“Harper,” he says, “Come on, stop. Let’s talk.”
This makes me laugh. I stop and whirl around. “Let’s talk? Seriously, did you really just say that?”
He shrugs. “Yeah.”
“Now you want to talk? Now that you got caught?”
He frowns. “Caught?”
“Yeah.” My pulse is racing, and my skin feels flushed. I never knew that anger and emotion could manifest itself in such a physical way.
“Caught doing what?”
“Caught talking to that girl.”
“Who?”
“Stop acting like you don’t know what I’m talking about!” My fists are balled at my sides, and I can feel the nails cutting into my skin.
“You’re talking about Devi? That blond girl? She’s in my science class. Harper, we were just talking. Come here.”
He reaches for me, but I push him away. I can’t take it anymore. I can’t take him being close and then pushing me away. I want him so badly, I want to be close to him always. And for him to not want me back, in every single way, the way that I want him, is too much to take.
“No!” I start to walk away from him as fast as I can.
He doesn’t say anything or try to stop me, but I can hear his footsteps behind me. It’s not until I’ve gone a few yards that I realize I’m going down the path the wrong way. I’m moving deeper into the woods instead of heading back toward the car and the parking lot.
I don’t know what to do. I don’t want to turn around, because he’s still behind me and that would be humiliating. But I’m not super-excited that I’m heading into the woods either. The last thing I want is to end up getting lost, or attacked by some animal or something.
Penn stops me from making the decision.
“You’re going the wrong way,” he calls after me.
“I know!” I yell back.
We keep walking. I pray that he doesn’t stop following me, because I really don’t want to be out here without him. Outside the clearing the moon is more obscured by the trees, and there’s obviously no bonfire. I can still hear the voices of my classmates, so at least I know I’m not too far away.
Now that I’ve slowed down a little bit, my anger is starting to fade.
So when Penn runs to catch up with me, I let him.
He falls into pace beside me.
He doesn’t say anything for a few minutes.
“How deep into the woods are we going to go?” he asks finally. “Because if this is going to turn into some kind of Blair Witch Project shit, then I need to know about it.”
“What’s The Blair Witch Project?”
He looks at me, stunned. “You never saw The Blair Witch Project?”
I shake my head.
“It’s one of those found-footage movies. You know, where the people die and they find the footage a little later? A creepy witch kills them in the woods.”
“Sounds ridiculous.”
“It’s not. It’s scary.”
“Well, whatever,” I say. “Stop if you want.” I’m praying he doesn’t take me up on it. If he leaves me out here alone, I’m going to freak out.
“Nah,” he says. “I can’t leave you by yourself.”
I don’t say anything for a few more steps. “I’m still really mad at you.”
“Harper,” he says, and his voice is soft and sweet. “I swear there is nothing going on between me and that girl. I was talking to her for, like, five minutes.”
I stop and whirl around until I’m facing him. “Why didn’t you tell me what happened between you and Jackson?”
His jaw tightens. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“He said he got you an appointment for your shoulder.” I know I’m taking a risk—there’s a chance Penn might completely flip out on me for talking to Jackson behind his back, and he might get even more mad that I’m questioning him about his shoulder.
And for a second I think that’s what he’s going to do. His jaw tightens even more, and his shoulders square, and he takes a big deep breath through his nose. I can practically see the internal battle going on inside him. Does he stay here and talk to me, or does he tell me to fuck off and take off through the woods? But what am I supposed to do? Just pretend that Jackson didn’t tell me any of those things?
Penn lets out the breath he’s been holding in. “Can we sit down?” he asks.
“Where? We’re in the middle of the woods.”
He glances around until he finds a log that looks reasonably stable. We both sit down, and Penn swallows hard and then runs his fingers through his hair. “Jackson got me an appointment at a doctor for tomorrow.”
“I know,” I say. “He told me.”
“I know,” he says. “You just told me that.”
“So are you going to go?”
He shakes his head. “No.”
“Why not?”
“Because, it . . . it doesn’t matter. My shoulder is fucked.”
“Okay.” I think about it. “But how do you know?”
“Because that’s what the doctors told me.” He reaches for my hand and envelopes one of mine in both of his. I scoot closer to him on the log, suddenly feeling like I want to be as close to him as I can.
“But you haven’t talked to this doctor, right?” I say gently.
“No.” He shrugs. “But I don’t care.”
The clouds slip away from the moon then, and his face gets bathed in light. I can see the defensiveness in his eyes. And I realize what it is, why he doesn’t want to go to the doctor. He doesn’t want to have belief. He doesn’t want to think that maybe someone will be able to help him. Because if it turns out they can’t, Penn will have to really accept that he won’t ever play baseball again. And he’s already worked so hard to do that. He doesn’t want to have to go through it all over again.
“I think you do care,” I say softly. “You know, if you go to the doctor, it doesn’t mean anything. It’s just an appointment.”
He doesn’t say anything.
“If they can’t help you, you haven’t lost anything,” I say. “Don’t you think you owe it to yourself to explore every possibility?”
He still doesn’t say anything. He just kicks at a pebble with his shoe, then pulls me in close to him. I lean against his shoulder, breathing in his scent—peppermint and Axe body wash and clean-smelling laundry detergent. We sit like that for what feels like forever.
I’m not going to push him. Whatever Penn has going on is something he’s going to have to work through himself. I can encourage him, but I can’t change him. He has to believe he’s worth it. He has to believe that if he lets himself think his shoulder can get better and then it doesn’t work out, that the disappointment he’s going to have to deal with is better than not knowing.
And then, just when I’m letting go of any hope that anything I’ve said can make a difference to how he feels, the universe decides that maybe I’ve learned that lesson.
“You’ll go with me?” he whispers softly. “Tomorrow? To the appointment?”
“Of course.” I say it like it’s a given, like it’s no big deal.
“Thanks.” He kisses me then, his lips warm and soft and sweet, and we sit there, not talking, until finally we get up and he takes me home.
Penn
I used to get nervous before big games.
Once I was out on the field, I was fine. I could stare down a 3–2 count and not even blink. I could be down 0–2 and still go for the homerun.
But before the game—before the game was a different story. I’d stand in the locker room, bent over the toilet, throwing up whatever it was I’d had for breakfast. I always ate something before a game, because if I didn’t, it was even worse. The dry heaves would shake my body as the acid burned my throat.
After I threw up, my stomach would still be in knots and I’d be a total asshole to anyone who attempted to talk to me. My coach knew better than to even try to converse with me right before a game. I’d g
o to the team meeting and just sit there in the corner, in my own little world, trying to keep myself from puking again.
But then, once I stepped onto the grass, everything would change. It was like I got into some kind of zone. Between innings I’d be in the dugout or the bull pen, laughing and joking around, replacing whatever I’d thrown up that morning by eating bananas and drinking Gatorade.
And that’s what I’m hoping is going to eventually happen after I wake up the morning of my doctor’s appointment and immediately have to run to the bathroom to puke my guts out. At first I’m upset. I mean, who the hell likes to throw up? But then I’m kind of relieved. I’ve been walking around so numb for so long that it’s kind of reassuring to know that I can actually feel something again.
After I’m done expelling the contents of my stomach, I take a long, hot shower, trying to calm my nerves. But it doesn’t work. The only good thing about this whole situation is that I have an early appointment. Which means I don’t have to spend the whole day sitting around, going crazy, trying to figure out exactly how I feel about all of this.
Harper is picking me up.
It doesn’t make me feel great that my girlfriend has to pick me up to take me to a doctor’s appointment, but I’m way too keyed up to drive. And it’s not like my parents or Braden can take me. Braden’s license is suspended (something having to do with “reckless driving,” which I’m pretty sure involved an incident where he was driving down I-95 while his friends mooned people), and I’m not in any mood to be around my parents.
I’ve been steering clear of them since our blowup the other night. Not that it’s been hard, since they haven’t been around, and not like I would tell them anything anyway. No way I want them to know I’m going to this appointment. The more people who know, the more people I’m going to have to tell if things don’t work out.
It’s bad enough that Harper knows.
When she pulls into my driveway and honks the horn, I’m already standing on my porch waiting for her. The morning is surprisingly chilly and overcast, and she’s wearing this soft pink sweater that makes her skin look fresh and clean. I lean over and kiss her, instantly feeling better.
“Hi,” she says. “You seem like you’re in a good mood.”
“I am now,” I say, buckling my seat belt. I reach down and move the seat back so that I have more room for my legs.
We drive into Boston, not really talking much. That’s one of the things I love about Harper. Most girls—or people in general, really—would feel they had to fill the silence, that they needed to say a bunch of stuff to try to make me feel better, or just make small talk in an effort to relax me. But Harper’s not like that. Harper can just be. Just her presence is comforting—she doesn’t have to say or do anything special.
We park in the garage across from Mass General, then walk across the street to the medical building. The receptionist points us to the sixth floor, room 612, and we cram into the elevator with a bunch of other people. My stomach drops as we fly up through the floors, and I’m not sure if it’s because I’m nervous or because that’s just what happens in elevators.
Room 612 turns out to be a waiting room for people who need X-rays.
“I’ve already had X-rays,” I explain to the receptionist after I’m done filling out the insurance paperwork. I’m slightly annoyed. I didn’t know this was going to be a whole big thing. For some reason I just assumed I’d be whisked right in to sit down with the doctor, that I’d tell him about my condition and let him know what the other doctors said, and then he’d tell me if he could help me or not.
But of course he’s going to want to look at X-rays. And I didn’t call my other doctor to have the X-rays sent over here.
“Dr. Tamblin likes to have new ones done,” the receptionist says cheerfully. “You can take a seat and we’ll call you soon.” She points to the chairs against the side of the room.
I sit down.
Harper sits down next to me.
My leg starts to jitter. I don’t like just sitting here. I feel like I need to keep moving, that if I’m just sitting here like this, I’m going to have too much time to think, too much time to start running through every single possibility of what’s about to happen.
“You okay?” Harper asks.
“I’m fine.” I pick a magazine up off the table next to me and start flipping through it. Colors go flying by in a blur of ads and articles, but I’m not seeing anything.
“Hey.” Harper reaches out and puts her hand on mine. I turn and look at her for the first time. “Whatever happens, it’s going to be okay.”
I want to ask her how she knows that, how anyone can know that, when they call my name.
“Penn Mattingly?” the nurse asks. “We’re ready for you.”
There’s nothing left to do.
I give Harper a kiss.
And then I get up and follow the nurse through the door.
Harper
As soon as Penn disappears with the nurse, my phone starts ringing.
I look down and see Anna’s number on my cell. Shit. I texted her last night to tell her I was going home with Penn, but she never replied.
“Hey,” I say, making sure to keep my voice quiet so as not to disturb everyone else in the room. Even so, a woman sitting in a chair across from me gives me a little bit of a dirty look. “Sorry I didn’t call you last night. It’s just that—”
“Harper,” she says, and her voice sounds a little . . . strangled.
“Anna?” I ask. “Are you okay?”
“Noooo.” She’s wailing now.
“What’s wrong?” I sit up straight in my seat. “Are you hurt?”
“No, I’m not hurt. At least not physically.” She’s gone from wailing to full-on sobbing.
“What happened?”
She starts to talk, but she sounds muffled, almost like she dropped her phone or something.
“What, Anna? Anna, I can’t hear you!”
She comes back, but she’s still fading in and out. “. . . and then we . . . and now he said . . . I can’t believe . . . a mistake!” And she’s crying again.
“Anna, I can’t understand you. You need to slow down.”
She starts to talk again, but before I can figure out if I can finally hear her, someone taps me on the shoulder.
I turn around to see the receptionist standing there, looking at me disapprovingly. “You’re not supposed to be on your phone in here.” She points to a sign that’s on the wall. “The cell phones interfere with the medical equipment.”
“Oh,” I say. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
She glares at me. “Yeah, well, there are signs all over the place.” She tugs on a piece of her hair. “You could kill someone.”
I roll my eyes. “I highly doubt I could kill someone just by talking on my cell phone.”
“Then why does it say that it interferes with medical equipment?” the girl sitting next to me asks. “Because my dad is in here for a very important heart procedure, and he can’t be having his machines interfered with.”
“Relax,” I say. “Your dad is going to be fine.”
“My dad?” Anna yells in my ear. “What are you talking about, Harper?”
“Look, you’re going to have to leave this room,” the receptionist says. “I’m sorry, but you’re being way too loud.”
Which isn’t even true, but whatever. “Fine.” I roll my eyes and then say, “I’ll call you right back” to Anna. I hang up on her mid-wail and then leave the waiting room and head for the elevators.
Once I’m outside the medical center, I call her back. “Hey,” I say when she answers. “Sorry about that. I was . . .” I’m not sure if Penn wants me to mention the fact that he’s at the doctor’s, so I just say, “I was somewhere that I couldn’t talk on the phone.”
“Like where?” She sounds suspicious. But before I can come up with a plausible answer, she’s already talking. “Harper, it was awful. I mean, it was amazing, but it was awf
ul, too.”
She’s not crying anymore, but I’m still having kind of a hard time hearing her. Her breath is coming in short gasps, and she’s sniffling a lot, probably from all the sobbing.
“What was?”
“Last night.” She takes a deep breath, and I can tell she’s trying to calm herself down. “I told Nico.”
Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God. I’m a horrible friend. I completely and totally forgot about the fact that she was planning on telling Nico she liked him last night. “Good for you,” I say automatically, before realizing that if she’s crying, it probably didn’t go so well. “Um, how did it go?”
“Horrible!” she says. “Well, no, that’s not true. At first it went amazing.”
“I’m confused.” I sit down on one of the benches outside and bend my knees, sliding my feet up next to me. The day is still a little drizzly and cold, and I pull my sweater tighter around me. “It was good or it was bad?”
“Harper,” Anna says. “I had sex with him.” She sounds stunned.
“You had sex with who?”
“Nico.”
“You had sex with Nico?!”
“Yes. Oh God, Harper. What have I done?” She’s about to start wailing again. Yikes. I’ve never heard her this upset before.
I try to stay calm. Me getting all worked up isn’t going to help the situation. Someone has to be the voice of reason here, and obviously it can’t be Anna. “Just relax. Now tell me what happened. Start at the beginning.”
“Okay.” She takes in a deep shuddering breath. “Well, we were at the party, you know? And we were drinking a little bit, and talking, and by the end of the night, all his friends had gone home and it was just us, you know?”
“Okay.” So far it doesn’t sound bad. In fact, it sounds completely normal.
“And so I told him that I’d been thinking about how I’d freaked out the other day about my music, and how nice he’d been to me.”
“Okay . . .” It still doesn’t sound that bad. But I’m waiting for the point where this banal story morphs into Nico and Anna having sex and things going horribly wrong. And then amazing? Isn’t that what she said? That it was horrible and then amazing? Or was it amazing and then horrible?