Heartland

by Sarina Bowen

  I’m ashamed to admit that I’d felt a little teary right there in front of a borrowed Macintosh computer. I’d grabbed a paper napkin out of my backpack to dab at my eyes.

  “Are you okay?”

  I’d looked up to see Ellie watching me carefully from the next terminal. “Yes,” I’d croaked. “I’m fine”

  “You don’t look all that fine.”

  “True,” I’d admitted. “But it isn’t as bad as it looks.” I’ve never been one to complain.

  “If you say so. Turning in the composition?”

  “Just did.”

  “Same. My computer is in the shop getting the keyboard replaced.” She’d let out a sigh. “It’s the second time my letter E got stuck.”

  “Oh, I bet that’s annoying.” Not that I’d know. “I’m still saving up for one.”

  “Jesus lord, I’d die.” She’d laughed. “Okay, fine. I wouldn’t die. A stuck E key is a first-world problem. But I’m used to my creature comforts. I’m Ellie, by the way.”

  “I know. Chastity,” I’d said quickly. “That’s, uh, my name.”

  God could I be any more awkward?

  “Do you want to get a hot chocolate after this? It might cheer you up.”

  I’d almost said no. I couldn’t afford to buy overpriced hot chocolate at the coffee shop. But talking to Ellie was the best distraction I’d had all week. “I want to. But I’m supposed to meet my algebra tutor later.”

  “Which one?” she’d asked, brightening up. “I tutor math in the lab on Saturdays and Sundays.”

  “Really?” I knew there was a tutoring lab, but I’d never been there. Because I have Dylan. “How much do you cost?”

  “Well.” She’d crossed her arms. “It’s one problem set? In which course?”

  “Math 101.”

  “Well, shoot. That will cost you a hot chocolate.”

  I’d taken her up on it immediately. And then—because I avoid confrontation at all costs—I’d called the house on Spruce Street, knowing Dylan wouldn’t be there. It had worked like a charm. Rickie had said, “No problem, hon. I’ll text him.”

  So here I sit in the lap of velvet sofa luxury with my new friend Ellie. I’m seven dollars poorer than I was before, but both the peppermint tea I bought for myself (the cheapest thing on the menu) and the company have cheered me up.

  “So why were you having a bad day, anyway?” Ellie asks. “Man trouble?”

  “Not exactly. It’s more like a lack of man trouble. I kissed my hot algebra tutor. And I wasn’t supposed to.”

  Her big eyes widen. “Which hot algebra tutor? You never said.”

  “He doesn’t work at the lab,” I say hastily. “He’s a friend. And he wants to stay that way.”

  “Oh.” She looks deflated. “That is a bummer.”

  “Do you have a boyfriend?”

  “No.” She makes a face. “It would be nice, though. This year is kind of lonely. My roommate is a total bitch.”

  “Oh, I have one of those, too.”

  “Yeah?” Ellie’s eyes brighten. “Does yours steal your clothes and then lie about it?”

  “Um, no. She wouldn’t want any of my things. We have singles, anyway. Just a common bathroom.”

  “Lucky! She must be easier to stand, then.”

  “You’d think.” I take a gulp of mint tea.

  “My roommate took my brand-new scarf. With the tags still on! And when I called her out on it, she tried to gaslight me.”

  “Gaslight?” I feel my cheeks flush like they sometimes do when I don’t understand the idioms that people use.

  “You don’t know Gaslight? It’s a movie from the forties.”

  “Ingrid Bergman,” says Dylan’s voice. “We haven’t got around to the classics yet.”

  I startle, sloshing my tea over my hand. And when I look up, Dylan is right there. Clear brown eyes. Tousled hair. Tight, muscular body that’s clothed in a nice sweater and ripped jeans. A handsome face that I finally kissed.

  Pain slices through me. Because I’m never going to get over him. There will never be a day when I look at Dylan and don’t wish for more.

  “Can I talk to you for a quick second?” he asks, taking the mug and grabbing a napkin off the table. He wipes the tea off my hand.

  “Now is not a good time,” I say quickly. Because I don’t want to cry in the coffee shop in front of my only new friend.

  Dylan actually rolls his eyes. “Fifteen seconds, Chass. Give a man a break.”

  “I’d talk to you.” Ellie raises her hand like a school girl. “Pick me.”

  And that’s just what I need—another girl in my life who’s swooning for Dylan. Because that always turns out well.

  “Fine. Fifteen seconds.” I jump to my feet. Let’s get this over with.

  Dylan takes my arm and tows me gently over toward the bulletin board, where nobody is currently reading the flyers for meditation circles and ski equipment sales.

  “Look, I’m sorry,” is his opener. “You're avoiding me. Not that I blame you. I'm sorry things got so out of control.”

  “Which things?” I ask warily. Because I don’t want an apology for fooling around with me.

  “Pick one!” Dylan raises his hands. “All the things. I shouldn’t have been so inappropriate.”

  “But…” I know Dylan was in a serious state of drunken depression when he kissed me. It’s not like I was expecting to hear those kisses made him as happy as they made me. But would it kill him to be a little less patronizing? “Dylan, I’m not twelve years old. It was just a kiss or two. I don’t think I’ll need a full course of therapy to recover.”

  He blinks. “Okay. Good?”

  “So did you really need to drag me over here to apologize a third time? Did you apologize to all the girls you kissed during Spin the Bottle in seventh grade?”

  I heard about Spin the Bottle and Seven Minutes in Heaven only last year, by eavesdropping on Debbie and her buddies at another bonfire. I’d been transfixed by their tales of who’d kissed whom over the years and how often.

  At thirteen, Spin the Bottle would have sounded like heaven to me. Seven minutes in a closet with a boy? I would have lobbied for eight. I was always the most inappropriate girl in the bunch.

  Yet somehow Dylan sees me as some kind of innocent child.

  “No. Good point.” He crosses his delicious arms and smiles at me. “You are in a feisty mood today.”

  “Is that so wrong?”

  “No.” He shakes his handsome head. “Not at all. Are we going to hug it out?” He opens his big arms wide.

  Oh boy. I can’t resist stepping into them. And when he pulls me in, I experience the familiar hormone rush that always happens when I’m close to him. Rapid heartbeat? Check. Goosebumps? Check. My nose lands against his flannel shirt.

  My mouth is mere inches from his, of course. But this time he has no interest in kissing me. It takes all my willpower to give him a squeeze and then step back.

  “Be well, Chass. I’ll leave you to your tutoring session, even if you’re basically cheating on me right now. But we’re still making caramels this weekend, right? I told Griffin we could use six gallons of goat’s milk. Don’t make a liar out of me.”

  “I won’t,” I say quickly. I might be slightly irritated at him, but it will blow over. My capacity to forgive him for not loving me back is basically infinite. “We’ll leave right after Friday classes?”

  “You got it. And this is for you. Share it with your friend.” He pulls something out of his pocket. “More market research.”

  He puts a little box in my hand and then walks away.

  As always, it takes me a second to get over my hormone rush. I stand there blinking for a long moment until I realize Ellie is grinning at me from the sofa. So I go back over to her and sit down.

  “Wow…” she says, stealing a glance at Dylan’s retreating backside. “Is that hot hunk of Vermont male your algebra tutor?”

  “Yes.” My voice is gravel.
<
br />   “And your future ex-boyfriend?”

  “Nope. I’ll never get that chance. He's my best friend, but...” There's no tidy explanation.

  “But you want more. I would if it were me.”

  I nod, miserable.

  “How deep in the friend zone are you?” she asks.

  “What?”

  “The friend zone. Does he flirt with you? Because that might be a good sign. Or are you so far into the friend zone that he farts on you for sport?”

  “Ew.” I shudder. “Not that last thing. But he’d never flirt with me. He only dates shiny girls. You know—slick girls with good clothes and the right makeup.”

  “Ah,” says Ellie knowingly. “I’ll bet it’s not their clothes. It’s probably the confidence.”

  “Probably,” I admit. Dylan doesn’t care very much about money and bling. But confidence is just as unattainable to me as money. “I think he likes sophistication.”

  Ellie squints. “He is a farm boy, right? The work boots are a tell.”

  “Sure.”

  “Then he’s looking for excitement that he doesn’t think he can get at home. Vermont girls need not apply.”

  God, I suppose she’s right. Maybe it’s not personal. But that doesn’t make it easier. “I just wish I could shut it off. I want to stop caring.”

  “Or you could just tell him how you feel?”

  “No!” I recoil in horror. “That’s never happening.”

  “Too embarrassing?” Ellie tucks a frizzy bit of hair behind her ear.

  At first I nod. But then I shake my head. “Embarrassment stinks, but it’s not the end of the world.” And I’ve been embarrassed a million times. “I don’t want to lose him. If he pities me, or if I make it awkward, he’ll back away. It’s just not worth it.”

  “I get it.” She gives me a sad smile. “He brought you a present?”

  “Yeah.” I look down at the box in my hand and tug on the ribbon. “We have this project where we’re making candies to sell at Christmastime. So he keeps buying examples for market research.” I open the box and find two perfect chocolates inside.

  “Fancy,” Ellie says. “No hot guy ever bought me chocolates. At least you’ve got that.”

  I offer her the box. “There’s one for each of us.”

  “Really?”

  “Sure.” I take one and then encourage her to do the same.

  The chocolate bursts against my tongue. It’s filled with a soft, almost liquid caramel. It’s delicious.

  But all I really want is more of Dylan’s kisses.

  Seventeen

  Dylan

  The weekend had been sunny and bright, with a cool yellow sun warming the farm. Chastity and I had made up our big batch of samples. And I put in a lot of face time with the animals and my brother. In that order.

  Having survived the anniversary of my father’s death made me more cheerful and less responsive to Griffin’s questions and prodding. I mostly tuned him out, even when he suggested I become a veterinarian because “the vet bill is killing us.”

  I told him I’d consider it, just to see what he’d say.

  “It’s a lot of extra years in school, though,” was his response. I could almost hear him adding up the tuition bills in his head.

  I don’t know what that man wants from me. I really don’t. He spent four years at Boston University. And how many of Dad’s cows had he milked on the weekends? Zero.

  But now it’s Sunday evening, and Griffin is many miles in my rearview mirror. Chastity and I have spent the last six hours dropping off our caramel samples. As we approach Burlington again, ominous gray clouds roll in off Lake Champlain, and the sky is darkening in a hurry.

  “The wind is really picking up,” Chastity says from the passenger’s seat.

  “Sure is.” The trees are swaying on either side of the highway. Vermont is the kind of place where nature frequently reminds you that she’s the one in charge. “Griff said something about a storm.” But I hadn’t really been listening.

  “Good thing we’re almost home.”

  “Yeah. Just one more shop, right? And then one tomorrow? What time is that?”

  “Nine thirty,” Chastity says.

  She’s definitely the business manager, while I’m the chauffeur. I like my job, though. I’ve got Post Malone playing on the radio as I pull into the last stop on our agenda today—Rockie’s Gourmet in Williston, Vermont.

  “How many boxes shall we give them?” Chastity asks as I shut off the engine.

  “One,” I say firmly. “That leaves two for tomorrow, and a single box for us. We would have even more, but you let that guy in Montpelier talk you out of an extra.”

  “He has two stores!” Chastity cries. “It was good for business.”

  “Two stores, my ass,” I argue, teasing her. “He gobbled them down the second we left that place.”

  She laughs, and I won’t deny that the sound of it fills in some of the hollow places in my chest. I’ve been so worried. I thought I’d wrecked our friendship.

  But maybe we’ll be okay. It probably helped that I was the world’s most eager caramel maker this weekend. I did at least my half of the labor on Friday night. I stirred for hours. I scrubbed pots. I played music and made jokes and watched the candy thermometer as closely as you’d monitor a nuclear reactor.

  Chastity seems happy with our progress. Yesterday we boxed all the caramels and stashed them in my truck, and today we drove all over hell dropping off our samples and chatting up store owners.

  Griffin and Leah had primed the pump ahead of time, letting some of the store owners know that we were coming. Even so, the reception of our sample boxes was warmer than I’d hoped.

  In other parts of the world, Sunday might be a strange day for doing business. But Vermont shops and restaurants are busy on the weekends and often close on Monday when the tourists go home.

  That’s what it’s like to own a family business. You’re never off the clock. My family knows all about it.

  Now I grab a box of caramels off the backseat and follow Chastity into the last shop of the day. After almost two dozen sales calls, we’re good at this now. She spots the manager—the gray hair at his temples probably gave him away—and by the time I’ve caught up to her, she’s already deep in conversation with him about caramels.

  “…hand-made and hand-cut in our commercial kitchen in Tuxbury,” she tells him. “From organic ingredients.”

  “Now the taste test,” I say, handing over the box. “That’s for you. This is our big box, but we’re also making a small one, too, for impulse purchases at the cash register.”

  “Don’t mind if I do,” the manager says, opening the box. “Cute label.”

  “Thanks!” Chastity says. “This guy designed it.” She hooks her thumb toward me.

  I did a great job, too, if I do say so myself. We’d settled on the name Nannygoat’s Candies. I’d drawn a portrait of a floppy-eared goat with her face turned toward the viewer. And the font is blocky and subtly vintage. It’s very hipster.

  The older man bites into a caramel, and his eyes light up. “Wow, kids.” He chews. “You can bring me samples any day.”

  Chastity beams. We’re used to the praise by now. But we still don’t know how it will translate into sales. We’ve been scattering our order forms like cottonwood seeds in the wind, but if nobody gets back to us, then I don’t have a clue what we’ll do. Follow-up visits, I guess? More samples?

  “This is our order form,” Chastity says. “But we’re happy to transact by email. Our first delivery will happen on November tenth, with weekly deliveries through the holiday season.”

  “I like it,” he says. “And you’re related to Leah, right?”

  “That’s right,” Chastity says. “We’ll probably combine our cheese and caramel deliveries. And the payment terms will be the same as Leah’s.”

  “Good, good,” the man says, patting the order form on the counter. “Let me gather my thoughts, and I’ll e
mail you when I’m ready. I get to keep the caramels?”

  “Those are all for you,” I assure him before we go, leaving behind another satisfied (potential) customer.

  The whole stop took only ten minutes, tops, but when we go outside, it’s become pitch dark. That’s late autumn in the north—nightfall is as sudden as a curtain drawn across the stage.

  “Well?” I say, as we head up the road into Burlington. “I think we should make a bet. How many boxes do you think we sold so far?”

  “No idea,” she says. “Did you look at your email?”

  “Nope!” I say cheerfully. “It’s too soon. If we look now, we’ll only be disappointed.”

  “When can we look?” she demands.

  “Eight o’clock,” I say, choosing a number at random. Somebody will order caramels tonight, right? At least one person? I don’t want Chastity to be disappointed. “Let’s get a pizza to kill the time. I’m starving.”

  “You’re always starving,” she points out. “We haven’t made any money yet, so we shouldn’t splurge.”

  “That’s not how it works. You have to celebrate when you can, because you never know when the bad times are coming.” It’s basically my whole outlook on life. “Let me buy us a pizza. I want ham and olives. And a six-pack of beer. Good beer. The kind of beer that successful candymakers drink.”

  “Okay. Fine.” She laughs. “I will prematurely celebrate with you. Would it be awful to ask you to look at my algebra homework while we wait for it?”

  “Not awful at all. What are we dealing with?”

  “There's some dreadful polynomials I'm stuck on.”

  “Polynomials. No problem.” I feel invincible tonight. October is always a suckfest, and this year is no different. But today was a good day. And sometimes that’s enough.

  When I reach Spruce Street, there’s a firetruck blocking the road. I roll down my window. “Is there a problem?” I ask the young cop who’s minding the intersection. “I live on this street.”

  “The wind took a tree down,” he says. “And the tree took out a telephone pole. You could try going around to the other end. But there’s no power anyway. Gonna be a few hours until they get the log cut up, because there’s trees down all over town. And then the power company has to do their thing. Might want to go somewhere else tonight.”