Play of Light

by Debra Doxer

  In the conversations I’d overheard, he never mentioned his uncle and aunt or his parents, which I thought was strange. I’d hear Emma go on and on to him about how strict our father was and how he annoyed the heck out of her. But Spencer never brought up his own home life. After he saved me on the beach that day, I’d seen him walking along the shoreline many times, but he only waved to me without much enthusiasm and averted his gaze, letting me know he wanted to be alone.

  I took it personally. I couldn’t help it. He was so friendly that first week we met. He was still nice after that, but ever since I told him he was more than nice, Spencer had put a distance between us that he didn’t show with Emma and her friends or even with Riley. It was unfair. So what if I told him he was nice? His reaction was strange, and I thought that all the answers to my questions about him were to be found in his eyes.

  It took hours to get his face just right. The moon was already on the other side of the house when I finally finished. Squinting through the darkness, I studied those eyes that were set so deep within his face below straight dark brows. I stared and stared at the picture.

  After a while, something about it made me start to cry. I only realized I was crying when a teardrop splashed down onto the top of his cheek, smudging the edge and making the paper buckle in that one spot. Then somehow I knew. The look in his eyes became clear to me, like a window to his thoughts.

  He was scared. He was sad too, but mostly he was terribly scared . . . all the time.

  A rustling noise on the ground caught my attention before a familiar voice spoke. “You won’t need ‘Sara Smile’ to wake you up in the morning since it already is morning.”

  I looked down, blinking at the shadows, but I couldn’t see Spencer. “What are you doing here?” I whispered as loudly as I could without waking anyone up.

  “I got tired of watching you from my window. Didn’t I tell you not to sit on the roof anymore?”

  My back stiffened. “Well, you can stop watching now. I’m going in.”

  “Wait for me. I’m coming up.”

  Quickly flipping my sketchbook closed, I leaned out and tried to see him. My heart stopped as I heard him begin to climb. Beside me, the drainpipe rattled and creaked. “What are you doing?” I whisper-yelled at him, terrified he was going to fall. “You can’t climb up here that way.”

  “Looks like I just did.” His face appeared at the roofline, grinning up at me. His teeth were ghostly white as his long fingers gripped at the side of the black shingles and he hauled himself up beside me. “Just call me Spidey,” he said with a smirk.

  Pushing my hair behind my ears to see him better, I took in his drawstring pajama bottoms and white T-shirt. He had his Red Sox cap on with long pieces of hair escaping beneath it. I could hardly believe Spencer was sitting here on the roof beside me. I’d just tried to clear my head of him and now he was here, like my thoughts had called to him.

  “What have you been drawing all this time?” he asked. His quiet voice was so close, I could feel the air shift beside me when he spoke.

  My fingers tightened on my sketch pad as I ran through possible lies to tell him.

  “Is it a secret?” he asked with amusement in his voice.

  But I wasn’t in the mood to joke. I swallowed as I pictured his eyes the way I’d drawn them. It was too dark to see his eyes clearly now, but I was sure they looked exactly the same. They were filled with secrets. I didn’t have secrets, but he did.

  Then I had a thought that made my hands start to sweat. Maybe he’d tell me his secret if I showed him the picture. But then I’d be revealing myself to him. He’d know how much I thought about him, and since he never thought of me, my humiliation would be complete. But he needed a friend, a real one. I wanted to be that friend so badly, I decided the humiliation might be worth it.

  Gathering my courage, I flipped open my sketchbook to the drawing I’d worked on all night. When I caught my first glimpse of it again, I knew it was powerful. I’d been practicing portrait drawing all year, and this was by far my best work. I tilted it toward Spencer so he could see, and heard him suck in a breath.

  Looking over at him, I saw the shock on his face as he stared at my drawing. I should have felt embarrassed knowing how obsessed with him this made me look. I thought for sure I’d want to climb back into the house and hide underneath my covers forever. But now that Spencer had seen it, my feelings were different. I was worried about him, and that seemed to push away everything else.

  He said nothing for a long time. He just looked at his black-and-white likeness as I waited for him to say something about it.

  Finally, he coughed, startling me, and he whispered what sounded like Jesus. “I had no idea you were this good, Sarah.”

  Watching him in the darkness, I could see he was upset by the drawing, but that could be because he thought he had a preteen stalker.

  As he rubbed his hands over his thighs, his gaze traveled between me and the sketch pad. It felt like he didn’t know quite what to say now, and the silence was becoming awkward.

  I filled my dry mouth with saliva and decided I’d have to speak first. “Art is what I love to do.” His eyes met mine. I felt a little jolt at the weight of his attention. “Do you have something you love to do?”

  After another moment of just looking at me, he licked his lips and glanced away. “Play music,” he said quietly.

  That got my attention. “Really? You play an instrument?”

  Nodding, he said, “Guitar and some piano. I sing a little too.”

  “Really?” I asked again, pleased that he had a passion for something like music. He was an artist, just like me.

  “Yes, Sarah.” He grinned at my reaction. “Really.”

  “Would you play for me sometime?”

  He laughed out loud, softly but happily, and I wondered if his eyes were joining in. “Sure,” he said.

  Peering at him with this shiny new nugget of information, I asked, “Is that sure, as in you’ll really play for me sometime, or sure as in, if I agree maybe she’ll leave me alone and forget about it?”

  Turning an amused smile on me, he said, “I’ll really play for you sometime.”

  Grinning back, I tried not to show how my imagination danced, wondering what his singing might sound like and what kind of music he liked. That was why he knew “Sara Smile.” He probably knew lots of music.

  “And you can talk to me too,” I added, hopeful about us again. “If you want, I mean. About whatever you want. I’d never tell anyone what you say.”

  His smile disappeared as his dark eyes narrowed. I closed my mouth and realized I’d done it again, said things to him I should have kept to myself. Somehow the words slipped out, and had I waited for one second before spouting my thoughts, I would have realized that was exactly the wrong thing to say to him.

  “I’m sorry,” I mumbled. “I didn’t mean . . . You don’t have to talk to me. Why would you talk to me? That was stupid. I don’t know why I said that.” Too late, I turned away and clamped my mouth shut, knowing I was making it worse.

  He was quiet for a moment while I worried about his reaction. “Sarah.” His fingers brushed my hand. I glanced up to find him still watching me. “We both know why you said that. We both saw your drawing.”

  My eyes widened because he understood. He knew what I saw when I looked at him, and he didn’t like it.

  “I knew it would be you,” he said. “I knew you were the one to stay away from.”

  Blinking rapidly, I reared my head back at his words.

  He sat there, dangling his hands between his bent knees.

  My eyes burned with unshed tears. I hadn’t imagined it. He was distancing himself from me on purpose. What did he mean, I was the one to stay away from? Because I saw too much?

  “Can I keep that drawing?” he asked.

  I stared at him, hugging it to my chest. Why did he want it? It might have been the best portrait of anyone I’d ever drawn. But it also revealed somethin
g about Spencer that he didn’t want anyone to see. That was why he wanted it. It was now a part of his secret, and the picture suddenly felt like it rightfully belonged to him.

  Carefully, I tore it from the pad and passed it to his waiting hand. Shifting away from me, he started to fold it, first in half and then in quarters. I nearly gasped at the creases marring the picture as the paper grew smaller and smaller, until it finally disappeared inside his hand.

  Reaching for the drainpipe, he turned back to me. “You don’t have to listen to me about not sitting out here alone, but if you continue to do it, I’m going to have to keep an eye on you. You don’t sleep. I don’t sleep, and I’ll be watching you the whole time, every time. Keep that in mind.”

  My mouth dropped open. Was he was trying to make me feel guilty or intimidate me, or make me feel so self-conscious at the thought of him watching me that I’d stop coming out here? At that moment, I vowed to come out every night just to show him that he couldn’t tell me what to do. But my bravery was nowhere to be found the next night or the night after that. Spencer was dealing with so much, the death of his parents and maybe even more. I couldn’t take his sleep away from him too.

  In the end, I never sat out on my roof again.

  On the walk to school the next day, something extraordinary happened. When Spencer said hello to me, his blank eyes warmed for a moment. At first, I thought I’d imagined it. I was nervous to see him after last night, and I thought my mind was playing tricks on me. But he did it again at the end of the day when he spotted me. His eyes melted just a little when they landed on me. It felt like we had an unspoken understanding. He knew that I knew something, but he also realized that he could trust me with it.

  As thrilled as I was by this new warmth, the way it quickly disappeared again when he looked away from me caused me to worry even more. This went on for a week, until I finally couldn’t contain myself any longer. Something was wrong, and I had to tell someone, even if I was betraying Spencer just a little bit. But that betrayal didn’t gnaw at me since I planned to tell the one person I trusted more than anyone else in the world. My dad.

  Dad’s chief and Uncle Russ stayed for dinner that night like they sometimes did. Chief Reardon’s wife died last year, so Mom had him over for dinner at least once a week. And Uncle Russ was a bachelor, making Mom feel the need to feed him a home-cooked meal every now and then too.

  That night, after Emma escaped to her room and while Mom was cleaning up from dinner, I waited for our company to leave. On their way to the door, Chief Reardon winked at me and Uncle Russ rubbed the top of my head like I was still five years old.

  Once they were gone, I followed Dad into the den and took the seat across from him. He was just reaching for the newspaper on the coffee table when his eyes met mine. Something in my expression made him lay the paper down again before he gave me his full attention.

  Then haltingly, having a hard time explaining it right, I told him everything, from how tight-lipped Spencer was about himself, to the look in his eyes and the way he froze me out whenever I tried to talk to him. I even told Dad about the picture I’d drawn of Spencer, although I left out the part about sitting on the roof while I did it.

  He listened quietly and when I was finished, he rubbed his bearded cheek thoughtfully. “That boy’s been through a lot,” he said. “Maybe he’s just really sad and that’s all you’re seeing.”

  “Maybe,” I agreed without much conviction.

  “Sarah,” he said, leaning forward to get my full attention. “It’s nice you want to help Spencer. But all you can do is try to be a friend to him. If he wants a friend like you, a good one with a good heart, he couldn’t find a better one. But if he doesn’t, there’s not much you can do about it.”

  I nodded, holding back tears at the thought of Spencer not wanting to be my friend.

  Dad’s big hand landed on my knee. “Whether you can see it or not, Sarah, your kindness makes a difference to people. Never lose that about yourself, even if you don’t always see the results you want. You make people happy by just being who you are. Believe me, I should know.” He smiled kindly.

  I smiled too, feeling pleased at my dad’s words and at how he saw me, because I wanted to be like him. He helped people every day.

  The rest of the school year flew by. To my surprise, with my best friend gone, I became good friends with Riley. We’d been neighbors all these years, but we’d never hung out much until now. We bonded over the Twilight movie, and we read all the books together. She was obsessed with Taylor Lautner and gasped in horror when I broke the news that he didn’t really do it for me.

  Mom still warned me to branch out and not simply replace one best friend with another. But I wasn’t the type of person to have a ton of friends like Emma did. Mom needed to accept that and stop pushing me to be more social.

  Nothing much changed between Spencer and me. I got more smiles and acknowledgments, but he still kept his distance. We had a few brief exchanges that I obsessed over far too much. But when I found out he was leaving for the whole summer to work as a counselor at a YMCA sleepover camp, I felt the loss before he’d even gone.

  Emma and her friends whined about their main crush being absent for so long, but a part of me was selfishly relieved. I hardly remembered how it felt not to watch for him each day or listen for bits of gossip from Emma. A Spencer-free summer might do me some good.

  Emma also whined about how she had to work and I didn’t, because I wasn’t old enough. Each day she went off to her job at the mall, and I hung out at the beach with Riley and some friends of hers from a church program she went to over in the next town.

  The big news of the summer was that my dad arrested a bank robber. The robber was dumb enough to rob one of the banks downtown and then go back for seconds. Dad and Uncle Russ were watching the bank after it got hit because of some protocol they had to follow. But then the robber actually came back, and my dad was the one who caught him, got his weapon away from him, and hauled his ass to jail. It was in the newspaper and everything. Dad was so famous for a while that he got off of traffic duty. For all of August, he ribbed his buddies about not having to stand out in the ninety-degree heat and direct tourists around construction zones.

  Overall, it was a great summer, and I was bummed like everyone else once school started again. The only part I looked forward to was seeing Spencer. I expected more of the same from him, though, friendly hellos but not too friendly, a nod here and there, maybe a look that I’d read too much into. Turned out, I was wrong. The first time I saw him that September, everything started to change between us.

  We heard that Spencer returned home, having met a counselor from the girls’ camp across the lake. She lived in the next town over, and he was devoted to her. Of course, Emma was miffed at him. He had a real-life girlfriend now, and it wasn’t her or any of her friends. Apparently, he no longer looked at her with even the slightest hint of flirtatiousness.

  The news of his devotion warmed my heart even as it broke it. I always knew he’d be a good boyfriend, kind and loyal. That was just who he was. Although I hadn’t run into him since he’d been back, I had a good feeling the dullness in his eyes had been replaced by something better. At least, I hoped so, for his sake. I was even proud of my selflessness, ignoring the twinges of disappointment I felt.

  That was why I was shocked when I found him lying on a sand dune late one fall afternoon. I was walking along the beach, procrastinating doing my algebra homework, when I looked up and there he was.

  It had been so long since I’d seen him, I was flooded with emotions. His eyes were closed, and he held a half-empty bottle loosely in his hand. He appeared to be sleeping on the dune with his Red Sox cap pulled down over his face. Khakis were draped low across his hips, and I could see a sliver of firm, tanned skin where his shirt had ridden up. Swallowing, I noticed he looked bigger, more filled out. Every time my eyes landed on his exposed abs, my mouth felt dry.

  Because of the ocean win
d, I didn’t smell the alcohol until I was nearly beside him. Then my gaze traveled over him again, shocked to realize he was lying there because he was drunk.

  “Spencer,” I said firmly, nudging at his calf with my toe. He didn’t stir. I said his name again, louder this time. When he didn’t respond, I glanced up and down the beach, wondering if I should go get some help. That was when I heard him say, “Sarah Smile.”

  As I glanced down at him, he moved faster than I thought possible, since he’d been passed out a second ago. Grabbing my wrist, he tugged me down beside him on the sand. “How was your summer? Did you miss me?” He smiled brightly.

  My skin tingled where his fingers touched me. I was shocked. This friendliness, especially toward me, was so unlike him that I reached up to push his baseball cap back, needing to see his face. When his hand darted out to stop me, I dodged it and quickly flicked the hat off. Then I gasped at the purple bruise that started at the edge of his eye and covered his whole cheek.

  “Shit, Sarah,” he muttered, turning away from me, scanning the sand for his hat.

  “What happened?” I felt my insides churn at how raw and painful it looked.

  He retrieved the hat and slammed it down on his head again. When he turned back toward me, he said, “Heard your dad was a big hero this summer. I also heard the bank robber had shit for brains, and any monkey at the zoo could have caught him.”

  I gasped at the insult, hardly believing he’d just said it.

  His face crumpled. “I’m sorry. Those aren’t my words,” he said quietly. “I’ve been listening to that crap since I got home. When I saw you, it just came out of my mouth. I didn’t mean it. You have to believe me.”

  “They’re your uncle’s words,” I stated, knowing it was true.

  He sighed, then he nodded.

  “Where’d you get that?” I pointed to the bottle.

  He turned his head toward it in the sand. “The same place as the words.”