The Boy Next Story

by Tiffany Schmidt

  “I vote for crying—if it’s a choice between that or public pants-wetting,” I joked. Merri laughed, but Lilly had taken out her massive planner and flipped to the current to-do list. There were so many annotations, cross-outs, and scribbles that it looked like secret code.

  I wanted to take that thing and hide it. Burn it. Like removing the target of her stress would remove the source. But I didn’t know what the source was. Not Trent, because he still made her smile like every day was her birthday. And while they weren’t all about Merri’s public declarations, they communicated in small looks and touches—in the ways I’d seen my parents do my whole life. I had no doubt that if Lilly decided to shove the planner in a recycling can and told Trent she wanted to marry him on a moon bounce, he’d be the first to take off his shoes and roll up his pants.

  My hands were moving over my sketch pad as I watched her flip pages and jot things down. I was drawing—not the stress-fried sister in front of me, but the smiling one in my mind. She was in a flouncy skirt, hand clasped with Trent, whose tie was askew and shirtsleeves rolled up as they jumped on an inflatable. It was the barest outline of a sketch, but the potential was there if I made the time.

  “Aurora Campbell?” The door had barely shut behind a short, balding man wearing hipster glasses and an orange tweed scarf. He was carrying a bulldog wearing a matching vest, but alas, no glasses. The man’s eyes roamed the store and settled on me. “You’ve got to be Aurora. Look at you, sketching already. My friend Marnie showed me that drawing you made of her sweet Octavio and Turner.”

  I should’ve asked the woman her son’s and dog’s names, because this wasn’t the first time a referral from her had shown up and I was dying to know which was which. I could’ve asked this guy, but all I managed to do was nod before he leaned forward to look at my sketch pad, which was a violation of both my privacy and my personal space. I took a step back and he grimaced.

  “Sorry! Sorry! That’s probably a total artist taboo. Please tell me you’ll still consider drawing Mr. Grumpus.” Hearing his name, Mr. Grumpus shuffled forward a few feet and opened his mouth. A long string of drool slid out and landed on his owner’s loafers. Despite this, and despite the fact that this was way too much enthusiasm for me, the dog looked like he was smiling and he was actually pretty cute. A sketch began to frame itself in my mind.

  “Go grab me a few books from the shelf over there.” The man started to turn. “Leave . . . Mr. Grumpus.”

  He handed me the leash and I dropped it to the floor, pinning it beneath my foot so I had both hands free to draw. I sketched in his scrunchy face and big eyes, his open mouth and dripping tongue, the rolls around his collar and the cut of his vest.

  The man was back. “What should I do with these?” he whispered.

  I glanced at the staggering pile of books he’d carted over. “Use the hardbacks. Pile three with the bindings facing away. See if you can get him to put a paw on the stack.”

  Mr. Grumpus cooperated and I adjusted the lines of the drawing to match the new setup, adding in shadows and texture and shading to match the white markings on his fawn coat. “I’m going to need some time.” And space if I could get this guy to give it to me.

  “That’s fine. I’ll go shop. Call me if you need me.” He bent down and added, “Stay, Mr. Grumpus.” Not that the dog had shown any inclination toward moving.

  “Oh, wait.” I had a sudden inspiration. “Your glasses, can you see without them?”

  The man’s cheeks turned pink as he handed them over. “I’ll manage.”

  Once he was across the store I peered curiously through them. Plain glass. Yeah, he’d manage just fine. I waited until I had most of the other details finished before attempting to balance them on Mr. Grumpus’s nose. He sneezed and tried to lick me but offered no other objection.

  Still, I sketched them quickly, then rescued the glasses, putting them safely on the shelf beside me before I added some depth to the books’ pages and reflective shine to the buckle on his collar. I looked up from the pad to see Mr. Grumpus had gone to sleep, and Mr. Grumpus’s owner was engaged in an animated conversation with Merri.

  I returned the dog, handed over the sketch, then let Merri deal with the gushing appreciation while I returned the prop books to their shelves. I slipped the bills in the cash register and slipped my phone out of my bag. Fifteen more minutes until we flipped the sign to Closed.

  I had texts from Clara, Huck, and Toby. My first instinct was still Toby, always Toby, but I ignored it. Toby and I had had plenty of hangouts lately. Huck was in the car again, this time coming home. He just wanted to whine about the drive and his parents’ taste in podcasts. I sent him a sad emoji.

  It was Clara I texted back once I was home. And Clara I let talk me into a synchronized watch of her favorite movie, Clueless, where we sat in our respective rooms and hit start simultaneously, then texted each other real-time reactions. I found myself wanting to discuss the soundtrack, but I saved those thoughts for a different audience and instead responded to Clara’s observations about costumes with my own thoughts on the framing.

  About ten minutes later, my door cracked open. Merri glanced at my laptop and said, “Great movie. Scoot over.”

  I moved a pillow out of the way and slid across my bed. “I’m live-watching with Clara.”

  Merri bounced beside me. “Good, then I’ll watch it with Fielding—he can skip ahead—and you.”

  “And you,” I echoed, knocking my shoulder against hers. She grinned. “Think how much cleverer we’re going to sound since we get to practice our commentary on each other before we text it. I give you permission to steal anything funny I say.”

  33

  A month ago, being “just friends” with Toby had felt impossible. But by the end of November we had a routine. We were quiet on the ride to school, but it was the comfortable kind. The type you didn’t need to fill with nervous chatter just to beat back silence, but you didn’t hesitate to break when you had something to say or wanted to sing along with “Last Christmas.” And when we hit the Hero High parking lot, every day I sighed and said, “Back to the salt mines” or “Is it Friday yet?”

  And every day Toby replied, “You’ve got this, Roar.”

  Every day I believed him.

  We met at his car after school. Then homework, sometimes together, sometimes apart. But there was always something: a movie, dinner, walking one of the dogs, tutoring—something. That was what made the difference; each time we separated there was a plan in place for when we’d get back together.

  I didn’t need to cling tightly to scraps of his attention, because I had so much of it, and by relaxing my grip, I’d cleared my vision. Toby wasn’t the perfect boy I’d pretended he was. He was impatient, impulsive, restless—not with me, with himself. His knee made it worse, because he’d lost the physical outlet for his energy. More than once I had to cut him off when he did his physical therapy exercises double or triple the prescribed amount. I’d look up from a math problem to see him white-faced and shaking as he attempted one last squat or lunge.

  He could also be lazy. While I didn’t go a day without drawing, he’d go several without practicing his music, tell me he didn’t feel like it or “My muse is on vacation.” He’d build a tower of cereal bowls in the sink, then tell me stories about frantically loading the dishwasher when he heard his dad’s car pull into the driveway.

  He could be quiet and distant—lost in his thoughts or mental compositions. And he could be entirely present—making me feel like the world centered on whatever I said or did or drew.

  “What are you doing?” I asked. I let myself in the door without knocking these days. His piano lessons and physical therapy ended by five, so it was assumed that if I wasn’t at Haute Dog, I’d be over sometime between six and seven. I always brought my math stuff, but we only opened it 50 percent of the time.

  “Sorting my music.” Toby was standing in front of the kitchen table; he pointed to the piles of sheet music on
top. “Some of these are awful—it makes me feel really old.”

  “You’ve been seventeen for three whole months now—where are the gray hairs?” I went up on tiptoe and pretended to check his head.

  “Ha.” Toby batted my hand away. “Well, I’m two years older than you, so trust my age and wisdom when I say I used to be a lousy composer.”

  “Why are you?” I asked, sitting on the table beside his piles and smiling at the changes in handwriting throughout the years. “Older, I mean. And not a junior.”

  Toby rubbed the back of his neck and I wanted to retract the question. “I was already going to be old for my grade with a late summer birthday, but my parents thought I needed an extra year of preschool after the adoption.”

  “It bothers you?”

  He shrugged and I thought that was going to be my answer, but then he sank onto the chair in front of me. “No one’s ever asked me that before. Yeah, sometimes it does.”

  I held my breath, because I wanted to be his no one. The person he had all sorts of first shares with. But more than that, I wanted to be here and hear him in this moment and not be so caught up in my own daydreams and swoons that I missed the reality. I’d done that before. More and more I was realizing how often I’d done that: projected the Toby in my head onto the guy beside me instead of appreciating the flawed and fantastic person he was.

  “It’s just—Fielding’s always been my best friend at school . . .” I wondered if his pause was full of him thinking about their current awkwardness. “He’s a grade above me. Not saying Curtis and Lance and all those guys aren’t great, but there are times when I look at Fielding’s grade and wonder if I’d fit in better with him and Penn and Byron.” He leaned back and stretched out his legs in front of him. It was a surprisingly vulnerable pose for someone who was exposing so much of his inner thoughts.

  “I haven’t seen you hang out with Fielding much lately.” I wasn’t tiptoeing into this minefield, I was belly flopping.

  He rubbed a palm across his face. “I owe him a call or text or twelve. I’ll get on it.”

  “Good idea.” And my good deed for the day. “But I interrupted what you were saying about school and year.”

  He shoved away a stack of pages. “It’s not just that—I feel this way a lot, wondering if I’m where I should be.”

  “When else?” I reached my foot out until it was grazing the leg of his chair. I needed to be touching him somehow and linking myself physically to this conversation.

  “I think probably every adopted kid ‘what-ifs’ sometimes. Especially if they have no details about their birth parents.”

  You don’t have to tell me this. The words were on the tip of my tongue until I realized why I wanted to say them. I was desperate to say them—because his face was tight with pain, his skin stretched over his bones, making shadows and hollows that haunted me. Would haunt me even after the conversation was over. I wanted to stop his hurting. But if I stopped his words . . . it wouldn’t do a dang thing.

  Because it wasn’t the words that were causing his pain; it was the truth behind them. And me wanting to stop him was selfish. It was about my desire not to have to see this. So I swallowed those words and offered a different set. “I’m here, I’m listening.”

  “I’m a Latino named Tobias Bronson May with a B-minus in Spanish. That just seems wrong. Or maybe it’s not. Maybe my birth parents spoke Portuguese or English, or who knows? But they didn’t want to, or couldn’t, keep me. And I know a lot of kids of divorce wonder if they picked the right parent to live with. Not that all of them get a choice. But I did. Mine were equally apathetic. Neither of them really wanted me either.”

  “Oh, Toby . . .” I wouldn’t lie and tell him his experiences weren’t true, because they were real to him and they were raw. I didn’t know what his score for this moment would sound like, but in paint it would be all blues and blacks with a splash of red heartbreak.

  “Should I have gone with my mom instead? I almost asked her during our Sunday phone call last week.”

  “But then you’d be on the West Coast! You’d never see us.”

  “Yeah.” He shrugged, oblivious to how the casual dismissal cut me to the bone.

  My hand shook, and I pulled it back into my lap twice before I committed to reaching down and squeezing his. This wasn’t about sizzle and sparks; it was about sympathy. And when he twisted his fingers in mine and held on tightly, I didn’t swoon or falter. I just let us be in this moment where he needed his friend. He scooted his chair in until he was right beside me, then leaned his head on my shoulder. My breath caught in my chest, but I exhaled and managed, “I’m glad you’re here.”

  “Right now,” he whispered, his words soft against my skin, “me too.”

  34

  Somewhere Merri found a dress that was paisley, sparkly, and pretty. I wouldn’t have thought it was possible, but proof I was wrong was doing skirt twirls down the hallway. Eliza laughed and pulled her hair up in a simple twist that made her cheekbones impossibly high and her eyes pop. Eliza’s dress was “gray” according to her and “like a perfect shimmery dolphin” according to Merri.

  I was straight-up eavesdropping. My bedroom door was open and I leaned against the wall beside it, poking at the third chapter of Little Women while listening to them primp and prepare. Jo March had burned off her older sister Meg’s hair while trying to curl it—which made me want to shout warnings to Eliza. Merri should not be trusted with hot hair appliances. I still wasn’t over the time she’d burned my neck with a straightener, causing a mark that resembled a hickey; all of sixth grade had teased me for a week.

  But unlike Meg and Jo’s little sisters, Beth and Amy, I was not jealous about being left behind. Not even when Fielding showed up at the bottom of the stairs looking like something out of an expensive cologne ad.

  I waited for the rom-com moment of him making some grand declaration about Merri’s appearance. Instead he drew her close and whispered in her ear, one hand curved softly between her bare shoulder blades, the other holding her hand. Her mouth curled up as her cheeks flushed. Mom and Dad were both flashing cameras around them, but neither even seemed to notice.

  Eliza cleared her throat. “Are we ready?”

  “Just one more minute,” Merri said, still nuzzled in his arms. “I’m busy taking Fielding’s breath away.”

  “I hate that idiom,” said Eliza. “It’s not biologically possible to steal someone’s breath.”

  Fielding’s chuckle was low and light. “As much as I hate to argue with you, Eliza, I’m going to side with Merri. I forgot how to breathe for a moment when Merrilee appeared at the top of the stairs.” He paused to look at my sister like he was drinking her in, then added politely, “You look lovely too.”

  Only Eliza would look delighted to be receiving a lesser compliment. And only Merrilee would respond, “Yes, we’re gorgeous. Now let’s go see everyone. And dance. Fielding, what’s the ratio of slow to fast songs at Hero High? I’m hoping—”

  He cut her off with a kiss. Like she was too irresistible to wait even one more word. It was a pretty dapper move.

  The three of them waved to my parents and me and climbed in his car—Eliza scowled when Curtis scrambled out of the back seat to open her door. Scowled, but gave him a head-to-toe scan that made her cheeks pink. “I can open my own door.”

  “Of course you can,” he answered, “but if my mom ever saw that, she’d disown me, so by indulging my gesture of respect, you also save me from orphanhood.”

  I could practically hear her eyes rolling, but she let him close the door for her before he scurried around to the other side and climbed in.

  I sat on the steps and watched them drive away, waiting for Huck’s dad to pick us up to go bowling. In Little Women Jo had met her next-door neighbor, Theodore Laurence, aka Laurie, at the party. But I didn’t glance at my next-door neighbor’s house to see if Toby was walking out the front door with a date of his own.

  Two hours later, af
ter Huck had thoroughly trounced me at bowling, his dad dropped me back home.

  My eyes darted left out of habit, and all the laughter of the night soured in my stomach, along with the too-salty bowling alley pretzel. Toby’s house was dark. His car wasn’t in the driveway.

  Which pretty, perky, preppy Hero High girl had he taken to Fall Ball? Was he dancing with her right now? Was he mooning over Merri? His jealousy discreet but obvious to those who’d turned studying his expressions into an art form? Clara was one text away—she’d have answers and take pictures if I asked. But I didn’t want them. I’d had the chance to be his date for tonight and I’d made the right decision saying no. We were friends. And that was enough.

  It had to be.

  35

  The weekend felt as long as the first few chapters of Little Women. I’d stared at one page for an hour before giving up and staring at my ceiling instead. I told myself falling out of love wasn’t as fast as falling out of bed—it took much longer and hurt much more. I told myself no news about the Snipes workshop was good news. I told myself I was getting better at math and English and fitting in at Hero High. Basically, I told myself a lot of lies.

  I brought the book with me to Haute Dog on Sunday and flipped the cover open and shut while I stared blankly at the empty store. I’d written only two response journals so far; I couldn’t motivate myself to read a book others thought was babyish. What did it say about me if I related to it?

  Monday, I stayed after class and asked, “Why did you pick Little Women for me?”

  “You’ll see.” Ms. Gregoire smiled enigmatically. “Where are you in the book now?”

  “Seven chapters in—is that too slow?” I started to duck my head, but Ms. Gregoire was shaking hers.

  “No, that’s fine. Which girl is your favorite?”

  I frowned, because I was pretty sure my answer was wrong. “I’m supposed to like Jo, right? Because she’s the most exciting and we spend the most time in her head?”