Lock and Key

by Sarah Dessen

  “You’re assuming I’ll get in somewhere. That’s a big assumption. ”

  “I’ve seen your transcripts. You’re not a bad student.”

  “I’m no brain, either.”

  “Neither was I,” he said. “In fact, in the interest of full disclosure, I’ll tell you I wasn’t into the idea of higher education, either. After high school, I wanted to take my guitar and move to New York to play in coffeehouses and get a record deal.”

  “You did?”

  “Yup.” He smiled, running his hand over the steering wheel. “However, my parents weren’t having it. I was going to college, like it or not. So I ended up at the U, planning to leave as soon as I could. The first class I took was coding for computers.”

  “And the rest is history,” I said.

  “Nah.” He shook his head. “The rest is now.”

  I eased my grip on my bag, letting it rest on the floorboard between my feet. The truth was, I liked Jamie. So much that I wished I could just be honest with him and say the real reason that even applying scared me: it was one more connection at a time when I wanted to be doing the total opposite. Yes, I’d decided to stay here as long as I had to, but only because really, I’d had no choice. If I went to college—at least this way, with him and Cora backing me— I’d be in debt, both literally and figuratively, at the one time when all I wanted was to be free and clear, owing no one anything at all.

  Sitting there, though, I knew I couldn’t tell him this. So instead, I said, “So I guess you never have regrets. Wish you’d gone to New York, like you wanted.”

  Jamie sat back, leaning his head on the seat behind him. “Sometimes I do. Like on a day like today, when I’m dealing with this new advertising campaign, which is making me nuts. Or when everyone in the office is whining and I think my head’s going to explode. But it’s only in moments. And anyway, if I hadn’t gone to the U, I wouldn’t have met your sister. So that would have changed everything.”

  “Right,” I said. “How did you guys meet, anyway?”

  “Talk about being the bad guy.” He chuckled, looking down at the steering wheel, then explained, “She doesn’t exactly come across that well in the story.”

  I had to admit I was intrigued now. “Why not?”

  “Because she yelled at me,” he said flatly. I raised my eyebrows. “Okay, she’d say she didn’t yell, that she was just being assertive. But her voice was raised. That’s indisputable. ”

  “Why was she yelling at you?”

  “Because I was playing guitar outside on the dorm steps one night. Cor’s not exactly pleasant when you get between her and her sleep, you know? ” I actually didn’t but nodded, anyway. “So there I was, first week of classes freshman year, strumming away on a nice late summer night, and suddenly this girl just opens up her window and lets me have it.”

  “Really.”

  “Oh, yeah. She just went ballistic. Kept saying it was so inconsiderate, keeping people up with my noise. That’s what she called it. Noise. I mean, here I was, thinking I was an artiste, you know?”He laughed again, shaking his head.

  I said, “You’re awfully good-natured about it, considering. ”

  “Yeah, well,” he said. “That was just that first night. I didn’t know her yet.”

  I didn’t say anything, instead just looked down at my backpack strap, running it through my fingers.

  “My point is,” Jamie continued, “not everything’s perfect, especially at the beginning. And it’s all right to have a little bit of regret every once in a while. It’s when you feel it all the time and can’t do anything about it . . . that’s when you get into trouble.”

  Over on the curb, the girls with the field-hockey sticks were laughing at something, their voices muffled by my window. “Like,” I said, “say, not applying to college, and then wishing you had?”

  He smiled. “Okay, fine. So subtlety is not my strong suit. Do we have a deal or what?”

  “This isn’t a deal,” I pointed out. “It’s just me agreeing to what you want.”

  “Not true,” he replied. “You get something in return.”

  “Right,” I said. “A chance. An opportunity I wouldn’t have otherwise.”

  “And something else, too.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Just wait,” he said, reaching forward to crank the engine. “You’ll see.”

  “A fish?” I said. “Are you serious?”

  “Totally!” Jamie grinned. “What more could you want?”

  I figured it was best not to answer this, and instead turned my attention back to the round tank between us, which was filled with white koi swimming back and forth. In rows all around us were more tanks, also filled with fish I’d never heard of before: comets, shubunkin, mosquito fish, as well as many other colors of koi, some solid, some speckled with black or red.

  “I’m going to go find someone to test my water, make sure it’s all balanced,” he said, pulling a small plastic container out of his jacket pocket. “Take your time, all right? Pick a good one.”

  A good one, I thought, looking back down at the fish in the tank beneath me. Like you could tell with a glance, somehow judge their temperament or hardiness. I’d never had a fish—or any pet, for that matter—but from what I’d heard they could die at the drop of a hat, even when kept in a safe, clean tank. Who knew what could happen outside, in a pond open to the elements and everything else?

  “Do you need help with the fish?”

  I turned around, prepared to say no, only to be startled to see Heather Wainwright standing behind me. She had on jeans and a DONOVAN LANDSCAPING T-shirt, a sweater tied around her waist, and seemed equally surprised by the sight of me.

  “Hey,” she said. “It’s Ruby, right?”

  “Yeah. I’m, um, just looking.”

  “That’s cool.” She stepped up to the tank, next to me, dropping a hand down into the water: as she did so, the fish immediately swam toward her, circling her fingers. She glanced up at me and said, “They get crazy when they think you’re going to feed them. They’re like begging dogs, practically. ”

  “Really.”

  “Yep.” She pulled her hand out and wiped it on her jeans. I had to admit, I was surprised to see she worked at a place like this. For some reason, I would have pegged her as the retail type, more at home in a mall. No, I realized a beat later. That was me. Weird. “The goldfish aren’t quite as aggressive. But the koi are prettier. So it’s a tradeoff.”

  “My brother-in-law just built a pond,” I told her as she bent down and adjusted a valve on the side of the tank. “He’s obsessed with it.”

  “They are pretty awesome,” she said. “How big did he go?”

  “Big.” I glanced over at the greenhouses, where Jamie had headed. “He should be back soon. I’m supposed to be picking a fish.”

  “Just one?”

  “It’s my personal fish,” I told her, and she laughed. Never in a million years would I have imagined myself here, by a fish tank, with Heather Wainwright. Then again, I wasn’t supposed to be here with anyone, period. What I’d noticed, though, was that more and more lately, when I tried to picture where I did belong, I couldn’t. At first, it had been easy to place myself in my former life, sitting at a desk at Jackson, or in my old bedroom. But now it was like I was already losing my old life at the yellow house, without this one feeling real, either. I was just stuck somewhere in the middle, vague and undefined.

  “So you’re friends with Nate,” Heather said after a moment, adjusting the valve again. “Right?”

  I glanced over at her. The whole school had noticed, or so it seemed; it only made sense she would have, as well. “We’re neighbors,” I told her. “My sister lives behind him.”

  She reached up to tuck a stray piece of hair behind her ear. “I guess you’ve heard we used to go out,” she said.

  “Yeah?” I said.

  She nodded. “We broke up this fall. It was big news for a while there.” She sighed, touching
her hand to the water again. “Then Rachel Webster got pregnant. Which I wasn’t happy about, of course. But it did make people stop talking about us, at least for a little while.”

  “Perkins Day is a small school,” I said.

  “Tell me about it.” She sat back, wiping her hand on her jeans, then looked over at me. “So . . . how’s he doing these days? ”

  “Nate?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Fine, I guess. Like I said, we’re not that close.”

  She considered this as we both watched the fish circling, first one way, then another. “Yeah,” she said finally. “He’s hard to know, I guess.”

  This hadn’t been what I meant, actually, not at all. If anything, in my mind, Nate was too easy to read, all part of that friendly thing. But saying this seemed odd at that moment, so I just stayed quiet.

  “Anyway,” Heather continued a beat later, “I just . . . I’m glad you and Nate are friends. He’s a really good guy.”

  I had to admit this was not what I was expecting—it wasn’t exactly ex-girlfriend behavior. Then again, she was the queen of compassion, if her time logged at the HELP table was any indication. Of course Nate would fall in love with a nice girl. What else did I expect?

  “Nate has a lot of friends,” I told her now. “I doubt one more makes that much of a difference.”

  Heather studied my face for a moment. “Maybe not,” she said finally. “But you never know, right?”

  What? I thought, but then I felt a hand clap my shoulder; Jamie was behind me. “So the water’s good,” he said. “You find the perfect one yet?”

  “How do you even pick?” I asked Heather.

  “Just go on instinct,” she replied. “Whichever one speaks to you.”

  Jamie nodded sagely. “There you go,” he said to me. “Let the fish speak.”

  “There’s also the issue of who runs from the net,” Heather added. “That often makes the decision for you.”

  In the end, it was a mix of both these things—me pointing and Heather swooping in—that got me my fish. I went with a small white koi, which looked panicked as I held it in its plastic bag, circling again and again as Jamie picked out a total of twenty shubunkins and comets. He also got several more koi, although no other white ones, so I could always find mine in the crowd.

  “What are you going to name it? ” he asked me as Heather shot oxygen from a canister into the bags for the ride home.

  “Let’s just see if it survives first,” I said.

  “Of course it will,” he replied as if there was no question.

  Heather rang us up, then carried the bags out to the car, where she carefully arranged them in a series of cardboard boxes in the backseat.

  “You will need to acclimate them slowly,” she explained as the fish swam around and around in their bags, their faces popping up, then disappearing. “Put the bags in the water for about fifteen minutes so they can get adjusted to the temperature. Then open the bags and let a little bit of your pond water in to mix with what they’re in. Give it another fifteen minutes or so, and then you can let them go.”

  “So the key is to ease them into it,” Jamie said.

  “It’s a big shock to their systems, leaving the tank,” Heather replied, shutting the back door. “But they usually do fine in the end. It’s herons and waterbirds you really need to worry about. One swoop, and they can do some serious damage.”

  “Thanks for all your help,” Jamie told her as he slid back behind the wheel.

  “No problem,” she said. “See you at school, Ruby.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “See you.”

  As Jamie began backing out, he glanced over at me. “Friend of yours?”

  “No,” I said. “We just have a class together.”

  He nodded, not saying anything else as we pulled out into traffic. It was rush hour, and we didn’t talk as we hit mostly red lights heading toward home. Because my fish was alone, in a small bag, I was holding it in my lap, and I could feel it darting from one side to the other. It’s a big shock to their systems, Heather had said. I lifted the bag up to eye level, looking at my fish again. Who knew if it—or anything—would survive the week, or even the night.

  Still, when we got back to Cora’s, I went with Jamie to the backyard, then crouched by the pond, easing my bag into it and watching it bob there for those fifteen minutes before letting in that little bit of water, just as I was told. When I finally went to release the koi, it was almost totally dark outside. But even so, I could see my fish, white and bright, as it made its way past the opening into the vast body of water that lay beyond. I expected it to hesitate, or even turn back, but it didn’t. It just swam, quick enough to blur, before diving down to the bottom, out of sight.

  When Jamie first called up the stairs to me, I was sure I’d heard wrong.

  “Ruby! One of your friends is here to see you!”

  Instinctively, I looked at the clock—it was 5:45, on a random Tuesday—then out the window over at Nate’s house. His pool lights were on, and I wondered if he’d come over for some reason. But surely, Jamie would’ve identified him by name.

  “Okay,” I replied, pushing my chair back and walking out into the hallway. “But who is—?”

  By then, though, I’d already looked down into the foyer and gotten the answer as I spotted Peyton, who was standing there patting Roscoe as Jamie looked on. When she glanced up and saw me, her face broke into a wide smile. “Hey!” she said, with her trademark enthusiasm. “I found you!”

  I nodded. I knew I should have been happy to see her— as unlike Nate or Heather, she actually was my friend—but instead I felt strangely uneasy. After all, I’d never even invited her into the yellow house, always providing excuses about my mom needing her sleep or it being a bad time— keeping the personal, well, personal. But now here she was, already in.

  “Hey,” I said when I reached the foyer. “What’s going on?”

  “Are you surprised?” she asked, giggling. “You would not believe what I went through to track you down. I was like Nancy Drew or something!”

  Beside her, Jamie smiled, and I forced myself to do the same, even as I noticed two things: that she reeked of smoke and that her eyes were awfully red, her mascara pooled beneath them. Peyton had always been bad with Visine, and clearly this had not changed. Plus, even though she was dressed as cute as ever—hair pulled back into two low ponytails, wearing jeans and red shirt with an apple on it, a sweater tied loosely around her waist—she had always been the kind of person who, when high, looked it, despite her best efforts. “How did you find me?” I asked her.

  “Well,” she said, holding her hands, palms facing out and up to set the scene, “it was like this. You’d told me you were living in Wildflower Ridge, so—”

  “I did?” I asked, trying to think back.

  “Sure. On the phone that day, remember? ” she said. “So I figure, it can’t be that big of a neighborhood, right? But then, of course, I get over here and it’s freaking huge.”

  I glanced at Jamie, who was following this story, a mild smile on his face. Clueless, or so I hoped.

  “Anyway,” Peyton continued, “I’m driving around, getting myself totally lost, and then I finally just pull over on the side of the road, giving up. And right then, then I see this, like, totally hot guy walking a dog down the sidewalk. So I rolled down my window and asked him if he knew you.”

  Even before she continued, I had a feeling what was coming next.

  “And he did!” she said, clapping her hands. “So he pointed me this way. Very nice guy, by the way. His name was—”

  “Nate,” I finished for her.

  “Yeah!” She laughed again, too loudly, and I got another whiff of smoke, even stronger this time. Like I hadn’t spent ages teaching her about the masking ability of breath mints. “And here I am. It all worked out in the end.”

  “Clearly,” I said, just as I heard the door that led from the garage
to the kitchen open then shut.

  “Hello?” Cora called out. Roscoe, ears perked, trotted toward the sound of her voice. “Where is everybody?”

  “We’re in here,” Jamie replied. A moment later, she appeared in the entrance to the foyer in her work clothes, the mail in one hand. “This is Ruby’s friend Peyton. This is Cora.”

  “You’re Ruby’s sister?” Peyton asked. “That’s so cool!”

  Cora gave her the once-over—subtly, I noticed—then extended her hand. “Nice to meet you.”

  “You, too,” Peyton replied, pumping it eagerly. “Really nice.”

  My sister was smiling politely. Her expression barely changed, only enough to make it more than clear to me that she had seen—and probably smelled—what Jamie had not. Like Peyton’s mom, she didn’t miss much. “Well,” she said. “I guess we should think about dinner?”

  “Right,” Jamie said. “Peyton, can you stay?”

  “Oh,” Peyton said, “actually—”

  “She can’t,” I finished for her. “So, um, I’m going to go ahead and give her the tour, if that’s all right.”

  “Sure, sure,” Jamie said. Beside him, Cora was studying Peyton, her eyes narrowed, as I nodded for her to follow me into the kitchen. “Be sure to show her the pond!”

  “Pond?” Peyton said, but by then I was already tugging her onto the deck, the door swinging shut behind us. I waited until we were a few feet away from the house before stopping and turning to face her.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  She raised her eyebrows. “What do you mean?”

  “Peyton, you’re blinded. And my sister could totally tell.”

  “Oh, she could not,” she said easily, waving her hand. “I used Visine.”

  I rolled my eyes, not even bothering to address this. “You shouldn’t have come here.”

  For a moment, she looked hurt, then pouty. “And you should have called me,” she replied. “You said you were going to. Remember?”

  Cora and Jamie were by the island in the kitchen now, looking out at us. “I’m still getting settled in,” I told her, but she turned, ignoring this as she walked over to the pond. In her ponytails and in profile, she looked like a little kid. “Look, this is complicated, okay?”