Heartbeat

by Elizabeth Scott

  He has thorns too, and I wonder if he knows where his end and he begins.

  20

  I see Caleb before first period the next morning. I’m alone because Olivia is at the orthodontist making sure her braces-free teeth are still straight. She got her braces off before high school started but I know she’s afraid that she’ll end up with them again. Her father had them twice, and so did her mother.

  I am at her locker, though, because she wanted me to grab one of her notebooks and give it to her later. I haven’t picked up the notebook. I’m staring at a picture of me and Olivia from last summer, the two of us sitting in my backyard laughing at something I don’t remember now.

  Mom took the picture. I remember that.

  “You missed the bell.”

  I blink and look over at Caleb. He’s looking at the picture, and then he looks at me.

  “That was taken before, right?” he says, and how can he tell?

  “You’re smiling,” he says, like I’ve asked him.

  I stare at him.

  I stare at him because he’s right. I can’t remember the last time I smiled for real. I turn away, shut the locker on the picture, the me that was, and then glance at him. His head is bowed a little, all that blond hair falling over his face, part of the trifecta Olivia told me about.

  I see it, him, but I see something else too. His hair is something for him to hide behind. My own bangs are down past my nose now and I haven’t gotten them trimmed. I don’t push them back. I let them swing forward, shadow my sight.

  I’m hiding too.

  “Aren’t you going to first period?” I say.

  He shrugs. “Study hall, so no. You?”

  “I—” I have Advanced French, or the class you take before French Literature, where you read French novels in French. I have taken French since the sixth grade and done well, beyond well, but now I just sit in class, the words washing over me, familiar but faraway sounding, like the echo of a song you can’t quite remember. “No.”

  He pushes his hair back with one hand then, those green eyes on me, and I think of the lake. Of how I’d heard he sat and watched the car sink. I am sure, suddenly, that he did. “Yesterday I had...there was court stuff. Judge follow-up.”

  “Oh.” I think of thorns, of grief growing deep. Becoming you. “Do you miss her?”

  He looks away, and doesn’t say a word.

  I know what that kind of silence means, and clear my throat. “So what happened?”

  “To Min—?” he says, and then stops. “Wait. You mean to me, right?”

  I nod.

  He heads toward the gym, the far end of the school, and stops after a second, looking back at me.

  I am walking toward him, and then I am walking with him.

  “You’ve probably heard it already,” he says. “Drugs, theft, suck camp, my dad’s car, and now community service at the hospital.”

  “For your dad’s car?”

  He walks over to the vending machines. Our feet hit the floor at the same time with every step. I like the sound it makes. “Yeah.”

  I look at him. I want to ask about suck camp, which I’m guessing was the “tough love” place his parents sent him to, the one that brought him home all cleaned up (mostly) until now. Until his dad’s car.

  But it’s his story to tell, and I know what it’s like to have to live with one. How hard it can be to think about, much less talk about.

  “You have a dollar?” I say and he grins—I see the flash of his teeth—and digs into his pockets, pulling one out.

  “You like cotton candy?” I say and he nods, glancing at me. His hair has fallen into his face again.

  I put the dollar into the machine and press the button.

  “Me too,” I say as it falls. When I pull the bag out, it’s silver and light, with a pink puff picture on it.

  He pulls out another dollar and puts it in the machine.

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “I know,” he says, and buys another bag. He pulls it open right away, sweet smell all around us, sugar and fake color.

  “I remember you,” I say slowly, and I do, bits of things half-buried. Elementary school, and the beginning of middle school; a boy with blond curls and a big smile and huge green eyes that looked like they had a bit of the sun in them, strange but somehow so pretty that you noticed them. “You talked a lot. You had—you were—”

  “I had friends,” he says, smiling a little.

  I nod, opening my own bag. The cotton candy isn’t sticky. It pulls apart in soft little clumps. “And you used to chase Amy Gray all over the playground.”

  He laughs. Amy is still pretty chaseable, only she’s been caught by a six-foot-tall volleyball player, Monica, and has been since we were freshmen.

  “You used to try to trade your sandwiches,” he says and I’d forgotten that, how when I was little Mom always bought the wrong kind of bread, the kind of stuff you see old people pick up at the supermarket and sigh when it thuds into their carts. Dan had slowly managed to get it out of the house after he and Mom started dating and I remember hugging him the first time I ate a piece of toast that didn’t weigh half a pound.

  “What?” Caleb says, and I shake my head.

  “I just—my mom used to get that bread, you know? And I’d forgotten how much I hated it and how she would never let me try something else until—” That had been Dan too. He’d said that I should at least be allowed to try another kind of bread for a week. “It can’t hurt her, Lisa,” he’d said. “There’s enough stuff in that bread she’s been eating to keep her heart and the rest of her healthy until she’s eighty.”

  I swallow and hear the bag crumple in my hand.

  “So what happened to you?” I say again, and Caleb tosses his empty bag at the trash can. It misses and lands on the ground.

  “I killed my sister,” he says.

  21

  “You—she fell off her bike,” I say, startled by the flatness of his voice. The sureness. How can he think Minnie falling off her bike was his fault?

  How can he think her death was his fault?

  “I was with her. Watching her. I had to do that a lot. Minnie was—she didn’t like any of the nannies we had.”

  “You had a nanny? But you were—” I break off, blushing.

  “Yeah, I was too old,” he says. “I hated it. And Minnie knew it so she hated them too and she had ‘impulse problems.’ You know how there’s a moment when you think about something before you do it? Minnie never had that. She’d just...anyway. She wanted to go bike riding and the last nanny had quit so we went to the park. My parents were always on me and her to make sure she wore a helmet but she hated it and I didn’t want to deal with trying to get her to wear it so I didn’t even bother trying. We got to the park and I was bored out of my mind sitting there, watching her ride around. Pissed off, you know? And then there was a car and I saw her...she flew off the bicycle and landed on the sidewalk. Her bike went in the lake and she just—she just lay there. People were screaming and all I could do was look at her. If she’d had a helmet on, she’d have lived. Broken bones, sure. But she’d have lived.”

  I don’t know what to say. I look down at my crumpled bag of cotton candy. I pick up one of the bits I pulled free. The first bite is what I remember—the pure, almost-crisp taste of sugar followed by a hint of bitter, like there’s so much sweet my mouth can’t process it all. It hurts, a little, to swallow. “If I skip second period, will I get detention?”

  He nods.

  “I can’t get detention. The...you know. Seeing my mom. I guess you can’t get it either. You have to be at the hospital or else you’ll get in trouble, right? With the judge or whatever and your parents?”

  “How come you haven’t said anything about me killing Mill
ie?” His voice is so quiet.

  “Because you didn’t. She was hit by a car. You couldn’t have stopped that.”

  “If I’d made her wear her helmet...”

  “She knew she was supposed to wear one. You can’t take the blame for that.”

  “Maybe.” He swallows. “My parents think I should.”

  “My mother thought having a baby would make my family better,” I say, and I hear how my voice is shaking, dig my fingers into my palms. “She was wrong. Parents can be wrong.”

  The bell rings then, and both of us jump a little. Both of us look at each other.

  “See you, Emma,” Caleb finally says, and then disappears down a hallway before I can say anything in reply.

  I don’t see him at the hospital that afternoon, and Dan spends a long time talking to the doctor. I whisper to Mom about the bread and how I’d forgotten about it.

  “‘I met—there’s someone who understands,” I say. I haven’t talked to her about a guy since the Anthony nightmare.

  “It’s Caleb Harrison,” I say, and everyone would have something to say about that. Even Dan tried to say something that first time.

  But she doesn’t reply. Her stomach doesn’t even move.

  When it’s time to go, Dan drives back to the house quickly, silently, and doesn’t say anything to me when we get there, just gets out and goes inside.

  Bad news about the baby, I bet.

  I thought I’d be happy about it, but I’m—

  I’m not.

  I’m not happy. I’m not sad. I’m just...here. Numb.

  I go up to my room and open my window. There’s a note taped to it, Olivia’s scrawled Emma on the front.

  And on my roof is Caleb.

  22

  “Caleb?” I say, like he’s not sitting right there, like I can’t see him sitting with his legs crossed, his hair blowing a little in the wind.

  “Hey,” he says. “I didn’t see you at the hospital this afternoon. I got stuck working on another floor. And I...I heard you and Olivia talking about the whole roof thing a while ago. Not that I meant to or anything, but I—” He breaks off, and although the sun is setting, I swear Caleb Harrison, car thief, is blushing.

  “Anyway,” he says, “I just came over. I don’t know why.”

  He is blushing. Who would have thought Caleb Harrison could blush?

  I look at him, and then climb out onto the roof. I’ve been out here with Olivia, and it’s not so different with Caleb. I sit down next to him and a strand of his hair blows across my face, making my skin prickle.

  It might be a little different.

  I open the note from Olivia. She has pink stationery with little dots on it that she uses for important messages, and there are matching envelopes too. Those only get used for very special messages.

  This message is in one of those envelopes, and apparently she’s with Roger, who asked her out when she was leaving school. They’re going to watch TV at his house.

  This is something, right? she’s written, and then Call me later!

  Call me later! is underlined three times and I know she must be happy and nervous because of how hard her pen has dug into the paper.

  “So what’s up with you getting letters on your window?” Caleb says as I’m putting the note away. “Nobody writes anymore.”

  “Olivia does. You know about her technology thing, right?”

  “Yeah, she was in my English class last year. Brought in her typewriter when we were supposed to be looking up stuff on library computers and asked about encyclopedias. I thought Mrs. Grimwood would have a fit. Is it true she doesn’t even talk on the phone?”

  “No, she will, but it has to be a landline. You know, like a phone in a house or a store or something.”

  “And she writes letters.”

  “Yeah, but only for important stuff.”

  “Like what?”

  “Can’t tell you.”

  He grins at me and it’s a wide, beautiful thing. My heart does this weird stutter-skip in my chest and Olivia really wasn’t kidding about what he looks like.

  “So, where were you at the hospital?” I say because it is the only thing I can think of, because the wind and his smile and today have left me feeling like everything inside me is visible and I don’t know if I want to be seen.

  “Fourth,” he says. “Lots of people waiting for surgery. Foot and gallbladders, mostly. I don’t even know what a gallbladder is.”

  “It helps with digestion, but you don’t have to have one, especially if it gets infected. Or if you get gallstones.”

  “Oh,” Caleb says, leaning forward a little and looking at the ground. His hair falls over his face again. “You really are smart. I mean, I knew you were because of all the classes you’re in, but still.”

  “What good is knowing about a gallbladder? It’s not—I spent so much time worrying about stuff like that, stuff that doesn’t...” I look down at the ground now. In the dark, it’s hard to see. “Stuff that doesn’t matter.”

  “Everything matters,” Caleb says, and I look at him. He’s looking up at the sky now, at the clouds, dark against the night sky, and the tiny bits of starlight that shine through them. “Or at least that’s what I was told at suck camp.”

  “That’s the thing your parents sent you to?”

  “Yeah, after school ended last year they shipped me off to The Helping Center. I spent the summer walking up hills and camping—which sucked—and being told that everything matters.”

  He doesn’t sound like he believes it. “Does it?”

  He’s silent for a moment and then leans back against my roof, still looking up at the faint light of the stars. “No. If everything matters, then nothing can because it’s all the same. And if it’s all the same, then nothing is ever special. And shouldn’t there be—aren’t there—special things? People?”

  “Yes,” I say, looking up at the sky too and thinking of Mom.

  “Yeah, so that part of camp sucked too,” he says with a short, sad little laugh. He sits up. “Sorry. It’s dumb.”

  “Why?”

  He glances at me and even though I can’t see him that clearly I am sure I’ve somehow startled him again.

  “Just because,” he finally says. “I already know what I did and what my parents think of me. But I guess they just wanted to be sure I knew. That I accepted it.”

  “But Minnie didn’t die because you—”

  “I gotta go,” he says, standing up, and I look at his back.

  “You don’t accept it, do you?” I say. “You know it isn’t true. That’s why you stole your dad’s car. Because you won’t do what they want. Won’t be what they want.”

  He freezes, and then looks over his shoulder at me.

  “I was angry,” he finally says. “I’ve said I was sorry but that isn’t enough for them. It’ll never be enough.”

  I stand up and walk over to him, sure-footed after years of me and Olivia hanging out up here. “I told Dan not to do what he’s done. Mom wouldn’t want it. He said I was too upset to think straight and I didn’t know what she wanted. He still says that. And I...” I swallow. “I loved him, you know? But he just wants the baby. And so now we’re waiting, and I know he wants me to want what he does. But I can’t. I won’t.”

  Caleb turns around. He’s a little taller than I am, tall enough that I have to look up to see him.

  “It’s lonely,” he says, not a question at all, and when I nod, he hugs me.

  And I stand there on my roof, in the dark, being held by Caleb Harrison. That’s all he does. Olivia is around, always, and she’s here for me, but she doesn’t get it. Not like Caleb does.

  In the dark, with his arms around me, I don’t feel so empty.

  23r />
  I almost forget to call Olivia but remember as I’m brushing my teeth and getting ready for bed.

  “Sorry,” I say when she picks up the phone.

  “For what?” She sounds really happy.

  “I should have called earlier.” I should have done it right after Caleb left but I didn’t. I just sat on the roof for a while, thinking.

  Thinking about him.

  “I wasn’t home earlier,” she says, and then laughs. “Emma, he’s so amazing! We ended up talking for hours. Did you know his middle name is Thomas? And he hates candy corn too! And he kisses—”

  “Wait, wait, wait. Kisses?”

  “Yep,” she says, and I can hear her smile. “He kissed me! I actually wished I could have gotten in touch with you right then—well, not right then, but right after—because wow! Amazing! It was the best night of my life.”

  “So, are you two together?”

  “He wants to go out this weekend. I told him I’d think about it.”

  “Really?”

  “No.” She laughs. “I said ‘Yes!’ practically before he finished asking me. Was that dumb? It was dumb, wasn’t it?”

  “Did he take it back?”

  “No.”

  “Then how dumb can it be?”

  “It’s just—I’m really happy and then I’m really nervous and then I’m happy and—you get it,” she says. “I’m never going to be able to sleep tonight. Maybe I should do something about my hair.”

  “Olivia,” I say. Olivia likes trying new stuff. Bright green eyeliner. Putting a tiny fake tattoo of a star near her mouth. Wearing fake eyelashes. But once in a while, she’ll do something extreme, and it’s always with her hair.

  And she always regrets it. Last year, she decided she wanted bangs and cut them herself. The result was beyond bad and took months to grow out. And the year before that, she decided she wanted to have black streaks in her hair but ended up with black spots.

  “Nothing like before,” she says. “I was just thinking about curling it.”