But hers, she thought, had nothing to do with who she was at the heart of her. While Derric’s secret did. And to see him reject Africa in favor of whatever it was . . . She couldn’t stand watching it. Intuitively, she knew it was wrong. Intuitively, she also knew she had to stop him.
• • •
BECCA HADN’T BEEN to Saratoga Woods in ages. When she’d lived in Langley at the Cliff Motel with Debbie Grieder and her grandkids, it had been simple enough to get there. Even after she’d become expert at using her bike’s twenty-seven gears, it wasn’t exactly an easy ride to the place, considering that the route was continuously hilly, generally windy, and universally narrow. But it was a direct one, and the woods were only a few miles from the center of town.
Now that she was living some distance from the village, though, she had to rely on the free island bus to take her to the woods. No matter how she went at it, this meant two bus rides and a long wait in the bitter cold, but she was determined that nothing was going to put her off from what she had to do.
She went out to the woods on a gray winter day in late February, when the water of Saratoga Passage exactly matched the dismal color of the sky. She had to hike a bit once the bus dropped her off, so she made her way along the rutted roadside where the ground was frozen and the puddles wore silver skins of ice. Soon enough she reached the woods, looming darkly across a meadow where dead grasses lay beaten down by the weather and openings among the thick fir trees indicated trailheads leading into the shadowy forest.
She made her way to the far southwest side of the meadow. There a path climbed steeply into the trees. The ground was slippery, and she took care. If she fell on this trail, it wouldn’t be anything like the day when Derric had fallen here in the autumn. Then she’d come upon him as she’d chased Seth’s dog. Today there was no one around to find her if she tumbled down the bluff.
High on the trail, she reached the spot where Derric had taken his fall and broken his leg so badly. She gave it a glance only. She wasn’t here on a pilgrimage to the spot where he’d entered into a prolonged coma. She was here on another mission, and her destination was immediately opposite, up a narrow ill-defined sketch of a path that Derric himself had made through the trees.
It was a trail that no one would even notice, easily overlooked if you didn’t know that it was there. It led up a hillside to where some fallen branches and the trunk of an old-growth hemlock formed a low teepee. This looked insubstantial but it was actually sturdy, having been built over time by storm and wind. Becca took a breath, grabbed onto an alder’s trunk, and began to climb upward.
When she reached the teepee, she crawled inside. She worked her way to its farthest reaches. There, carefully wrapped in several old plastic shopping bags and even more carefully tucked away, she found the package where she’d first discovered it. It had been in this spot for ages. Impeded by the cast on his leg, Derric hadn’t touched it since October.
Well, Becca thought as she removed it, he would touch it now. Touching it, he would see the difference between the Derric Mathieson he actually was and the Derric Mathieson he was trying to be. This wasn’t about Courtney Baker, Becca assured herself. This was about Derric being true to himself. If nothing else, he needed to do that.
Becca put the package into her backpack. Quickly she got herself down from the teepee and out of the forest. Daylight was fading as she began her walk back into Langley. It was several miles, but the day was growing late and she couldn’t risk waiting for a bus to come along.
• • •
SHE REACHED LANGLEY sooner than she thought she would, for as she trudged along the road, an elderly woman with a purple streak through her hair pulled over and offered her a lift into town. Chilled to the bone, she was happy to hop inside and be assaulted by two mini-dachshunds, ABBA’s greatest hits, and a heater running full blast. Five minutes later, she was in front of the Langley Clinic where, she knew, Derric generally waited for his mom to finish her workday.
He was alone in the waiting room. His head was bent over an open notebook, and he was referring to a text and then writing something. He looked up as the door opened. His eyes locked with Becca’s for a second before he looked away and continued writing.
Becca didn’t pause to take a reading from his whispers. She’d removed the AUD box earphone on her way out to the woods, and she’d not returned it to her ear, but she didn’t wait to gauge what his reception of her might be. She figured she could easily lose her nerve if she did that. Instead she strode across the room and sat right next to him.
He started to move. She put her hand on his arm. He said, “Hey, what’re you . . .” but that was all because at that point, she opened her backpack and in one second she had the package out and he knew as well as he knew his own name what was inside of it.
Then she heard it tumbling from him: No way . . . she’ll . . . couldn’t . . . now there’s going to be . . . damn damn damn . . . this is what . . . oh great . . . when it comes to trust . . . came at her, and she could have finished the broken thoughts easily because she knew they referred to what she held in her lap. Inside the package were dozens of letters, all of them written by Derric to Rejoice. She’d been five years old when he’d left her behind. Less than three when she’d been orphaned, she hadn’t even known that he was her brother.
Derric said in a whisper so fierce that it felt like a slap, “What’re you doing with those? What the hell do you think . . . No way do you even have the right—”
“This is who you are,” she said to him. “It’s who you’re running from. And that gives me the right.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about. What d’you expect’s about to happen? I fall on my knees and declare my love and beg forgiveness and—”
“This isn’t about us,” she hissed. “There isn’t an us and you’ve made sure I know it. Okay. I get it. End of story. We’re over. But this . . . what I’m holding right here? This is about you and this is about your sister.”
“Shut up! Shut up!”
“I won’t shut up. You’ve hidden Rejoice for the last eight years and now you’re hiding yourself. D’you think I can’t see that?”
“I said shut up!”
“You’ve taken down flags, you’ve taken down pictures, you’re growing your hair and everyone thinks Oh look, he’s becoming American while all the time what’s really going on is—”
“Get out of here!” He grabbed the letters from her.
“You can’t keep hiding—”
“What the hell?” He shoved the package into his backpack. His expression was as hard as Becca had ever seen. He whispered fiercely, “You think you c’n talk to me about hiding anything from anyone? That’s really messed up. That’s frigging unbelievable is what it is. I’m not the person hiding anything but a bunch of letters. While you—”
“That’s what you think? This is just a bunch of letters? Please. Don’t even try to go there. You’re hiding your own sister. You’re pretending Rejoice doesn’t exist, so you’re hiding the truth. You think if you turn yourself into some one hundred percent American dude with a cute blonde girlfriend and—”
“That’s what this is about! I’m with Courtney and you—”
“Oh please. Give me more credit than that. This is about you. It’s about Kampala. It’s about who you left behind and what you can’t face anyone knowing.”
“Shut up, shut up, get away from me, shut up!”
Becca knew that the ferocity of his tone came from the fact that he was terrified someone might overhear them. His horror was the same as most people’s fear: that admitting to something dark about themselves might lead to being scorned by others. But what he didn’t see was that where he was heading with this new Derric of his led to scorn, while where he had been before his transformation led only to the truth about what it had meant to be alone and afraid and only five years old on the s
treets of Kampala.
“Okay,” she said. “I’m shutting up. You can do whatever you want. You’re a free agent. Have at it. Whatever. But maybe with all the doing you’re engaged in, you’ll eventually decide to do the right thing.”
“Which is what, according to the Book of Becca?” he demanded.
“Which is tell the truth.”
He threw the backpack to the floor. He did the same with his notebook and the text he’d been reading. “You are really an amazing hypocrite,” he told her. “Try thinking about that with all the other thinking you’ve been doing.”
Becca started to reply, but that was the precise moment when someone called her name. She turned to see Derric’s mom, Rhonda, with a chart in her hand, smiling at her from the hallway where the examining rooms were.
“We’ve missed seeing you!” she cried happily. “Where on earth have you been hiding?”
Derric looked at Becca and raised an eyebrow. His expression said, So here’s your chance. Gonna tell the truth? I don’t think so.
Of course, he was right.
TWELVE
Derric wasn’t surprised when Becca got out of the Langley Clinic as fast as she could. The last thing she wanted to talk to him about was where she was hiding out, so there was no way she was going to have a conversation with his mom about it. He almost wanted to laugh at how fast she beat her retreat when Rhonda asked her question. Course, his mom hadn’t meant hiding as in really hiding. But the fact that she didn’t know how close she was to the truth of what was up with Becca was part of what made her question so funny.
He had to come up with an explanation for Becca’s showing up at the clinic, though. There was no way Rhonda was going to let that dog doze. Since she had one last patient to see, he had time to cook something up. So when she let loose with her typical grilling, he was ready for her.
Becca had stopped by to ask him a question about a project they were working on in their Western Civ class, he explained to his mom. She’d been given Extra Underpants Schuman for a partner.
“Oh dear,” was Rhonda’s reply. She knew Tod Schuman. Everyone knew him. Everyone also knew why he had the nickname. “That’s not going to be easy for her. You didn’t want to. . . ?”
“We were assigned,” he lied.
When they arrived home, he went straight to his bedroom. His dad wasn’t back from work yet, and his mom went directly to the kitchen to start dinner. He had a few minutes, then, when he was off her radar. He intended to use that time to find a place to hide the letters to his sister.
His preference would have been in the basement, squirreled away among his childhood stuff. But the route to the basement was through the kitchen, and he couldn’t risk his mom asking why he was heading down there. Besides, she’d also make a big deal about him trying to go down the old wooden stairs with a cast on his leg. It would be “Let me do that for you, sweetie. I don’t want you to fall. What d’you want down there? I’ll get it in a flash,” and that was the last thing he needed.
In his room, though, there weren’t a lot of options. Closet? Possibly. Drawers? No way. His mom was always putting clean clothes in the dresser. Under the bed? Maybe not because of the vacuum. In the ancient beanbag chair? Well . . . It was so old it had been repaired three times, and the last repair involved about four feet of duct tape. Beneath this patch, the chair had split along its seams, and his mom was after him to throw the thing out.
But he liked to lounge there with his headphones on and his music cranked. It was his space, he told his mother. It was ugly but comfortable and he liked it, he told her. So, to respect him, she never touched it.
In short, it was perfect for hiding the letters. He peeled back the duct tape. Then he quickly removed the letters from his backpack. They were stored in an old Star Wars lunch box that Derric had found in the basement years ago. It had belonged to Dave Mathieson’s older son and had languished forever up on a shelf along with Little League mitts, baseball bats, cleats, and dusty athletic trophies. He’d scored it in order to protect the letters from the elements so that he could hide them in the woods. Once he had them in the beanbag chair, though, the question was what to do with the lunch box.
He was considering this when his cell phone alerted him to a text. The text was from Courtney: Pick u up7? xxx What the hell . . . ? he wondered. Did they have a date and he’d forgotten? That would be radically uncool. Becca showing up with his letters to Rejoice had thrown him, sure. But he didn’t think he’d been thrown enough to forget a date with Courtney.
He sorted through his mind for what was up before he replied since he didn’t want to come off like a dolt. School night so it couldn’t be a date as in a date. Were they supposed to be studying together? Could be, for sure. What else was there? Basketball game? Not right now. Club meeting? They weren’t in any club together. But the idea of clubs jogged his memory. It wasn’t a club, it was Courtney’s Bible study group. She’d been after him from their first date to give her prayer group and her Bible study group a try. She did Bible study once a week, and three times now she’d asked him to join her. He’d given her an excuse each time, avoiding the moment when he was going to have to tell her directly that he wasn’t a Bible kind of person. For she was a Bible kind of person, and Bible-reading, prayer-circling, and church-going were the only subjects on which they didn’t see eye to eye.
He texted her back. 2 much 2 do. Math sucks. Nx time? Xxxxxxx
It took nearly ten minutes for her to reply. Her oK spoke volumes. She wasn’t happy.
He texted her again. Sorry. Miss u big time, babe.
Another wait, but only two minutes this time. M2. Cuz after the meeting . . . ;).
He knew what that meant: After Bible study they’d stop somewhere. They’d park in one of the thousand and one places on the south end of the island where you could hide in the darkness with no one the wiser that you were even there. No matter the cold outside of the car, they’d warm each other soon enough.
She was tempting him. Just thinking about doing anything with Courtney got him going. But the Bible part of it . . . ? Could he really sit there and talk about the Bible while all along knowing that afterward he and Courtney were going to get it on with each other? He supposed he could. But if that was the case, why didn’t he jump at the opportunity she was giving him? He wanted to, didn’t he? He wanted to be in the dark with her, right? She let him do some things, but not others. He touched here but not there. He kissed this but not that. Her legs were smooth and her stomach was tight and her breasts were soft and why the hell didn’t he just do what anyone else in his position would do? Read the Bible, go to the prayer circle, get on his knees and pretend to ask Jesus-God-Buddha-Whoever for world peace or whatever it was that the prayer circle prayed for because then Courtney would maybe in the darkness in the back of her car . . . She would, wouldn’t she? Or would she?
Derric groaned. He dropped down onto his bed and he shoved the Star Wars lunch box beneath it. Courtney Baker had him turned every which way and she kept him turned every which way until the only thing he could think of was the hot pressure building between his legs.
He sputtered out a weak laugh at himself. At least Courtney managed to keep him from thinking about Becca King. He owed her that. She was one hell of a diversion.
He rolled onto his side and reached for his cell phone. Naked he texted her.
!!! was her reply.
??? was his next text.
In a moment she sent a picture instead of words. A total nipple shot. She was out of her mind. He unzipped, lowered his jeans and jockeys, took a picture . . . but then he didn’t send it. Instead, he texted, luv u crazy got 2 go. Then he deleted the shot he’d taken and he spent a few minutes staring at the one she’d sent.
It was like she was more than one person. She was the Courtney everyone saw in school: the Bible study Courtney, the prayer-circle Courtney, the frien
dly bubbly Courtney with a smile on her face and a happy greeting for everyone she knew. But she was also the Courtney who knew of an overgrown driveway on Surface Road that led into the woods to an abandoned house and who parked her car there and turned to him and said, “You are the hottest guy at school,” and when he kissed her, she kissed him back. And when he touched her, she touched him back. And she slid her hands across his bare chest and teased the flesh at the top of his jeans.
She’d said to him at the very first before they’d done anything, “Are you and Becca King over? I’m asking ’cause no way do I invade some other girl’s turf, but if you’re over, I’d like a chance.”
Stupidly, he’d said, “A chance for what?”
She’d smiled and said, “A chance with you.”
He’d opened his mouth to reply, but nothing had come out. Courtney Baker? A chance? Him? All he could manage was “Why?”
“Because you’re special and you totally don’t know it. I’d sort of like to kiss you, if that’s okay.”
Had it been okay? He didn’t remember. She wasn’t like anyone he’d ever known.
So, dude, why not go tonight? he asked himself. Spend an hour reading the Old Testament or whatever, and then . . . then . . . What the hell was he avoiding? When the hell had he become so lame?
That was the question of the hour, he thought sourly. He had a feeling the answer was that insufferable know-it-all called Becca King.
THIRTEEN
It didn’t take long for Becca to figure out that handing over those letters to Derric had been a very dumb idea. If she’d thought she was going to remind him of his roots in Uganda—of who he really was, she’d told herself—she’d been wildly wrong. She did accomplish something, though. Where before he’d been coolly polite to her, now she didn’t exist for him.