“Well, I was thinking, I don’t really know what the sights even are—so since you’re from here, maybe you want to hang out this weekend?”
I stop walking, and the cart squeaks to a halt. I blink at him.
“Seriously?”
“Well, yeah,” he says. He slips his hands into the pockets of his jeans, his shoulders rising slightly in a shrug. “But maybe someplace not supercrowded?”
I immediately think of the SocialSquare comments and hiding in the dry goods storage. I remember how Milo’s eyes darted around the alley before he slunk off toward home. So far only my fingernails have experienced that kind of public paranoia (and they’ve since been scrubbed clean of chipped polish, as if they’ve joined the manicure version of the Witness Protection Program), and already I don’t want anything to do with it.
“Uh, that sounds great,” I say. “And absolutely.”
Milo lets out a breath, like he was worried I might say no, which is completely and totally upside-down ridiculous, but it’s cute that he doesn’t think so. “We should probably be careful. You know, about being seen together,” he says. He shuffles his feet, and a cloud of sawdust kicks up around the toe of his boot. “Not that there’s anything to see. But, uh, now you’ve seen how crazy things can be. So, you know, we should watch out.”
“Yeah, of course,” I reply. I’m shocked that now I’m the calm and collected one, while he’s playing the role of stuttering nervous guy. “Tomorrow morning? Say around ten?”
“I’ll do the driving, you do the navigating?”
I shake off the comments that are still pecking at my brain and smile. “Sounds like a plan.”
“We’ll be back late,” Mom says, leaning against my doorframe. “Call if you need anything, and if it’s an emergency, call the doctors Parad. They’re in tonight.”
Early this week, Mom started to get that twitch in her left eye that we all know means she needs a break from writing. When Dad saw it at breakfast this morning, he told her they were going to drive up to Atlanta for dinner at their favorite sushi restaurant, whether she wanted to or not.
“If I have to kidnap you, I will,” he said, taking a sip of his coffee out of his EITHER YOU LOVE HISTORY OR YOU’RE WRONG mug. “But my knee is acting up, so please don’t make me resort to that.”
For the first time in days, Mom’s out of her office and her favorite purple yoga pants. Dad very wisely picked a restaurant with a dress code, so she’s wearing a pale-blue sundress; her curls, long and brown like mine, though streaked with gray, fall past her bare shoulders. The bunny slippers I bought her as a joke three Christmases ago have been replaced by a pair of brown leather sandals.
“Lookin’ good, Mom,” I say.
She rolls her eyes. “Any plans for you today?”
If I tell her that Milo Ritter is picking me up to hang out and see the sights in Wilder, I’m afraid she and Dad will never leave. And as much as she needs this night out, I need Mom and Dad not to give the world’s biggest pop star the parental third degree.
“Just a date with some laundry and a Paranormal Diaries marathon,” I tell her.
“Team Salinger,” she says, declaring her allegiance to the muscled werewolf from our favorite TV show.
“Ugh, no way. Team Auden,” I reply. I prefer the tall, dark ghost hunter.
She laughs and shakes her head. “Always with the bad boys.”
As soon as I hear their tires pull out of the driveway, I leap off my bed and fling open my closet doors, pulling out my favorite butter-yellow top, gauzy with little ties at the shoulders. After I’ve thrown on a pair of worn cutoffs, cuffed just above the knee, and my gray leather sandals, I study myself in the full-length mirror on the back of my closet door. It’s too hot for my favorite jeans, the ones I imagined wearing when I pictured our first date back at Naz’s house, but I think the outfit is a good mix of fancy and relaxed.
Not that this is a date, of course. Just two new friends hanging out. No big deal. No need for my skin to feel cool and tingly. No reason for my heart to be pounding out a heavy bass rhythm. No reason for the manic grin that keeps trying to take up residence on my face.
Ugh, those damn heat-seeking missiles.
I spend a moment reminding myself about the Internet commenters and the telephoto lenses and Milo’s broken heart, which helps calm the tingles and the pounding, though there’s nothing to be done about the grin. He’s not even here yet, and already my cheeks ache.
When Milo arrives to pick me up, his tiny black sports car has been replaced by a big, shiny black pickup truck. It’s like his baby car finally grew up into a big-boy car. The truck is one of those giant diesel numbers, and the chug-chug-chugging of the engine makes it sound like you could hitch our whole house to the back and haul it up to Atlanta with minimal effort.
“Where’s the Audi?” I ask as I skip down the path toward the truck. I hope I don’t sound too snobby, because I really couldn’t care less about cars. All I care about is that it has four wheels and an air conditioner, and really the four wheels are negotiable. It’s my parents who have made me take a blood oath never to get on the back of a motorcycle.
“This is way more practical,” he replies. He opens the passenger door for me, and I climb in. The door slams behind me, then Milo makes his way around the front of the truck to the driver’s side.
“For all those major construction projects you’ve got lined up? Camping trips up the summit of K2?”
“And to blend in a bit,” he says. “The Audi was way too easy to spot.”
Milo turns on some music, a singer-songwriter I’ve never heard before, but I hear only a few notes before the music fades away. We drive with the windows down, sneaking smiles at each other, the roar of the wind covering the music and preventing a whole lot of conversation, which is pretty fine with me. When I’m done giving him directions to the two-lane country highway, I settle in for the drive, leaning slightly over the center console. I can smell the earthy, sweet scent of his cologne, or maybe just his detergent in the thundering wind that swirls through the truck’s cab.
“You gonna tell me where we’re going?” he calls over the rush of the wind.
“Just keep driving,” I reply. I tuck a strand of hair that’s escaped from my ponytail back behind my ear and watch the rolling hills and grassy fields rush by as we cruise down the two-lane country highway.
His eyes fixate on the road in front of him, a smile playing at the corner of his mouth. “I like the sound of that.”
We drive for just over an hour, but the minutes fly by. I’m tempted to give him bad directions so we can get lost for a while, because I can’t think of much better than just sitting beside him. But when I spot the mile marker that signals our turn is coming up, I direct him to slow down and take a left at a crumbling brick gate flanking a dirt driveway. The truck bounces over long-worn ruts in the road, off to the side of which is an ocean of pecan trees in perfect staggered rows as far as the eye can see. They’re ancient, with wide trunks and long branches creating a canopy over the land. The temperature drops slightly as we’re shaded from the beating sun, and the breeze feels even more heavenly. By August, it’ll be unbearable out even in the shade of the trees, but in early June it’s the perfect summer oasis.
Farther down the road, massive live oaks, growing since before the Civil War, line the way and overtake the ordered view of the grove. The branches twist and gnarl and lean over the road as if weighed down by the gray tangles of Spanish moss that drip from the branches. At the end of the dirt road, the trees part for an overgrown lawn and a hulking behemoth of a ramshackle old mansion.
Milo pulls the car around on what was once a circular driveway, throwing the truck into park at the front entrance. He leans his head out the window, taking in the sagging veranda, the shutters hanging crooked by rusty bolts, and the front door with the stained glass panel, now dusty and cracked and sporting one tiny bullet hole in the top left corner.
“What is this pla
ce?” There’s a bit of awe in his voice, which is carried away on the breeze. It’s how I felt when I first found this place—how I still feel every time I see it.
“This is Westfell Grove. It dates back to before the Civil War, and once upon a time it was rumored to be a stop on the Underground Railroad.”
“It looks like it should be a museum.”
“It should, or at least a historic site, but the guy who owns it is a crook or maybe just a jerk. Either way, he’s decided it’s too expensive to restore, so he’s letting it rot.” The long-since-forgotten property hasn’t had a tenant in at least fifty years, and the house shows it. The white planks of the siding have grown gray with mildew and moss. The bottom-floor windows are all blacked out with plywood so old it’s actually starting to peel off the house, and several of the second-story windows have been broken by pecans or rocks or worse, sent flying by roving vandals. The whole house has settled over the years, but unevenly, so the porch sags on either end, making the house look like it’s frowning.
“Wait, this is private property?” Milo ducks his head to peer through the windshield, looking for some security guard or homeowner with a gun to come screaming up to us, but none does. “Aren’t we trespassing, then?”
“Yeah, but the owner lives up in Atlanta. I don’t think he’s been down since he bought the place. He’s just waiting for it to fall down so he can avoid the hassle of paying to have it demolished. He’s probably hoping we’ll vandalize it.” I’ve heard my dad go on and on about the tragedy of demolition by neglect, especially when it comes to historic sites. That’s how I first found Westfell. I was in middle school, and Dad and I were playing one of our epic games of Which Way Does This Road Go? Our only rule is to obey all No Trespassing signs (Those people have guns, Dad always said), but this place didn’t have any. Which meant not only did we drive right up to the front door, but on later trips we even discovered a place where the plywood was falling off and crawled inside to do some exploring. It was Dad who discovered the rumor about the Underground Railroad, and he’s spent part of his summer research every year trying to substantiate it.
If I can find proof, I can save this place, he always says, wistful but determined, like some sort of historic-preservation superhero. I want it saved, too, but there’s also something about the way it looks now, almost sagging under the weight of its history, that I like.
“Maybe we should trespass and do some guerrilla maintenance,” Milo says.
“A noble thought, but this old girl needs way more work than a hammer could do. Basically it needs to be gutted, reinforced, and top-to-bottom restored.” Now I’m pretty much quoting my dad word for word. I make a mental note to thank him for dragging me along on these trips, even when I was an unwilling participant (in my defense, sometimes a twelve-year-old would rather stay home and find out who’s getting told to pack their things and go on whatever iteration of bad reality TV competition happens to be on at the time).
Milo’s eyes rove over the bones of the house. “It’s so sad. You can just barely tell what it used to be. It’s almost too far gone to imagine.”
I pull out my sketchbook from my bag. I’m still carrying it around out of habit, but now it’s going to be of use. I flip a few pages. “You don’t have to imagine. Here it is.” I visited the county archives in the basement of Wilder City Hall last summer with Dad to find the picture. Ever since I first saw it, even in grainy sepia, I couldn’t stop drawing it. And that was when I started coming out here by myself whenever I could convince my parents to let me borrow a car. It became my secret place, my muse, and I have a whole stack of sketchbooks back in my room with more drawings of the property. Sometimes I’d bring Naz with me, and she’d settle onto one of the low tree branches and watch a game or study for an exam. But I haven’t been out here since I stopped sketching. Standing here in front of the house feels like visiting a friend you’ve been neglecting. I’m excited to see it, but sad that it’s been so long, embarrassed that I dropped the ball.
Milo flips the page to where I’ve done a pencil sketch. On the left side of the paper, the house as it was: shutters straight, sun glinting off the glossy paint, blooming azaleas lining the wide porch, which has all its spindles lined up straight like tin soldiers. But as Milo’s eyes move across the page, the house deteriorates into the leaning, hulking structure in front of us, like someone is wiping away the past.
He holds the sketchbook up so he can eye it in line with the reality of the house in front of us. “You did this?”
All of a sudden I feel shy, an emotion I hardly recognize. I’ve never been precious about my artwork before. My parents used to have to negotiate with me over how much time I could spend showing my artwork to their dinner-party guests. Otherwise I’d have been like the kid at the piano, banging out tunes over the conversation while the guests tried not to roll their eyes.
“Dee, these are incredible.”
He flips through similar sketches of the house from various angles, even one of the oak tree we’re standing under. It’s the only part of the property that’s flourished over all these years. The branches have expanded out as if they’re attempting to hug the yard, and they’re positively dripping with gray Spanish moss, giving the tree the appearance of an aged lady looking after the place. I could draw that tree until the sun goes down, and then capture it by the moonlight. And suddenly, it’s all I want to do. My fingers twitch at my side, longing to reach for a pencil for the first time in weeks.
Milo turns the sketchbook back around so I can look at my own work. “You’re really talented,” he says.
And just as fast as it arrived, that need, that drive to draw is gone, replaced by the doubt that has been my constant companion for weeks.
“I’m okay,” I say, but I’m not talking about my talent, nor am I telling the truth.
The snap of the covers on my sketchbook brings me back. Milo offers it to me like it’s an act of mercy. I take it and stuff it back into my bag.
“You always do that, you know?”
“Do what?”
“When you get compliments on your work, you shrug or act all whatever about it, like you don’t believe it. Is it just me?”
“No,” I say. “It’s not just you.”
“Then what’s going on? Because what’s in that book doesn’t look like it came from someone who lacks confidence.”
Confidence. There’s a thing I’ve always taken for granted. Not that I’m full of myself, but when you grow up with your parents, your teachers, and your friends all telling you how great you are at something, you tend to just believe them. I never really stopped to look at my own work, to try to decide if they were right. And that was why the rejection felt so much like a punch to the chest. It took all the air out of me, and ever since then I’ve felt like I’m walking around gasping.
“Complicated question?”
I sigh. “You have no idea.”
“Oh, but I do,” he says, his sigh matching mine. He wanders across the half-grass, half-dust front yard, a cloud kicking up around his boots with each step. He stops at a massive tree stump, sits, and pats a spot next to him. “I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours.”
The excuse is on the tip of my tongue. The brush off. But it hangs around for only a fraction of a second before the truth rushes past it with the urgency of a tsunami. I tell him about Governor’s School and the paragraph critique that accompanied my rejection. The words that have lived on the page and in my brain feel strange in my mouth, but they still come: “lacks focus and perspective,” “underdeveloped,” “clichéd.” I spit them out like watermelon seeds on hot pavement, and when I’m done I gulp in a breath of the thick summer air. The words taste sour on my tongue, but it feels good to get them out. I never told my parents about the critique. I didn’t even show Naz. I just told everyone I got the dreaded “no” letter and shoved the words of the critique through the shredder. But they’ve been living in the pit of my stomach ever since, like a pesky file I
can’t delete.
Milo doesn’t say anything at first.
“Dee, I’m so sorry. That sounds like a real shit sandwich.”
The burst of laughter explodes out of me like a cannonball, and it feels good to release more of the pressure that’s built up since that letter arrived. It must have been how he felt when I told him about Pee Pants (again, so sorry Bryce Johnson).
“Can I tell you something?”
“Okay,” I say, the laughter calming.
“That critique? That has nothing to do with this,” he says. He taps the center of the sketchbook that’s balancing on my knees.
“Yeah, but the plan—”
He holds up a hand to silence me. “You’ve got to quit confusing the plan and the dream. Plans change. They fall apart. Sometimes outside forces even blow them to smithereens. But the dream is what you always come back to. It’s your lighthouse in the fog. In the freaking storm.”
I think about that for a minute, my brain catching on the image of my sketchbook on a tiny island, pelted from all directions by rain and wind and waves while a red-and-white-striped lighthouse stands over it, small but sturdy, like the ones I’d seen and sketched on our family’s summer trips to Cape Cod. My poor sketchbook is getting beaten and battered, and I want to grab it and hug it to my chest. Like the house, it too feels like an old friend I’ve been neglecting. I feel the lump rising in my throat, the burn in my eyes telling me the tears are coming. But I don’t want to cry. Not about this, and not in front of him.
“It occurs to me that you never told me yours,” I say.
Milo lets out a laugh, but there’s no joy in it. “Do I even need to? My angry critiques are everywhere. Milo Ritter has nothing left to say. Milo Ritter needs to find a new career. Milo Ritter is coasting on teen pop stardom. I honestly can’t tell you which hurts worse, the evisceration I got from Rolling Stone or the comment below it that simply said, This album sucks. That’s a pretty damning review right there.”
My Unscripted Life Page 9
