Between Here and Forever

  I thought I would be, but the truth is I feel like—I feel like I did during those few heady weeks with Jack, when the world seemed like it had a place for me, not as Tess’s sister, but as just me, in it.

  I’m not saying I want to run around hugging everyone or skipping through fields of flowers, but the hard knot of anger—the one that’s lived and breathed across and around my heart—has loosened.

  And so my first glimpse of Eli’s classmates doesn’t make me want to find large rocks and hurl them at their heads, even though I see them eyeing me and writing me off, able to spot my cheap jeans and not-faded-on-purpose shirt for what they are, where they show I’m from.

  Eli hasn’t written me off. Eli wants me here.

  Although, once we’re in the cafeteria, he doesn’t really look like he wants to be here. He doesn’t look upset, exactly, and his fingers aren’t twitching, but he looks—he looks like he’s holding everything inside himself very still. Like he’s willing himself to be calm.

  The problem is, it shows. I can see it, in how the fluid grace of his walk is slowed down, stiffened, and in how he keeps looking around. Like he can stop his fingers, but he keeps expecting people to see him doing something they don’t want to see anyway.

  And then I notice something else. No one talks to him. We’ve passed by at least twenty guys in their white shirts and khaki pants and acne constellations ranging from a few stars to entire galaxies, and no one has said anything.

  Even I get “Hey,” at school from people I see in my classes, girls who used to call me “friend” and hang around the house, hoping to talk to Tess until before she went off to college and I drew into myself.

  Eli gets nothing, and as we wait in line for food that looks better than anything I’ve ever seen in Ferrisville High’s cafeteria or, frankly, anywhere, I notice that everyone acts as if he isn’t even there.

  We get our food—and we don’t even have to pay, I guess it’s part of the tuition—and walk back into the main part of the cafeteria.

  It’s gorgeous, all windows and light and I think there’s even soothing music piped in. It’s like a museum or something—at least until you see that everyone is eating normally, the guys furiously shoveling in food just like they do in my school.

  It’s not that I was feeling like I didn’t belong, exactly, but a reminder that guys are guys, even if you give them tablecloths, is a pretty welcome one.

  I wait for Eli to make a move to sit down somewhere, but he’s just standing there, holding his plate so tightly his fingertips are white with strain, the tips tapping against the bottom over and over.

  “Excuse me,” a guy says, all sneer, and shoves past me, heading toward a table.

  “You might as well leave,” he says to Eli as he passes him. “Last thing anyone wants to see is you doing your twitch thing while we’re trying to eat. Bad enough having to watch it in class.”

  Ass. I shift, like I’m turning, and “accidentally” catch my elbow on the guy’s plate, sending everything on it flying into him.

  “Great, you found a friend as fucked up as you,” the guy says, scowling, and then adds, “Retard,” in my direction.

  I’m ready to match his belligerence head-on, because I don’t like how he talked to Eli, to me, but Eli’s face has gone from fake calm to a kind of barely controlled rage/sorrow, and it’s the sorrow that gets to me. Stops me.

  Rage I can handle. Bring it on, slam it into the big ball of anger that fills me up. I can take that. I understand it.

  But sorrow—that I have no defense against. Part of why I hated Jack so much the night I realized he was never going to love me was that he really and truly was sorry. He could have kept screwing me and trying to get Tess to notice him, but he didn’t want to hurt me.

  And that’s what broke my heart. Like Tess lying silent in her hospital bed, like the way my parents looked as they stared at the few, slight boxes of her things, the very stillness of sorrow, the soul-deep endlessness of it—it scares me. There is nothing I can do to push it back, to keep it away.

  Anger can try to break your heart, but sorrow is what will. What can. What does.

  I don’t know what to do, though. I don’t know how to fix things—Tess’s continued stillness is proof of that. I don’t know how to make everything all right.

  But I have to do something. I look around, see the sea of white shirts—nothing helpful there—and spot a door near a few windows looking out onto the picture-perfect lawn.

  “Can we eat outside?” I ask Eli, who nods stiffly, hands still white-knuckled around his plate, and I understand the look on his face.

  He looks trapped, helpless and furious, and that’s a feeling I know too well. Know how much it hurts. Know how it holds you down, how every day there are a thousand little ways to see there is nothing you can do to change who or what you are.

  I walk toward the door, because it’s all I can think of to do, and when we’re outside, I see an empty table and head for it.

  I get there at the same time a slight guy with deep ebony skin does.

  “Hey,” he says to Eli, and then nods at me.

  “Hey,” Eli says, and for a moment I think he’s not even going to sit down. But he does, and what follows is weird and tense and makes me wonder if maybe all those giddy feelings I’d let myself have before were premature and stupid.

  Nobody talks. Eli doesn’t talk to me or the guy sitting with us. He just eats his food, one bite after another, with no pleasure on his face. No expression at all really, except a sort of grim determination.

  The other guy doesn’t talk either, just pulls out a book and starts reading.

  I manage to choke down about half the sandwich I’d grabbed, and am wondering if I should bolt for the parking lot when I hear a cheerful voice exclaim, “And this is the Fennelson Building, where our students dine.”

  I look up and see a bow-tie-wearing middle-aged man who is clearly the Saint Andrew’s equivalent of a guidance counselor, because even better clothes can’t disguise the “I help students! Really, I do!” attitude that’s practically quivering off him.

  “Ah, and we have a guest today,” he says, smiling at me even as his eyes register dismay at my clearly not-from-Milford clothes. “We do offer our students the chance to bring off-campus guests to lunch, provided they’ve earned the right to do so via Saint points. It’s one of the many things that makes Saint Andrew’s so special.”

  He moves closer to the table. “And, of course, in addition to our dedication to preserving the traditions of a rigorous education, we’re also committed to diversity.”

  The other guy at the table looks up then, smiles fake and furiously at everyone on tour, all white people, I realize, all of whom are nodding like “Oh, yes, of course that’s important,” as their gazes stray to the other buildings, the other students, or even their watches.

  “Never mind that I’m a National Merit Scholar,” the guy mutters. “Notice me because I’m black!”

  The tour guide/school cheerleader hears enough of that to clear his throat and say, “All right, let’s move on to the next building—we’ve got an excellent science lab here.”

  “I hate that bullshit,” the guy says as the tour group walks away.

  “Me too,” Eli says, the first thing he’s said the whole time we’ve been here, and I think Finally! with an amount of relief that’s embarrassing. But I’m still glad he’s said something.

  The guy doesn’t respond, though, just shrugs and swallows the rest of his soda before getting up and walking away.

  Eli closes his eyes, like he’s endlessly weary. When he doesn’t open them after a second, I dare to reach over and touch the edge of one of his hands.

  “It’s my—it’s the OCD,” Eli says, his voice quiet. “That’s why everyone is—well, you saw it.”

  Maybe I should pretend I haven’t seen what I have, but if Eli feels like I do about his life—and seeing his closed eyes now, I believe he does—the last thing he wants is peopl
e bleating platitudes like “Oh, I know things will work out!”

  “It’s all they notice, right?”

  “Yeah,” he says, and opens his eyes, truly looks at me for the first time since we stepped into the cafeteria. “So you can see why when you talk about how great things are for me, I—you can see why I don’t get it.”

  “Sorry” seems too small a word to use now, and it’s a word I’m sick of anyway, a word I’ve heard too many times and I bet he has too. I take a deep breath and look down at my plate.

  “It sucks when people look at you and see someone else instead of you.”

  “It does suck,” he says. “Is that how—is that how you think people see you and Tess?”

  “It is how people see us. Me. Especially since—” I clear my throat, force myself to look at him. “Since the accident, I know they look at me and see her. See what she’s going through, see how—see how my family isn’t the same without her. Before, it was just that I wasn’t her. Now it’s that I’m here and she’s not.”

  I’ve never said that last bit out loud before. I’ve never even let myself think it.

  But that’s how it is, and that’s what is at the heart of all the anger and fear I have coiled inside me. I’m here. She’s not. And that doesn’t seem right to anyone. I can sense it. I see it.

  And it makes me something more than angry or afraid.

  It makes me sad, so sad.

  “You want to get out of here?” Eli says, looking at me, just me, and I let myself see that.

  I let myself look back.

  I want to leave with him, and so I nod.

  And so we do.

  thirty-three

  After we leave the school, my bike wedged into the backseat of Clement’s car, Eli heads into the heart of Milford.

  I don’t say anything. I like that he hasn’t automatically turned to the hospital, to Tess. I like that he asked me to come with him. I like that he wants me with him.

  I like him.

  I could pretend I don’t know where we’re going, but if Eli’s place in the world is like mine—and lunch at his school showed me that it’s maybe even worse, that maybe the only person he has in the whole world is Clement—then I know exactly where we’re going.

  His home.

  I’m right, and Clement’s house looks like I thought it would: large and old, not the biggest house on the block but somehow the most imposing, a certain starkness to its features that’s missing from the lushly painted and landscaped houses that are within discreet distance.

  “Clement’s not much for decoration,” Eli says after we’ve parked and walked into a giant front hall, made all the larger by the absolute absence of anything. It’s just a room with a high, airy ceiling, arched emptiness before the rest of the house. “He says Harriet didn’t like clutter.”

  I try not to gape as Eli leads me down a hall with a series of large rooms branching off on either side, but it’s kind of hard not to. My parents’ house is large by Ferrisville standards—we have an upstairs, instead of the one-floor houses most people have—but it’s nothing compared to this.

  The hallway ends in a large living room, dark with heavy wood furniture and a massive, deep blue Oriental carpet that sinks halfway up my shoes. Just beyond that I can make out what looks like the kitchen.

  “This was my grandmother,” Eli says, picking up a photo in a large, silver frame.

  A heavy-set woman with nut brown skin and wide, sparkling dark eyes—Eli’s eyes—grins at the camera, one arm slung exuberantly around Clement, who is gazing at her as if she’s a goddess.

  I smile at the photo, because it so fits with everything Clement has ever said about Harriet, with how his love for her still shines in his voice. “She has your eyes. Or I guess you have hers.”

  “That’s what Clement says,” he says. “My mother liked to remind my father of that when they were fighting about me.”

  He hands me another photo, silently. A truly beautiful couple—a tall, elegant man and a tiny, raven-haired woman—are in wedding clothes, smiling at the camera. I can’t help but stare at the woman’s wedding dress, the train so long it’s been swept to one side and then arranged so it pools like water over the steps they’re standing on.

  “My parents,” he says, and I see he has his father’s cheekbones, high and sharp, and his mother’s hair. There is an intensity about them both, though, a sense of barely contained urgency, that I don’t see in Eli.

  “No photos of you?” I smile at him.

  He shakes his head. “My parents used to send them, but I made Clement move them when I came. I don’t like—looking at them just reminds me of how hard I used to try to be what they wanted.”

  He sees me looking at him and says, “Hold on, I’ll show you one.” He heads out of the room, and I hear the sounds of his feet on stairs.

  After a moment, he returns with a photo and hands it to me.

  It’s Eli—I can tell that right away—and he’s young, maybe three or four. He is smiling at the camera, a hesitant smile, and his hands are clutched tight around a stuffed animal I bet he was supposed to play with, pose with. I think of Cole, with his easy laughter and exuberance, and wonder what could make him look this tense, this anxious.

  “You look nervous,” I say, and Eli takes the picture back, putting it facedown on an end table.

  “I was. My parents were there, and they wanted me to look happy,” he says. “And to not ‘fidget.’ That’s what they used to say I did. I ‘fidgeted.’ It wasn’t until my first school asked them to take me to a doctor that they admitted something was wrong with me.”

  “First school?”

  “Yeah,” he says, moving away from the picture and sitting down on a long, low-backed sofa.

  After a moment, I sit next to him. “So what happened?”

  “What did you look like when you were little?” he says, putting his feet up on the coffee table in front of us.

  “Same as now,” I say, not calling him out on changing the subject. “Only I used to try and—I used to try and dress like Tess. I mean, I’ve always had to wear her old clothes—” Will that freak him out? No, he doesn’t look bothered by it. “But I used to try and make my hair look like hers and stuff. It never worked, obviously.”

  “And you’ve always lived here.”

  “In Ferrisville, yeah.”

  “Is it really that different than Milford?”

  I place my feet next to his on the coffee table. I point at his shiny, expensive shoes, dark leather that looks buttery-soft. Then I point at my own used-to-be-white-but-are-now-dingy-gray canvas sneakers.

  “I have sneakers too.”

  “And I bet you didn’t buy them out of a bin where they were tagged ‘Buy One Pair, Get One Pair Free.’”

  “My parents do have money,” he says, a bitter little laugh escaping. “Couldn’t have been sent to all the schools I was without that.”

  “How many schools?”

  “A lot. A dozen, at least.” He holds his hands out toward me briefly. “And all because of these. Well, these and my fucked up brain.”

  “You shouldn’t—you aren’t like that,” I say. “I didn’t even notice you had OCD until you told me.”

  “Right.”

  “Really,” I say. “I thought you were nervous around Tess because she’s so … well, because she’s Tess and she’s beautiful.”

  He’s silent for a moment.

  “I don’t really know how to say this,” he finally says. “So, um, don’t get mad, okay?” He bites his lips, folds his arms across his chest, and then slowly unfolds them. “I just—I don’t see what’s so great about her.”

  “That’s because she’s asleep. If Tess was awake you’d see. She’s the kind of person everyone wants to look at. Like you.”

  “Are you kidding? I got asked to leave my last school because I was taking so long getting ready to work—I had to sharpen my pencil a certain number of times, and then I had to have all my papers lined up al
ong the right edge of the desk and—anyway, there was a lot of stuff I had to do, and I wasn’t getting any work done. And yeah, people looked at me then, and at every other school I’ve been to, but not like how you think.”

  I’m sure I don’t make a face but I guess I do because he grins at me and says, “I swear! Not until I came here, and you must have noticed that it’s stopped. Word of my—of who I am, of my … you know—it’s gotten around.”

  “Like you’ve never ever met a girl who doesn’t care?” I say, and I know I’m making a face now. I mean, yes, I know he has OCD, but he’s also acting like he’s a troll and I’m sure we both know he isn’t.

  He’s silent for a second, and then looks out the window that shows the gleaming, green front lawn. “Did Tess like it when guys wanted her because of how she looked?”

  And when I don’t say anything because he’s right, Tess knew she was good-looking but always avoided the guys who only saw that, he says, “Exactly. Is it so weird that I want someone who actually likes me even when I’m not—even when I can’t—” He blows out a breath. “I want someone who doesn’t care that I have to walk through doors a certain way and stuff.”

  “Okay, I get that,” I say. “But you’re still acting like you’re a diseased yak or something and—”

  “A yak?” he says, smiling.

  “Yeah,” I say, grinning back. “And you’re not. I mean, who doesn’t have problems? So that’s why I find it hard to believe that you’re having to wander around girl-less.”

  “Well, you’re here with me.”

  “Like I count. You know what I mean.”

  “Sure,” he says. “At the all-male schools my parents sent me to, there were girls everywhere. Hidden in the walls and stuff. Don’t know how I keep missing them. And how come you don’t count?”

  “Because I don’t,” I tell him, my stomach fluttering because I think I could count with him, and I definitely know I want to. “You’re just being nice, and it’s sweet, but you don’t have to do it. I know you never would have noticed me if I hadn’t asked you about Tess.”