Oliver McAuley: No, as far as that’s concerned, I think you’re insane.
Kellie Brooks: there is NO WAY the stones are better than the who. you’re the one who’s crazy.
Oliver McAuley: Now I’m not sure if I can trust you regarding anything.
Kellie Brooks: i was just about to say the same!
Kellie Brooks: so do you want to go with me to a friend’s party next week? or are you totally above high school parties?
Oliver McAuley: I don’t make a habit of frequenting them.
Oliver McAuley: But sure I’ll go. It’ll be good to meet your friends outside of Adelaide.
Kellie Brooks: i don’t really seem to have THAT many friends outside of adelaide anymore.
Kellie Brooks: terrifying thought I know.
Oliver McAuley: I can think of worse scenarios than that.
Kellie Brooks: i guess.
Kellie Brooks: it’s a halloween party so you have to wear a costume.
Oliver McAuley: I can handle that.
Kellie Brooks: oh, and please don’t tell anyone about your stones opinion or i’ll completely deny i know you.
Chapter Seventeen
Sara is, miraculously, home when I get there after school the next day, and since Finn is zooming around playing pirates and zebras, she clearly lived up to her assigned duties and picked him up from daycare.
“Hey,” I greet her, trying to seem like she didn’t just go AWOL on us. My voice sounds a little screechy, so I’m not sure I pulled it off.
“Oh, good, you’re home,” she says. “I need to work on homework, so Finn’s all yours.”
“But I haven’t seen you in days.” My voice is still screechy. Get it together, self. “Can we hang out?”
Can we hang out? Ugh, I sound like such a dork.
“I really don’t have time, Kell,” she says and disappears up the stairs. I put my energy into joining in the game of pirates v. ninjas instead of dwelling on Sara v. the rest of us. Luckily Mom’s home before long, because honestly the not-dwelling isn’t going that well.
“Hey, you two.” Mom drops to her knees to hug Finn, then stands and hugs me. “Could you do me a huge favor and cut up all those veggies on the counter for the salad?”
The thing is, I have homework, too, but I’ve never figured out how to refuse Mom without being a huge brat. So I just pick up a cucumber and a knife and start chopping.
“How’s school, Kell-belle?”
“It’s fine,” I say, because the actual school part is, and I know it would make Mom really sad to know lately the Kaitlyn stuff isn’t. Mom has enough to be sad about these days without me adding to that crap pile. “How was work?”
“Exhausting. I started on a girl’s backpiece that’s going to take several sessions, but believe it or not, I got the whole thing outlined.”
“That reminds me, the other day I was thinking how you and Russell are almost to the point where you only have appointments people make in advance, so maybe you should hire someone else for all the walk-ins, at least on your busy days like the weekend. You do have an open station, two when the freelance lady isn’t there.”
“That’s a great idea.” She slides a casserole dish into the oven. “I’ll talk to Russell and see how he feels. We’ve definitely turned away more people lately than we’ve liked.”
“Mom! Mom!” Finn runs into the room with a bunch of Sara’s highlighters. “Can I have paper so I can color?”
“You’d better give those back to Sara,” I say. “Or risk being torn limb-from-limb.”
“Let’s not talk about dismemberment so close to dinner,” Mom says. “Finn, did you ask Sara if you could borrow those?”
He shakes his head, so we make him return them. Mom gets another knife from the fancy set she’d given Russell for Christmas the year before and grabs the carrots. “Want some help?”
“Thanks, Mom.”
“I’m impressed with you. It really is a good suggestion for the shop.”
“Guess I’m not as useless as everyone thought.” I smile so she’ll know I mean her brand of useless and not Dad’s. (Truthfully, I mean both.) “Can I get some more hours next week? I’m not having any issues balancing school or anything.”
“Sure, baby,” she says, but her focus seems to be on the carrots and the sharp, sharp knife, not me. “How’s everything with Oliver?”
“Good,” I say, instead of I can’t believe how cute and smart he is and how good kissing him is. “Can I go out on Friday night? And then Saturday after work—if I can work Saturday—some people from newspaper are going to hang out in The Loop. Okay?”
It takes a long time for Mom to seemingly even realize I’m talking to her. “Mmm hmmm. Sure, Kell.”
At this point I feel like I could get her to agree to giving me a million dollars or letting me skip town for a year or tattooing a full backpiece on me. But I just excuse myself from vegetable chopping instead of taking advantage.
Okay, I guess getting out of vegetable chopping is taking advantage. Just to a very mild degree.
Sara’s door isn’t shut, but I still knock before sticking my head into the doorway. “What’s your deal?”
Okay, not exactly good negotiation tactic there, self.
She’s sitting at her desk, surrounded by textbooks, novels, and notebooks. “Kell, seriously, not now.”
“It seems sort of…I don’t know, just, like.” Terrible timing to become extra-inarticulate. “You’re choosing her over us.”
“That’s a stupid thing to say.”
I really hate when Sara uses stupid or any of its synonyms regarding me. She might as well have slapped me.
“I’m—” She looks up at me. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry, too,” I say, not because I really am, but because I don’t want to fight with her. I just want things to be okay again. I don’t have to be right.
“We had a lot to talk about,” Sara says. “Eighteen years, and more, after the trip. I didn’t feel right just leaving.”
“But you felt fine just leaving us?” I try to make my voice mellow and open, the way Mom always sounds.
“I didn’t leave,” she says. “And I’m back now, aren’t I?”
“I still feel like you’re still shutting me—shutting people out.” I might have said more then, but I feel weird admitting I’ve been talking to Dexter about her.
“Right now I just need to do my homework,” she says, which is such a normal Sara thing I know I’ve pushed enough. “All right?”
“Fine.” Of course I wanted more from her than dismissal, but it’s like I’m not programmed for real conflict. Sara’s always been the easiest person in my life. I can’t just switch over to dealing with her as the unknown…or the enemy.
I walk back downstairs, where Mom’s making homemade salad dressing and not looking overly concerned at the state of our family.
But the next night, Sara doesn’t come home, and I guess the truth is that no one is surprised. Least of all me.
I pick up Oliver from his dorm on Friday night, even though by now I still haven’t seen a trace of Sara, and I feel weird leaving the house dark and empty. I’m torn between assuming we’ll just never see her again and staring out the windows for her imminent return. But I’m determined to be fun tonight, and not to get distracted by my drama, family or otherwise. I feel like so recently I was 95 to 100 percent fun!
I drive us over to Cherokee Street (after a reasonable amount of time spent making out, of course), where vintage and antique shops line up against hipster coffee shops and old-school traditional taco places. We grab coffee and cocoa right away before dropping into Apop Records (Oliver insists on buying me Buddy Holly & the Crickets on vinyl, and I let him because he seems so excited to do it), and then to a handful of vintage shops and the store that sells only stuff made in or about St. Louis.
I wonder if I should still be so surprised that, in general, having a boyfriend is really easy. This is completely the kind of nig
ht I’d want to have anyway, but I’m with someone who’s interested in all the same places I am (well, I was way more excited about the music, and he was more interested in looking at dusty old books, but it evens out), plus there’s the bonus of holding hands with him and knowing that, post-tacos, we will be making out again.
“What’s your next column about?” Oliver asks me over the giant plate of tacos we’re sharing.
“Vegetarian options in the cafeteria,” I say. “It’s kind of goofy, too.”
“Yeah, but isn’t that the point?” He grins at me. “What are you doing tomorrow night? They’re playing some old movie on campus, thought you might like to go.”
“I’m hanging out with Adelaide and some newspaper people,” I say.
“Oh,” he says. “Want me to come?”
“No, I’m good,” I say, like he’s being nice to offer, but his eyes dim a little, and I realize he’s disappointed. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. Just to be honest, it’d be nice to see you more.”
“You’re seeing me now,” I say. “In combination with tacos. Pretty great, right?”
“Ha,” he says.
I don’t want to flat-out say that he isn’t invited, and I don’t want to comfort him even though maybe I should. I’m still learning the good relationship rules, so how would I know the other ones yet? If a guy wants you to spend all of your free time with him, is that nice, or is it too much?
I hear a tiny Adelaide in my brain yelling, Just talk to him, Brooks, but she’s pretty easy to ignore when she’s not around.
“Where do you want to go after this?” I ask. “Is your roommate out?”
“He’s there,” Oliver says.
“Okay,” I say, trying to seem like things didn’t just get kind of weird. “I guess I could just drive you back.”
“Sorry.” He takes my hand despite taco grease. “I just like hanging out with you. You’re one of my favorite people.”
It’s intense. Oliver is intense. But lately I haven’t felt like anyone’s favorite. Why would I refuse this? I’m one of his favorites, and he doesn’t let a little taco grease get in the way of anything. That’s basically perfection.
Sara’s door is shut but her light is on when I get home, and I take a chance and knock softly.
“What?”
It’s the same way Kaitlyn answered when I tried to talk to her, and I wonder why lately conversation with me is such a horrifying option to the two people I used to talk to the most. Still, I open Sara’s door and lean in. Of course I’m hoping to catch her in some secret moment, something telling or meaningful or new. But she’s just hunched over a textbook. She’s just Sara.
“I said what, I didn’t say come in.”
My mouth actually falls open because she sounds so mean. I catch sight of myself in the mirror, and I look ridiculous. But it’s Sara! Sara’s made me look ridiculous!
“I wanted to talk to you,” I say, even though I didn’t knock with thoughts of Oliver in my head. I knocked because this is Sara and that sentence should get to end there. Now that I’m here, though, I might as well ask something like, What if a guy is clingy and intense, but also intense in a good way? Seriously, since when do Sara and I need reasons and excuses for each other? Especially when we haven’t seen each other in days?
“I’m busy,” she says with barely a look to me. The only positive thing about that is hopefully she missed me looking ridiculous. “It’s one in the morning, Kell.”
“Right…and I want to talk and you want to do homework. Which is weirder?”
She doesn’t look up and so I can feel that the conversation is over, whether or not I’m still standing there. Still, I give it a chance, wait a minute to see if maybe something will snap into place in her brain and she’ll be normal Sara again.
But nothing snaps, and nothing happens. It gets awkward that I’m still standing there, so it takes me a few more moments to leave the room and head to my own. I turn on music (a Herman’s Hermits album, even though even for me they’re pretty dorky) and scan through a list of people in my head I could text at this hour about how things with my boyfriend are sometimes weirder than I want them to be and of course that my sister’s pulling further and further away. But Kaitlyn and Sara were my one in the morning people. Oliver’s the closest thing I have now, and not really.
I can remember how I felt when I applied for the paper. It was straight out of a self-help book. (Mom bought us plenty of those after the divorce.) I’d thought, I want to be more, like my hard-hitting editorial on the smell of poop was some big step forward for mankind. But right now, I don’t feel like more. Right now even with my column and new friends and Oliver, my world seems a lot smaller.
The next day after work, I meet a bunch of people from the Ticknor Voice at Pin-Up Bowl, where none of us actually want to bowl. After hours it’s a bar, but before nine they don’t care if you’re twenty-one or not. You can’t drink, but you can hang out. There’s red velvet everywhere and shiny red couches, where we pile in to drink soda and eat homemade gourmet Pop-Tarts.
“Have fun, Brooks.” Adelaide shoves Mitchell, who’s sitting on my left side, and squeezes in. I guess it’s funny we just let her, but with Adelaide, you just let her. “What’s with your face?”
“This is just my face,” I say, even though of course I know despite the soda and the pastry and that I’m literally surrounded by new and old friends, I am not in my best mood ever. I am not even close.
“Aw, leave Kellie alone,” Chelsea says, a brave move countering Adelaide in any matter. “She’s fine.”
Chelsea’s sat at our lunch table since she started dating Mitch last year but clearly can’t tell my moods apart. She could never be a one in the morning friend, Adelaide-bravery or not.
I get out my phone to text Oliver. Even if maybe he’s being kind of clingy, I know he’ll respond with lightning speed and I’ll have tangible proof I’m important to someone right in this moment.
Ugh, I sound so pathetic. Only in my own head, but still.
“How’s the boyfriend?” Adelaide asks.
“He’s fine,” I say, then reconsider because fine sounds like how your grandma’s doing, not the guy you’re making out with. “He’s great. How’s Byron?”
“Also fine and great,” Adelaide says.
“It’s so cool you guys have college boyfriends,” Chelsea says.
“What about me?” Mitchell asks. “Aren’t I cool?”
We all laugh because even though Chelsea’s in love with him, none of us would exactly use the cool word as a descriptor. And Oliver texts back that I’m right about the awesomeness of Pop-Tarts, gourmet or not, so I guess I’m back to thinking he’s, for real, great and not just fine.
After we get kicked out of Pin-Up Bowl, Adelaide wants to see a foreign film at the Tivoli, but the rest of us talk her out of that and we get food at Blueberry Hill instead. The truth is that their food isn’t that great, but it’s practically a music museum, so we pretend it doesn’t matter that as far as the eating’s concerned we might as well be at the school cafeteria.
My phone buzzes again, and I assume it’ll be Oliver being cute again, but instead it’s his brother. Yo Kells. Any word from Sara?
I don’t want to, but I understand Sara pulling away from us. She’s like a little perfect piece of metal being drawn back to a perfect magnet. But what did Dexter do? He’s in her perfect orbit.
she’s home but barely talking to us. sorry!!
It feels weird that a guy like Dexter needs me, but I send a second message, just to be nice. i don’t get it. she has no reason to ditch u.
My phone buzzes just a moment later: She has no reason to ditch you either, Kells.
Chapter Eighteen
The Ticknor Ticker
The Defeated Meatless
By Kellie Brooks
Ticknor Day School has a certain “reputation” in our community. Other schools might brag about test scores and sports teams, but here
at Ticknor we’re independent and free thinking.
One thing that seems to go together with a lot of free-thinking people is being a vegetarian. And Ticknor recognizes this, even including mention of it on their website: “Vegetarian students will be excited by the array of meatless options!!”
In addition to the fact that I don’t know anyone literally excited by cafeteria food or the startling use of the double exclamation point, this statement doesn’t exactly ring true. Here’s what I had to choose from for lunch yesterday: pizza, salad, chicken tenders, tiny cheeseburger. (Side note: has anyone noticed how tiny the cheeseburgers are at Ticknor?)
Here’s what my hypothetical vegetarian friend Leafy McGreens had to choose from (no, Leafy doesn’t exist, but there are vegetarians here, just none I am personally friends with): salad with fewer toppings, tofu tenders, pizza if you’re comfortable ripping off the sausages and pepperonis. Not even a tiny tofu burger! My stepdad is a vegan, and I’m not sure he’d have anything to eat at our school besides plain lettuce. What kind of existence is that?
Ticknor, everyone thinks of you as the weird hippie of schools. Shouldn’t the weird hippie be the first one to let our non-animal-eating friends have more to eat?
Chelsea’s party is in—is full swing what parties get up to? well, okay—full swing by the time Oliver and I arrive on Friday. We would have made it there sooner, but we got pretty distracted when he picked me up, considering Finn was at Russell’s mom’s, Mom and Russell were both still at the shop, and Sara was—shocking to no one—nowhere to be found. (Also then we had to repair our costumes from making out damage. Oliver’s zombie makeup got rubbed off, and therefore, I had his zombie makeup on my face and a few areas of my Batgirl costume to wipe off.) Yeah, this is a party, so obviously if Oliver and I really want, we’ll have ample opportunity to—well, not be alone but at least make out all we want. Maybe it’s because he’s in college or maybe because I don’t like the thought of people from school being able to walk in on me making out, but I feel like we’re beyond that.
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