All We Can Do Is Wait

by Richard Lawson

  They both leaned back in their chairs, falling into silence. Scott pulled his phone out of his pocket, Alexa figuring that he was checking his messages, probably his girlfriend’s parents telling him they were on their way. But then he turned to Alexa and held his phone out.

  “That’s her,” he said. “Aimee.”

  Alexa took the phone from him and looked at a picture, one of those outside-the-house-before-a-school-dance pictures, probably a semiformal, judging from the length of the girl’s dress. Scott was in a blue blazer and wrinkled khakis, like a boarding school uniform, Alexa thought. Aimee, dyed blond and perky looking, was standing in front of him, his arms around her waist. The house behind them was small and simple, half aluminum siding, half brick. It didn’t look like the proud, rambling Victorians or big brick colonials that girls Alexa knew from Newton lived in.

  “She’s really pretty,” Alexa said.

  Scott nodded. “Yeah. This was her sophomore semi. Last year. It was awesome.”

  “My school doesn’t really do dances,” Alexa said, handing the phone back to Scott. He looked surprised.

  “Why, because there are no guys?”

  Alexa shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess they think they’re dated or something. A tool of the patriarchy.”

  Scott frowned. “Wow.”

  There was a small pause. Not quite awkward, but not quite comfortable either.

  “What year are you?” he asked.

  “Junior.”

  “Oh, cool. Me too.”

  “Are you here alone?”

  “Uhh, yeah. Right now.”

  “What about Aimee’s parents?”

  Scott seemed to flinch. He dropped his shoulders, leaned forward to rest his arms on his knees, ran a hand through his thick hair. “Yeah, yeah, they’ll be here soon, I’m sure. So. That’s good. That’s good.”

  Alexa watched him for a moment. They were about the same age, but he seemed very young just then. Scared and confused, out of his depth. She could relate. “I’m here with my brother, technically, but I might as well be alone.”

  Scott bobbed his head, which was now hanging between his knees. “Yeah, yeah,” he said, sounding distracted.

  A moment passed, and the air in the room seemed to change. Alexa sat still, unsure what to do. Clearly this boy was upset, and she wanted to comfort him, but she felt too ragged to be much help. She looked at her phone and realized that thirty minutes had passed since she’d last seen Jason, who could be anywhere by now. Had he left the hospital entirely?

  Alexa opened Twitter and scrolled through her feed—she followed mostly news outlets like the Globe and WBZ 4—to see if there were any updates from the outside world. But it was more of the same. The horrible photos, of billows of dust occluding twisted metal, of the bridge in bent tatters. Her friends from school were tweeting out blanket condolences, some saying they were praying “for all the victims,” but none of them had gotten in touch with Alexa directly. They probably didn’t know. They probably figured that Alexa had just left early for the day, because she’d been weird lately. Odd, changed, more mature, a little lost.

  The guilty thing was, Alexa had slowly come to like the part of herself that had changed. She did feel older and more mature. She was ready to tell her parents that she wasn’t the good daughter they thought she was, that she couldn’t do everything they wanted just to offset the failures of their son. She was maybe done with anger and grief and was prepared to just move on. To let selfish Jason be selfish Jason, to let her parents be disappointed, to let old friends be gone. But then the bridge collapsed and the phones pinged and all of Alexa’s impending independence suddenly seemed reckless, careless, like she’d unpinned something that was holding her world up and it had all come tumbling down.

  What would Jason say if he knew? That Theo and Linda were on that bridge because of Alexa. That Alexa’s stupid, childish dreams had probably killed their parents. Maybe Jason had the right idea. Better to disengage and self-destruct and be a callous jerk than to try to involve anyone else, to tether your expectations to other people. And what would Jason say if he found out that the meeting with Ms. Reeve and Ms. Cline had been Alexa’s idea, that it really was all annoying, type A, goody-goody Alexa’s fault? She had rebelled wrong. She’d insisted on getting her parents to officially sign off on her plans, and now they’d suffered for it. Jason hadn’t even thought to ask why his parents were on the Tobin that afternoon, but Alexa nonetheless felt like she was lying. She felt like a sneak, like a criminal.

  Still, she wanted Jason next to her, helping her. Even if a big, terrible secret was hovering between them, she needed her brother, whatever comfort he could provide. But they’d barely spoken since that Labor Day weekend a year ago. He’d reverted into the same bad, jaded, hazy Jason from before. And as much as Alexa knew Jason might never forgive her for what she’d done to their parents, she wasn’t sure she could ever forgive Jason for his distance, his coldness. Alexa was indeed very much alone as she sat in the waiting room, looking at Scott, who was now rocking back and forth, one knee bouncing up and down, the laces on his beat-up sneaker thwacking away.

  She wasn’t sure why, but she reached a hand out and placed it on Scott’s shoulder, gave it a little reassuring rub. He stopped rocking and looked up at her, gave her that same weary, sheepish crinkle of a smile.

  Alexa smiled back and Scott sat up, rubbed his eyes. “Should we see if Dolores Umbridge over there can tell us anything new?” he asked, gesturing toward Mary Oakes. Alexa was about to say yes, but then Mary Oakes turned and disappeared once again behind the swinging doors. “Great,” he said with a sigh.

  Scott pulled his hood up and leaned his head back against the wall. Alexa sat back too, staring up at the stained white ceiling. They sat there like that in silence, the panic of the scene around them fading just for the moment.

  After a minute or two, Scott sat up and turned to Alexa. “So wait, like, not even a prom?”

  And they both laughed, together.

  Chapter Four

  Scott

  SCOTT AND AIMEE had been dating for about a year when Aimee started seriously talking about colleges. It was the beginning of her junior year and Scott’s sophomore year, and though Scott had always known this was coming, that Aimee would eventually start to make plans for leaving Boston—and him—behind, it still shocked him how sad and scared it made him feel when the day actually arrived. The thud of what he always knew would someday happen: that people were going to leave and he’d be stuck in Newton, with his parents, just like they had been stuck in Newton with their parents. But he tried not to show it, listening to Aimee as she listed dream schools and safeties, maybe nodding a little more enthusiastically when she mentioned schools that were closer to home.

  “I guess Amherst could be good,” Aimee said once over a weekend lunch at Johnny’s in Newton Centre. It was a favorite place of theirs, where they’d been on their first official date, Scott attempting to pay for the meal with a wad of crumpled bills before Aimee insisted they split it. “Though I feel like their theater department is kinda small?”

  Aimee tended to get the lead, or at least a big part, in most of the school plays. She was talented and pretty, in “an interesting way,” as Scott’s mom put it. “Doesn’t BU have a good theater major?” Scott asked, trying to sound nonchalant, but of course wishing beyond wish that Aimee would end up at a school just down Comm Ave, instead of all the way at the other end of the state, or even worse, in a different state altogether.

  “True,” Aimee said, chewing thoughtfully on a french fry. “But I dunno . . . it’d be fun to be somewhere else, y’know?” She looked at Scott, maybe suddenly realizing the implications of what she was saying. “But not too far. I mean, obviously somewhere you can come visit a lot.”

  “Right,” Scott said, giving her a smile and taking a sip of his Coke. He had a helpless feeling c
hurning in his stomach, a gnawing certainty that he’d already lost Aimee, had been losing her since the day they got together, making out at a soccer party back when Scott was just a freshman on the JV team.

  He’d since made varsity—one of the few sophomores at Newton North, a strong soccer school, to do so. So it wasn’t like Scott didn’t have his own stuff going on, his own things to be excited about. But beyond high school, his future didn’t look anything like Aimee’s. He wasn’t quite good enough at soccer to get a scholarship, so he’d probably stay in town, maybe go to UMass Boston or Suffolk or something, somewhere that wasn’t too expensive. He’d probably still work weekends at his parents’ store, a pizza shop in Newton Centre that had gradually grown to offer a larger menu and also half-functioned as a kind of specialty foods grocery. The business did well enough, but it was small and local, and Scott’s parents were never quite secure in their finances.

  Newton was a rich town, with only a few scattered poorer families to give the place character or something. Scott was from one of those families, all of whom lived in houses in Nonantum or Newton Corner, near Watertown, where the terrorist kid was hiding in that boat after the Marathon bombing. Scott was often keenly aware of the differences between him and Aimee, whose parents lived in a big house on Farlow Hill and who had never once mentioned student loans or financial aid or anything.

  After lunch, Scott and Aimee walked, hand in hand, to the T stop, taking the D train down to Fenway, where they saw a movie and cuddled and made out and ate popcorn, Scott letting things feel normal again, like this wasn’t all going to end in a year and a half.

  Things progressed regularly enough throughout that fall and into the winter, with soccer and plays and all the immediate stuff of high school taking precedence over Aimee’s future plans. But when February vacation rolled around, Aimee announced that she was going to spend the week looking at colleges with her dad. Scott had assumed that they’d spend the break together, like they had the year before, watching Netflix and doing some discreet, quiet fooling around in Aimee’s attic-like third-floor bedroom. He was crushed—and angry—when she told him just a few days before the vacation was set to start.

  “Well, what am I gonna do for a week now?” he asked her, sitting on Aimee’s bed while she sat at her desk, half paying attention to the physics book on her lap.

  She sighed, looked up at him. “I don’t know! I thought you’d be working at the store most days anyway.”

  She was right, of course. Scott’s parents put him to work during almost all of his vacation time, but he would have a few nights free at least, nights when he thought he and Aimee would be cozy together at her house, which was really the only place he ever wanted to be those days. He told her that and she rolled her eyes. “We can make up for lost sex time when I’m back,” she said, returning to her book.

  Scott didn’t hate the sound of that, but he did hate the idea of Aimee exploring her potential new life without him, of her falling in love with some school and returning at the end of the week convinced she just had to move halfway across the country to go to Northwestern. (This trip was Aimee’s Midwest tour of schools. The East Coast ones would be visited on weekends.) It made Scott feel bratty and hot in the face, like he was a kid wanting to throw a really big and cathartic tantrum. But he restrained himself. He didn’t want Aimee to see him being so immature, so uncollegiate, even though that was exactly what he felt, desperately wanting them to stay teenagers in love forever, not wanting time to move on, not wanting anyone to grow up any more than they already had.

  Despite all of Scott’s useless petulance, Aimee went on the trip, and Scott remained in town, working long days at the store and then mostly bumming around at night. One evening, he went over to Pete del Vecchio’s house, a friend from the team who lived nearby. They played FIFA and Pete talked about girls, specifically Pete’s longtime crush, Taissa Groff, Aimee’s hot and kind of strange best friend, who lived in a sprawling, ghostly old mansion that had an elevator in it. Scott was trying not to text Aimee too much, not wanting to seem too needy. But sitting there in Pete’s dingy basement rec room while Pete droned on about how Taissa had provocatively brushed past him at a party back during Christmas break, Scott felt lonely and cramped and dejected. So he sent Aimee a text, asking how things were going. He was pretty sure she was in Ohio at the moment, looking at Oberlin and Kenyon.

  Scott saw the “read” receipt pop up and waited for the little bubbles indicating that Aimee was writing back. But they never showed up. Aimee had seen the text and decided not to respond. Scott waited what he felt was a reasonable amount of time, and then wrote another message: hangin at delvecchios. hes still in luv w taissa lmao. what r u doin. This time, the message didn’t switch to “read,” and Scott became immediately convinced that Aimee was at some college party, making out with some pretentious theater guy, deliberately ignoring her buzzing phone, knowing that it was just a dumb text from her stupid high school boyfriend.

  He told Pete he had to leave, Pete protesting that Scott was only leaving because he was losing at FIFA. Scott walked the few frigid blocks home and retreated up to his room, torturing himself by looking at old Instagrams of him and Aimee in what now seemed like happier times. Him and Aimee at Six Flags New England at the end of the school year last year, a sunny and exhausting and entirely thrilling day that had culminated with, back in Newton, Scott losing his virginity to Aimee.

  In another photo, Scott and Aimee were at a table at J.P. Licks with Taissa and Cara and some of Aimee’s other theater friends after the spring musical, Pippin, most of their faces still pancaked with stage makeup. Scrolling through Aimee’s feed (Scott never posted much on Instagram, though he loved being tagged), Scott realized he had his arm tightly around Aimee in a lot of the photos, like he was always trying to keep her close to him. It hadn’t worked, though, and now Scott was convinced Aimee would return from her trip and promptly break up with him. He checked his phone one last time—still nothing—and drifted off into a restless, unhappy sleep.

  The next morning, he was cheered to wake up to a bunch of texts from Aimee, who was apologetic about not writing back. my dad got mad at me for looking @ my phone @ dinner. said i had to turn it off. then i forgot. ilu. Scott felt an immense amount of relief, though he wasn’t entirely sure how Aimee—as frequently glued to her phone as anyone else—would have forgotten to turn the thing back on. Still, she sent him a cute picture of herself, looking coy in a drab hotel bed, and they had a little back-and-forth about mundane stuff, and Scott felt better.

  When they finally met up after her trip, though, things seemed different. Scott went over to Aimee’s house, saying hi to her parents as they cleaned up dinner. “Aimee’s upstairs, sweetie,” Aimee’s mom said, and Scott climbed the stairs, excited and expectant, hoping Aimee would say she hated the Midwest, that it was too cold, even colder than Boston, and that she’d decided to stay put.

  To his great dismay, he instead found her cheery and gushing, talking about how beautiful all the theater facilities had been at the schools, how talented everyone seemed. She’d seen two plays, one weird avant-garde thing at Oberlin and Picasso at the Lapin Agile at Northwestern.

  “Oh my God, they were like real actors, Scott. And the sets were so cool. It was so professional. It was amazing.”

  “That’s . . . great,” Scott said, not doing much to mask his disappointment. “That’s really cool.”

  Aimee turned from her unpacking and looked him, hurt or annoyed or both. “Gee, don’t sound so excited.”

  “I am excited!” Scott replied weakly. “It’s just . . . Ohio and Illinois are really far away.”

  “I know,” Aimee said, walking over to give Scott a hug. She kissed him, running a hand through his hair and smiling. “But they’re not that far. Plus, we’re talking about a year and a half from now.”

  She continued to go on at length about how incredible everything and e
veryone had been, how the professors had these lengthy résumés and how intense the classes were. Scott sat glumly on her bed while Aimee flitted around the room, putting clothes away and chattering. He had thought that maybe they’d just have a quiet night in together—Aimee’s parents usually let Scott stay until midnight, largely unbothered—but now he wasn’t so sure he wanted to just sit there while Aimee waxed rhapsodic about how perfect and dynamic her life was going to be when she finally left Newton.

  “There’s a party at Sam Stein’s house tonight,” Scott interrupted.

  Aimee wrinkled her nose in disgust. “Sam Stein?” Sam was a senior on the soccer team, a known asshole who barely gave Scott the time of day, except to yell at him when Scott screwed something up at practice or, worse, during a game. “Why would you want to go to a party at Sam Stein’s house?”

  Scott was irritable. “Because he’s on the team with me. I don’t know. I was invited. We were invited.”

  Aimee let out a little scoff. “Everyone on the team is invited to those parties. Isn’t it, like, a bylaw?”

  “Why are you being a bitch about this, Aims?” Scott spat out, immediately regretting it.

  Her eyes darkened and she stopped unpacking. “Uh. Whoa. What the fuck, Scotty?”

  “Sorry, it’s just, like, I haven’t seen you in a week and I just want to do something with you. Why do you have to make fun of me for that?”

  “I wasn’t making fun of you, Scott! I just didn’t think you liked Sam freaking Stein. I mean, you don’t care about soccer parties all year and then suddenly you’re, like, dying to hang out with the worst soccer guys?”

  “We met at a soccer party!” Scott said indignantly.

  “Scott, that really doesn’t count. That was Maddy Cohen’s birthday party, there were just some soccer guys there. JV ones.”