She started to smile again, that same crooked, dimpled smile, but out of mercy, suppressed it. “It really is,” she deadpanned, and relief flooded my face.
Ariana Grande suddenly cut through the air with her vocal brilliance as the song “God is a Woman” alerted me to the time. It was getting late and I knew from experience that without that timer, I would lose track of time, and end up getting a lecture for disappearing for too long. I pulled out my phone and silenced my alarm as quickly as possible, my sudden jerkiness almost causing me to slip off the rail. Lennox’s arm wrapped around my waist before I lurched down into the muck beneath me.
Our eyes met as I caught my breath. “You saved me,” I said in the stating-the-obvious way that was becoming my trademark communication style.
This time she was the one to blush. Red tinted her edges; the blush crept up her neck but stopped just below her chin. It tinted the bottom of her ears but stopped before it found her cheeks until she suddenly realized she’d kept her arm around my waist a little longer than normal. With a jerky movement of her own, she pulled away, and the red found its way up to her eyelids.
“I guess I did,” she replied.
That night, after I had said goodbye to Lennox and fumbled an invitation to hang out again sometime, after dinner with my mom and little sister, the three of us lined up in a straight row at our island counter, after homework was over, I sat at my computer with one goal in mind: find the solution to my inner doldrums. Make something happen.
I knew it was cheesy even as I did it, but I couldn’t think of another way to word my dilemma: I typed “things teens can do to improve their lives” into Google. I knew that was a bust from the moment a list starting with “do well in school” popped up, especially since my 4.5 GPA hadn’t done much to improve my fulfillment level so far, but I kept looking, figuring if I scrolled long enough, there would be something different. After an hour of scouring the internet, I was pretty dejected. Suggestions like “make a drastic change to your hairstyle” and “make a fucking scrapbook” (okay, maybe the fucking part was my own addition) were not what I was looking for; they were exactly the kinds of shallow, mundane crap I was running from. I stared at the chalkboard wall behind my bed and read the lyrics of people who could make me feel. Lyrics I had scrawled when I was so desperate to taste something, touch something that was more. Underneath the Paramore lyrics I’d read a million times, I listed my next moves in loopy letters with a broken piece of lavender chalk. Three choices from the hour of searching that, if nothing else, had some potential.
1) Do one thing you’re afraid of.
I liked this one because the one thing that I would do was so obvious, if not exactly a pleasant thought in December weather: I’d cliff dive at Grayson Lake. After my failure the first time we’d gone to the lake, I hadn’t even tried to jump on the second trip. While my friends made made the trek to the top of the mountain, I’d stayed behind, my toes submerged in two inches of sand. After freezing up so spectacularly the first time, I’d tried to make an excuse not to go along at all, but when Marley kept hassling me about it, I tried a different tactic. I knew I couldn’t even stand on the rocks and look down after last time, so I’d used my pasty, lack of tan as an excuse to stay put below, slathered myself in baby oil, and spent the next two weeks with peeling skin.
Still, I couldn’t take my eyes off Marley and Jake as they flung their bodies off the edge of a cliff and even after they admitted that they’d been scared in the seconds before they’d stepped off the edge and into air, they wore matching looks of exhilaration when they made it back to dry land. I couldn’t help but interrogate them after they submerged from the water below.
Did it hurt when you hit the water? I had asked, even though that wasn’t the part that made me chicken out. In truth, I think maybe it was that movie, the one with the girl from Gossip Girl that made me so scared: The Dive from Clausen’s Pier. In the movie, a guy is paralyzed after he dives off a pier into shallow water. I was so afraid of that concept; the idea that I could just follow behind my friends, see them leap to safety, but I could hit some danger that was lurking there, unseen beneath the murky waves. One thing I was afraid of that I would do: I was going to cliff dive at Grayson Lake.
2) Visit a nearby town.
This one also had potential, even if it was a little less obvious. I’d have to make another list to whittle down my options: would I go with history or fun? Would I take a group with me or go alone? I thought about it. There was always King’s Island, which would have to wait until the season started up again. Somewhere, though. I would go somewhere. I looked around my room for inspiration, breathing in the too familiar smell of candy cane and old lady. My diffuser was really working in overdrive, suffocating any other potential odors with a misting of peppermint and lavender. As much as people liked to write essential oils off as pseudoscience, they really worked, and I had been noticeably more relaxed since I’d started keeping a steady flow of those scents in my air.
My room was not the most inspirational. I mean, I’d done the kind of stuff Pinterest had led me to believe would bring me inspiration: I had a chalkboard wall lined with song lyrics, a suitcase style record player that I used to set a very artsy aesthetic, and even some slightly played out fairy lights because even at 16, I couldn’t resist anything that felt like it had been pulled from a fairy tale. Then I saw it and as soon as my eyes caught on it, I knew: my antique gold jewelry box that contained one single item: a letter to my dad.
It had been a burn letter, which was an idea I’d gotten from a therapist that Mom had sent me to when I was having a hard time with my dad’s seamless ability to forget about me and Ari. In it I had said things that I had lied about feeling all those times when Mom asked how I was holding up with him being gone. I was supposed to burn it, but after I scrawled all my truth onto butterfly stamped stationary, the hot righteousness I felt had stopped me from destroying it. He needed to know how I felt, and I told myself that someday I would work up the nerve to mail it. I scratched the resolution down in my journal.
3) Mail the letter to Dad.
When I was seven and Ari was just a newborn, right after Dad left, he used to come around at least every couple of months to take me to do things, but he would leave Ari behind because she was breastfed and he said she wouldn’t know the difference between seeing him and not seeing him, anyway. I never thought that was fair, like somehow Ari was being shafted, but I didn’t say anything because I liked having all of the attention to myself again. Because I only saw Dad so rarely, the time we spent was always fun: we’d go swimming or to Camden Park. He’d let me eat junk food. Dad was like a big kid and even on the days when he’d just take me to the playground, the way he’d push me on the swings and then run underneath me or pretend to be a monster while I slid away from him on the slides made it all amazing.
But then Ari turned two and Mom said he should try to include her in his visits. Suddenly, the once every month or two became two total visits in the year and by the time Ari turned three, we hadn’t seen him for four months. When I wrote the letter, I was ten. I explained to my dad that out of everything, the disappearance, the inconsistency, the broken promises, all of it, the thing that he had done that was the worst was make me hate Ari. He left our house right after she was born and he stopped seeing me right after she started to tag along, so as a tiny kid, I blamed her for taking my dad away from me. I thought Ari was so awful that he couldn’t stand to be around us anymore. Luckily, I got past it, but part of me hated him for the year I had spent looking at my cute little chubby cheeked sister with resentment. As I thought about little scrawny Ari now, all legs and freckles, I knew it was time. I had to mail the letter.
There was one more item I wanted to add to my to-do list; one item that I had avoided committing to even though I had known since I sat down that I was going to add it. The last one was the one that gave me the greatest feeling of being torn because the draw was far too irresistible to ignore, but
I so desperately wanted to be the kind of girl who could ignore the siren song of “love.” I hesitated before writing it down, something about the utter girliness of it feeling off-putting. In the end, in letters tinier than the rest of my list as though that would somehow hide it away, I wrote:
4) Go on a blind date.
Dating. Wasn’t that about as frivolous and every day as a drastic new hair color? When I thought it over, though, there was a lot that could happen, a lot that could change if the blind date went the right way. I’d dated before, I’d even had one girlfriend, but maybe, just maybe, if I went on a blind date, I would meet someone and fall in love. Maybe even get my heart broken. I could even kind of picture what a new relationship could look like: our hands intertwined as we sipped coffee and walked the annoying brick streets that lined my neighborhood. A crinkling smile as I told her a dumb joke. A slightly hysterical giggle as we pushed each other on the swings. Just me and someone else, in love. After all, was there even an experience out there more universal than that?
Chapter Two
Lennox
I never meant to talk to Hannah that day on the bridge.
Trudging through the woods wasn’t exactly my cup of tea; I wasn’t a nature person. If I’d had my druthers, I would stay inside basically all the time. But, I was starting to go stir crazy in my room because, since the move, the only people I had to talk to in the new, alien house I’d been imprisoned inside of were the two people I most wanted to avoid: my parents. Unfortunately, avoiding my parents meant that I was in my bedroom alone pretty much morning to night. The new room was cool: my mom said we had gotten a pretty sweet deal and that real estate was much cheaper here in Huntington than it had been in Columbus, but even an almost double sized bedroom couldn’t keep me from feeling like the walls were closing in. When my mom offhandedly mentioned how close we lived to a pretty sizable public park I thought, what the hell. At least if I’m outside, I won’t be here.
I had a vague notion of the park being pretty, but I was cold and all stuck-in-my-head and didn’t even quite know how I had ended up in the woods. I just knew that it was quiet and even though I’d been trying to escape my own angsty loneliness, I’d ended up alone again. Then I saw her.
She was sitting on the rail of a bridge—a bridge that didn’t really seem to serve any purpose—and totally lost in her own thoughts, too. Eyes glazed over, hair long and tangled in front of her face, she reminded me of something from a storybook and I felt the beginnings of flutters in my stomach before I remembered the last thing I could do was talk to some girl the first time I ventured out of my house alone. Girls were the reason we were here. Girls were the reason my parents had left the church I had grown up in. A girl was the reason for all of it . . . and if I was being honest with myself, that girl was me. I was the one who had destroyed my family’s whole world.
So, I really was just going to leave her alone. Keep walking through the woods, maybe exchange the classic head nod of acknowledgement if it came up and was necessary. As I got closer, though, I was hypnotized by her total lack of awareness of anything going on around her. We were alone in the woods and as my feet crunched on sticks and leaves, she didn’t even notice. Didn’t even glance my way. Suddenly, I got this idea that maybe I could startle her, and we’d share a laugh. I wouldn’t become friends with her; God knows I wasn't strong enough for anything that would complicate this one year I had to get through before I left for college. But maybe I could numb some of the loneliness and share a chat with someone.
I walked up to her, now hyper aware of every snap of a stick my feet caused, but still she didn’t look up. As I walked up behind her, she pulled a pack of clove cigarettes from her pocket and lit one, the exhale audible in the still air. As she released the smoke into curling spirals around her head, I whispered into her ear.
“One hit wonder,” I said, chuckling as she jumped.
After that, it had just been so hard to end the conversations. She was so sweet, and her eyes never left my face while we talked. It was like she was the first person in a month who had been interested in anything I’d said. I kept willing myself to wrap it up, to find a way to get away from her, but every time there was a natural lull in conversation, something kept me there, rooted to the spot in the middle of the woods.
I rationalized my way through it and with every allowance I made for myself, I spun farther away from the idea of never talking to her again. I started with an innocent enough excuse to stay: a conversation with a stranger was innocent. This conversation wasn’t the start of anything. But as our eyes stayed locked on each other and the air grew more electric, my thoughts spiraled from that safe path. Just because I was completely captivated by her didn’t mean she liked me. The sparks could, theoretically, all be something made up in my head. There was no real reason I couldn’t make a friend and if my parents didn’t like it, that was there problem, not mine. What was the worst they could do? I didn’t even have to answer that. It didn’t matter. Let them do their worst: I had to see her again.
Chapter Three
Hannah
The next time I saw Lennox, she was already there, sitting on the rail of my bridge almost like she was expecting me. Less than twenty-four hours had passed since I’d last seen her, but I still felt a jolt when I realized she was there, in the same spot where we’d last met. Her hands were pink like she’d been sitting in the bracing December winds for a while and for a second, I felt hopeful. Maybe she had been waiting just in case I showed up. Maybe she’d actually wanted to see me as much as I wanted to see her. It had to be to be more than a coincidence that we were at the same spot at the same time, both there. With a forceful swallow, I stuffed down my hopeful thoughts and tried my best to saunter over and sit beside her. Realistically, my sauntering had such a jerky quality that I more resembled something from a zombie film than someone with a cool, effortless swagger, but whatever. They say practice makes perfect, so maybe with enough involuntary, spasmic movement, I’ll eventually have some sex appeal.
“I hoped I would see you here today,” Lennox said, turning her head to face me. I searched her face for clues about how she meant that. A piece of her bangs fell into her eyes like something out of a movie and I just about fell off the bridge in a swoon.
“You did?” I asked.
She nodded. “Yeah. I liked talking to you the other day and I figured it would be nice if I knew at least one person when school started back up.”
My face fell, but I quickly looked back up, not wanting her to see how disappointed I was. So, her excitement to see me had nothing to do with me and everything to do with not being completely isolated when school resumed. I mean, I wasn’t mad at her for that; I got it, it just sucked for me.
“Right. I get that,” I responded. “Well, hey!” I continued with a pasted-on smile that felt so tight that it was like my skin had become a few sizes too small for my face. “We don’t have to accidentally meet in the woods every time. We could exchange numbers and hang out like normal teens.”
With a smirk that crinkled the corner of her left eye, Lennox pulled her phone from her pocket and handed it to me. I fumbled with the numbers and letters as I programmed my information into her phone and, though I wanted to blame it on my gloves, they were fingerless. I handed the phone back to her and mine immediately started to vibrate. I pulled it from my pocket, saw the unstored number, and hit decline.
“See? Now we can call each other and everything.” I stammered.
“Indeed, we can,” she replied and that cocky, clipped way she answered made something in my stomach lurch. She was just so effortlessly cool, the kind of person who shouldn’t even be able to exist in the awkward void of adolescence. Then I realized I was staring as I had all these thoughts and felt my cheeks redden as I pictured myself as this moony eyed girl looking all smitten at this chick I barely knew. But what could I do? I was smitten.
My lips were chapped. The thought occurred to me from nowhere, but suddenly I fixated on
them, thinking about how they were so dry and cracked that there couldn’t be anything appealing about them. I didn’t have any Carmex and I was painfully aware that as soon as I started thinking about the chapping, I’d jumped right into my habit of running the edge of my teeth against the skin like I was trying to peel off the dead skin. I told myself to stop and I did for a few seconds, but as our conversation lagged and the wind made my lips tingle from the friction, I started it up again.
“Can you drive?” I blurted. I gripped the railing so tightly that rust dug into the palms of my hands.
“Yep,” Lennox responded with a chuckle. “I have an old Volvo 240 that I bought for like five hundred dollars last year because there’s almost two hundred thousand miles on it, but my dad read online that they can get almost 300. It’s shit, but I like it.”
I knew nothing about cars, like Jon Snow levels of nothing, but I nodded like I knew what she was talking about. My mom bought me a car on Craigslist. It was blue, the stereo mostly worked, and the air conditioner had enough Freon that it could turn your skin a similar shade as the car. That was literally my entire working knowledge of the thing. Well, I knew those things and I also knew that my mom refused to let me drive it to school because she was sure that having my own car on campus would cause trouble. It had probably been the biggest argument we’d ever had because I couldn’t see her side. I hadn’t ever been in any trouble, so I didn’t see how a car would change anything.
“I like driving,” I said. “It’s one of my favorite things to do when I’m bored. I just get on the highway and turn up the radio and go.”
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