Up for Air

by Laurie Morrison

She backed away, crashing into the line divider and knocking the pole to the ground, where it landed with a clang that made her jump.

  “Geez, watch it!” someone said.

  She tried to pick it up with her good hand, but it was heavier than she’d realized. It fell back over and clanged against the ground again.

  She was light-headed with hunger and all of these people were watching her as she walked over to an empty bench after she’d made this huge scene, but somehow she felt oddly calm.

  Here she was, stuck at a giant bus station in Boston, with no way to get anything to eat and no way to get home. Right when she thought she couldn’t possibly have screwed everything up any worse.

  She pulled out her phone. Jeremy was close by for his summer program, but it wasn’t like he would want to see her, and what could he do?

  She could call Mom, but it would be hours before Mom could get all the way here, and Mom was going to be so, so upset. Mitch would know what to do, probably. He’d come up with a strategy. He was her best option.

  Unless . . . Connor and his friends were coming for the concert, and when Mark had rattled off the names of people who were coming, he hadn’t said Caroline’s. Maybe they had an extra ticket still, even?

  But no. Connor was with Caroline, and that whole fantasy about seeing him here at the station was just a ridiculous, delusional dream.

  Annabelle took a deep breath and powered on her phone. She knew message after message would pop up from Mom, but she wasn’t going to read them. She was going to call Mitch and ask him what to do, and that was all.

  Except then she couldn’t ignore all of the messages that flashed across the screen, because she saw Connor’s name.

  How’s it going, HB? he’d written.

  Three and a half hours ago. Today.

  After the other night with Caroline, he still wanted to talk to her. And he was probably on his way to this very station where she was sitting right now.

  She clicked on his number and dialed.

  Connor picked up on the third ring. “Hello?”

  People were talking in the background, but Annabelle couldn’t make out what they were saying. Connor’s voice sounded soft but close, as if he were talking right into the phone with his hand covering his mouth.

  “Um, are you in Boston?” she asked.

  There was a pause, and Jordan’s seagull laugh blared in the background.

  “Why?” Connor asked.

  It wasn’t an easy question to answer. “Well, I . . . I am, and I sort of need . . . I’m stuck.”

  “You’re stuck?” Connor asked.

  It wasn’t mean, the way he said it. It was just kind of thin. Off-handed and a little confused. Like it wasn’t really his problem if she was in trouble.

  Just like it hadn’t really been his problem when she was in trouble the night they tried to get into Dennis Martin’s pool, she realized.

  “Con, who’re you talking to?” a girl’s voice asked.

  Annabelle struggled to swallow. “Is that Caroline?”

  Another long pause. “Yeah. Look, I’m on the bus, and I don’t really . . .” He trailed off.

  Tears blurred Annabelle’s eyes, but she willed them to stay out of her voice. “I saw your text.”

  No response.

  “Why did you text me?” she asked.

  She didn’t only mean this afternoon. She wanted to know why he’d kept on texting her all those other times, too. And why he’d flicked her ponytail, and why he’d stared at her the way he’d stared at her when all that time he’d had Caroline.

  “I was just making sure we were good,” Connor said. “That you were good. That you weren’t . . .”

  He didn’t bother to finish that sentence, either. Or maybe he couldn’t, with Caroline right there.

  Annabelle had never been good at the fill-in questions on Mr. Derrickson’s history tests, but she was pretty sure she knew how to fill in the rest of Connor’s sentence. He wanted to be sure that she wasn’t mad at him. That she still thought he was so great and wonderful, like Elisa had said.

  A voice came on the intercom again. The Hyannis bus was leaving with all those other people but not her.

  “Right,” she said. “Bye, Connor.”

  She hung up without waiting for him to say anything else and buried her head in her hands.

  What was wrong with her? She couldn’t believe she’d called Connor as if she really thought he’d rush over to rescue her just because he sent one meaningless text that took basically zero effort.

  That was even more pathetic than showing up at that party when she hadn’t been invited and sitting down next to him in the sand. Even more pathetic than assuming she’d fit with her dad when she hadn’t seen him in ages and the bad memories were so much stronger than the good ones, like flashlights shining steady instead of fireflies blinking their faint glow.

  Her phone buzzed with a new text from Connor. Sorry HB.

  She stared at those two flimsy words—one he hadn’t even typed out all the way—and that lazy, empty frowny face. A sharp new feeling knocked a little bit of her shame out of the way and made her sit up straighter.

  Anger.

  She was angry with herself, yes.

  But she was angry with Connor, too.

  Sorry, he’d texted.

  Well, she was sorry, too. She was sorry for the version of herself who’d heard Connor say she was all grown up when she stepped out of the pool that day and gotten so excited about what that might mean.

  And she was sorry for rosy-cheeked Caroline, all snuggled up next to Connor on the bus right now, with no idea how he treated other girls.

  She thought of Connor running over to congratulate her after her second meet with the team. Rushing so he wouldn’t miss her, with his goggles pushed up against his forehead and those red goggle indents ringing his bright green eyes.

  She imagined herself grabbing the front of those goggles, pulling as hard as she could, and letting them go—snap!—so they’d smash right into his handsome, flirtatious, confident, charming face.

  Then she closed his last text message and called the person she should have called in the first place.

  “Belle!” Mom said before the phone even finished ringing once. “Stay right where you are, baby. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

  Mom had come straight to Boston as soon as she’d gotten the text Annabelle had sent this morning.

  She’d taken the car on the ferry, and she’d been on her way to the college where Jeremy’s summer program was, figuring Annabelle might have gone there. Then Dad had called her after Annabelle had left the coffee shop, so she’d started heading in that direction instead. And when Annabelle had finally turned her cell phone back on, Mom had tracked it to the station and was already on her way there.

  Mom ran up to where Annabelle was waiting, in front of the soft pretzel place, and pulled her in for a long, tight hug.

  “I’m so sorry,” Annabelle said. “I’m sorry I always make you worried and I keep messing everything up.”

  Mom pulled away, and the line between her eyebrows looked different this close up. Concerned instead of worried. Those two words sounded pretty close to the same thing, but they weren’t.

  Concerned was the opposite of how Connor’s voice had sounded when she told him she was stuck.

  “Honey, you don’t always make me worried,” Mom said. “Why would you think that?”

  “Because . . . school, and then . . . Connor, and my hand.”

  Mom held on to Annabelle’s good hand and led her back over to the empty bench where she’d been sitting before.

  “Annabelle. You make me happy and proud. And sure, sometimes a little worried. But I don’t know any moms who don’t worry about their kids. It goes with the territory.”

  “But . . . Saturday night, you and Mitch sounded so happy before you knew I was home. When it was just the two of you. I’m not like you. I mess everything up.”

  Mom was still holding Annab
elle’s hand, and now she squeezed it tight. “Do you know what Mitch and I did after you went to bed Saturday night? We watched all the videos he had on his phone of you racing this summer. Swimming so much faster than those girls who were twice your size. Getting right back up there after you got disqualified.”

  Annabelle had been staring down at the three thin bracelets on Mom’s arm, but now she picked up her head. “Why?”

  “Because you amaze us, Belle. How hard you work? The way you don’t give up even when something goes wrong?” Mom angled her head down a little, making sure Annabelle was looking right into her eyes. “That’s brave, honey. That’s strong.”

  Usually, Mom’s compliments didn’t fill Annabelle up the way Mitch’s did. When Mom told her she did great in a swim meet, she didn’t really know what she was talking about. And when she said she was proud of Annabelle for working hard at school, it felt like she’d be prouder if Annabelle’s grades were as good as Jeremy’s or Mia’s. But this time, the compliment warmed up Annabelle’s whole body. Not that hot-chocolate warmth in her belly, like she’d gotten with Connor, but a gentler, more even warmth, like stepping out into the sun.

  “I mean, I’d rather you didn’t hop on a ferry by yourself to track down your father,” Mom said. “But I’m not worried about you in the grand scheme of things. I worry day-today, sure. But I know you’re going to be okay. You hear me?”

  Annabelle nodded, and her stomach growled. “I haven’t eaten since breakfast.”

  Mom stood and surveyed the area. “Then how does a greasy, sugary pretzel sound?”

  “Really, really good,” Annabelle said, and they walked up to the pretzel counter, hand in hand.

  Chapter 31

  On the drive to Cape Cod, Mom told Annabelle that Dad had called her in the spring, back when he’d first moved to Boston.

  “He said he wanted to be in touch with you,” she said. “I should have told you right away.”

  Mom was watching the road, and Annabelle studied her profile. She and Mom had different coloring—Mom’s hair and eyes were darker—but Mitch always said how much they looked alike from the side because they had the same chin and nose.

  All this time, Annabelle had thought she was keeping something from her mom, but her mom had been keeping it from her, too?

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked.

  Mom sighed. “It wasn’t the first time I had heard from him. He used to leave messages sometimes, saying how much he missed you. How he wanted to talk to you or visit, but then . . . he didn’t follow through.”

  Mom paused and mushed her lips together. It looked a lot like she might be biting her bottom lip the way she always told Annabelle not to.

  “I didn’t want you to be disappointed if you didn’t hear from him. I thought . . .” She paused again, and now she was definitely biting her lip. “I misunderstood. I told him he could write to you when he was ready, but I thought he’d tell me before he sent a letter. I thought I’d be able to prepare you. To talk through what it would feel like to hear from him.”

  Annabelle remembered pulling that square envelope out of the stack of mail and seeing his handwriting. She wasn’t sure anything would have prepared her for that, really, whether Mom had told her the letter was coming or not.

  Traffic slowed down on the highway, and Mom glanced over. “I’m sorry, honey,” she said. Which was bizarre. Annabelle had kept the letter a secret and snuck away to Boston, and Mom was apologizing. “I wanted to protect you, and I couldn’t.”

  She thought of Kayla and Elisa. How they’d been trying to protect her, too, but that hadn’t worked, either. How maybe she had to make her own mistakes with Dad and with Connor, as humiliating as they were.

  “I’m sorry, too,” she told Mom.

  “I know, honey.” Mom patted Annabelle’s hand, and her bracelets clinked. “We’ll have to talk about some consequences for what happened today, but it’s okay. It’s all going to be okay.”

  And Annabelle felt like maybe that was true. Especially after they got back to the ferry terminal in Cape Cod, and Mom told Annabelle something else she’d never known: the real reason Mitch had wanted to move to the island two years ago.

  “It’s true that the house was a good deal. And it was brave and entrepreneurial. But some investments he’d made hadn’t done so well. We needed to sell the New Jersey house; we didn’t choose to.”

  At first, Annabelle thought she must have misheard. Mitch, the “mover and shaker” who got profiled in Gray Island Magazine, had made bad investments?

  “Maybe I’ve pushed too hard for you to be at the Academy,” Mom added as they parked the car on the bottom level of the ferry. “I felt guilty that the public schools were so highly ranked in New Jersey, and here we were pulling you out of them because moving to the island was right for us, not for you. But maybe the Academy just isn’t a good fit.”

  Annabelle tested out the idea of leaving the Academy, the way she sometimes pressed against the slowly healing bone in her thumb to see how much it still hurt. It didn’t feel good . . . but it wasn’t quite so sharply painful anymore.

  “When we met with Mrs. Sloane,” Mom went on. “I don’t know. I don’t want you to be at a school where they don’t appreciate you.”

  Wait. Where they didn’t appreciate her?

  Mom had always been a teacher-is-always-right parent, never listening to excuses about how some teacher was mean or unfair or didn’t assign something until the last minute. Annabelle had assumed that if she left the Academy, it would be because she wasn’t right for the school, not the other way around.

  They climbed the stairs to the ferry’s top deck, where they could watch their progress across the open ocean and then see the familiar black-and-white Bruck Point Lighthouse as the island came into view.

  “Well, we don’t have to decide anything today,” Mom said.

  So they didn’t. They bought Hershey bars at the snack stand and didn’t care when the chocolate melted all over their hands. And Mom helped Annabelle find some more Dad memories—good ones, like how he’d taken her to her first swimming lessons when she was two, and how he used to push her on the swing at the park down the road for hours and make up silly songs to help her remember her spelling words.

  “He really does love you,” Mom said. “So much, honey. I hope he’ll be able to show you that someday.”

  And when they got back home and Mitch hugged Annabelle, she knew deep in her gut that she could quit swimming forever, and she and Mitch would find new things to bond over. He would ruffle her hair and blow her kisses, anyway.

  “It can be tough stuff, being a dad,” he said. “I know yours disappointed you today, but I want you to know: I’ve done my share of disappointing things, too.”

  She didn’t know what he meant at first.

  But then she remembered his daughter Maura at the pool last summer, when he was criticizing the parents who let their kids wear swimmies. How she said he wasn’t around to watch her learn to swim when she was a kid. And she thought of that boy at the coffee shop, Finn. How Finn was getting a different version of her dad than she had. One that hummed and grinned and got tan in the summer.

  It wasn’t really fair, the idea that she was getting a version of Mitch that his own daughters hadn’t. But he was trying to make things right with them. He called them every Sunday and agonized over how to make things special whenever they visited.

  “Well, you’ve never disappointed me,” she said. “Right back atcha, kiddo,” he replied. “Never.”

  Chapter 32

  Later that week, Annabelle made a plan to meet Elisa and Kayla at Beach Buzz after one of Elisa’s shifts.

  It was a rainy day, so the coffee shop was extra busy, but they pulled an extra chair over to a two-person table by the window.

  All three of them were quiet when they first sat down, and then all three of them started speaking at the same time.

  “So, listen,” Elisa started at the same time as Kay
la said, “We didn’t mean to upset you,” and Annabelle said, “I’m really sorry about the other night.”

  “Jinx!” Elisa called out, and they all laughed.

  Then they were quiet again, not wanting to cut each other off. Annabelle thought of the orientation she, Jeremy, and Mia had gone to at the Academy before sixth grade, with all the other day students. They did this activity where they had to count to ten as a group, but they couldn’t plan out what order they would go in, and they had to start over any time two people said a number at the same time.

  They’d messed up again and again until Mia had taken over, counting to ten as fast as she could all by herself. When the admissions person had pointed out that the idea was to work together, Mia had said, “We did! I said the numbers and everybody else didn’t interrupt me.”

  Annabelle channeled some of sixth-grade Mia’s confidence and blurted out what she wanted to say.

  “You were right about Connor. About how he was acting with me. It didn’t mean anything. I should have listened to you, and I shouldn’t have just left.”

  Kayla spun around the straw in her drink. “Well, we probably shouldn’t have, like, bombarded you.”

  Elisa nodded. “As soon as you left, we realized you probably felt kind of cornered.”

  “A little,” Annabelle admitted. “But I get it now. You were trying to look out for me.”

  “Sorry if we kind of bungled it, though,” Elisa said.

  “And we’re really sorry if Connor hurt you,” Kayla added.

  Annabelle had thought the Connor-hurt had already crested, but it hit her again at full force. “I should have realized,” she squeaked. “I shouldn’t have been so—”

  “Hang on,” Elisa stopped her. “You can’t beat yourself up about this, Annabelle. It’s impossible not to be into it when someone like Connor is giving you that kind of attention.”

  The way she said it, Annabelle got the impression she was speaking from experience.

  “Did you . . .” She wasn’t sure how to finish the question she wanted to ask, but Elisa seemed to understand.

  “We had a thing last summer. Or, I thought it was a thing.” Elisa’s voice was casual, but she tore off pieces of her napkin as she spoke. One corner, then the next, then the next. “We were close, and it seemed like it meant something, but then I found out it didn’t.”