“I don’t really give a shit what it does, but try me and find out.”
Turning his body, this time moving until he’s positioned directly in front of both me and Eric, he points down the hall.
“Let’s get out of here. It’s over.”
We both turn and start moving away from Dillon and the others even though we can still hear them arguing with each other. It’s only when we’ve made it far enough away that they’ll be unable to hear us that Kayden speaks again.
“Eric, can I talk to you for a sec?”
Kayden
He wasn’t supposed to be a part of my plan, but with the way he seems to care about her and the way he smiled at me when he heard it was me rigging the P.A system, he’s the only person that can help me with what comes next.
I have no doubt that the mess with Dillon is nowhere near over. I also know that despite my threat to him about leaving Eric and Belle alone, he’ll still find ways to get around it. I’m banking on him doing that. I meant what I said about backing away from the fighting. I’m done with it, but it doesn’t mean I can’t get him back in other, smarter ways.
She’s wary of me, since I stopped in the middle of hall and called for Eric instead of her. Pretty sure that’s gotta come as a shock, but I can’t worry about that right now. Everything that happens from this point forward has to have my entire focus. If it works the way I hope, it all comes back to her happiness anyway, so I can handle her being pissed for a little while.
Hearing her speak only solidifies what I’m doing here. There may have been a point, a few weeks ago where she actually needed me there to protect her, but I always knew she could take care of herself. That all she needed was strength and her voice. She proved that to me today, talking down to those assholes that until a few weeks ago, I called my best friends.
My mom, during one of the times she spent ripping my dad apart used to complain that there’s no woman alive that needs or wants a Walker. Walker boys are defective. We would break the person we love down, until they were only a shadow of their former self. I believed that for a long time. It’s probably why I stayed silent with Dean for as long as I did. If he was no good, it meant I was no good, so all we had was each other.
She was wrong. I know that now and it’s because of Isabelle. I can be good for someone, even if I screw up along the way. I can be that good boy she said a girl like Isabelle deserves and I’ve finally got the chance to prove it.
I can’t take back everything that I said about her, the things I did over the last eight years, but I can spend the next eight minutes, hours, days and months making up for it. I finally see what I’ve been refusing to all along.
It’s okay to have differences, to not be like everyone else around you. It doesn’t make you weaker or less worthy than anyone else that might appear normal. It is what it is. You’re just different. At the end of the day, we all want the exact same things in life and I think Isabelle and I are living proof of that.
“What do you need, Kayden?”
“Remember what you said earlier about me getting involved?”
“You mean, when I told you to hang back and give her a chance? Yeah, I do.”
“Well I’ve got one more thing planned, but it’s not until later. I’d do it on my own, but I think that after what just happened, she might not trust it. If I ask you to help me, will you do it?”
“You swear this isn’t gonna turn into something like Homecoming?”
“I’ll sign my promise in blood if that’s what you want. This isn’t a joke.”
“That’s gross. You don’t need to do that. What do you need me to do?”
“Get her to the gym at 3:45. I want her there right at that time.”
“Why?”
“Everyone will pretty much be cleared out by then and what I’m planning, I sort of need privacy for. Well, present company excluded, if you don’t mind missing your bus.”
“All you need is her in the gym at 3:45?”
“That’s it. I got the rest from there.”
“Alright, I’ll do it, but on one condition.”
Despite everything I put this kid through and everything I believed about him, I’ve gotta hand it to him. He could easily be afraid of me right now, but he’s not. He’s just doing what I should’ve been doing all along.
Looking out for her.
“Name it.”
“This time, whatever you’re gonna do, make sure it’s for keeps. You might be able to threaten those guys into leaving us alone, but you won’t bully me. If you hurt her, I’ll hurt you.”
“Deal.”
Epilogue
Belle
The rest of the afternoon passes by in a blur and thankfully it’s an uneventful blur. The musical interruptions stop after the broadcast outside at lunch. The strange thing is, even though I know it was Dillon trying to get to Kayden, I found myself missing it.
Moving from class to class, everything quiet even though I’m surrounded by noise, I start believing that I imagined the whole thing. With the way I stood up for myself, a move that in the last three years I’ve never done, I’ve got no other explanation for everything that’s happened today.
I don’t see Kayden again and I struggle with how that makes me feel. I know I was scared to come face to face with him, but with everything that happened when we did finally come together, the fear’s been replaced by something else.
Love.
No matter how out of my way I go in order to avoid it, run from it or even deny its existence at all, it doesn’t change the truth.
I am in love with Kayden Walker.
It’s that love that makes me search for him down every hall, around every corner, even though something tells me he doesn’t want to be found. It’s that love that makes me hound Eric for information. There’s an overwhelming urge to know what the two of them talked about that for whatever reason, I’m not allowed to know.
There’s only one part of admitting how I feel that bothers me. If everything that happened was designed by Dillon and not Kayden, the way I originally thought, then why isn’t he searching me out? If everything he said during our few weeks together was real, the way he made it sound, then why isn’t he here now?
Love might have the power to heal, but it also has the power to hurt, which is what it’s doing to me.
I don’t want Eric to be the one he’s talking to. I want it to be me, though deep down I realize I don’t deserve his words. I did the exact thing to him that everyone has been doing to me for years. I suppose it’s not all that surprising that he’s going out of his way to avoid me, despite talking to my friend earlier.
I judged him. I took everything that happened and assumed he was behind it, instead of believing in the person that I’d gotten to know. I made a horrible mistake and it’s one I’m not sure I can ever take back.
For all the acceptance and understanding that I crave, I sure didn’t extend it to the one person that deserved it most. The world can’t be expected to change and adapt to anything it perceives as different, if we don’t first do it ourselves.
How many times has that been drilled into me, not only by my mom, but my teachers too? One easy lesson and somehow I’d completely forgotten it, in favor of being just like everyone else.
Realizing all of this though, it doesn’t make the hurt I feel at being ignored any easier.
“You need to come with me.”
“Excuse me?” I ask, as Eric grabs me by the sleeve, attempting to drag me a completely different way than the one I actually need to go.
“Ms. T wants to see us in the gym.” He answers, as if it’s something I should have known.
“Why?”
“I don’t even know.”
Now I know something’s going on. If Ms. Taylor actually wanted to see us, she would have given Eric a reason and he’s got an even better memory then me. There’s no way he wouldn’t remember what it is. I call bullshit on his ‘I don’t know’.
“Try
again, Eric.”
“Would you just trust me and come?” he whines before shooting his best sad eyes at me. “It’s supposed to be a surprise. She’s been putting it together for awhile or something, but god, don’t tell her I said that. She’ll kill me.”
That’s another thing he’s good at. Being over dramatic. This explanation makes more sense though, so removing his hand off my shirt, I motion for him to move and follow along behind the moment he does.
The entire time I’m walking, I try and figure out exactly what kind of surprise my teacher could be putting together for me. My birthday is in the spring, so it can’t have anything to do with that and there’s really nothing else that jumps out. I think about asking Eric, knowing that if I ask enough of the right questions, he’ll break and tell me, but with the hurry he seems to be in to get me there, I’m not so sure I want to stop him.
I’m not big on surprises. There are just too many variables to consider and usually even just thinking about it is enough for me to shut down. Ms. T knows this better than anyone, so why she’s doing this doesn’t make sense to me.
As we finally round the corner and the gym comes into view, I see her standing outside the door, her face wearing the same welcoming smile she has every day when I walk into her class. Seeing her this way settles the worries that have been building the entire way here.
“Alright, well here you go. I’m out of here. I gotta catch the bus.”
The minute he mentions the bus, it hits me. That’s my only way home. If I’m not out there to catch it, same as Eric, then I’m going to be stranded here for the hour or more it’ll take until my mom gets off work.
“Wait!” I call out. “How am I supposed to get home?”
“Don’t worry about that. Something tells me, you’ll get home just fine.” Ms. Taylor answers easily.
Okay, now I’m confused and the only person that I could get answers from is completely out of sight. I could ask her what she means, but before I can open my mouth, she motions for me to go in.
“Isabelle, I know how you feel about surprises, but go in. I promise you, it’s not going to be as bad as you’re imagining.”
She has no idea the scenario’s I’ve got running in my head right now. I can see the accidents, the tears and me falling completely apart so easily, it’s like it’s happening in real time even though I’m standing here, completely safe and dry.
Have I mentioned I really hate surprises?
“Go on, dear.”
Closing my eyes, taking a few deep breaths to calm the heartbeat that’s threatening to beat itself to death inside my chest, I move forward slowly, until I’m all the way through the door and standing a few steps inside the gym.
It’s when I open my eyes that I see it and more than that, I see the person standing in the middle of it.
Kayden is standing in the middle of the gym, dressed, not in the clothes I saw him wearing earlier, but in a suit and as my eyes lock completely on his, he does the one thing that up until now he’s never done.
He takes my breath away.
Kayden
There was this moment while I stood here waiting that I actually thought Eric ditched me and she wouldn’t show up. In fact, the longer it took waiting for Ms. Taylor to open the door to signal she was here, I worked myself up so much, I’m pretty sure I’ve got grey mixed with the blonde in my hair. That’s how much I’m relying on this to work out right.
It was hard to put all of this together with only a half hour to work with, but somehow I did it. It might not be an exact duplication of the dance, especially since she won’t be appearing in the Cinderella dress and I’m in a suit instead of the ruined tuxedo, but it’s as close to perfection as possible.
The lights from that night are filling the room with stars. There’s a bottle of soda and soup from the deli, sitting on the table off to the left. It’s as close to her favorites as I could manage and I really hope that when she does show, she’s surprised by it. I’ve even got the tunes, though it’s definitely not the system they used for Homecoming. It’s a beat up old boom box that Coach had hidden in his office. Since it plays CD’s though, it’s everything I can possibly ask for.
Everything is ready. The only thing missing is her.
The door opens and I can hear Ms. Taylor’s voice coming through, the low tone telling me that Isabelle’s here and she’s on the other side of the door. After a few minutes, where I start to wonder if she’s ever going to make her way in, she finally steps inside. Her eyes are closed, but she’s walking toward me just the way I imagined her doing in my head.
There’s an excitement level in me, seeing her move that I’ve never known before and if I thought it couldn’t get any stronger, I’m wrong. As she opens her eyes, it feels like an explosion goes off in my chest at the sight of her, as she takes it all in.
“Umm…”
I actually expected her initial reaction to be something worse. When Ms. T agreed to help earlier, she explained, in excruciating detail, all of the ways that she pictured this going wrong. She warned me about Isabelle’s fear of surprises and that I needed to prepare myself for whatever the fallout might be. I’d taken it all in and prepared myself as much as possible, but in her typical way, she goes and does something I never prepared for at all.
“Belle, are you okay?”
She moves closer to me, her head moving up and down in a nod and it scares me. With the way she talked so easily in the hall earlier with Dillon, the last thing I want is for her to revert back to silence now, especially if I’m the reason why.
“What is this?”
“What does it look like?”
“It looks like Homecoming.”
“Then I guess you have your answer, don’t you?”
“Why?” she asks and I’m actually stumped by the question. Not because I don’t have an answer for her, because I do. I’m stumped that she’s even asking me at all. Does she really not get why I would want to do this for her?
“You don’t know?”
She shakes her head and I frown. With the way she looked at me in the hall, I thought she might have been on the same page as me. That she missed me as much as I did her and wanted to fix everything that I stupidly broke, but now I’m not so sure. For the second time in as many minutes, I’m scared I’m doing the wrong thing again.
Shit, I suck at this part. Explaining how I feel, why I do the things I do, what she means to me. I mean, she’s the one that dropped her feelings on me first, because I choked the last time we were like this. I can already see that I’m going to blow it before I’ve even started.
I can’t just leave her hanging. I’ve done that for far too long already. Even if I can’t get the words to come out right, I have to at least try. She’s standing here now, giving me a chance, despite all the crappy stuff in our history. I owe her the words, even if they’re not as perfect as I want them to be.
“In my life, I don’t have a whole lot of memories that end happily, but the ones that I do have and can easily pull up in my mind, Isabelle; they all have you in them.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I know, but I’m going to try and explain okay?”
“Okay.”
“The first real memory I have, is one of the first times I was old enough to remember being at your house. We must have been about three, maybe four. I came and sat down beside you while you were playing and it’s like, even then, you knew I wasn’t anything special because you just ignored the hell out of me.”
I stop, allowing myself to recall the moment as clearly as I can in my head and unable to control it, I feel the smile spreading across my face.
“It bugged me so much. I tried everything I could to get your attention and nothing worked. Then one day, you finally looked up, those big blue eyes of yours pointed right at me, an annoyed look on your face. I swear, it was like the best thing ever. I didn’t even care that I annoyed you. The only thing that mattered was—I finally got your attention.”<
br />
“I don’t remember that.”
“I figured that. Isabelle, I don’t think you’re supposed to remember these things because they’re my memories of you. I don’t want you to either, because they’re so important to me that I don’t want to share them. Not with anyone, not even you.”
She smiles and I’m just frozen in place. It’s actually the perfect time for her to do it since this is another memory I have that I need to share.
“Once I got you to look at me, the next step was getting you to smile for me. I tried over and over to get you to do it and nothing ever worked. Half the time, I just upset you so much you’d cry and I’d end up having to go home. One day though, I decided that I’d tickle your feet, I mean everyone smiles and laughs at that right? So I did it and sure enough, you smiled and I never really knew how important it was at the time. Remembering it now though, I see it.”
“You see what?”
“When you smile at me Isabelle, it’s like I’ve being hit by lightning. Once you do it, time freezes. All motion just stops. It’s as if the smile keeps me still. Some of the happiest times in my life are when you smiled at me. Then and now.”
“Okay.”
It’s not the answer I’m expecting, but considering she’s still standing here with me, I can’t ask for much more. I’ve got so much work to do, repairing everything that I broke. It can’t all be fixed with a few pretty words and a perfectly decorated gym. As long as she’s staying though, I’m fighting.
“The point I’m making with all of this is, every good thing that’s happened in my life up until this point, has in some way revolved around you. Getting you to notice me, you smiling at me, the way my name sounded the first time you ever said it, the way it still sounds, even today. The softness of your lips when they’re pressed on any part of me, the cute little faces you make when you’re texting me. How perfectly your hand fits in mine. It’s always been you.”
“Kayden…”
“See what I’m saying?”
“Kayden, stop please.”
Count On Me Page 25
