First Frost

by Sarah Addison Allen

  “I helped someone who had fallen down. He was wearing a zombie costume. That’s all.”

  “That’s all? You got that much of his costume on you from just helping him up?”

  “Yes! I wasn’t making out with him, if that’s what you think! I didn’t do anything wrong. I just helped someone who had gotten into a fight.”

  “Josh,” Sydney said flatly. “You helped Josh Matteson.”

  The look on Bay’s face was priceless. “How did you know? Did Phin say something to his mom?”

  “No,” Sydney said. “I just saw Josh drop you off.”

  “You were watching?” Bay demanded. Sydney played the silent card again. “He offered me a ride home. Completely platonic. He drove the speed limit. We wore our seat belts. He barely said two words to me.”

  “Josh Matteson.”

  “Yes, Mom, Josh Matteson.”

  Sydney felt a sinking sensation as she remembered something Claire had said. She’s mentioned a boy once or twice. “Oh, Bay, he’s not the one, is he?”

  “The one what?”

  “Your aunt Claire said you liked a boy. It’s not Josh, is it?”

  Bay looked affronted. “So what if it is? What’s wrong with Josh Matteson?”

  Sydney bit her lip, not knowing where to begin.

  “How can you expect me to tell you anything when you never tell me anything,” Bay said, walking past her and up the stairs. Sydney followed her.

  Bay’s room was the first one at the top of the staircase. It was painted a dove gray that turned peacock blue after dark, as if the room absorbed the warmth of daylight and radiated with it at night. Bay didn’t turn on her light. She stepped over shoes and books in the darkness, ripping all the wilted flowers out of her hair and tossing them onto her paisley-print rug.

  Bay took off Grandmother Mary’s dress and looked at it forlornly.

  Sydney held out her hand and Bay walked over and gave it to her.

  Bay kicked off her ankle boots, then crawled into bed, still in the long johns she’d worn under the light dress to keep warm.

  Sydney stood silently in the doorway. “Are you dating him?” she finally asked.

  “No. He doesn’t like me.” Bay turned on her side, away from Sydney. “He doesn’t even know me,” she whispered, and Sydney realized her daughter was crying.

  * * *

  It all started, as these things often do, with a boy. Sydney blossomed in high school. And she loved it. She loved every minute of it. And she was so desperate to keep it that she separated herself almost totally from her family. She was rarely at home. Her grandmother Mary understood what it was like to have that kind of attention, so she let her youngest granddaughter bask in it. A little too much. Sometimes it felt like a push. You go have fun. I remember what it was like to be you.

  Sydney was the belle of the ball, envied for many things—her beauty, her way with hair, but mostly because the most popular boy in school had fallen in love with her. Sydney and Hunter John Matteson had been inseparable. This was much to the distress of Emma Clark, who had loved Hunter John all her life, and who would end up marrying him, in the end. All she had to do was wait. What she knew, what everyone knew, was that Hunter John was only making hay while the sun shone. He could only dally with a Waverley while in school. As soon as he graduated, real life began, the life each Matteson father thrust upon his son.

  In real life, a Matteson never married a Waverley.

  Sydney didn’t understand that at the time. She thought she and Hunter John would be in love forever. There’d been no warning when they graduated. He’d ended their relationship suddenly, leaving her stunned, her heart shriveled to the size of a pea and her hatred for this town building until it shed from her skin and left angry blue flakes on her sheets when she got out of bed in the mornings.

  Bay never knew exactly why Sydney left Bascom. She didn’t know Sydney left because a Matteson broke her heart and she decided to do what her own mother had done, leave this stupid town and everyone in it. Sometimes Sydney wondered, if Hunter John hadn’t played with her that way, would she have stayed? Probably not. But at the very least she would have left with a bigger heart and a happier soul, maybe one that never would have attracted the likes of Bay’s father into her life. Had it been her insecurity that had made her stay with a man who had beaten her? She might never know.

  It was moot, in the end. It all happened the way it was supposed to, because she got Bay out of it. And when she returned to town, there was Henry, whom Sydney had known as a child. Henry had watched her with Hunter John, all while being in love with her himself, helpless to stop her from giving her heart away.

  She would be damned if she would let another Matteson break the heart of another Waverley, especially not her daughter. Josh wasn’t as chest-thumping and proud as his father had been, but his good nature only meant he was going to do what he was told. He was going into business with his father, just like his father before him.

  Sydney didn’t know how Josh felt about her daughter right now, but she did know that it’s remarkably easy to fall in love with someone who is already in love with you. It’s a little like falling in love with yourself. Sydney was honest enough with herself to know that’s how it had happened with Henry. He had loved her long before she had loved him. And Bay was an extraordinary young woman. Beautiful, kind, mysterious. If Josh spent any amount of time with her, he would fall for her. Sydney knew that with a certainty as hard as flint.

  So the obvious course of action was to prevent it from ever happening.

  8

  Monday afternoon, Bay sat outside on the beige stone steps of the main academic building at school and did her homework, waiting for the late buses, the ones that took the Wide Open Spaces kids home. They were the kids from the farthest edges of the city school district. They were a quieter crowd than the rest of the kids. Their lives weren’t filled every minute with something. Most of their lives, it seemed, were actually spent on the bus. Bay was usually the first one off, at Pendland Street, which she could easily walk to when she felt like it. It wasn’t that far away. But she needed the excuse to be here, because that’s what she’d told Josh she’d do in her note. And giving up would mean conceding that she was wrong, even though at this point she knew she was.

  She was just waiting for her heart to catch up.

  Everyone loved an October afternoon. Even the Wide Open Spaces kids were more lively than usual on the sidewalk. It was the kind of day everyone thought of as a quintessential fall school day—crisp air, letter jackets, plaid skirts. Something everyone says they once read in a book.

  She finished her homework, then brought out her copy of Romeo and Juliet. She’d read it hundreds of times. Now she just liked to turn the pages to words she enjoyed, rolling them over in her mind: solemnity and pernicious, jocund and caitiff.

  Doff.

  Rote.

  Fray.

  She heard someone clear his throat behind her, so she automatically scooted aside and moved her backpack, thinking she was in the way of someone walking down the stone steps.

  Someone did move by her, but then took a seat next to her.

  She looked over, a little irritated because there were thirty-three steps from the sidewalk up to the rotunda, and this person still wanted her personal space.

  But then she realized who it was.

  “Hi,” Josh said.

  Every day she’d been sitting on these steps, waiting for him. And now that he was finally here, she had no idea what to say. She wasn’t sure she wanted to say anything now. She couldn’t help that she belonged with him, that every time he was near, she felt a pull in her stomach, as if something inside her was pointing to him and saying, Home. Home. Home. But she didn’t have to try so hard. It wasn’t changing anything but herself, changing herself into someone miserable and insecure, someone so not her.

  “You left your phone in my car Saturday night,” Josh said. He had his elbows on his knees, one hand casually holdin
g her cell phone out to her.

  “Oh. Thanks,” she said, taking the phone and stuffing it in her backpack. So that’s where it had been. She couldn’t find it anywhere when her mother had demanded custody of it as part of her being grounded, as if Bay used it all the time and would feel its absence mightily.

  She fumbled around in her backpack, thinking he was just going to get up and leave. But the longer she dug through her backpack, needlessly rearranging her books, the more she realized that he wasn’t going anywhere.

  She finally turned again to him. Josh was staring at her, sunglasses covering his eyes. He was wearing jeans and a rugby-striped sweater. She stared back, silent, raising her eyebrows. If this was going to be a conversation, he was going to have to make the effort.

  “I’m sorry I was rude to you,” Josh finally said. “I was having a bad night, but that was no reason to take it out on you.” He looked at his hands, clasped together between his wide-splayed knees. “I’m glad you were there. I thought about it a lot this weekend. I realized I didn’t even thank you. So, thank you.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “Okay?”

  “I accept your apology.”

  He smiled. “Very magnanimous of you.”

  “That’s me. Magnanimous.” Several minutes passed in silence. Bay finally said to him, “You’re still here.” It wasn’t said rudely, but curiously, as if he might have forgotten.

  “Yes,” he said, nodding.

  “Is this,” she circled her finger in his general direction, referring to his presence, “a part of the apology?”

  “No. But I understand why you would ask that. And, again, I’m sorry.”

  “Why were you fighting with that guy?” Bay asked, something she’d been dying to know, but figured she would never have the answer. Now that he was here, and wasn’t going anywhere, apparently, she might as well take the opportunity to find out.

  Josh shrugged. “He made a joke about how my dad couldn’t buy my way into the state championships. We’re a good team. My dad has nothing to do with it. Literally. He hates soccer.”

  “You’re a great player. I’ve seen you play. I mean, we all have,” she quickly added.

  “There was a part of me that hoped I’d get caught. Someone even posted a video of the fight. I thought my mom and dad were going to be called back from vacation and I would get a lecture and they would tell me how disappointed they were in me. But the principal didn’t so much as look at me today, even with this,” he said, taking off his sunglasses and pointing to his black eye. It was purple and yellow today, melancholy colors. “They’ll never know, unless I tell them.”

  “Why would you tell them?”

  He shook his head. “Sometimes I just want them to know I’m not who they think I am.”

  It was such a strange thing to say that she automatically asked, “Who are you?” And it finally occurred to her that she really didn’t know. She knew as little about him as he knew about her. She simply had the benefit of knowing, knowing, where she needed to end up.

  “I’m Josh Matteson, nice to meet you,” he said, putting on a big fake smile and holding out his hand as if he wanted her to shake it. She didn’t. His smile faded and he put his sunglasses back on. “I don’t want to go to Notre Dame, like my grandfather did. I don’t want to go into business with my dad.”

  “That’s not who you are. That’s who you aren’t,” she pointed out. “What do you want?”

  He seemed flummoxed by her response. “I don’t know,” he said. “I get cold sweats when I sit in my car in the mornings, trying to make myself go to school. I go to sleep at nine at night because I’m so exhausted. Sometimes my cheeks hurt from smiling, from pretending I’m okay with where my life is heading.”

  The answer was so obvious that she thought he was playing with her at first. Then she realized he wasn’t. “Then stop pretending,” she said.

  He gave her a look, like she’d said something cute. “I bet you’ve never pretended a day in your life,” he said.

  “You say that like it’s easy.”

  He shrugged. “Sometimes I daydream of mowing,” he said. “I love watching when the soccer fields are mowed. It seems so soothing, to ride on a lawn mower, back and forth, for hours.”

  The late buses pulled in, and the Wide Open Spaces kids grabbed their backpacks and band instrument cases and started lining up.

  Bay stood. “You could get a job at the soccer arena in Hickory. I bet they do a lot of mowing there. And playing. And teaching,” she said.

  Josh watched her as she shouldered her backpack. He looked a little bewildered, as if he had steeled himself for something unpleasant. Bay did a mental eye-roll. Did he really think just talking to her would be so awful?

  “Would you like a ride home?” he asked.

  “As thrilling as it was the first time, no, thanks. The buses are already here.” She didn’t mention she was grounded.

  Josh stayed seated as she descended the steps.

  “Will you be out here tomorrow?” he called.

  “I’m here every day,” she said as she got in line.

  Just before she stepped onto the bus, Josh called, “Bay!”

  She turned to him. He stood up, wincing a little, his hand on his side, favoring his rib cage. “Tell your friend Phin I said thanks.”

  “For what?”

  “Watch the video,” he said, then slowly walked up the steps and disappeared.

  * * *

  She tried to watch the video on her phone on the bus ride to her aunt Claire’s, but her battery was dead and she needed to recharge it. It didn’t matter anyway, because she had to give her phone to her mom when she got home.

  The initial terms of Bay’s inaugural grounding were as follows:

  1) Sydney would take Bay to school in the mornings and pick her up at her aunt Claire’s in the evenings.

  2) Bay would surrender her phone, as soon as she found it.

  Sydney said there might be more items to add to the list, she just hadn’t thought of them yet. Bay had gone over the terms in her head, finding all sorts of loopholes. Like, there was nothing that said she couldn’t actually sit on the steps of the school and talk to Josh, though the likelihood of such a thing happening was so astronomically slim that her mother probably thought it wasn’t worth mentioning at the time.

  Another loophole: Her mom didn’t actually say she couldn’t leave the house for specific purposes, although that was what a grounding implied.

  Her mother seemed to be playing this by ear. This surprise grounding, which happened a full twenty-four hours after the alleged crime, was supposedly because Bay didn’t ask permission for someone other than Phin’s mother to take her home. At least, that’s what Bay’s obviously confused father told her, trying to make her mother’s decision make sense.

  But Bay knew there had to be more to it than that.

  Because as many times as Sydney had encouraged Bay to get out and meet people and date, the moment Bay told her she liked someone, she reacted like this. Which led Bay to the conclusion that it wasn’t the crime her mother had a problem with. It was the boy.

  Bay’s mother didn’t like Josh Matteson. And Bay had no idea why.

  * * *

  “Claire, you need a website,” Buster said as Bay entered the kitchen in the Waverley house a half hour later.

  Claire smiled at Bay. Bay gave her a faraway look in return, perhaps a little too content for someone who had just been grounded for the first time.

  “Who doesn’t have a website?” Buster continued. “I can’t believe you still fax.”

  “I don’t know how to make a website,” Claire said as she stirred the large copper pot of sugar and water and corn syrup, waiting for the mixture to boil. Once it boiled, she would watch the food thermometer rise until it was time to add the flavoring and coloring. Lemon verbena again today.

  The labels on all the lemon verbena candy jars read:

  Lemon verbena essence is to soot
he,

  producing a comforting quiet.

  Wise is a voice with nothing to prove.

  Everyone should try it.

  Buster looked around furtively, then whispered, “Okay, don’t tell anyone this, but there’s a top-secret profession called web designers who will do it all for you. I’ll hook you up, but you have to swear to secrecy.”

  Claire shook her head at him. She’d met him last summer at one of her catering jobs, where he’d been a waiter. Later, out of all the applicants from Orion’s cooking school looking for part-time work, she’d chosen him. Sometimes she doubted this decision. He never shut up.

  “Okay, forget the website,” Buster said. “You need to accept the offer from Dickory Foods. That business advisor you consulted said you should sell within a year, before you lose momentum. So, you sell the business, but still stay in charge of it. Think of it: expansion, advertising, the plant in Hickory. Can you imagine? Not having to stir every day? Not having to put labels on jars? Not having to assemble mailing boxes? No more of those biodegradable packing peanuts stuck to my butt with static when I leave this house?”

  “You like when the packing peanuts stick to your butt,” Claire pointed out.

  “I do enjoy the attention.”

  “Just crack those molds and get to work.”

  The doorbell rang and Bay went to get it. She hadn’t said a word since she’d arrived.

  “What’s with her?” Buster asked.

  Claire just shrugged.

  “You have some visitors,” Bay said, smiling as she walked back into the kitchen with Evanelle Franklin and her companion Fred. Evanelle was eighty-nine now, tethered to oxygen and wearing thick glasses that made her rheumy eyes look huge. Fred, calm and pressed, was always beside her, carrying her portable oxygen container like a purse. He let her do all the talking, content to be her straight man.

  Fred had lived with Evanelle for years, and Claire knew he loved the tiny old woman as much as Claire did. He’d become a fixture in their family over the past ten years. He’d been shy and uncertain when he’d first moved in with Evanelle, coming to parties in the Waverley garden with some trepidation, as if worried he might be asked to leave.