“See? You made it, chicken,” he said. He sat, dangling his legs over the edge of the concrete, and scooted back, patting the ground in between his legs, just like before. “Come on. Sit down.” When I just stood there, my arms crossed against the constant cold breeze, my whole body shaking, he rolled his eyes again. “Alex. I’m not going to let anything happen to you. Sit down. I want to tell you something.”
Slowly, slowly, I lowered myself into his lap, my legs dangling over the edge now, loosing rocks into the water below. I leaned into Cole, taking in his familiar scent, feeling the shape of his chest that I’d memorized over the past several months, and closing my eyes, the memories flooding back so hard it almost hurt.
He pressed his cheek against my ear.
“I told my parents yesterday that I’m done with sports for good,” he said.
“Really?” I asked, turning so my forehead was leaning against his chin.
He nodded. “I was afraid I was going to lose you.” He reached up and grabbed my chin, gently lifting it up so I was looking into his eyes. “I can’t lose you. I love you too much.” He bent and lightly kissed me. “All that stuff that happened, Alex. It’s over. It won’t ever happen again.”
I ducked my head, my chin pushing against his hand. “You’ve said that before,” I mumbled.
I felt his belly move outward and back in again as he took a deep breath and released it. “I know,” he said. “But this time it’s different. I went to an anger counselor yesterday. I’m changing. For you, Alex. I’m changing because I love you.”
Relief flooded my body. Cole had talked about changing before, but this time felt different. He’d never talked about counseling before. Despite myself, I started to let myself believe that maybe this time he really meant it. I turned the whole top half of my body so that I could look into his face. I didn’t know what to say. Everything could be different now. Everything could be like it had been in the beginning. I could be getting my old Cole back for good. I wanted to cry, I was so happy.
Cole picked my hand up off his thigh and held it in both of his, gently stroking my fingers. “I want to marry you, Alex,” he said. “I want us to be together forever.”
And suddenly, I found my voice. “I want that, too,” I said, and was surprised at how true that was. Despite all that we’d been through, I wanted this future with him. And I believed in it.
Cole scooted backward, away from the edge of the spillway, pulling me along with him. When it was safe, I turned to face him, wrapping my legs around his waist, and we kissed, forgetting about fear. Forgetting about how high we were and how the tiniest slip could take us a long way down.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Things were good. Cole was going to counseling and seemed to be making a renewed effort to make it work between us. He was back to calling me Emily Dickinson and buying me things and making everyone pretty much think we were the perfect couple. It felt as though we’d made it through a dark winter and were blooming again, right along with the early-spring flowers.
He was working so hard at making things better, I even began to let my heart believe in us just a little again. And then a little more. And after a month with no violent outbursts, it started to seem as if all that other stuff that had happened was in the past now, and he and I would make it.
One night, lying on his bedroom floor listening to TV noise drifting through the hallways of his house, we decided it only made sense for Cole to go to Colorado, too. He was sorry about throwing the papers out the window before, he said. He’d never stopped wanting to go, he said. He said he knew as much about me as Zack and Bethany knew—maybe even more than they knew—and it seemed like the best place for the two of us to grow a stronger bond.
I knew Zack and Bethany would hate the idea. But it was worth it to fight them whenever I thought about hanging out in front of a roaring fire, letting go of my past, snuggled in Cole’s arms, then making love in a down-filled cabin bed. It sounded like the romance we really needed.
Plus, Cole had been talking more and more about spending the rest of our lives together. Maybe he would officially propose and we would go ahead and get married there. We’d be eighteen. A mountaintop wedding. Beautiful.
I decided I would bring up the idea to Bethany and Zack the next time I saw them. After all, they’d asked to bring Tina along. My asking to bring Cole made so much more sense.
I waited until I saw them together at Zack’s house. Every day I watched and waited, and as soon as I saw Bethany’s car pull up in Zack’s driveway, I threw on my jacket and rushed over there.
“Hey,” I said when Zack’s mom opened the door. “Are they here?”
“Alex!” she declared, much too loudly. I almost thought I detected a hint of something in her voice that I couldn’t quite pinpoint. How much had Zack told her about Cole? Did she know about the fistfight in the front yard? “Well, honey, it’s been so—come on in—Zack’s just right down—Zack, Alex is—I just made a snack—you need anything?”
I shook my head and said, “I’ll just go down,” and before she could argue, I was through the living room and halfway down the stairs to the rec room.
As I expected, Zack and Bethany were sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of the TV, playing the same racing game they’d been playing at Trent’s party. Bethany paused the game when I came into the room.
I hoisted myself up on the washing machine, which sat just a few feet from the TV stand, and crossed my legs at the ankles, casually kicking the machine softly with my heels—bong, bong, bong— just as I’d done a billion times over the past seventeen years.
“Who’s winning?” I asked.
“We just got started,” Bethany said. “You want in?” She held her controller up for me.
“Nah,” I said. “I just wanted to talk. About Colorado.”
They exchanged glances… again… as they’d done so much lately—as if anything they might have to say about me has already been said and they didn’t need to waste anyone’s time saying it again. “Yeah?” Bethany said, pressing the button to un-pause the game. The basement was awash with the sound of cars zipping around a racetrack.
“Yeah,” I said, and took a deep breath. There would be no easy way to say this. I had to just come out with it. “I was sort of wondering if Cole could come with us.”
Zack let out a bark of laughter—just one “ha”—but kept playing the game. Bethany, however, set her controller in her lap and took off her glasses.
“You’re kidding, right?” she said. She didn’t look at me. Zack kept playing, the “ha” his only contribution to the conversation.
“No,” I said. “Listen. I know you guys don’t like him, but he promises he’s going to try to get along and… I think he might propose to me.”
“Oh. My. God,” Bethany said, picking her controller up out of her lap and tossing it to the side. Zack pressed the pause button this time and stared at me as Bethany stood up and paced to the rusted refrigerator at the far end of the basement. “You can’t be serious.”
I hopped off the washer. “Yeah, actually, I am. We’ll be eighteen. Why couldn’t we get married out there?”
She opened the fridge and pulled out an orange soda, popped the top, and took a sip. “Well, for starters, he abuses you, Alex.” I flinched, blinking. It was the first time she’d ever said so plainly what I’d been denying even to myself.
“He hasn’t done anything in a long time,” I said, which was true. “And it’ll be different if we’re married, because then he won’t have to deal with the pressure of his parents and school and everything. He’s going to counseling because he wants to make it better. For us. For our future.”
Zack laughed again—this time like “ha-ha”—but there was no laughter in his face whatsoever. “You’re an idiot,” he said.
“Excuse me?”
“He’s right,” Bethany said. “I’d kind of given up on the trip anyway, since you stopped showing any interest. But if you’re bringi
ng Cole along, I’m out. I won’t have anything to do with that guy.”
“Ditto,” Zack said.
I could feel fury filling me from the toes up. “You’d love that, wouldn’t you?” I shouted. “You’d love to shove me right out of your little friendship, just like you’ve been trying to do ever since I met Cole. Maybe you should go together, just the two of you. Better yet, maybe you should take Funny Tina with you. I hear she’s a freaking riot!”
“You’d think you’d be more appreciative,” Bethany said, waving her soda can in my direction.
“I should be more appreciative?” This time I was the one who laughed, a hoarse chuckle.
“Yeah,” she said. “Zack almost got arrested trying to protect you from that asshole. He almost got suspended for defending you in the locker room. And he got his mouth smashed up. All for you, Alex.”
“Ah,” I said. “So you’re jealous. Because he didn’t do it for you.”
She walked back to where she’d been sitting and set her soda down. “No. Actually, I’ve been too busy being hurt that my best friend’s been treating me like shit to even care about much of anything else.”
“Oh, well, I’m sorry if I haven’t properly revered you, Your Highness. I’m so sorry that I have a boyfriend and you don’t because you’ve never had the guts to even talk to the guy you like, much less try to get with him. Or maybe you won’t talk to Randy Weston because you’re really in love with Zack. God, Zack, why don’t you just go ahead and do her already, so she can lighten up a little bit?”
Both of them shot angry, shocked looks at me. Zack’s face had gone as gray as the concrete floor. Bethany’s whole body was red. I’d even shocked myself. I stood there, panting, unsure of what to do next.
I had just sounded… like Cole.
Oh my God. I was turning into him.
“Go home, Alex,” Zack said. He pressed the pause button, and the racing noises started up again.
Bethany wiped her glasses with her shirttail and put them back on, then picked up her controller and started playing, too.
Suddenly it was as if my legs couldn’t move. As if I’d forgotten how to put one foot in front of the other and make myself go forward. I stood there, my hands on my hips, trying to catch my breath, trying to figure out what just had happened.
“I said bye-bye,” Zack said again. No yelling. No cussing. No emotion whatsoever. It was as if he were talking to a stranger. Or a dog.
“Fine,” I said, trying to sound tough. Trying to save as much face as I could. Trying not to sound like I instantly regretted what I’d just said. I stomped to the stairs. “But if you guys don’t accept Cole, you don’t accept me. You’re out of my life.”
“Your choice,” Bethany said. Then she muttered something I couldn’t make out under her breath, and Zack mumbled a response.
I crept up the stairs, only to find Zack’s mom standing in the entryway waiting for me. She looked grim. Sort of like a fairy godmother who’d screwed up and sent someone to a gas chamber instead of to the prince’s ball.
“Oh, honey,” she said, reaching to stroke my hair. “Oh, honey, I’m sure they—did you fight?—things will smooth—Zack and that boy just don’t—oh, sweetie, I wish there was something I could do to help.”
And suddenly there was something so motherly about her that I wanted nothing more to do with her. This is all your fault, I raged inside. If you hadn’t made it look so good all these years, maybe I wouldn’t have ever missed her. Maybe I’d be hard like Celia and Shannin, and I’d never have gotten into this mess. I ducked from her touch.
“There isn’t,” I said, and escaped through the twilight-dim cold air, through the yards, back home to my room, where I could pretend everything made sense.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
When I was a little kid, I leafed through the photos of Mom and Dad constantly. After I’d rescued them from the garbage, I’d hidden them in a shoe box under my bed, and every time I felt sad or lonely I’d get them out and stare at them until I had every grainy little millimeter of them memorized.
I would tell stories about them. Talk to Mom in them. Tell her she looked beautiful. Imagine what the next frame would look like if the photographer had snapped another and then another and then another photo of them, making them come alive, like in the movies.
I had my favorites—the one of their silhouettes sitting cross-legged under a tree, their knees touching; the one of Mom’s arms being pulled in opposite directions by her friends, her smile so bright; the ones where you could see it in Dad’s face. His love for her. It was all-consuming.
I used to kneel next to my bed and line them up in what I imagined their order to be. The one of them on the concrete steps, Dad in a cheesy Hawaiian shirt. All the way to the one of the amusement park ride, Mom looking so miserable, like she was going to throw up.
Trying to find the perfect order. Holding the one wedding photo (why just one?) in my hand and trying to find exactly the spot where it belonged. Like if maybe I could get the order right, more photos would suddenly appear in the box: photos of things that never got to happen because she was gone. Things that would forever happen without her. Christmases and birthdays and marriages and births. Or maybe, God, I don’t know… just something. Something that would say this life was important, too. Not just whatever life lived for Mom in Colorado, but this one. The one she had right here.
With me.
My life.
What I wouldn’t have given for one photo of Mom holding me or standing with me or playing with me and looking happy about it.
After the fight with Bethany and Zack, I locked my bedroom door and knelt beside my bed. I rummaged behind books and old pencil boxes from elementary school until my hands landed on the familiar cardboard of the shoe box. I pulled it out and sat on the bed with it in my lap.
It’d been so long. Would their faces look the same to me now as they did then? Or would I open the box only to discover that Mom never looked happy? That she only ever looked like she was trapped on a ride and wanted, more than anything, to just get off.
Slowly, I pulled the lid off the box. My breath caught. There they were. Just as I remembered them. Look. Mom’s smiling. Look. They were holding hands. Look. They had a happy life, and it wasn’t until Shannin, Celia, and I started showing up in the frames that she got that distant look in her eyes. It wasn’t until we landed in the photos that she started dreaming of Colorado.
I pulled out a photo with shaking hands. I remembered this one, of course. Mom was standing on the side of a road, a fanny pack strapped around her waist. She was grinning goofily and holding a flower so that it looked like it was growing out of the top of her head. I recalled all of those details about this photo. But what I’d never noticed before was what was in the background. Blue-black, hazy, monstrous. A mountain.
I leaned over the picture, my eyes straining to find some sort of clue. Where was this taken? Where, Mom? Where were you headed? You and your spiritual healer friend?
I would never know. Now, thanks to Bethany and Zack or thanks to Cole or, hell, I don’t know, thanks to me, probably, I would never find out.
I dug around in the box, pulling out photos at random and staring at them and then dropping them back in, only to dive in for the next.
I didn’t even realize I was crying until Celia barged into my room.
I jumped, scurrying to hide the box from her. Even after all these years, I still wanted this life inside the photo box to be all mine. Celia and Shannin didn’t deserve it. I pushed the box next to my hip, and it slipped down the crack between the bed and the wall. I could hear the scraping of the cardboard against the wall as it fell, and the papery swishing sounds of the photos falling out and landing on the floor.
“What do you want?” I said, wiping my face with my shirt.
“Zack told me what happened at his house,” she said.
“Goody for you. Get out,” I said, thinking, He certainly wasted no time getting the news out
. Maybe he should take out a billboard.
“You’re not going to Colorado now,” she said. “At least not with them.”
“Nope,” I said, pulling a magazine off my nightstand and opening it, trying to look nonchalant about it. A folded-up piece of paper fell to the floor. I bent over and picked it up, holding it in my palm. “You can leave now.”
“Um, forget something?” she said, standing on the throw rug in the middle of my room with her hands on her hips.
“Nope,” I said again. “Bye.”
“Yep,” she countered, bobbing her head. “The cake. You forgot Dad’s cake.”
I brought my hand to my forehead. The cake. Of course. The party was tomorrow, and I’d totally forgotten the cake.
“The grandmas went to pick it up,” she continued, her voice dripping with snottiness. “And it turns out you hadn’t even bothered to order it.”
“Oh, man.” I sighed. “I forgot. I’m so sorry.” I felt guilt rise. Now if Dad’s birthday party was screwed up, that would be all my fault, too. It was like I couldn’t do anything right. I’d let down my sisters, my friends, my dad, everyone.
But Celia had seen her one-up opportunity, and she wasn’t about to let it go. “How? How is it even possible that you forgot? You’ve had months to do it, and I reminded you, like, a billion times. God, Alex, I can’t even believe you.”
“I said I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll order it today. I’ll have them put a rush on it or something. It’s not the end of the world, Celia.”
“The grandmas already ordered it. Shannin’s super-pissed, just so you know.”
I rolled my eyes, shutting the magazine with a slap. “Of course she is. Because everyone in the world is mad at me right now. I don’t care, okay? I’ve got my own problems. Why don’t you go get Shannin and Zack and Bethany and everyone else in the world and have an ‘I Hate Alex’ party, okay? Just… leave.”
Bitter End Page 23
