“I wanted to say—I wanted to ask about your bag,” Eli says. “It looks a little wet. I can get you a towel or something if you need to dry it off.”
I shake my head, say no without words, because I can’t talk just now.
I don’t know what to think about the fact that he even noticed my bag was wet. No one … it’s been a long time since someone looked at me and saw me.
I wish—
Luckily, before I can finish that dangerous thought, a nurse buzzes us in, and we walk to Tess’s room.
Once I’ve done that and settled into my usual seat, I feel better. Less thrown by his comment. By him noticing me, even if it was only my bag.
I look at Tess and touch her shoulder, wait for her chest to rise and fall.
It’s such a tiny movement, but it’s the biggest one she makes. The one that keeps us all coming here. Keeps us all waiting.
“I brought someone to see you,” I tell her, and then look at Eli.
He sits down across from me, and I think she’s caught him, that he’s trapped by her beauty like everyone else is, but then he starts tapping the fingers of one hand against the chair and looks at me like he’s waiting for something.
“He’s shy,” I tell Tess, and then look at him again, widening my eyes so he knows he’s supposed to be talking now. “But you heard him the other day, remember? The guy with the voice?”
Eli clears his throat and says, “Hey.”
I look at Tess’s face. Nothing.
“Can you say something else?” I say.
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Whatever you tell girls when you meet them.” I don’t know what else to do. Tess talks to guys. I don’t. They don’t even notice me.
I turn back to Tess and watch her face as he starts to talk.
“Um. I’m Eli,” he says. “I go to Saint Andrew’s. I’m a junior, and I—”
“A junior?” I say, and look at him again. His fingers are still tapping against the chair. “There’s no way you’re a junior.”
“I am.”
Oh, crap. I was sure he was a senior, eighteen and getting ready for college. “You don’t look like any of the guys in my school. How old are you?” Maybe he got held back a year or something. Anything.
“Seventeen.”
Double crap. “Okay, but you’ll be eighteen soon, right?”
“Well, if nine months counts as soon.”
I widen my eyes again and then glance at Tess. “Soon, right?”
“Oh. Right,” he says.
“You can tell him all about college,” I tell Tess. “How to survive his freshman year and all that. And you’re really only halfway through your sophomore year, and twenty isn’t that much older than eighteen. Plus he’s thinking about majoring in English, just like you. If you wake up, the two of you can try to convince me that Shakespeare is interesting, never mind that you can’t understand anything the people in his plays say.”
“I’m not going to major in English. And I don’t get what’s so great about Shake—”
I clear my throat then, to get him to stop, and look at him.
He’s not even looking at Tess. He’s looking at me like I’m some sort of puzzle he can’t figure out. Maybe he’s overwhelmed by Tess or thinks I’m weird. Or both.
“He’s kidding,” I tell Tess. “You know how guys are. Remember when you were Juliet during junior year and the understudy put laxatives in Bill Waford’s lunch so he’d be the one who’d get to kiss you? And then Bill begged to have the play’s run extended so—”
“Did that really happen?” Eli says. He’s still tapping his fingers, but now against his arms. It’s like he’s playing the piano on his skin or something.
I nod. “Just about every guy in school tried out for Romeo as soon as they found out Tess was auditioning for Juliet.”
“What if she hadn’t gotten the part?”
“See, now you have to wake up,” I tell Tess. “Show him how there’s no way anyone else could have gotten it. You were the only one who could ever play a girl people would die for.”
“Were you in the play?”
“Huh?” I say, startled.
“The play. Were you in it?”
“Who’d want to see me onstage?” I say. “Plus, because everyone knew Tess was going to try out, they didn’t even open the auditions to freshmen.”
“So you’re a junior now, like me?”
“Yeah,” I say, surprised he’s figured out what grade I’m in. “But you’re clearly way more ready for college and stuff than me.”
Eli glances down at his hands, which are still moving, and then blushes.
He even makes embarrassed look good. He doesn’t turn bright red or anything, but two spots of color appear right below his cheekbones, making them appear more prominent. Making him look vulnerable, and almost accessible to someone like me.
And he sees me looking. I can tell because he stills for a moment, staring right at me. Damn, damn, damn.
I turn back to Tess, watching her still face.
“Say something else, please,” I tell him, because I don’t know what else to say, and I don’t want to think about him catching me looking at him.
“Like what?”
“Talk to her like you would if I wasn’t here,” I say. “Just pretend I’m part of the wall or something.” If he acts like I’m invisible, I will be, and then things will be normal again.
He’s silent for a moment, and then he says, “I don’t know how I’m supposed to pretend your sister is part of the wall, Tess. She’s very … she’s like a dragon, sort of.”
That hurts. But I asked him to act like I wasn’t there, didn’t I? And got called a big scaly fire-breathing monster. Fabulous.
“See?” I tell Tess, and make sure to keep my voice light. “He clearly needs to be protected from me. So wake up, okay?”
Nothing. I pull my knees up to my chest, curling into the chair, and fiddle with the laces on my sneakers.
“Sorry,” Eli says.
“Oh, she’s just flirting,” I say, and force myself to uncurl, to sound unconcerned, but what more does she need? “You’ll see when you get to know her. The summer before she went to college, she was working over here, in Organic Gourmet, and guys from Milford would actually ride the ferry over to Ferrisville just to try and get her to talk to them.”
Well, one guy. Jack.
“You don’t like Organic Gourmet?”
“What do you mean?”
“You made a face when you said it,” he says.
I shrug. “That’s what us dragons do.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“It’s okay,” I tell him. “I know what I look like. What I … what I am.” As soon as I’ve said it, I look at Tess again, but she’s still unmoving. Still silent.
Still not fully here.
“We should go now,” I say, and get up. I force myself to say good-bye to Tess, to not act like how he’s gotten me to admit what I am—and how I did it in front of her—has rattled me.
I force myself not to look at him.
Outside her room, I walk out of the unit and head for the elevators. I don’t look at him when I say, “Same time tomorrow?”
I expect him to say he doesn’t think it’s working, that having me sitting there is annoying or weird or both, but he just says, “Okay.”
I don’t look back when I leave, and I don’t think about him on the way home.
I think about what happened the summer before Tess went to college, when she was eighteen and I was fifteen, instead.
I think about Jack.
fourteen
Tess met Jack first.
She’d gotten a scholarship to college of course, not because of her grades but because she “exemplified leadership potential.” She got a summer job over in Milford, as a checkout clerk for all the overpriced food at the Organic Gourmet market. (Milford doesn’t have things like supermarkets, you see. Just “markets” and “boutiques.
” Ugh.)
My parents didn’t understand—didn’t she want to see her friends, didn’t she want to have fun, didn’t she know college was taken care of?—but she said she wanted to work. She said she was going to save money for books and other things her scholarship didn’t cover.
To be honest, I think she got a job because Claire lived so close to us and because Claire had stopped hiding in her house. Instead, she was starting to walk around her yard, walk around town, showing off Cole and smiling like she’d glimpsed something amazing no one else ever had. I think that was when Tess realized Claire was never going to issue whatever sort of apology Tess was waiting for.
So Tess went to work, and Jack came into Organic Gourmet on Wednesday, June 30th.
I sometimes wonder if I’ll always remember that date, and how I felt when I looked up from the book I was reading on the front porch when I heard Tess turn onto our street and saw him walking behind her, shoulders hunched like he was nervous.
And he was. I could tell as soon as I saw him. Jack was cute; tall with sandy hair and wire-rimmed glasses that he was forever shoving up his nose. He had freckles on his cheeks, a broad, quick scattering, and on that first night, as he stood talking to Tess by the steps, I could see the pale underside of his arms sticking out from the T-shirt he wore.
His arms weren’t stick-thin or anything, just pale, but the sight of that skin … it looked vulnerable, somehow. And that got to me.
He got to me.
He looked nervous. He looked like he needed a hug. And I wanted to be the one to hug him. When I looked at him, he looked like how I felt, unsure but eager, ready to fall in love.
The problem was, of course, that his look was aimed at Tess and not me.
Tess was too nice—and too used to adoration—to blow him off, so she let him follow her home. Let him talk to her. And so she—and me, because I would sit on the porch and listen to them talk—learned he was going to college to study biology. He wanted to be a doctor, wanted to join a volunteer organization and work overseas. He wanted to help people who wouldn’t be helped otherwise. He wanted to be someone.
He never said that he wanted to matter, of course, but I understood how he felt when he talked to Tess about his plans. I didn’t want to save the world or anything like that, but I wanted to live and work somewhere where people noticed me. Where I wasn’t only “Tess’s sister.” Where I wasn’t a smaller, uglier version of perfection. Where I was just me.
Jack was glad to be done with Saint Andrew’s, because he wanted to go to a school where he didn’t know everyone, and he hadn’t had a girlfriend since the girl he’d been seeing on and off for a few years dumped him right after her school’s final formal (Milford schools never had proms, only formals) and then went off to backpack around Europe until she left for college.
Tess never knew any of that stuff. But I did. I asked questions, and he answered them.
That came later, though. First, I had to see him with Tess. I’d wait and watch him walk her home every night, watch him listening to her talk until she’d smile and wave and walk away in this way only she had, a way that left him and everyone smiling and glad to be seen by her. A way that somehow made sure they never noticed that she’d left them.
After about a week of this, though, she’d told him good night and gone inside and he’d stood at the end of our little driveway, shoulders slumped again, like he’d finally understood what her smiles and waves really meant. That they were nothing.
His shorts were a little too big for him, and hung down a little past his knees. The skin under his arms, from his wrists up to the wide-open sleeves of his T-shirt, glowed pale in the moonlight, and when he turned to walk to the ferry I knew he wasn’t coming back.
I don’t know how I knew—maybe the slump of his shoulders matched how I felt, invisible—but I did. I slipped away from the house and caught up to him.
“I’m Tess’s sister,” I told him. “Abby.”
“I know,” he said. “She’s told me about you. I don’t think you look like an elf, though.”
“An elf?” Tess was always describing me that way, and I think, in her mind, she was being kind. But did I really look like a magical creature? Of course not. However, since I was short, and had my grandmother’s unusually colored eyes—well, describing me as “elf-like,” was, for Tess, pretty nice. She always liked the idea of magical things. Of pretend.
“No, that’s not what she said,” he said. “I mean, she said—”
“It’s okay,” I said. “She thinks she’s being nice when she says it. And I bet she told you that you look like an elf too.”
He grinned at me even as his shoulder slumped a little more. “She doesn’t date elves, right?”
“She doesn’t really date,” I said. “She’s—I think she has this perfect guy in mind or something, and he’s not—well, who’s perfect?”
“She’s just so … it’s like there’s something secret about her,” he said. “Something sad, I think.”
Tess was about as sad as any extremely popular and beautiful girl could be, which was, of course, not very, but I didn’t say that. I liked that he thought there was depth to Tess.
I thought if he could imagine it in her, he would see it was truly in me.
“I can help you with her,” I said. “Like I said, I know the kind of guy she’s looking for. Do you like poetry?”
He shook his head.
“Well,” I said. “You do now.”
That first night we talked for an hour, until the last call for the ferry came, the lone whistle from the dock echoing into the night.
Granted, all we’d talked about was Tess, but I’d talked to him, and I floated home, happier than I’d ever been.
I had no luck with guys. Not that there were any in Ferrisville to even want luck with. Oh, there were a few who were cute, but I knew all their fathers and brothers and cousins, and I knew what happened to guys in Ferrisville. They grew up and got a job in the plant. They grew up and grew bellies and lost their hair and sat around scratching their stomachs on the beach in the summer, slowly turning red in the sun.
I wanted more than that.
As for friends, back then I had those. Everyone in school said hello and invited me to their parties and all that stuff. But I had nothing in common with them, and most of my “friends” just wanted to be near Tess, wanted her to notice them and invite them into her world. There were a few that maybe did like me, but they weren’t like me.
I wanted to get out of Ferrisville, and they didn’t. They might go off to the community college, or even the state college an hour away, but they would come back. No one in their families had ever left town for good, so why would they? People came to Ferrisville and stayed. It might be small, and life might be slow-paced and small too, but nobody but me seemed to mind that.
“Stuck-up,” my so-called “friends” said about me when I stopped talking to them that summer. I guess they thought I believed I was too good to talk to them, that I thought I was going to somehow become Tess.
I didn’t think I was too good for them, and I knew I wasn’t going to be Tess. I didn’t want to be. I just wanted a world that was me and Jack and nothing more. I wanted him to be mine and, for a while, I thought he could.
And then, after it was over, I didn’t want to go crawling back to my “friends.” I didn’t want to ask for forgiveness, didn’t want to beg to be let back into something I didn’t really want any part of. I didn’t want to live in Milford, but I didn’t want to live in Ferrisville either. I didn’t want to hear about boys or clothes or parties or anything. I just wanted to be left alone. And so I was.
And so I am.
But that’s now, and I still had to get to that point.
I still had to break my own heart.
In the end, it was easy. Jack kept talking to Tess, kept walking her home. He was volunteering to collect water samples from the Ferrisville side of the river as part of some project the state was doing to see if
the water was less full of chemicals than it had been. And I kept talking to him.
He tried to talk to Tess about poetry, and I talked to him about biology, about the latest medical trends, about countries that needed doctors. He asked Tess out to dinner, and when she said no I made him sandwiches that we’d split as we sat in the dark on the beach, talking.
We talked about Tess less after a while, and talked more about him. About me. He was—and will always be—the only guy I ever told the truth about how I sometimes felt when Tess was with me. About how I hated being her shadow.
“You shouldn’t think like that,” he said to me one night. We were down on the beach, like always, and he pushed his glasses up his nose and turned to look at me, moonlight gilding his hair to a shade that was a richer blond than Tess’s could ever be.
“You’re not like Tess at all, so why compare yourself? She’s beautiful on the outside, but you—you have the …” He cleared his throat. “You have the most beautiful soul. I know that sounds stupid, but it’s true. Any guy would be lucky to be with you.”
How could I not kiss him after he said that?
So I did, and he kissed me back. He dropped the rest of his sandwich, and when we separated he stared at me like he’d never seen me before.
“Abby,” he said, and the ferry whistle blew.
“I see what Tess doesn’t,” I said. “I see you, Jack. And I think you’re amazing. Meet me here tomorrow night. Just—just you and me.”
“Amazing?” he said. “Me?” He sounded so surprised I had to kiss him again.
And the next night, he took the ferry over earlier, and I slipped out of the house after dinner and met him down on the beach.
My parents didn’t ask where I was going or what I was doing. They never worried about me. Tess was the one who got phone calls all the time, who had guys get into fights over her—including a memorable one during my parents’ company picnic—and who used to come home way past her curfew, mutely shaking her head when my parents demanded to know where she’d been.
The parties had stopped when she’d quit hanging out with Claire, replaced with her telling us over and over that she had to get into a good school and always followed by long, frequent bouts of sitting in silence in her room. But the guys still called, and people still wanted to see her. My father would sometimes joke that it felt like we were all part of “Tess’s Messenger Service.”