Amelia Unabridged

by Ashley Schumacher

  There is a question buried in his statement and how his hand tightens on mine. He wants to know that I won’t say anything, that if the stars should fall from the sky and our fake and real friendships imploded into nothing, I wouldn’t take this story to the press and sell it to the highest bidder.

  He wants to know that he is safe.

  And though it is dreadfully inappropriate, while sitting beside the graves of his sisters, with the manifested fog of my dead friend weaving its way around us, I kiss Nolan Endsley on the cheek.

  He freezes, and I wonder if I’ve made a mistake, if I’ve misinterpreted the hand-holding and the sleeping in a pile on the bookstore floor. My face reddens with a blush of embarrassment and I make to pull back.

  “Sorry,” I mumble.

  But his head whips toward me, his hand coming around to the back of my neck. For an unfathomable period of time, we stare at each other, the kind of staring where your eyes don’t blink and your toes curl in your shoes the longer you look. The air between us is humming with a charge for which I have no name as the line between us tightens just short of breaking.

  Behind his eyes, the trees in the once-dark forest are orange in the growing light. Wolves scamper off and gnash their teeth at the rising sun, and all manner of threatening, creepy shadows melt into nothing as I watch the world that is Nolan uncurl from its sleep.

  When the light reaches his eyes and shines out, he tilts his head ever so slightly. I hold my breath as he both pulls me in and leans into me with a sigh that sounds like a crashing wave.

  “Amelia,” he whispers, and then his lips are on mine.

  It’s not my first kiss. There were boys I dated. But I forget their names and faces in this moment, as I press forward, trying to shrink the space between Nolan and me into nothing.

  Nolan and me.

  He kisses like he talks when he is passionate about something—thoroughly, completely, and with such precision you wonder if anyone else could ever compare.

  We fall into a rhythm, quick, slow, quick, slow, but eventually the lack of breath catches up with me and I gently push him away.

  “Need to breathe,” I exhale.

  He brings my lips back to his, but doesn’t press them together.

  “Breathe like this,” he says against my lips, “but don’t go.”

  A cruel reminder.

  I take a deep breath. “I’m sorry I have to go back to Texas.”

  He leans back a fraction, sprawling his hand against my neck and rubbing his thumb up and down my cheekbone. “I’m sorry you feel trapped,” he whispers.

  I smile, but if his kiss was the sea, this smile is a puddle. “I’m sorry that you’re sorry.”

  He tilts his head forward, stopping just short of our lips meeting again.

  “Can we pretend,” he says with his voice low, “that this is the part where you decide to stay in Lochbrook?”

  My heart is steady in my chest, the butterflies at bay. It’s an overlapping of universes, a burst in the space–time continuum. For a second, I am Amelia, destined to stay in Michigan beside Nolan and his weird dog, confident in her lack of plans and laughing at the world. An Amelia who completely ignores Jenna’s neat, orderly plans and instead makes her own blueprint. She collects one-shot photos, goes to community college, tries every program in the curriculum, and the clever wind is happy with her choice.

  “I can’t stay,” I say, and under my breath I add, “I pinky promised.” When Nolan’s face falls, I continue, “But I am very, very good at pretend.”

  “Well.” His smile is crooked, a little sad, but gleaming. “If that’s the case…”

  When our lips meet again, I feel the fire spread from his body to mine, burning any protests to ash. His hands tangle in my hair, and I don’t think of Orman or Jenna. I don’t think about mysterious packages, pinky promises, or how we are kissing in front of his sisters’ graves.

  Instead, I try to keep my heart from splitting in two as we build something we know is going to break.

  * * *

  When we return to the bookstore, the little meadow of grass surrounding Val’s is bustling with activity. Wooden panels prop up temporary booths painted olive green, and people I half recognize from the store are attaching signs to the front of the vacant stalls. The book club man with the plaid tank top is wearing another plaid shirt, a short-sleeve button-down, and laughing, as a much younger man tries to straighten a sign that advertises fried hot dogs.

  In the midst of it all is Alex, messenger bag tugging at his neck in a way that must be uncomfortable, phone in hand as he jogs from booth to booth. He looks frazzled, like the White Rabbit late for tea.

  “What on earth…” I begin. None of this was here a few hours ago.

  Nolan laughs at my expression. “The bazaar. It’s a yearly thing Val puts on. Each year she picks a different cause and half the proceeds from all the stalls go to charity.”

  The flyer from the elevator pings into my head.

  “It’s for an elementary school this year, right?” I ask, as we near the bookstore’s entrance. Distantly, I hear the clunky sound of a student playing piano.

  “Yeah, the school library, I think.”

  “When’s the bazaar?”

  “Saturday.”

  “Saturday? As in ‘day after tomorrow’ Saturday? Shouldn’t we be helping?”

  Nolan gives me a beseeching look. “No.”

  “Yes,” Alex says, appearing behind us and throwing his arms over our shoulders. A strangely docile Wally sits at his heels. “You should be, Nolan. As our guest, Amelia is not honor bound, but it’s the least she can do, if she’s going to keep eating at the café for free.”

  “Hey, I tried to pay. Your mom won’t let me.”

  Alex raises his hand off my shoulder and flutters his fingers. “Semantics. Do you two want to help me hang light strands in these trees or not?”

  Nolan’s response is a vulgar hand movement, while I gaze openmouthed at the trees surrounding the clearing.

  “Which trees?” I ask. “You can’t possibly mean all of them.”

  “Only the ones with leaves.”

  “Alex, they all have leaves,” I say.

  He must take this as a confirmation of our volunteering, because he’s off, presumably to find the endless strands of lights we will need to light up the forest around us.

  Nolan says nothing as we watch Alex hurry away, but he tries to murder me with his eyes.

  “What?”

  “You know what,” he says. “We could be inside eating food or reading books or…” He trails off, cheeks red.

  I grin. “Kissing?”

  He glares as his face reddens further, but his voice is even when he says, “Yes, if you’d like.”

  My heart stumbles a little at the way his eyes are eating me whole, but I try to make my voice as normal as his and say, “But if we help Alex today, we can have all day tomorrow to ourselves.”

  “Or…” Nolan darts his eyes around the clearing before raising his hand to touch my still-blushing cheek. “We could say screw it and have both.”

  I’m about to agree, to squash down my need to please Alex and prove to him that I am a friend, not a fan, when Alex’s arrival is trumpeted by a squeaky dolly. Nolan drops his hand from my face, but not quickly enough.

  Alex makes his eyes comically wide. “Canoodling on the bazaar grounds, are we?”

  Nolan rolls his eyes. “Mosquito,” he says, and, as if to demonstrate, lightly slaps my cheek with the tips of his fingers. “There was a mosquito on her face. No canoodling here.”

  It’s my turn to say something funny and witty, but I can’t think of an appropriate response. My head is still swimming with thoughts of Nolan’s sisters, of Jenna, of the distant haze that is my pinky-promised future. Instead, I wind my arm around Nolan’s, pulling myself to his side.

  “It’s only temporary,” I tell Alex. “I still have to go back to Texas.”

  “Temporary.” Alex makes a sound
like he doesn’t believe me, but his eyes leap worriedly to Nolan’s face.

  “She pinky promised,” Nolan says, and I’m proud of the steadiness in his voice. His fingers interlace through mine.

  I look up at Nolan, he looks down at me, and for another split second I imagine staying. I allow the whales to swim tight circles around us as I play this game of pretend.

  This alternate future unspools before me like a ribbon, and I marvel at its countless photographs, the sheer number of books waiting to be read, the new landscapes waiting to be discovered behind Nolan’s eyes.

  I ignore the consequences of staying—the disappointment of the Williamses, the weight of Jenna’s expectations never easing, the sheer terror of deviating from a set path—and instead imagine long nights of Nolan reading me to sleep, afternoons of one-shot photography, and mornings of being rudely awakened by an ill-behaved mongrel.

  “Are you okay with this?”

  At first I think Alex is asking if I’m okay with my daydreams, if I’m willing to pay the price to have them spun into reality. But the whales swim away when he clasps Nolan’s shoulder in that distinctly boy way as they lock eyes.

  Friendship. Pure, sparkling friendship shines between them, and I wonder at the thickness of the thread that has bound them through years and tragedies.

  Jenna prickles at my thoughts, and I half wonder whether the thread that binds us is made stronger or weaker by her death. Or maybe it was cut in half the moment she died and now I’m untethered and desperately trying to do anything I can to reconnect us.

  Nolan’s hand tightens around mine, grounding me. “I’m okay with it,” he says to Alex. “It’s her choice. Whatever she wants.”

  We put our bleeding hearts away to begin lighting the trees. Alex keeps stealing looks at me when he thinks I’m too busy unwinding lights, but instead of looking away when our eyes meet, he just smiles down at me from where he and Nolan sit perched on the low branches of the same tree.

  It goes quickly. Alex is surprisingly slapdash with his application and even tells Nolan not to be so “precious” about it.

  “It’s going to look cool even if you don’t wrap every single knot.”

  Nolan doesn’t look up from wrapping the world’s tiniest twig. “I want it to be perfect,” he says.

  “I blame you for this, you know.” Alex glares at me. “What have you done with my devil-may-care friend?”

  I grin. “I canoodled him,” I say simply.

  Even if we were to string up enough lights to cover the forest of the lost golden-haired princess, it still wouldn’t be as bright as Alex’s and Nolan’s laughter.

  * * *

  That night, when I leave my bed to go to the Orman room, I run the last few steps down the hallway, eager to see Nolan’s face after an evening spent with him and Alex, exchanging stories about Jenna and Emily and Avery beside the fireplace downstairs.

  We talked for hours, and the more Nolan spoke of Avery’s precociousness and Emily’s sweetness, the more Alex recounted stories of “those Endsley kids” causing trouble in the lighthouse room, the less dead they seemed. I said so to Nolan, after telling them how Jenna and I met, how she saved me from my own darkness and showed me a real family.

  “Talking about her makes me feel like I haven’t lost her.”

  “You haven’t,” Nolan said. “We haven’t lost them. They’re not gone; they’re just somewhere else.”

  “Somewhere we aren’t, though.”

  “Yeah,” Alex said. “That’s the part that’s complete shit.”

  I thought talking about Jenna for so long would hurt, but I feel lighter than air, a helium balloon held to Nolan’s fist by the line between us.

  We said our good nights when the store closed, but I had only been in bed for an hour when I felt a tug on the thread, a low pulse.

  Come away, come away.

  He’s in the Orman room, and there’s no sign of Alex or Wally. And even though we don’t fall asleep on the floor this time, we take turns reading from The Forest Between the Sea and the Sky until our voices slur with fatigue and all the stars—old and new—have winked out from the early morning sky.

  chapter thirteen

  When I come down to the store early Friday morning, Nolan is waiting for me. There is a newfound freedom between us, a kind of wild abandonment that can only be found on the other side of sharing dark truths and painful stories. And saliva.

  It almost makes me forget that I leave in two days.

  Almost.

  “Let’s buy a bunch of books and go read them at the beach,” he says, by way of greeting.

  Self-portrait: an hourglass, but instead of sand, it is filled with tiny books, and trick photography is used to make it appear like the subject—me—is trapped inside.

  I am both repulsed by and drawn to the rows of books, my flesh recoiling as my soul lurches forward in a desperate attempt to fling itself from my body and wrap around a story. I’ve been avoiding stories and all their complications, but now that I’m ready to return to them, I’m worried it won’t be the same, even after Nolan read to me two nights in a row.

  I’m a mess.

  I say as much to Nolan, who has selected the history room as our first destination. A headless mannequin dressed in Regency garb greets us, and there are replicas of major historical documents on the wall.

  “We’re all messes,” he says. “Isn’t that the point?”

  “Sucky point,” I say.

  “Sucky world,” he answers.

  The sentiment seems too harsh and I say so.

  “Tell me something that doesn’t suck,” he says, head hunched over a book he holds open in one palm, with the last bite of an apple in the other.

  “Sunsets,” I say.

  “Heightened by the pollution that is slowly killing our planet,” he says.

  “Puppies,” I say.

  “Which part? The one where they are used as meat in some countries or the one where there are more than the world wants so we destroy them?”

  It’s a stupid game, depressing, and I love it.

  “The ocean,” I say.

  “It’s too sandy.” He snaps the book closed, puts it back on the shelf, before floating with purpose to the next. “People die in the ocean.”

  “People die everywhere,” I retort, ignoring the slight jab at my heart.

  “Exactly,” Nolan says. He turns to face me. “Because everything sucks.”

  We stare at each other. Nolan—unbelievably, blessedly—cracks first. His mouth tilts upward and his eyes finally catch the mirth.

  I laugh. “I guess everything has the potential to suck. It just has to be in context.”

  “Maybe we should do our best to stay out of context, then.” It’s a joke that, to anyone else, would sound, well, out of context. One of those sad smiles, the kind an author might describe as wan or wistful, settles into my jaw. Because sometimes it feels like you are living a nostalgic moment even while it is happening, like it is too fake or perfect or distant to be truly experienced, and this is one of them.

  We move to the Victorian room, with its reading chairs covered in lace, fringed lamps, and ornate blush-pink bookcases. The light fixture is a chandelier dripping with pearls, and music well suited for an Austen heroine’s monologue streams softly through speakers. Nolan is scanning the shelves, one finger dragging along spines until he finds what he’s after.

  “Have you read this?”

  I can’t make out the title, but the cover portrays a woman in a long gown, on horseback, and the book is almost as thick as a dictionary.

  “No?” I say with uncertainty. Nolan drops it definitively into the handled basket at his feet, which already holds two books from the history room.

  He’s like a bee buzzing from flower to flower, darting around a room loosely organized by the emotions the books provoke. He is about to head to the next room when I spot a familiar royal blue cover with a Scottish word as the title. It makes my chest feel a bit ho
llow, Jenna’s promise to bring me a kilted Highlander coming back to me.

  “Have you read this one?” I ask, pushing past the ache.

  Nolan lifts an eyebrow. “No. Should I?”

  I’m about to explain that the plot is complicated and awesome and involves time travel, Scottish rebellions, and folklore, but I stop myself. I will sound like a crazed fan if I try to do the story justice, but also I don’t want to cry about Jenna.

  “You should,” I say. “I think you’d like it.”

  Nolan tosses it into the basket. “Did you want to pick anything? Grab whatever you’d like; we’ll take them all down to the lake.”

  I don’t comment that he is taking both our hurts—water and books—and combining them into a golden afternoon.

  It’s so luxurious and extravagant. I shouldn’t use Mark’s card for such a frivolous purchase, but it’s too alluring to resist, and he wouldn’t mind. He’d probably be thrilled. I pick a couple of books from the mystery room and one from the adventure room and put them alongside the others.

  When we go downstairs to pay, Nolan doesn’t bother to ask Valerie to come over from the piano. He goes behind the counter himself and scans each book, stacking them neatly to the side and paying with his card.

  “I can pay for mine,” I protest.

  “Of course you can,” he says, putting the books in a canvas tote he extracts from under the counter. “But I can, too. It’s not a big deal.”

  “I should pay for my own,” I say, and I wonder why I’m being so insistent.

  “Let me do this for you,” Nolan says. “Please.” And in a move that seems terribly bold, with the clusters of patrons loitering nearby, he reaches forward and touches my cheek. “Let me give you stories.”

  It’s easily the sexiest thing anyone has ever said to me, and suddenly I understand the word desire on a whole new level.

  We sneak out the back door—so Alex, in his bazaar prep mayhem, doesn’t recruit us to help unclog cotton candy machines—and take Nolan’s car to his house so we only have to carry the books down the hill rather than through town. It’s the first time I’ve sat in his car, the leather interior still new and so different from Alex’s old truck, but already it feels like I belong.