and she jumped in surprise. She grabbed it off the coffee table and answered.

  “Hello?”

  “Sydney? This is Tallulah Young, Phin’s mom. I’m sitting in front of the gym at school with Phin. Bay’s not here. He said she already got a ride home. Did you know about that?”

  “No,” Sydney said as the front door opened, “but she just got here.”

  “Is she all right? Phin said there was a fight at the dance.”

  Sydney’s heart kicked in her chest when she set eyes on her daughter. Her dress was smeared in blood.

  “It’s fake,” Bay said quickly. “Fake blood. From a costume.”

  “She’s fine,” Sydney said to Phin’s mom, not taking her eyes off Bay. “Is Phineus all right?”

  “He’s fine. He ruined my best sheets, though. It’s coming out of his allowance.”

  “Geez, Mom, I said I was sorry,” Phin said before his mother hung up.

  Youngs may be the strongest men in town, but you should see their mothers.

  “I can’t believe you waited up for me,” Bay said, taking the defensive before Sydney even said a word, which was Sydney’s first clue that she was hiding something. When Sydney didn’t say anything, Bay plucked at the dress. “It’s fake. It even smells like corn syrup. Smell.”

  “I don’t want to smell it. I want to know how it got on you,” Sydney said.