“Smile, Colten!” Al the manager said as he policed the dining room. He’d recently come up with a truly sickening slogan, “Smiles sell steaks,” which made me want to dump a tub of ranch dressing over his head. I turned my back to him, so he couldn’t see whether I was smiling or not, and dragged a wet rag over a table.
What did I have to smile about? I was trapped in a bad situation with Syd, and my back and legs ached as if I were seventy instead of seventeen. When I got home tonight, my parents and brother would circle one another like Rottweilers in the local park, testing to see who would be the first to give ground. And worst of all, Julia was dead.
Julia had no patience with me when I got into a mood like this. “Don’t sulk,” she’d say, jabbing me in the ribs. “I’m the one who gets to be temperamental. I’m the spoiled rich one, remember?” If she couldn’t make me laugh, she’d bait me until I flared up at her. She liked to set me off because, she said, it was so hard to do. “I love a challenge. Honestly, Colt, you have to be the calmest person alive.” I swear if she could talk to me right now, she’d say something like, “Hey, stop acting like you’re the one who’s suffering. I’m the one who got killed, remember?”
When I got home with my head still full of Julia, a message was waiting for me: Syd had called. I didn’t call her right back. I opened the notebook instead.
Dear C.M.,
I want to break up with Austin, but we’ve got this wedding coming up at the end of December, a friend of both of our families. It would be awkward to break up before that. I know that sounds like a lame excuse, and maybe it is. But my life is so wrapped up with Austin’s. Our families know each other. We’re always seeing each other at picnics and dances and the country club. We’re in the same group of friends. It’s hard to get away from him. Well, I don’t expect you to understand.
I’m so confused. I think I like you more than Austin, but you’re so different, your life is so different. And it’s not easy to break up with someone you’ve known for such a long time.
Saturday night, I was on my bed with Syd, half our clothes off. She had come over, and again I’d let things go way too far. We hadn’t had sex yet, but I got the feeling she wouldn’t stop me if I tried. “I don’t know what I’d do without you,” she whispered.
“You’d survive just fine,” I told her.
She gave a sort of shocked laugh and slapped my arm. “Colt! I mean it. You’re the best thing in my life right now.”
That did it. Tom was right; I wasn’t doing her any good. I sat up and said, “No, I’m not.”
“Yes, you—”
“Syd, look. I never should’ve started with you, because—” I choked on the words. I didn’t want to hurt her, I really didn’t. “I want to go back to being friends, the way we were before.”
She sat up, too, her eyes wide. She wore a front-hook bra, which I had opened, but now she pulled it together in the middle. “Why?”
“It’s the way I’ve felt all along. I just didn’t have the nerve to tell you. Because of your parents . . .”
“So, what, you feel sorry for me? Screw that.” She hooked her bra and yanked her shirt over her head. “Don’t do me any favors.”
“I know. I should’ve—well, I’m sorry.”
“Where are my shoes?” She paced the floor, hunting for them. She picked up my shirt and threw it at me. I stayed on the bed, watching her, trying to find the right words so she would calm down and not hate me.
She knelt to peer under the bed. Then she looked up at me and said, “We’re good together. Why do you want to wreck everything?”
I licked my lips, trying to figure out how much to tell her. “The truth is—there’s somebody else.”
“What?”
I didn’t want to say it again.
“You’ve been seeing somebody behind my back?” she said.
“No. I mean there was somebody before you, and I’m not over it yet.” I thought: She’s dead, but we won’t go into that.
“Jackie? You’re still hung up on Jackie?”
“No, not Jackie.”
She knelt there, staring at me. I noticed then that her T-shirt was on backward, the tag poking out of the neck hole. “You haven’t had a girl since Jackie. How could you fall in love with someone and not tell me?”
“I didn’t tell anybody.” I reached over to touch the tag, to let her know her shirt was backward, but she jerked away.
“Who is it?” she asked.
“I can’t tell you. Anyway, it’s over now.”
“You’re unbelievable.” She dragged a shoe out from beneath the bed. “You’re such a liar! You made me think you loved me.”
“I never said that.”
“No, you just acted like it and let me believe it.”
“I’m screwed up right now.”
“You sure are.” Her eyes brimmed over. “I don’t want to see you, or talk to you, ever again.” She found her other shoe and jammed her foot into it. Her jacket was stuck between the end of my mattress and the footboard. She wrenched at it, and I got up to help her.
I pulled the jacket free. “I know you’re mad right now, but—”
“Go to hell.” She grabbed the jacket and slammed out of my room. I flopped down on the bed and stuck the pillow over my head. I had done what I needed to do, but it didn’t make things any better.
I had another dream about Julia that night. She came into Barney’s with Austin when I was working, and I had to set a table for them and pretend I didn’t know her. I tried to catch her eye, but she kept looking at Austin.
Then the scene switched, the way it does in dreams, and I was alone in the tree house with Julia. “I heard you’re seeing somebody else now,” she said.
“I was, but I had to break up with her.”
“Because of me?”
“Partly, yes.”
She smiled. Then her smile faded and she said, “I don’t feel right. I think there’s something wrong. . . .” She lifted her hand, and it was full of blood. Blood pooled in the palm of her hand and dripped all over the floor of the tree house, but I couldn’t see where it was coming from.
“What happened?” I said. I grabbed her other hand, but that was bloody, too.
“I think it’s from the accident,” she said, frowning.
“What accident?”
“The car accident. It was very bad. Didn’t you hear about it?”
I woke up then.
chapter 11
On Sunday Tom went back to school and I went walking down by the river, alone. When I got to the bridge, I crossed under it to the south side. The bank was rockier here; boulders jutted into the water.
I passed some small ripples that barely counted as rapids. The Willis River was no whitewater paradise. I looked around, remembering that Kirby had said that she came here sometimes, but I didn’t see her today. Or anyone else.
I sat on a log and watched the water. I had seen the river just about every way you could. Chocolate-colored after floods, green and still in August, boiling during storms, hard-skinned in January. Today it ran blue and serious, a real winter river.
I knew that if I stuck my hand in, the water would burn and sting and turn my skin red. When we were little, Nick and Paul and I would dare each other. We’d grit our teeth and plunge our hands in, count to three, pull them out and howl. Then we’d stick them in our armpits, to ward off frostbite.
I had to laugh, remembering that. And still I felt the smallest itch to do it again today, to walk up to that water and let it sear my hand, shock me all the way through.
When Nick picked me up for school that week, I had the whole backseat to myself, since Syd and Fred weren’t there. “The lovebirds want to be alone,” Paul smirked.
“What lovebirds?”
“Syd and Fred.”
“Syd and Fred?” I asked, not sure I’d heard right.
“Yeah, he’s been slobbering over her for two months,” Nick said.
Paul laughed. “You shouldn’t have let her go, Colt, because he snagged her like that.” He snapped his fingers.
“I don’t own her,” I said. “She can go out with anybody she wants.”
“That’s the truth.” They kept laughing.
I had a hard time believing that Syd liked Fred, especially this soon. But it was none of my business. I’d messed up things enough with her as it was.
Tom called that week, while I lay on my bed recovering from a shift at Barney’s and thinking up excuses not to start studying for finals. “Hey, could you send me my walking stick?” he asked.
“Your what?”
“You know, Grandpa’s old walking stick. I think it’s in my closet somewhere. A friend of mine wants to use it in a play.”
“How the hell would I mail it?”
“Well, could you at least look for it? Just let me know if it’s there.”
“All right.”
He sighed. “So, have Mom and Dad come around yet?”
“Oh, you know Mom. She’s okay. I don’t know about Dad. He still won’t mention your name.”
“That’ll change,” he said, but he sounded like he was trying to convince himself.
“It will. Don’t worry about it.”
“Thanks, mate.”
Mate. He must’ve been watching some Australian movie; I could even detect that Down Under accent creeping into his voice. The last time he saw an English movie, he called me “old chap” for three days. My brother loved to experiment—with accents, clothes, hobbies, whatever. No wonder my parents thought being gay was something he might just be trying out for a while.
At work Al made me put up decorations. I don’t know why he picked me, since I was probably the least festive person who worked there. And to make the job even less fun, he hovered, criticizing my wreath-hanging technique. “Don’t just plunk it on the nail like that,” he said. “Try to look happy, can’t you?”
“You mean, show some holiday spirit?” He’d told me approximately forty-five times that afternoon to “show some holiday spirit.”
“Exactly.”
While I wound silver garlands around everything that would hold them, I thought about the Christmas before, and Julia. I was stuck on an entry in her notebook from last December. I had read past it and on into January. But then I’d gone back to it, reading it over and over until now I couldn’t get the words out of my head if I tried.
Dear C.M.,
I love Christmas. I feel like a little kid again. I love all the corny songs and TV shows. I love the lights and decorations, the red and gold and glitter. I’ve always hated it when they tear everything down in January, when everything goes gray and white again. Blech.
Michael and I used to hunt all over the house for our presents. I got so psyched to find them, especially the things I really wanted and wasn’t sure I was going to get. Like this pink stuffed horse one year—don’t ask me why it had to be pink!
I want to get you something, but I don’t know what. Anything we give each other, we’ll have to explain to people. But I’ll come up with an idea.
She’d ended up giving me a book, Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild. It was a good choice. I’d wanted to read it, and she knew that a book was something I could just stick on my shelf without anyone noticing it or asking who had given it to me.
But I hadn’t gotten her anything.
“I didn’t know we were giving presents,” I said, while we huddled in the back of her car, under a blanket she’d brought.
“That’s okay,” she said, in this tone that told me it was definitely not okay.
I didn’t know, I wanted to say again. And I couldn’t even explain why I didn’t know, why it hadn’t occurred to me to get her a gift, why I hadn’t realized she might give me one. I guess I thought of all that as real-world, girlfriend-boyfriend stuff, something she shared with Austin but not with me. For the most part, Julia and I made up the rules of our relationship without talking about them; we both seemed to just know them. Not this time.
I didn’t know how to fix it, either, because anything I got her now would seem forced. “I’m sorry,” I said.
She turned and looked me in the eyes as best she could in the dimness. The streetlight on the bridge gave us no true colors; she was silver and black. I felt the heat of her under the blanket. I wasn’t sure whether the space between us had been warmed by her or me or both of us; I couldn’t tell where the dividing line was.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said, and the thing was, I could tell she meant it. She let it go. Even in her notebook, in the entries after that night, she didn’t mention it. It was something she could’ve held against me but didn’t.
The week before Christmas, this first Christmas without Julia, we got eight inches of snow. I went out and shoveled it off the driveway. The sun was setting as I finished, streaking the sky with purple. The snow muffled everything. All I could hear was the scrape of my shovel. The bushes looked like they’d been dipped in cream frosting. It was so good to be outside that I didn’t even mind the shoveling.
Kirby Matthews came walking down the plowed street. I stopped shoveling when I saw her. Her hair was black and her coat was black, so she stood out against all that white.
“Colt,” she said. “Out playing in the snow?”
“If you want to call it that.” I hefted the shovel.
“Don’t you have a snowblower?”
“My father broke it last winter.” He’d actually rammed it into the side of the house while drunk, but I didn’t feel like sharing that particular family story with her. “What are you doing all the way down here?”
“Walking.” She came to stand near me, out of the road. “I like to walk in the snow.”
“And Michael doesn’t, I guess.”
“Not really.” She wrinkled her nose. “He’d rather be inside. But I’d suffocate if I was in the house all day.”
“Me, too.”
“We watched a whole marathon of movies today—you know, the old black-and-white kind where everyone smokes and they’re all wearing hats, and every time something dramatic happens, the background music goes crazy?”
“Yeah.”
“We love those movies. Michael has half the lines memorized. But after a while, I just had to get outside.”
We stood there looking at each other. Then she said, “Sorry about you and Syd.”
“Oh . . .” I didn’t know what to say about that. “Thanks.”
We got quiet again. For some reason, these silences weren’t awkward. Maybe it was the snow lying everywhere, making stillness seem okay. Then she said, “You going out somewhere?”
“No, why?”
“You’re shoveling out the car.”
“Oh—no, my mother’s working tonight. I told her I’d get the car out for her. But I don’t work until tomorrow.”
“Where?”
“Barney’s Steakhouse.”
“I know that place. . . . My parents took us when we were little. I used to love it.” She laughed. “Does it still have the crayons and the kiddie place mats to draw on?”
“Yeah. Only the kids draw on everything else, too.”
She laughed again. “Well, I’d better get going. It’s getting dark.”
“I could drive you. I’m almost done here.”
“What about your mother?”
“I’ll be back before she has to go.”
“Oh. Well, okay.”
She stood there while I finished. I told her she should go in the house, but she said she wasn’t cold. She liked looking at the world whi
le the snow was still fresh, she said.
Mom was glad to let me warm up the car for her, so I took Kirby home. We didn’t talk on the ride to her house, but again that was okay. I was very aware of her in the seat next to me. I almost thought I could hear her breathing, even over the grinding chug of the engine and the rasping of the tires on the plowed roads.
“Thanks, Colt,” she said as she got out of the car.
“Anytime.” I was sort of wishing it had been a longer drive. Kirby was the first person I’d been with in a while who made me feel relaxed.
chapter 12
Dear C.M.,
I couldn’t see you last Friday because Pam needed to talk to me. She’s my best friend, so I knew you would understand.
Pam’s always telling me I should break up with Austin. She thinks he doesn’t treat me very well, and I guess sometimes he doesn’t. I don’t mean he hits me or anything. But he takes me for granted. He’s not too interested in what’s going on in my head. He likes me to be around, to listen to him, to dance with him. Sometimes Pam and I joke that we could make a Julia doll and send it on dates with him. Austin would never know the difference.
Yeah, right. There were pages of entries like this in Julia’s notebook. And still she’d stayed with Austin.
Tom came home for Christmas, but Dad still wasn’t speaking to him. Once or twice Dad sort of grunted at him, which Tom said was the first crack in the dam. My brother always was an optimist. Mom was better than Dad—she mostly treated Tom normally—but she sometimes got this uncomfortable look on her face, as if my brother had grown a long scaly tail or a second head and she was trying not to stare at it. I dealt with the whole thing by working almost every day over the break.
One night Kirby came into Barney’s with Pam Henderson. I hadn’t seen Pam in months. She’d been away at boarding school, but I guessed she was home for vacation. It took me a minute to recognize her. She’d gotten thin and quiet, and her hair hung down in dull strings. Before, she’d been one of those sickeningly perky girls who never shut up. She and Julia were always giggling over their own private jokes. And now she was the first person I’d seen who showed Julia’s death on her face.