I nod my head.
“And?”
“It’s good. I think we’re both going to try harder,” I say. “Sophie, I still haven’t called Mom and I can’t make any promises, but maybe. Maybe. I know that as your big brother I’m a miserable fuck-up and my only excuse is that I’m still working things out.”
“Well, Cole… When we screw up on the court, our volleyball coach always tells us that as long as we’re still breathing, we’re still trying. And then he usually tells us to get over ourselves.”
I laugh. “That’s not bad advice.”
“His other little tidbit of shared wisdom is to punch every day in the face.” She shrugs. “I actually find that one a little more helpful.”
What can I say? The kid is cool.
***
I tell myself that I’m not going to text her again. Then failing to take my own advice, I text her.
Who cares? It’s not like she’s going to respond.
One night I send her a picture of the sky after practice. More fake book titles.
It’s okay because she never gets back to me.
Until she does.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Cole
I’m in bed reading when my phone chirps. I expect it to be a text from Sophie. Or maybe it’s one from Adam, detailing the myriad of ways that I’m a pussy for staying in on a Thursday night.
When I see her name, my entire world stops spinning.
What’s it about?
At first I’m confused. What’s what about? Then I realize that she means the book title that I sent her earlier—Angels and Demos. It only takes me a half a minute to come up with something.
It’s a buddy comedy about a group of infielders from a California baseball team as they follow their passion to make it big in the music business.
My fingers itch as I type out a second text.
You’re it.
A minute passes. Two. It feels like a million fucking years. Three minutes. Weeds grow over my feet. The polar ice caps melt a few dozen inches. Four minutes. My internal organs petrify.
My phone makes a sound and just like that, the world is back in motion.
Aimee
“That was a titillating lecture, don’t you agree?” Jodi rolls her eyes.
“Dr. Hillard blew my mind like usual.” I bring three fingers to my temples and rub vigorously. “After an hour of that, I think I need a caffeine boost.”
“Me too. I actually want it to be pumped into my bloodstream intravenously.” She fishes around the front pocket of her bag for her sunglasses. Slipping them over her nose to shield her eyes from the sunshine, she turns to look at me. “The Union?”
I nod once. “Union.”
“Hey, I meant to tell you something,” she says as we move down the sidewalk, dodging a couple of guys. One of them looks a little like Cole and I let my eyes linger on his blond hair and the straight line of his jaw.
“What?” It’s amazing how a few months ago, when I wasn’t looking for him, he was everywhere, and now I haven’t seen him in weeks. Maybe it’s the universe trying to tell me something.
“I saw Cole last night.”
The sound of his name spoken out loud makes my heart do a somersault. I stop walking and spin around so that I can look at her. “You did?”
“Yep. Kyle and I were having dinner at that outdoor cafe on Southbay. They’ve got a fantastic mango tofu wrap that’s the perfect balance of sweet and salty. Another plus is that you can get onion rings as a side instead of your standard fries. You know that I seriously love onion rings.”
“Jodi,” I say impatiently. “I’m figuratively tapping my foot over here.”
“Okay, okay.” She squishes up her mouth and pushes a loose curl back behind her ear. “There honestly isn’t much to tell, which is probably why I didn’t mention it first thing. I only saw him from a distance walking to his truck and all I can tell you is that he looked good.”
Of course he looked good. He always looks good. “Was he alone?”
Jodi drops her head so that I can see her eyes over the sunglasses. “Yep. No shirt on so I think he must have been finishing up at the gym. Either that or he was modeling for a calendar.”
I start to speak but change my mind and let Jodi babble the rest of the way to the Union. She fills the silence with a complete rehash of the compulsory sorority meeting that she attended two nights ago. I nod and grunt a little but, really, my brain is five minutes back, stuck in the tar pit that is Cole Everly, bare-chested and sweaty after a workout.
Once we’ve gotten our coffees, Jodi clears her throat and says, “I want you to tell me again.”
“Tell you what again?”
“Go over it again.” She rolls her hand in the air. “The texts, the photos that he’s been sending… all of it.”
I reach for a wooden stirrer from the opposite end of the counter. “Why? It doesn’t mean anything.”
Before Jodi puts the lid on her coffee, she dips her finger in and brings it to her mouth to test whether or not she needs to add more sugar. “Do you want it to mean something, Aimee?”
Do I want it to mean something? I take a few seconds to answer. “I don’t know. Does it matter?”
She shoots me a knowing look. After that night, I told Jodi everything. And I mean everything—about Jillian, the accident, and Cole’s mother. She needed to hear something so I gave her the truth. And the whole time that I cried and let her hold my hand, I was thinking about that time that I woke up and Cole was looking at me with sad, shiny eyes. Didn’t you have anyone else after Jillian died?
“Ah.” She tips her chin. “We’re back to this again.”
“Jodi, he’s probably already met someone else by now. Guys like that… they don’t just wait around.”
“He didn’t sleep with that Kate bitch, and I don’t think he’s interested in anyone else.”
“How would you know?” I shake my head. “It’s been weeks.”
“Weeks, months! It doesn’t matter. He told you that he loved you.”
“Not exactly. He asked me what I would say if he told me that he loved me.”
I can see that she’s a little disappointed with my response. “Now you’re just being obtuse.”
“I’m not being obtuse. I just…”
Jodi doesn’t let me finish. She’s moving her head and her hands in ten different directions. “You can lie to yourself all you want, but I know the truth. I see it. Cole loves you and you love him.” Her voice holds a certainty. “When you two look at each other your eyes turn into little sparkly red hearts.”
“Jodi,” I say. “That’s not…”
“You’re overthinking it. You’re so busy worrying about what might go wrong that you’re not giving it the opportunity to go right.”
“No, I’m just…” I shake my head. “I think that I’ve lost my chance with him.”
“Aimee, love is a choice, not a chance.”
It takes me a minute to place my own words, the ones that I said to her after she met Kyle, when I was explaining why I didn’t believe in insta-love.
“Oh.” What else can I say?
She takes a sip of her coffee and touches my arm. “Now you get it.”
***
“Hmmm… Have you thought very much about trust, Aimee?”
Have I thought about trust? Even for a therapist, I think it’s an odd question.
I stare at Dr. Bernstein, sitting across from me in a chair covered in an ugly off-white fabric. She looks like a therapist. Glasses, hair pulled back from her face, the whole bit. And she makes a lot of hmmm sounds from deep in her chest. It’s very doctor-ish and soothing.
“Trust,” she says again, encouraging me with her eyes. Beyond her, the room falls away to a bright picture window that’s full of sky.
“What do you mean?”
She uncrosses her legs and leans forward so that she’s angled over the armrest. “When your parents came to the session last week, do yo
u remember how we talked about trust? About it being a two-way street?”
Yes. Among a lot of things, she’d said that they needed to practice trusting me and that I needed to do the same for them.
I nod my head, trying to keep my thoughts straight.
“There’s a certain level of trust between friends, isn’t there?”
Friends? All of a sudden, I’m nervous. Something is seriously wrong here.
“And,” she goes on. “I wonder if you’ve ever given any thought to the trust that Jillian broke the night of the accident?”
Jillian… I think my brain is snapping in two. Breaking. “What do you mean?” I can barely hear my own voice. I’m shivering, shaking. I draw an image out of my mind: Jillian and me standing against the railing of a bridge, our fingers entwined, the wind whirling our hair up around our faces. I think we were fifteen.
I will if you will…
“She didn’t tell you that she’d been using pills.” Her eyes are heavy and every word out of her mouth is a prick against my sensitive skin. “She told you that she was fine to drive, but that wasn’t true, was it?”
Do you hear that sound? It’s the sound of the world ripping apart.
“That’s not… that’s—she wasn’t…”
“Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not telling you what to feel, Aimee. I’m just giving you the tools to help you work through this and I think this is something that you should at least consider.”
I can’t think of how to respond to that. I have so many words inside of me and no idea how to say them so I keep my mouth clamped in a straight line and I rub my hands over my trembling arms. God, it’s cold in here.
“One… Two… Three…”
After an eternity, Dr. Bernstein nods at the clock and closes the notebook on her lap. “Forgiveness isn’t simple,” she says like I don’t already know that. “There’s always a possibility that you aren’t the only one who needs it.”
Cole
It happens the way it began—with her bumping into me on a sunny day.
Later I’ll be able to wonder about all the ways that we might have missed each other. I’ll think about how the guy in the car in front of me could have made that light a mile back, or what would have happened if I’d decided to skip the Starbucks run before I stopped for gas.
But, in this moment, I’m not thinking about stars aligning or fate. Nope. I’m annoyed because the pay-at-the-pump machine isn’t reading the magnetic strip on my debit card. Again.
“Fuck,” I grumble, wiping the debit card against my leg and running it through the machine a third time. Card Error.
I start across the lot of the gas station, tucking the debit card in the fold of my wallet and the wallet in my back pocket. As I reach the swinging glass door, I see the girl coming. Her dark hair is pulled into a messy bun. She’s got a lopsided walk, her back is to the outside world, and she’s pushing against the glass with her bony hip. I just don’t realize who the girl is until after she’s caught her foot on the grated metal threshold and her bottle of orange juice is dripping down the front of my shirt.
“Agh!”
“Oh my God!”
“Sh—” That first split-second of recognition hits me hard. It feels like an earthquake is trapped inside my body. My skin rumbles with the impact.
Power lines go down.
Trees are uprooted.
Homes are destroyed.
Cities are leveled.
Her hands fly to my chest right before her eyes find my face. “Oh my God.” Wait for it. “I’m so s—”
There. I watch the words evaporate right off the tip of her tongue. She goes white and then pink like a human mood ring. Her mouth flaps open and her black eyelashes flutter against her cheeks.
“Hi Aimee.”
Her eyes dart between my face and my orange-juice-soaked shirt. She pulls away and covers her face with her hands. “I am so sorry. I am such a klutz,” she whispers, peeking at me through her fingers.
I gingerly pull the sticky fabric away from my chest. “It could have been hot coffee. Just tell yourself that.”
“I can’t believe—” She falters, shakes her head. “I have no idea what to say right now.”
“A simple hello could lead to a million wonderful things.”
That gets her hands off her face, which is nice because I want to look at her. I want to examine all the details that make her up and then compare them to my memories to make sure that I haven’t forgotten anything important. Hair, eyes, shoulders, that freckle on her cheek.
“What are you doing here?” She squeaks.
“Getting gas.” I state the obvious. “You?”
“Same.” I follow the movement of her head to where Mara is leaning over her car. She waves and I wave back. “We’re skipping class today to head home early for the Thanksgiving break. M-Mara wanted a granola bar and I had a craving for orange juice and, well… you can figure out the rest.”
Silence. We’re awkward. This is awkward.
I cough. “Of all the gas stations in all the towns in all the world…” Aimee blinks at me and I know that she has no idea what I’m talking about. “Casablanca,” I offer up.
Aimee shakes her head. “I haven’t seen it.”
“Well you could knock me sideways. I’m shocked.”
She laughs and as it fades, it turns into a smile. A real smile. It’s the one that I remember. So beautiful that it puts the sun to shame. I tell her this and she smiles and blushes some more.
“So, um, are you going home for Thanksgiving?” She asks eventually.
I lean back on my heels and squint my eyes against the sun hanging at the top of the sky. “Nah. It’s too far for such a short trip. I have to be on campus by Saturday morning for track team stuff.” I take a shallow breath. “So, how are things with your family?”
“Oh, good actually. We’ve been talking and clearing up a lot of the misunderstandings, and I think things are better.”
“Good.”
“Well, it was, you know…” She waggles her shoulders and gets a look on her face. “… nice to see you.”
“Yeah, of course,” I say, mimicking the look and scratching the back of my neck.
Silence.
She points to her sister. “I should go.”
“Me too.” I step to the right the same time that she steps to the left and we end up smacking into each other.
“You first,” I say, moving out of the way and grabbing the handle of the glass door to keep myself from touching her again.
“Thanks,” she breathes. “Um, bye, Cole.”
If she looks back, I’ll say something. If she doesn’t, I’ll let it go.
I wait.
I wait some more.
She looks back.
Just once, right before she gets to Mara’s car. It’s a small swing of the eyes over her shoulder—so quick that if I weren’t already looking for it, I would miss it.
Still counts.
“Hey, Aimee!” I shout.
She turns fully, wipes a hand across her beautiful face.
I’d like to say something profound or great, but if those words are inside my head I can’t find them. All I can come up with is this: “I’m finally reading the Harry Potter books.”
“You are?” I can tell that she’s genuinely surprised. “Why?”
I move my head to the side like why-do-you-think.
“Which book are you on?”
“Three.”
Her eyebrows go up even further and a fragile smile tips the corner of her mouth. “I think that’s my favorite one. Do you like them so far?”
I spread my hands. “I’m not a douchebag, am I?”
She looks at me and it’s not so much the fact that she’s looking at me—it’s the way that she’s looking. Hope stirs in my chest. And when she breaks into laughter, it grows wings and takes off into the sky.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Aimee
“Where are you off to?
”
I crane my neck over my shoulder. My dad, home early from work, is coming down the stairs cradling a magazine under one arm and a kayak paddle under the other. I don’t ask.
He pauses on the fourth step. “Aimee?”
“I’m actually going down to the pool for a swim.” I finger the strap of the black bathing suit peeking out from under my tank. “It kinda feels like time.”
He flinches in surprise at the words pool and swim, but just barely. He takes the next stair as he works out what to say. “That’s… that’s tremendous, Aimee.”
Tremendous? Who says words like tremendous? “Yeah, um…” I stand and stretch my legs, pressing my slick palms into my thighs. “Try not to make a big deal, okay? I didn’t mention it to Mom.”
Dad smiles. It’s the conspiratorial, it’s-us-against-them smile that he used to use with me. “Of course. No big deal. No deal at all.” He wipes his hands in front of his body to emphasize that he gets it. “Do you want a ride, sweet pea?”
“No, that’s okay. I’m going to take my bike because I actually have a couple of stops to make first.”
The smile slips a bit. “Oh, alright.”
“But hey,” I say, heading toward the garage. “Would you mind checking the air in my tires for me?”
Dad makes me wait while he fiddles with my bike for a few minutes and I feel twelve again. Then he follows me down the driveway and once we’ve reached the end, he hugs me for a long time. We don’t use actual words but it feels strangely like a conversation. As I peddle away, I decide that it’s not perfect but at least it’s a start.
My first stop isn’t far so I don’t have much time to get psyched up. I tell myself that it’s like swimming in a race. You don’t think, you just do.
Don’t think, just do. The words move inside of me like fast water, propelling me down the road, around the curve. Panting, pushing, I drop the bike at the crest of the hard-packed shell walkway, take the familiar front steps two at a time, and ring the bell before I can stop myself. Don’t think, just do.