by Nicole Helm
Callie patted his shoulder, and it was the first initiated physical contact since that stupid moment. Maybe they were on their way back to normal.
“Don’t be too hard on yourself. You do your best, Shelby will do her best, and everything will work out.”
Trevor shook his head and looked down at the cement below him. A small trail of ants made their way across the cracked surface. “I guess you’re right. With all her faults, she’s got a good head on those shoulders. I mean, she’s not like…” He censored the thought, but a few words too late.
“She’s not like me.”
“That’s not what I was going to say.” At Callie’s raised eyebrow he set the empty bottle down. “Okay, that is what I was going to say, but I knew before I said it that it wouldn’t come out right, so I didn’t say it.”
Callie shrugged, picked at the label of the bottle. “You’re right, though. Shelby’s got that kind of maturity I didn’t manage to scrounge up until, oh, a year ago. She won’t make the mistakes I did. She’ll be the one who makes all the right choices.”
Trevor looked at Callie, hated that he’d put sadness back in her eyes. That he’d inadvertently pushed her guard back up. The only way he knew how to break it down again was to go back, go back to where things weren’t so murky. “You know, I almost asked you to prom senior year.” He chuckled, but when her laugh didn’t meld with his, warning bells sounded in his head.
Her mouth gaped open as she stared at him, like he’d just admitted to cross-dressing or something.
“What? It’s not that shocking, is it?”
“No. Yes. I mean.” She furrowed her brow and looked down at the ground. “Matt Barns told me you were going to ask me, but then you didn’t.”
“Matt told you?”
She nodded, and suddenly he realized he hadn’t traveled into mood-lightening territory at all. Now they were stuck in some kind of time warp. Eighteen and hideously awkward.
“What changed your mind?” Her voice was so quiet, so meek he wasn’t sure it came out of Callie’s mouth.
“I don’t know.” He struggled to recall the events of an April so many years ago. “Mom didn’t like the idea for starters.”
“Why not? I thought she liked me.”
“Seriously? My mom couldn’t stand you.” It surprised him to see the look of horror on her face. “I thought you knew that.”
“She was always so nice to me.” Suddenly Callie was that insecure girl she’d been, but the bravado had been stripped off. It nearly stopped his heart.
“I thought…”
He squirmed. “It’s not that big of a deal. Mom was so rule oriented. You never were very good at following rules. She didn’t approve. It’s nothing to be upset about.” But he could tell she was, and he couldn’t figure that out.
“You didn’t ask me to prom because your mom didn’t want you to?”
“Well, that wasn’t the whole reason.” She was angry. He didn’t understand it, but Callie was sitting there angry at him for some dumb thing he’d done in high school. They were talking about a dance ten years ago. Callie could hold a grudge, but it was a dance. So not Callie.
“What was the whole reason?”
Trevor had to think about that. Why had he chickened out from his first instinct all those years ago? The fear of Callie laughing at him and saying no? That had played into it. She’d dated older guys, dangerous guys. He’d never been her type. Not romantically anyway, and he hadn’t really been sure enough of himself to suck it up. But the main reason…
“You scared the shit out of me.”
“What?”
He took a deep breath, tried to put words to what he’d felt back then. “Unpredictable doesn’t begin to describe it. You were always moving, always reacting. There was so much hurt under it all. Even when we were laughing or having fun, you were so riddled with grief. I didn’t know what to do with it, and I guess I was selfish enough not to want that to be a part of prom.”
She was quiet for a long moment, and some neighbor’s screen door slammed closed. “That’s not selfish,” Callie finally said, but her voice was less than convincing, and Trevor didn’t know how he’d ventured into such weird territory.
Apparently he was making all the wrong moves when it came to Callie.
“Pretty sure it’s the definition of selfish.” He studied her and had no idea what he saw. Whatever it was, whatever emotions played there were new to Trevor. He didn’t know where to go from here, didn’t know how to pull them back into the present. Which was also weird territory, but not nearly as confusing as this.
Callie shook her head, her tense shoulders sagging. She stared hard at the bottle she held in her hands. “No. Prom is a one-time deal. It should have been fun. If I remember correctly you got into Tina’s pants that night, so you had your fun.”
“Callie.” He didn’t know what to say. Somehow, ten years later, she was making him feel like a total asshole. Then it dawned on him. “You didn’t go.”
“Not my scene.” She shrugged, but the movement was jerky. “I probably would have said no even if you’d asked me. Could you imagine me in one of those prom get-ups? Please.”
But he could tell by the way she stared intently at the bottle, tracing the circle of the opening with her thumb, she was lying. She hadn’t gone because he hadn’t asked her.
Maybe she had been right a few nights ago. Maybe he really didn’t know her at all.
Em appeared at the walkway with two pizzas in hand and Trevor was thrust into the present. Here he thought he’d left teenage angst behind when he’d gone off to college.
Apparently, it was still alive and well.
Callie slammed her alarm again and again until the offending buzz stopped. She’d been up until three the night before working on the Stearman, so six had come way too early.
Trevor’s words from the night before had haunted her, kept her working long past bedtime, long past the time when her muscles screamed at her to stop. At this rate, she’d have the Stearman done way before the fly-in.
You scared the shit out of me.
There were a lot of things she wasn’t proud of when it came to that time between her grandparent’s deaths, but she couldn’t get a handle on the fact she’d been scary. At the time, she’d felt strong and in control. Yeah, it had been hiding a manic sense of grief, but who knew Trevor had seen beyond that into the scared, hurt little girl she’d been?
She would have gone to prom with Trevor if he had asked. She would have done the dress thing and the hair and makeup crap and probably felt like an idiot most of the time, but she would have gone because it was Trevor.
But she’d been too scary. His mom hadn’t liked her.
Callie didn’t understand why finally understanding this mattered. She was a different person now. She wasn’t going to magically win Mrs. Steele’s approval from the great beyond, and she wasn’t the same raucous, hurting, hellraiser. What did it matter?
She was a businesswoman. She was an adult who was trying very hard to cope with all that life had thrown at her, and doing an okay job.
Why should something that happened ten years ago, something so completely unimportant, rattle her? It was a high-school dance, not significant in any damned way.
Callie sat up in bed and scrubbed her hands over her face. “Get it together,” she muttered into the darkness of her bedroom. She could go back to sleep for another hour, but that would be an hour lost at AIF. Still, she didn’t get up.
Instead, she reached over and pulled a box out from under her bed. Callie had never been one for snapshots, mementos or anything that might remind her too much of what she’d lost, but Grandma always had been. Albums, collages, scrapbooks. Grandma never had enough in the world of memories.
There were no family portraits in Callie’s room. Callie didn’t like to fall asleep or wake up to the ghosts of her past staring at her blankly from pictures on the walls. A few airplane prints hung, breaking up the otherwise misty gray
around her. For a long time, that misty gray had suited her, no matter how many times Em complained about how depressing it was.
Callie took her eyes off the walls and pried the lid off the box now in her lap. She pulled out the scrapbook Grandma had made and given to her on her fifteenth birthday, a few short months before her death.
Callie couldn’t remember the last time she had thumbed through the heavy pages of pictures decorated with stickers and frames, butterflies and rainbows and flowers. All things Callie was not.
She only looked at one page though. The first one. At the top of the page in big pink sticker letters read The Baker Family. Beneath was one of the few pictures that existed of her mother, father and her. Callie was an indecipherable bundle of pink blankets, but her parents’ beaming faces were what Callie had always cared about.
She was now six years older than her mother was in the picture, two years older than her father. The older she got, the more she could see each of them every time she looked in the mirror.
Her mother’s straight black hair and dark brown eyes, the pouty lips Callie rarely used to her advantage. Her father’s sharp nose and chin.
When a tear dropped onto the picture, Callie slammed the book shut and shoved it into the box, but before she could toss it under the bed, she stopped herself.
If she really believed she had changed, that she was not the girl who scared people off, it was time to start embracing that. Swallowing, Callie reopened the scrapbook. Using her fingernails, she carefully pried the family picture off the heavy paper.
She pushed off the bed and walked over to the hand-me-down set of drawers. She stared at herself in the mirror for a moment, and then tucked the picture into the corner where she would now look at it every day.
They were her family. Gone? Yes. But still hers.
Though her muscles ached and her eyes were gritty from lack of sleep, the newfound strength worked its way through her.
Callie gathered her clothes for the day, looked at the picture in the mirror, the gray misty walls, and smiled. She had been a mess, but she didn’t need to be anymore.
Full of this newfound confidence, Callie marched into the cabin’s kitchen where she knew she would find Em concocting something healthy and granola-y for breakfast.
“I think we should paint my room.”
Em blinked up at Callie. “Okay. Did you have a particular color in mind?”
“Not gray. Something less depressing.”
A smile spread across Em’s face. “Pink?”
“Don’t push it.”
Chapter Eight
“I think it’s stupid. They’re adults.”
Shelby frowned at the road in front of her, even though she really wanted to gear that scowl at Dan.
She liked Dan. A lot. He was funny, smart, and he never tried to be someone he wasn’t to fit in. She liked that best. He was shy and nervous sometimes, but Shelby was beginning to realize that was with the boyfriend/girlfriend stuff. The more she got to know him and the more time they spent together, the less he fumbled or flustered.
Though the fumbling was kinda cute.
On the flip side, the closer they got the more Dan voiced his own opinion—even if it differed from hers. Shelby wasn’t a big fan of that.
“Adults sometimes need a push in the right direction too,” Shelby replied, maneuvering the car around a curve.
“Except you’re doing it for you, Shel. Not because it’s right for them.”
This time, Shelby did scowl over at him. “Can’t it be both?”
“Could be.” His eyes were watching the farmland pass by. Then he looked over at her and smiled that really cute smile that crinkled up his eyes and made her heart do weird things in her chest. “But I don’t think it is.”
Shelby let out a humph of breath and focused on the road. What did it matter who it was right for? Trevor and Callie had a thing for each other, obviously. She was going to try and push them together a bit. It didn’t matter why.
“This was your idea.”
“No, my idea was having a joint graduation party. Your idea was to have it at AIF in some complicated plot to get your brother and Callie together.”
“Dan, do me a favor,” Shelby growled. “Shut up.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
It was hard to keep the scowl on her face, because she liked that about Dan too. He didn’t get moody when she snapped at him. He agreed to let the subject drop.
Sometimes, when Shelby was feeling a little sad or missing Mom, she liked to imagine what her life would be like in ten years. A lot of the time, even if it was silly or lame, she liked to imagine that Dan would still be in her life. That this, right here, would be it. And she’d daydream about that until it made her smile enough that she was ready to feel happy again.
Mission accomplished. Shelby pulled her Civic into the parking lot of AIF with a smile on her face and determination in her heart. She was a firm believer in making your own happiness. If life was supposed to make her happy, it was doing a crap ass job. She would have to make things happen rather than wait for them to happen.
Shelby stepped out of her car and shaded her eyes against the sun. AIF was a weird place. A cluster of gray and white buildings surrounded by green grass and, farther in the distance, leafing trees. All in the middle of nowhere farmland.
Shelby didn’t really get it, but driving up on a bright sunny May day, even she had to admit it was kind of pretty.
“We can go up to the office and see where they are.” The grass around the buildings was freshly cut, which Shelby knew to be Trevor’s doing. Around the fences, bushes and wildflowers grew in what Mom would have been sure to call wild and unkempt. Shelby thought it was kind of beautiful.
Focusing on the task at hand, she squared her shoulders and began marching toward the office. AIF’s secretary would hopefully be able to tell them where Callie was and then Shelby could put the whole plan into action.
If this one failed, as the prom dress friendship mission had, so be it. She’d keep coming up with new plans until she got what she wanted.
“Good morning,” Mary greeted them. Shelby didn’t know the older lady very well, but Mom had always said she was odd. Only behind her back of course. Now that Mom was gone, Shelby felt uncomfortable around the people Mom had always complained about. “You looking for your brother?”
“Oh, no, ma’am. Actually, I wanted to talk to Callie.”
“She and Em are with your brother. Just missed ’em, actually. They’re heading down to the big house. You’re welcome to follow. Take your car around the fence where you came in and take the gravel road away from the highway. Can’t miss it.”
“Thank you.”
Shelby ignored Dan’s disapproving expression. She needed Trevor, and if she got him to stay, he’d always be there. If she needed to come home for the weekend to escape a roommate, or if she needed to borrow money, or get her car fixed, Trevor would be right there. She might not have her parents, but she’d have him.
It wasn’t wrong of her to want that, to try and make sure that happened, no matter what anyone said or thought.
They climbed back into her car and Shelby gingerly drove down the curving gravel toward the “big house”, cringing at each dinging sound on her precious car. She had never been past the main buildings of AIF, so she had no idea what was hidden beyond the random clutches of trees. Finally, at the last turn around a pond lined with big cottonwood trees, the big house came into view.
Shelby leaned forward to get a better look, intrigued by the unique building before her. It was big. Not huge or anything, but bigger than her home. It had a weird, slanted, A-frame structure, and the wood of the outside looked at home with the trees that surrounded it on three sides.
The house was seemingly held up at the sides by two sloping wooden porches. The expansive lawn around the house was cut, but everything looked a little dilapidated, a little sad. Even the blooming fruit trees couldn’t cheer up the lonely, bleak ex
terior.
Trevor, Callie and Em stood outside the house talking about something, that is until they heard her car on the gravel and all turned with mixed looks of confusion on their faces.
Again, Shelby squared her shoulders. The plan had been to get Callie alone, avoid Trevor. Maybe it was better that they were together. Em was kind of an outlier, but it wasn’t anything Shelby couldn’t handle.
“You sure about this?”
Shelby flashed a bright smile at Dan. “What’s not to be sure about?”
He shrugged and then stepped out of the car with her. Before Shelby could open her mouth in greeting, Trevor was crossing to them with that oh I’m so smart and intuitive FBI agent look, but Shelby was determined not to crack.
“What are you doing here?” His tone was casual, but he studied them each carefully even if his smile remained one of concern.
From her peripheral vision Shelby could tell Dan was squirming and she had to fight the urge to roll her eyes. When it came to Trevor, Dan was such a wimp.
“We wanted to talk to Callie and Em. Just for a sec.”
Em and Callie crossed over, Em looking all bright and cheerful and Callie looking a little different. She was dressed in black and jeans and everything, but she was smiling. It wasn’t that nasty smile before she said something rude either.
It was like a real, happy smile. That put Shelby off her stride for a minute.
“What’s up?”
Shelby surveyed the group in front of her, determined Em would be the least likely to see right through her, so she focused in on Em’s blue eyes. “Dan and I had a little idea we were hoping we could run by you.”
Shelby concentrated, blocking Callie and Trevor’s skeptical looks completely out of her line of vision. “Dan and I have been talking about having a joint graduation party. His mom can’t really help out and I, well…” She slid a look at Trevor and saw exactly what she wanted to see. Guilt.
Maybe that was wrong of her. So be it.
“We thought maybe we could have our party out at the airport. You’ve got the Canteen and big open space. It’d be great for a big barbecue. We’d do all the work. We’d want to kind of rent the space.”
