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The End of Our Story

Page 12

by Meg Haston


  “Come on,” he says. “I want to show you something.”

  I follow him outside. Wilson’s truck is idling in the parking lot. A canoe rests in the bed, tailgate down. It’s long, sleek, made entirely of wood that changes to different shades of amber as the pink light moves.

  “Whoa.” I push myself into the truck bed and run my hand over the curves of the wood. “Beautiful. Have you taken her out yet?”

  “Nah. I just finished her.”

  “You made this? Wil.”

  He tosses his hair out of his eyes. “Would you, ah—you want to try her out?”

  * * *

  We don’t speak on the way to the beach. I watch the lines of his jaw pulse in an odd rhythm, watch his lips move slightly. He’s far away, someplace I may never be able to find. When we get to the beach access, we carry the canoe across the sand. It’s lighter than I expected. Wil rests the boat on one shoulder and two paddles on the other. There are almost no waves and the sun is slinking red beside us.

  “One, two, three,” Wil says, and we ease the boat onto the wet sand. I kick off my flip-flops and roll my jeans up. I wade in up to mid-calf, tugging the boat with me as I go.

  I jump in and Wil wades a little deeper before he jumps in, too. We’re quiet. I’ve done this enough to know that a boat meeting water for the first time is a sacred thing. Wil hands me a paddle and settles in behind me. I wish I could see his face. I imagine it instead. I make it soft, with no harsh lines. I pretend that he has nothing to worry about except a quiz in science or a mother who wants him to go to college more than he wants to go. We fall into rhythm, sliding across the water. It doesn’t take long for everything in me to sync with our strokes. My breath, my heartbeat. We head north.

  Wil speaks first, with a voice like uneven pavement. “Do you . . . do you hate me?”

  “What? Wil!” I know better than to turn around. “Of course not. How could you think that?”

  “After what I told you about my dad. It’s embarrassing, Bridge.” He pauses. “That’s not even the word. It’s humiliating, the kind of person he was.”

  “That has nothing to do with you,” I tell him. “That’s on him.”

  “It has everything to do with me.” The canoe rockets forward. “I’m part of him. I have him in me. And I don’t want you to think—I fucking care what you think, Bridge.”

  “Listen to me. It doesn’t mean anything about you.” The breeze carries my words back to him. “No matter what kind of person he was. You’re different. You aren’t your dad.”

  “Really, though?” His laugh has an edge. He stabs the water with his paddle and spins us in a perfect circle. The beach and horizon replace each other. My stomach swoops.

  “Really.”

  “See, I’m not so sure. I’m part of him, or he’s part of me, or however that works.”

  “But you’re not the things your father did,” I say fiercely.

  “Maybe a man can’t separate who he is from what he does. Apparently, I’m the kind of guy who puts his fist through a wall, right? You saw that. Tell me I’m not just another angry Hines asshole.”

  I swivel until we’re knee to knee. The color has drained from his face.

  “No,” I say emphatically. “Hell no.” I take his hands in mine. They are damp. “I think you’re pissed because your dad wasn’t who you wanted him to be, and then he died.”

  His face buckles, and he glances out at the water. No doubt he wishes he could slide beneath the surface, release the oceans behind his eyes. “What are the odds?” he asks me.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The mathematical odds of something like this happening to a person’s family.”

  “You can’t think about it like that.” I squeeze his hands tighter. He’s shaking.

  “There are billions of other people out there—billions, right?”

  “Seven billion.”

  “Seven billion other people out there, and this thing, this thing that has ruined my life forever, happened in my house. To me and not somebody else. How is that possible? I’m just this little speck in the universe. And I never wanted to be more than a speck. I just wanted to be happy, that’s it. Simple, right?” He shakes his head. Pulls away from me.

  I remember a bulletin board in fifth grade. In sweeping glitter letters at the top, Mrs. Gilkey had written Fifth graders flying high! She’d stapled bunches of Tootsie Pops over construction paper baskets, and we were supposed to write about our dreams in our candy hot-air balloons. Where did we want to live one day? Who did we want to be? I think I said Someplace exotic and The woman who ends world hunger. Wil’s basket had two words.

  Here. Me.

  “Simple,” I echo.

  “But I don’t get simple anymore. Not after this.” Wil shakes his head suddenly, violently, like he’s trying to fling the memory of that night from the folds of his brain.

  “Look at me,” I tell him.

  His eyes are bottomless worlds of green. They hold everything I’ve missed. Tell me. Tell me what happened that night. I wish I could unlock his skull. Draw out the memory parasite in thick coils. Remove it from his body. I’d make it mine, if it would just give him some relief.

  “I’m sorry. I am so sorry.” My body is made of thousands of tiny magnets, opposing forces, propelling me into him and holding me back. “You don’t deserve this. I wish I could take it away. I wish—” My eyes fill.

  His head drops.

  There’s a heavy silence between us. I can’t hold this inside me for another second.

  “I fucking miss you. I’ve missed you, Wil. I miss us.” Saying it out loud makes my insides firework: turquoise and gold and scarlet rocketing inside me.

  He sort of collides with me, slides his arms around my waist and buries his face in my neck and makes a sobbing sound. My eyes are hot and wet. If there is a breath somewhere, a full, deep breath anywhere on earth, I can’t find it.

  He pulls back and the space between us is unbearable, and before I can wonder, he covers my mouth with his.

  He tastes like boy and salt, like Wil. I have been parched for him, for the way his mouth fits with mine, for his hands on my arms, my waist, in my hair. My hands search him, remembering every little detail, every familiar inch. Wil Hines is a story I know by heart, a story that comes racing back to me, all at once. Now that he’s close again, I’ll never let him go.

  BRIDGE

  Spring, Senior Year

  THE next morning, my skin is still vibrating from the kiss. I race across the tennis court during PE, wanting to shriek the words to Leigh. But I can’t. Not until I know what we are.

  “So, what’d you do last night?” Leigh lobs an easy ball my way, a neon sun backspinning over the net. Despite having a general policy against a heart rate over 130, Leigh is somehow good at tennis.

  “Hung out with Micah. And, ah—” I whack the ball as hard as I can, and it hits the fence behind her and rolls two courts down. “Sorry.”

  She waits until the gym teacher at the other end of the court isn’t looking. Then she gives me the finger and takes her sweet time interrupting the game next to us—two sophomore stoners, and the game next to them: Ana and Thea.

  I watch Ana scurry for my ball and my whole body tingles like I’ve been under the sun for days. I watch her laugh and toss the ball back to Leigh, and my brain shifts into overdrive. They aren’t a good match, Wil and Ana, not the way we are. She’ll find someone next year, someone who wants college and a tie collection and a golf membership. I didn’t ask for this. He needs me. But my excuses are thin, and beneath them is simmering guilt. The feeling that I’ve done wrong by her. I look away. I pretend to stretch. I am sweat-soaked under low clouds.

  “Seventy-six–love,” Leigh bellows before she serves. She’s been making up scores all period.

  We lob the ball back and forth until she gets bored and decides to end the game, punishing me, point after point. We meet at the net and slurp the Big Gulp Leigh filled with gas-station
iced coffee on the way to school.

  “What’s going on with you?” She squints sweat out of her eyes.

  “Nothing. What do you mean?”

  “You’re, like, smiling. It’s weird.”

  “I can’t smile?”

  “Not lately, you can’t.”

  I reach for the Big Gulp and suck the last of the syrupy dregs through the straw. “Maybe I’m just having a good morning.”

  “It’s fucking PE.” Leigh shakes her head. “Nobody on earth is this happy this early in the morning unless—” A sly grin crosses her face.

  “Leigh.” I cut my eyes down the court. “Shut up.”

  “Ohmygod.” She socks my bicep, hard.

  “Leigh.”

  “You got laid! For the first time in, like, a year!” She yelps loud enough that the stoners on the next court burst out laughing. Ana and Thea glance over.

  “I. Did. Not.” I grab her arm and drag her across the court, toward the locker rooms.

  “Ladies?” the gym teacher yells.

  “Feminine issue!” I yell back. We hustle off the courts, Leigh squawking the whole way. When we get to the locker room, I shove through the double doors and I check beneath the bathroom stall doors before I say, “Okay. I did not get laid.”

  “Buuut—” Leigh pulls me down to the bench in front of my locker. “Spit it out, Hawking.”

  “I kissed Wil. Last night,” I blurt.

  Leigh’s eyes go big. “You kissed Wil. Like, your Wil. You kissed your Wil.”

  I bob my head.

  “Who happens to be Ana’s Wil, at the moment.” Her forehead crinkles.

  “Don’t remind me.” I kick off my sneakers and peel off my socks.

  Leigh sits there with her mouth slightly open, silent.

  “Say something,” I order.

  “No, I mean, this is . . . Are you getting back together?” Her disapproval lines get deeper.

  “I don’t know. We haven’t talked about it. I was going to find him after Spanish so we could talk.”

  Leigh twists one of her dreads around her index finger. She looks past me. “This is huge.”

  “I know, Leigh. That’s what I’m telling you.” I search her. Stormy eyes are not what I expected. “Would you look at me? What are you, pissed?”

  She shakes her head. “No. No way.”

  “Well? Aren’t you going to say, Do your thing, whatever makes you feel good, some bullshit about my goddamned heart chakra?” My stomach surges.

  “No way. This is you guys.”

  “So?” There’s an edge to my voice.

  “So . . .” She lets her head fall back against the locker. It makes a tinny thud. “If it was just some guy, and you were just hooking up, then hell yeah. Do what makes you feel good. But you and Wil . . .”

  “So what am I supposed to do, then?”

  “You’re supposed to think, Bridge. I mean, like, now? With all he’s got going on? With Ana?”

  “Can we not talk about Ana?” I stretch out on the bench and stare into the fluorescent lights overhead.

  “Not really.” She reaches over and squeezes my ankle. “She’s kind of an important part of this.”

  I press my palms over my eyes until everything goes black. “Yeah. I know.”

  “Bridge. I didn’t—”

  The locker room doors swing open again, and I sit up and rub the spots from my eyes. Ana and Thea traipse in and lean their rackets against the wall.

  “Hi.” Ana’s face tightens when she sees me.

  “Hey.” I nod.

  “I’m just saying, you’ve been there for him,” Thea tells Ana. She bends over one of the sinks and splashes her face with water. “And I know he’s sad and everything, but that doesn’t give him the right to forget you completely.”

  “Are you guys talking about Wil?” I ask before I can stop myself. The knot in my stomach gives me the answer.

  Thea turns from the sink and blinks, wet-faced, like she’s seeing me for the first time.

  “I just wish this whole thing was over, you know?” Ana tells Thea quietly as a few freshmen girls trickle in. “It’s just been hard, and I know that’s selfish or whatever. But Wil just isn’t . . . there anymore.”

  Thea sighs, leaving pity fog on the mirror.

  “There is no over, you know.” I just can’t stop myself.

  Ana turns. “What?” She launches the word directly at me, hard.

  “I don’t think you ever get over not having a dad anymore.”

  “Right. Obviously, I know that, Bridge.” Ana’s face is red. She looks at Thea. “You’re not the only one who—”

  The shriek of the bell cuts through the locker room. Head down, I follow Leigh through the double doors. I don’t expect to see Wil on the other side of the hall. Just like that, the sadness, my disappointment in Leigh’s reaction, drain from my body.

  He opens his mouth like he’s going to shout something across the hall, and then he sees Ana. He edges through the crowd and he leans close to her in a way that I understand, in a way that kills me. She lights up. I watch his lips.

  We have to talk, he tells her.

  Wil doesn’t get to Spanish until there are doce minutos left in the period. When he comes in, he looks at Señora Thompson and we all look at Señora Thompson and she gives him this poor baby look and she keeps teaching, but now it sounds like there is something caught in her throat. Anyone else, and she would have sent them straight to the office.

  Wil slides into his seat without turning around. I want to stare into him, through his pupils into the wires that power the Wil machine, and read his mind. To know what he’s thinking, and know where we stand.

  When the bell rings and everyone else has left, Wil says, “I’m sorry I was, uh, tardes, Señora.”

  I want to hug him and say, God, you’re so bad at Spanish.

  “I’m sure you had a good reason, Wil. Try to be on time tomorrow,” she says.

  “Gracias.”

  In the hall, he pulls me into the corner by the stairs. A group of sophomore guys takes a break from shoving one another into the closest row of lockers to stare. I edge even closer. I’m desperate to kiss him again, but I won’t. Not here. His eyes are brighter than I’ve ever seen them.

  “Hey,” he says.

  “Hey,” I say.

  He rests his hands on my hips and he falters, as if he isn’t sure. I rocket yes vibes. I guide his hands with mine. Our movements are halting, like a song that fades in and out from a station that’s far away.

  “I ended it with Ana,” he says.

  “Oh, Wil.” I collide with him. Slide my hands over his warm, solid chest and rest my head against his collarbone. I’ve missed the sound of his heartbeat, the smell of his skin. I drink him in. I want all of him. I want to make up for lost time.

  I curl my fingers around his fingers. “Is she okay?” I murmur.

  He shakes his head. “Nah.”

  I pull back. “What’d you say?”

  “That it wasn’t working. That we would have broken up after graduation anyway. Which is true.” His eyes are cloudy.

  “Oh. Okay.” I wonder if he said my name, or she did. I wonder if Ana Acevedo has ever lost anything precious. She seems like the kind of person who might be able to take all the right turns in the life maze. Who might get through unscathed. I hope she is. Real loss is like water: Over the years, it erodes. Slowly makes full things hollow.

  I’m sorry. I am, I tell her.

  “I didn’t say anything about—about last night,” he admits. “I didn’t want to make it worse for Ana.”

  I shake my head. “Yeah! Yeah. Of course.” I look at him and he looks at me. Ana’s name hangs between us.

  “I want to go somewhere with you,” he says, reading my mind.

  “Anywhere,” I say.

  BRIDGE

  Spring, Senior Year

  WE rocket through the double doors, blowing through the barrier between school and the outside world. We surge
down the steps, and when our feet touch the asphalt, we break into a sprint, my hair whipping behind us. We leave Ana’s hurt and Leigh’s furrowed brow and the curious boy stares behind us. We run toward us.

  “I’ve never skipped school!” I screech, barely sidestepping a Vespa. “If I get busted for this, you’re dead, mister.”

  Wil takes my hand. “Truck’s that way.” Urgently, he pulls me toward his dad’s pickup. We both lunge for the passenger side, and he throws open the door for me. “Get in.” His body dips toward mine, and he pulls me into him. We press our noses together and breathe into each other and then we let our lips touch, lighting each other on fire.

  He kisses me once more, quick, and slams the door.

  I lean back in my seat and close my eyes. My phone dings, and I ignore it. It’s probably Leigh, texting all the way from the land of Do you think you should?

  “Where are we going?” I ask when he slides into the driver’s side seat.

  “Don’t know.” He throws the truck into reverse and peels out of the parking lot. In under a minute, we’re leaping down Atlantic, windows down. I was expecting the beach, but we’re headed west, away from the water. The wind whips through the truck, tickling my damp skin. In here, with his fingers wrapped around mine and propped on the console, we’re safe.

  We barrel down Atlantic, and at the last minute, he whips the truck across three lanes and we’re speeding down his block. He pulls into the empty driveway and kills the engine.

  I thrust open the car door, and I hit the pavement on shaky legs. Inside, the house is silent. There are still a few boxes in the front hall, neatly labeled.

  “More of his stuff,” Wil says before I have to ask.

  I can’t imagine what it would be like to live in a house alongside Wilson’s ghost. I slip my hand into his, and he tugs me down the hall and into the breakfast nook. The only sound is the hum of the ancient refrigerator, the one Wilson refused to replace. Wil told me once that his mom wanted one of the sleek silver refrigerators, the kind that spits crushed ice and has a special drawer for things like kale.

  I wander into the kitchen. There’s a grocery list pinned to the fridge in Wilson’s small, boxy handwriting. I recognize the letters from the napkin notes he would leave in Wil’s lunchbox: This is the last of the Halloween candy. Make it last. Or six more days till summer, buddy.

 

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