After

by Kristin Harmel

  I hopped up. “I’ll make you a plate.”

  “I don’t need—” Mom began, but I cut her off.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll get it,” I said. “Just sit down and relax.”

  She opened her mouth to reply, but nothing came out. Instead, she sank slowly into a seat at the kitchen table, kicked off her heels, and sighed.

  “So,” I said as I scooped cold fried rice and sweet-and-sour chicken onto a plate, “do you want to talk about it?”

  “Talk about what?”

  “Whatever’s wrong,” I said. I slid the plate into the microwave, set it for a minute thirty, and pushed Start. I turned and looked her in the eye. “You’ve been crying.”

  “No, I haven’t,” Mom protested.

  “Can you at least not lie to me?” I said. She looked away. “Is it about money?”

  “What would make you think that?” she asked. “You know Dad had a life insurance policy and that I’m making plenty. Why do you keep worrying about that?”

  I shrugged. “You always seem worried.”

  She didn’t say anything. The microwave beeped. I pulled the plate out and slid it in front of her, along with a fork. I sat down beside her and tried a different tactic. “You were at the office late today.”

  Mom didn’t look at me as she speared a piece of chicken and took a bite. “I had a lot to do,” she said after she’d swallowed.

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t want to bore you with it,” she said. “Lawyer stuff.” She took another bite.

  I knew that was code for Stop asking me questions, so I changed the subject. “Tanner has to do a diorama for school,” I said. “They’re supposed to make scale models of their bedrooms. So he’ll probably need some supplies.”

  “Okay,” Mom said. “If you e-mail me a list, I’ll pick up the materials on my way home from work tomorrow.”

  “He’ll probably need some help with it,” I prompted. “I don’t think he’s done a diorama before.”

  Mom took another bite and glanced up. “Lacey, I’ve got a really busy week. My caseload is just unbelievable.” She scooped up some rice and added, “Maybe you can help him. You’re good at that kind of thing.”

  “At dioramas?” I couldn’t resist asking.

  Mom shrugged. “You’re more creative than me,” she said. “And you have more time. You’d be doing me a big favor, honey. Please?”

  “Yeah, okay.” I paused and tried to decide how to phrase what I wanted to say. “Look, maybe you could spend some time with Tanner this weekend or something, though. I’m really worried about him.”

  “Lacey, he’s always been quiet. You can’t keep worrying about everybody and everything.”

  “But if I don’t,” I said before I could think about it, “who will?”

  Mom held my gaze. Then she stood up from the table and scraped the remainder of her food into the trash can. She put her plate in the sink and turned to me. “I’m going to go to bed,” she said. “You should get some sleep too, honey.”

  I watched her walk out of the kitchen. She reminded me a little of a ghost. She’d lost a lot of weight since the accident, and now, instead of walking with the purposeful stride of an attorney who knew what she wanted out of life, the way she used to, she seemed to shuffle from place to place, a vacant look on her pale face. I wondered whether she acted like this at her office, too, and if anyone noticed.

  I cleaned up the kitchen, rinsed Mom’s plate, started the dishwasher, and walked upstairs to my room, wondering how it was possible to have an entire conversation without saying anything at all.

  chapter 3

  By Wednesday, Sam Stone had gotten his own textbooks, so he didn’t have to share with me anymore in trig. And it wasn’t like we had any other reason to talk to each other. The rumor was he had moved from somewhere out in western Massachusetts, but I didn’t feel like it was my place to ask him why. If anyone knew what it felt like to be drilled with unwelcome questions, it was me.

  At lunch that day, I was sitting with Jennica and Brian as usual. He had his right arm draped around her, which I figured must make it tough to eat.

  “So that new guy, Sam?” Jennica asked. I looked up, startled that she seemed to be reading my mind. “You know,” she continued, “that guy from our trig class?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “So he’s hot, huh?” She leaned forward and grinned at me.

  “Jennica!” Brian exclaimed, feigning hurt as he pulled her closer.

  “Aw, baby, he’s not as hot as you,” she said.

  Brian stuck out his bottom lip in a mock sulk. “Really?”

  Jennica giggled. “You’re the hottest of the hot.” She gave him a quick kiss on the lips.

  “No, you’re the hottest of the hot,” Brian said in an equally disgusting voice.

  “No, you are,” Jennica said, batting her eyelashes.

  “No, you are, pookie,” Brian said, leaning forward to kiss her.

  Pookie?

  “I think I just threw up a little in my mouth,” I muttered. I stood, and the two of them looked up from their love haze.

  “What’s wrong?” Jennica asked, blinking at me.

  “Nothing. I’m just not hungry anymore. I’ll see you later.” I grabbed my tray and waited for her to ask me where I was going—after all, there weren’t exactly a lot of exciting lunchtime options at Plymouth East—but she had already turned back to Brian.

  I threw out my trash and headed out the door to the mostly empty halls. We were allowed to make brief trips to our lockers during lunchtime, but we got in trouble for hanging around too long, so I figured I’d just switch out my morning books for my afternoon ones and go outside. It was overcast, but it hadn’t rained yet, and there was a bench under the big oak tree near the senior parking where I sat when I didn’t feel like sitting with Romeo and Juliet in the cafeteria.

  I had just opened my locker and was digging around in the back, trying to find my compact mirror, when a deep voice coming from the other side of my locker door startled me.

  “Hey.”

  I swung the door closed and found myself face to face with Sam. He was leaning casually against the lockers, his hands jammed in his pockets. I blinked at him, then dropped the English textbook I was holding. It bounced off my backpack and hit me in the calf. I winced.

  “Problem?” Sam asked, glancing down at the textbook and then back at me.

  “No,” I said quickly.

  Sam studied me and then smiled, the corners of his mouth creeping slowly upward like a stream of syrup spreading across a pancake. “You sure?” he asked.

  “Positive.” I felt a little short of breath.

  He bent down and picked up my backpack and my textbook in one smooth motion. “Here,” he said, handing them to me. “You might need these.”

  “Thanks.” I stared at my feet, willing my face to stop flaming. What was wrong with me? I was reliable, mature Lacey Mann, who could be trusted to behave like a grown-up in any situation. And here I was acting like, well, Sydney.

  “So.” Sam put his hands back in his pockets. His warm green eyes met mine. “What are you doing out here in the hallway? Shouldn’t you be eating with that friend of yours in the cafeteria? Jennica?”

  “It’s no big deal,” I said. “She’s with her boyfriend. I just felt like walking around.”

  “Guess you don’t want to watch her and her boyfriend all over each other,” he said.

  I looked up sharply. “What? No. That’s not it.”

  Sam looked like he didn’t believe me. “It would bother me.”

  I paused. “Okay,” I admitted. “Maybe it bothers me a little.” I cleared my throat, suddenly desperate to change the subject. “So, um, your old school,” I said. “Where is it? I mean, where did you come from?”

  “Taunton.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I’ve been there.” It was about thirty minutes away.

  “Oh yeah?”

  I nodded. “My brother
Logan played in a baseball tournament there a few years ago.” Back when he still played baseball, I added silently. Back when things were normal.

  “Cool,” Sam said. “I used to play ball. Maybe I played against him. Are you a baseball fan?”

  “Definitely.”

  “Sox?” he asked.

  I nodded again. “My dad always takes my brothers and me to Fenway a few times each summer.” Then I stopped abruptly, the words caught in my throat as I realized what I’d just said.

  “Cool,” Sam said, oblivious. “I haven’t met a lot of girls who like baseball. Did you guys make it to a lot of games this year?”

  I swallowed hard. “No,” I said without elaborating.

  Sam seemed to register that something was off. He un-slouched from the locker and drew himself up to his full height. He was taller than I had realized.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “Fine,” I said.

  “Okay,” Sam said uncertainly. He gave me a half smile. “I’ll see you in class then, cool?” He turned and walked away.

  • • •

  The rest of the week sped by, the way the weeks in the fall always did, when your new grade and new classes still felt fresh and exciting. Sam had begun smiling at me in class now and saying hi in the halls like we were friends. I always smiled back and then looked quickly away, as if locking eyes with him would be a dead giveaway that I was beginning to develop a crush.

  It’s not like it was wrong to feel that way about him. It was just that I figured I didn’t have much of a chance. Why bother liking him if the chances of him liking me back as more than a friend were slim to none? Summer Andrews was already flirting with him, and on Thursday, I saw him sitting at her popular senior table for lunch. I wasn’t an outsider—I was on student council and played lacrosse in the spring, and people liked me just fine—but I wasn’t a cheerleader either. I was brainy, quiet Lacey who everyone thought of as sweet instead of sexy. And despite what my dad used to tell me freshman year, when I’d come home sometimes on the verge of tears, there wasn’t a single guy at Plymouth East who would go for a nice girl over an easy one.

  On Saturday morning, I was lying in bed, half-awake, trying to stop thinking about Sam, when the sounds from downstairs snapped my eyes open. I glanced over at the clock: 6:06. Too early for me to be awake. Too early for the TV in the living room to be on. But there was no such thing as too early or too late in our house anymore.

  I sat up and listened, wondering what Tanner was watching. It was a pretty safe bet that it was either a cartoon or something to do with animals. He was obsessed with animals. Sure enough, when I went down the stairs a few minutes later and rounded the corner into the dark living room, my little brother was sitting a foot from the TV, his face bathed in the glow from the screen. I could see a giraffe ambling through the wilderness.

  “Good morning,” I said casually, as if it were normal for him to be sitting there, looking like he wanted to climb inside the TV and escape into the wild himself. Tanner turned his head slightly and nodded before returning his attention to the screen.

  I went into the kitchen to make us some breakfast. I was determined to pretend that everything was normal until it actually was.

  After scanning the fridge to see if Mom had picked anything up on her way home last night—she had—I turned the stove on and slipped three pieces of wheat toast in the toaster. I pulled out a frying pan, put it on the burner, sprayed it with PAM, and cracked three eggs into it, making sure their edges didn’t touch, the way Dad always used to when he made breakfast for us.

  A few minutes later, I scooped the eggs, their yolks still runny, out of the pan and onto the toast. When I walked back to the living room, Tanner accepted his plate without even looking up. He was riveted to the screen.

  “So what are you watching?” I asked after I’d set two juice glasses down and taken a bite of my toast. I knew it was The Crocodile Hunter, one of Tanner’s favorite shows, but I wanted him to say it. Ever since the accident, he had retreated further and further into himself, and now he hardly said a word, not even to his friend Jay, who came over to play video games once a week. Although, come to think of it, I hadn’t seen Jay for a while now. I wondered if he’d finally given up on Tanner.

  Nobody seemed to care but me. I had tried bringing it up with Mom, but she just shrugged and said that it wasn’t all that abnormal and that Tanner would deal with things in his own time. But what did she know? She saw her legal assistant ten times more often than she saw her kids; Tanner was usually asleep by the time she got home. I had also tried talking about Tanner with Dr. Schiff, the psychologist my mom made us visit every other Saturday. But she had just told me that it wasn’t my responsibility. “You’re just a kid,” she would always say.

  It always made my blood boil.

  As usual, Tanner didn’t answer my question. Instead, he grabbed the remote and hit the Info button until the name of the show appeared at the bottom of the screen. He shot me a look and returned his attention to the TV.

  “This looks like a good one!” I said enthusiastically, as if we were having a normal conversation. I fished for something else to say. “I really like how he explains everything so well. And his accent is really cool. Don’t you think?”

  Tanner nodded without taking his eyes off the screen. He took another bite of his toast. I pushed mine away. I didn’t feel hungry anymore. I made some more cheerful, one-sided small talk before I gave up. Tanner obviously wasn’t going to respond. And I had run out of things to say.

  “Okay, Tanner,” I said, feigning cheerfulness. “I’m going to go hop in the shower.”

  I had just crossed the living room into the kitchen when I heard Tanner’s voice. I stopped and turned around.

  “What?” I asked.

  He was silent for a minute, and I started to doubt that he’d said anything at all. Maybe I’d imagined it. But then he spoke again.

  “You know, he died too,” he said clearly, still staring at the TV screen. “The Crocodile Hunter. A stingray got him.” He looked at me, evidently expecting some kind of response.

  I gulped. “Yeah, I know.”

  “No one saved him either,” he said. Then, he turned the volume up. The conversation was over.

  I stood there, my heart thudding in my chest. Guilt and responsibility weighed down on me, squeezing me from the inside out.

  A hundred times a day, I thought about how different life would be if I hadn’t insisted on taking those extra moments in the bathroom. Or if I had cried out to warn Dad, in that instant before the Suburban hit us. Instead, I hadn’t reacted. It had been the only important thing I’d ever had to do in my life, and I’d failed. It was like Tanner said. Nobody saved the Crocodile Hunter.

  And I hadn’t done anything to save my dad.

  • • •

  By the beginning of the next week, Sam Stone was the talk of the school. Summer Andrews had apparently decided that he was her big new love interest. It didn’t seem to matter to anyone else that Summer actually had a boyfriend, Rob Macavey, a senior with big arms, close-cropped dark hair, and eyes that were just a little too close together. Jennica and I agreed that he’d clearly been hit in the head one too many times on the football field.

  But Summer, who didn’t even have a class with Sam, had decided that she had a crush on him, and so the whole school knew she had called dibs. I couldn’t understand why she couldn’t just limit the number of guys she tried to pounce on.

  In class, Sam and I were apparently friends now. I supposed it was because he didn’t know anyone very well yet, and since he sat next to me in two classes, I was a logical person to strike up a conversation with. I was surprised to realize how much I liked talking to him, though. It started to be a routine that he would sit down in trig, grin at me, and rattle off the Red Sox score from the previous night, as well as some kind of commentary about a player who screwed things up—even if the Sox ended up winning. I’d been a Sox fan for years and could
practically recite the roster in my sleep, but I’d never known a boy before who would talk to me about sports like I knew what I was talking about. It was nice.

  After school on Wednesday, I was surprised to find Sam waiting for me by my locker. I’d had plans to go to the mall with Jennica and then study with her later, but she had texted me after the final bell to say that something had come up with her mom and she couldn’t make it. Concerned, I’d texted her back to see what was wrong. Don’t worry, she had written. Brian’s with me.

  “There you are,” Sam said as I approached.

  “Hey.”

  “So how’s it going?” Sam asked. Was it my imagination, or did he seem nervous?

  “Good,” I said. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what he wanted.

  “So I hear you’re really good at trig,” he said. “Right?”

  I shrugged. “I guess.”

  “I was just wondering if maybe you could help me study for the test on Monday,” he said.

  “Yeah, okay.” I forced a smile. I was Lacey, the reliable study buddy. I just wasn’t sure how he’d figured this out so quickly. “I was going to study with Jennica tomorrow, so you can come over too, if you want.”

  “Cool, thanks.” He paused. “So, do you need a ride home or something?”

  “Now?”

  “Yeah.”

  I glanced around. Jennica was gone. I’d probably already missed the bus. And riding with Sam would be preferable to riding with Logan and Sydney any day. “Okay,” I said. “That would be great.”

  I pulled a few books out of my locker and shut it. Sam surprised me by taking my backpack off my arm, slipping my books into it, and tossing it over his shoulder. “C’mon,” he said.

  I followed him outside. He opened the door of his Jeep for me and tossed our bookbags in the back. I told him how to get to my house, and soon we were cruising down Court Street. The silence between us was beginning to feel stifling.

  Finally, I blurted out, “So are you going out with Summer Andrews?” I felt like an idiot the moment the question left my mouth.