The Rules of You and Me

by Shana Norris

  I laughed and picked at a few blades of grass near my feet. “I never did make it into the treehouse. Avery and Elliott gave it up because of me and we slept on the ground instead.”

  “Everyone is afraid of something,” Jude said. “Yours just happens to be heights.”

  “What are you afraid of?” I challenged him.

  Jude scratched his chin. “Commitment,” he said.

  I rolled my eyes. “That’s such a guy response.”

  “I don’t just mean relationships,” he said. “I mean all kinds of commitments. The kind that make you change your life, that make you take a step you don’t know if you’re brave enough to take.”

  “I think everyone’s afraid of that,” I said.

  He shook his head. “My brother wasn’t. He dove into everything headfirst. He never doubted any step he took. He was always one hundred percent sure that whatever move he made, it was the right one.” He pulled at a piece of grass and twirled it between his fingers. “I’d love to have just a tiny bit of his confidence.”

  “Seems to me you have a lot of it,” I told him. “You didn’t hesitate to help me with my tire. You gave me a ride home. You managed to weasel your way into my tourist day and got me halfway up to this rock. That takes a lot of confidence, you know.”

  Jude looked at me and smiled. He had a smile that made a warm tingle spread through me. No guy had smiled at me like that since the early days of my relationship with Zac.

  Don’t get any ideas, I reminded myself. I was not in the market for a boyfriend. I’d arranged the end of my last relationship because it was too much stress keeping him from finding out the truth about my dad. The last thing I needed was to get myself right back into something where I had to keep secrets to protect my family.

  “I’m starving,” I said, jumping up from the rock. “You hungry?”

  Jude stood, brushing his jeans off. “Yeah, I could eat. I know this great little place in town. And I promise, it’s on the ground.”

  #

  “I was starting to think I’d have to send out an A.P.B. to find you.” Aunt Lydia sat on the couch in her little living room, with a magazine spread open on her lap. The TV was on, but the volume was muted. Had she kept the volume down in order to listen for me when I came home? Even my own parents didn’t keep tabs on me like that, except when Mom thought I should be studying to keep my GPA up rather than having something that resembled a social life.

  “I went out to see Asheville,” I said.

  “You could have called to let me know where you were,” Aunt Lydia said. It was late in the day. Jude and I had gotten lunch and then talked for a long time. He told me about Asheville and I told him about Willowbrook. Time flew by before I knew it.

  The thought of calling to check in had never even crossed my mind. “Sorry. I’ll try to remember that next time.”

  Aunt Lydia narrowed her eyes as she looked me up and down. “Who were you with anyway? Ashton was here with me, and she didn’t know anything about your plans for the day.”

  “I was with Jude Westmore.” I didn’t see any reason to keep it a secret from Aunt Lydia.

  But her reaction showed that she hadn’t expected that response at all. “Jude Westmore? How on earth did you meet Jude?”

  “You know my first day here, when I got that flat tire a couple blocks over? It turns out that Jude was the guy who helped me. And then I ran into him at the party last night, and he gave me a ride home. I just happened to see him outside his house today.” I decided to leave out the details about Jude being shirtless and how long I watched him. “We got to talking and he ended up going with me to Biltmore Estate and Chimney Rock.”

  Aunt Lydia sat frozen in place like one of the statues at Biltmore. Her mouth hung open slightly, her forehead creased into a look of confusion.

  “Jude Westmore went to Biltmore Estate with you,” Aunt Lydia said slowly, as if she was having trouble with the words.

  “And Chimney Rock,” I reminded her. “Though I didn’t climb to the top. Then we got lunch.”

  Aunt Lydia closed her magazine and set it aside, unfolding her legs until her feet were flat on the floor. “Hannah, maybe we should talk for a moment.” She patted the couch next to her.

  I sat down, smoothing out a wrinkle in the front of my skirt.

  Aunt Lydia took a deep breath. “Hannah,” she said, “I would never try to tell you who you should or shouldn’t be friends with. And I’m not your mother—”

  “Thank goodness for that,” I muttered.

  “But,” Aunt Lydia went on, “Jude Westmore is a little…troubled. I don’t know if he’s told you this, but his father walked out on his family years ago and then his brother passed away while deployed in Afghanistan last year.”

  I nodded. “I know all of that. I mean, I’ve heard bits of it.”

  “His mother has a lot of problems,” Aunt Lydia said. “Jude hasn’t exactly dealt with everything in his life in the best manner. He barely graduated high school. He gets into a lot of fights. There was an incident a couple months ago at the auto shop where he used to work. Some money went missing from the office and everyone thought Jude took it.”

  I looked at Aunt Lydia. “What exactly are you trying to say? That I shouldn’t go to anymore tourist destinations with him?”

  Aunt Lydia bit her lip. “I’m saying you should be careful. Jude is certainly not the kind of boy your parents would approve of, and believe me, Hannah, I remember what it’s like to be almost seventeen. I know the guy your parents don’t like is exactly the kind of guy you think you want. But the idea of the bad boy is sometimes better than the reality of him.”

  “I’m not dating him, Aunt Lydia. He just showed me around town. That’s it.”

  “Just be careful,” she said again, reaching over to pat my hand. “Sometimes people get hurt when Jude is around. I don’t want you to be one of them.”

  “I’m not some stupid girl who throws herself at the bad boy in town,” I said.

  Aunt Lydia smiled. “That’s right, you’re not. You have everything going for you, Hannah. Next year you’ll be going off to Yale. I don’t want you to mess any of that up for some boy you don’t know.”

  My head hurt at the thought of Yale and the applications I still hadn’t even looked at. Every time I thought about heading off to one of the Ivy League schools, my stomach churned like I might throw up. I had barely made it through my junior year with my sanity intact. I didn’t want to imagine my senior year striving to be the best and then four or more years at a high pressure college.

  “I won’t mess anything up,” I promised Aunt Lydia. “My mother would never let me live it down.”

  Aunt Lydia gave me a sympathetic smile. “She just wants what’s best for you. We all do.” She looked at the clock, then back at me. “Your dad called about an hour ago. He really wants you to call him.”

  I faked a yawn and stretched. “Maybe tomorrow. I’m tired from all that walking around today.”

  Aunt Lydia frowned, but she said, “Okay. Good night.”

  I stopped at the door and looked back at her. “How do you know so much about Jude anyway? Are you stalking him?”

  Aunt Lydia laughed. “No, I get all my gossip from Ashton. During my breaks that girl talks my ears off about everyone in town. There’s nothing that goes on around here that she doesn’t know about.”

  I said good night to Aunt Lydia and walked down the hall to my room. I wondered just how much Ashton knew about Jude.

  CHAPTER NINE

  “What happened to you at the party the other night?” Ashton asked as she licked a trail of rocky road ice cream off her hand. “One minute you were there and the next you had disappeared.”

  Ashton had come down from Aunt Lydia’s studio half an hour before saying that she needed to get out of the house so Aunt Lydia could work. She claimed it was one of Aunt Lydia’s “no contact days,” which apparently meant that the house had to be absolutely silent in order for her to focus
. Ashton seemed confident that if we just got out of the house for an hour or two, she could actually paint something.

  So we were at Mountain Dairy, where Kate worked scooping out dozens of different ice cream flavors.

  I shrugged as we sat down at a little table in the corner. “I wasn’t feeling very well, so I left early.”

  “Did you walk all the way home?” Ashton asked, her eyes wide.

  “No,” I said, licking my cotton candy ice cream. I usually got vanilla or chocolate, but those seemed like such boring flavors. If I was supposed to break the rules this summer, maybe that meant stepping outside of my normal ice cream flavors as well. So I had bought the bright blue, very sweet cotton candy flavor. “I got a ride from someone.”

  “Who?” Ashton asked.

  I was hoping she wouldn’t ask, but I knew she would. “Um.” I scooped up a bit of ice cream with my finger. “Jude Westmore.”

  Ashton’s mouth hung open. “Jude Westmore gave you a ride home?”

  I nodded. “Yeah. He lives near Aunt Lydia anyway. It wasn’t a big deal.”

  “Jude doesn’t give people rides home,” Ashton said. “Not anymore, anyway. What did he say to you?”

  “Nothing. He saw me leaving and asked if I needed a ride. Then he took me home. That’s pretty much it.”

  Ashton sat back in her seat, staring at me silently. Kate called out to her manager that she was taking a break and sat down across from me. She reached over and pushed Ashton’s mouth closed.

  “You’re attracting flies in that big hole in your head,” Kate told her.

  Ashton pointed at me, but looked at Kate. “Do you know what the new girl just told me?”

  “No, what did the new girl say?” Kate looked at me, intrigued.

  “Tell her,” Ashton said. “Tell her what you just said.”

  I sighed. “Jude Westmore gave me a ride home from the party the other night. That’s it. What’s the big deal?”

  “Really?” Kate’s eyebrows shot halfway up her forehead. “Now that is an interesting development.”

  “It’s not a big deal,” I said.

  “Jude doesn’t do things like that for people anymore,” Kate told me. “He used to, back before Liam was killed. They were two of the nicest guys around and would do anything for you without asking a thing in return. But then Liam died and Jude became a completely different person.”

  “Maybe none of you know who Jude really is,” I said. “Maybe he needed some time to not be the person everyone expected him to be.”

  They exchanged looks, but they didn’t seem convinced. I hated when people thought they knew everything there was to know about a person. There was no room to be anything different in their minds. Once someone else decided who you were, you had to be that person forever, even if it wasn’t really who you wanted to be. How could anyone know who they really were with all of this outside pressure to be what others expected?

  “Can we talk about something other than Jude?” I asked.

  Ashton’s eyes lit up. “Okay. So Lydia told me a little secret.”

  I shot her a confused look over my ice cream. “About what?”

  “That your birthday is coming up very soon,” Ashton said.

  Kate gasped and clapped her hands. “Birthday party!”

  I shook my head. “No, no birthday parties.”

  Both Kate and Ashton pouted, poking out their lower lips. “We love birthday parties,” Kate said. “Just so you know.”

  “We had planned to start up a birthday party company once,” Ashton said. “Like we’d come in and do all the decorating and the cake and everything. The only thing that stopped us was deciding on a name.”

  “And the fact that we were ten years old,” Kate added.

  “Seriously, you can’t have a birthday without a party,” Ashton told me. “It’s like a law.”

  I tapped my chin. “Funny, I don’t remember learning about that law in school.”

  “Ha ha,” Ashton said, sticking her tongue out at me. “But what else are you going to do on your birthday?”

  I shrugged. I really didn’t have any plans for my birthday. I had kind of hoped I could forget it for one year. My mother always hired someone to plan my birthday parties. And so every year, there would be this ridiculous, over the top party with a ton of people I barely knew and didn’t care to know. People from school who came just to eat and swim in our pool. People I passed every day in the hall and barely said two words to the rest of the year. Yet on my birthday, they all acted like they were my best friends just because my mom deemed them suitable enough to come to our house because they probably wouldn’t steal anything. And for four hours I’d have to paste on this fake smile until my cheeks ached and my head hurt and pretend I was having a good time while my mom drank dozens of cocktails and my dad had that glassy-eyed look I’d spent the last three years ignoring. Because, as always, it was all about appearances, especially when it came to birthday parties. The bigger the party, the better your status in life.

  “I’ll probably hang out at Aunt Lydia’s all day,” I said. “Maybe I’ll go crazy and order a pizza.”

  Kate shook her head. “Not acceptable. You’re having a birthday party.”

  I tried to protest, but they didn’t hear me. I couldn’t have a birthday party, it would be too weird. No one had ever thrown me a party other than my mom. And besides, who would they invite? The only people I knew in Asheville were the two of them and Aunt Lydia. And Jude.

  But I couldn’t imagine Jude coming to my birthday party, unless he could hide out in the shadows all night. Maybe I’d be there right next to him just to avoid the whole thing.

  Ashton grabbed a napkin and a pen from her bag to start writing down a shopping list. She and Kate yelled out ideas while I finished the last of my cotton candy ice cream. It was too sweet, but good. I’d probably be buzzing on sugar the rest of the day.

  “Are your parents coming home from Paris for your birthday?” Ashton asked, looking up at me. “Should we invite them? If you give me the number, I’ll call and tell them about it.”

  Yes, that would be a great idea. Call my mother in Paris and my dad at rehab and invite them to a birthday party for me thrown by two girls they didn’t know and probably wouldn’t approve of since I’d met them through Aunt Lydia.

  “No, they won’t be coming,” I said. “They won’t get home until later this summer.”

  Kate gave me a sad smile. “That’s too bad. What about any friends from back home? They’re welcome to come too.”

  I could just imagine Natalie roaming around the mountains, making fun of everyone she saw. She’d certainly say something about the color of Ashton’s hair and the ratty sandals Kate wore. Natalie wasn’t exactly known for her tact.

  “They’ve all gone away for the summer,” I said, waving a hand. “So I don’t think they’ll make it.”

  “Well,” Ashton said, smiling brightly, “at least you have us.”

  #

  My phone chimed from my pocket. I leaned against the wooden railing to let people pass as I pulled it out to see the text.

  Just saw Avery & Zac at Rose Castle. Can’t believe he’s dating that hag!!!

  Natalie again. She had been sending me random texts about everything that was happening back in Willowbrook. I found myself caring less and less each day about the events back home. As long as no one in town had found out about my dad yet, everything else didn’t bother me. It was hard to care about who was dating who or what party Natalie was going to that night while I forced myself to go up yet another step at Chimney Rock.

  Which was exactly what I was doing with Jude again that day. Somehow, I had let him convince me to try the climb again, even though I had no intention at all of ever going up to that rock. Just the thought of being up there, far too high above solid ground, made me feel sick.

  “A friend?” Jude asked. A string of kids passed between us as they fought to get up the trail before each other.

  �
�Just someone from back home,” I told him. “She feels the need to keep me updated on every little thing that happens.”

  “I can see how that would get annoying,” Jude commented.

  I sighed as I stuffed the phone back in my pocket. “It’s not that it’s annoying really. It’s just that I don’t care. It’s weird. A year ago, I was happy in the middle of all of that stuff. I was Hannah Cohen, straight A student, president of half the clubs in school, on the track to being valedictorian and heading off to Yale. I had the boyfriend that everyone liked. The parents that everyone knew. I was the girl that everyone wanted to be.”

  “So what happened to that girl?” Jude asked.

  “I wish I knew. It all started to seem wrong. I realized that every part of my life was nothing more than an image people saw, and I wasn’t sure that I wanted to be that fake person anymore. But I don’t know who the real Hannah is behind it.”

  I bit my lip. I had said too much, let him in too close. It was hard to remember being the person I was a year ago. It seemed like a dream, like it had never been real. Which it hadn’t. The appearance I kept up was my parents’ creation, not mine.

  Maybe dating Zac Greeley had been the first crack in that persona. Everyone thought we were an odd couple, and Natalie never understood why I dated him, though she put up with him for me. Zac was a nice guy, but he was unique. He was constantly on the move, unable to focus on one thing for very long, and he always came up with insane ideas. My mom hated him at first sight. Her nose had scrunched up at Zac’s wrinkled T-shirt with a hole near the collar and his orange sneakers that were held together with duct tape. The more Mom hated him, the more I was determined to be with him.

  But it all got to be too much. Zac had a way of seeing inside people, knowing things you didn’t want him to know. And he had gotten too dangerously close to the truth about my family. I wouldn’t make that mistake again. I’d get through this summer, then I would go home and forget about everyone here and be the Hannah Cohen everyone expected me to be.