“I can’t help how I look,” he says, like he’s got horns growing out of his head or something.
This is making me nervous. He’s making me nervous. “Okay, I—I think you’re perfect for Tess, and yeah, it’s because of how you look. Or it was, before I realized that you’re nice too. But you—I mean, you know what you look like. You’ve seen a mirror before and everything after all, right?”
“Okay,” he says, shrugging.
“Okay?”
“Yeah,” he says, and then hesitates for a moment. “Are your—are your parents like you too? Do they come visit every day?”
“Yeah,” I say, and finish my soda, pushing the can’s sides in. “They pretty much live here.”
“I haven’t seen my parents since last year,” he says.
“Oh, so you board at Saint Andrew’s?”
“No,” he says. “I live here, in Milford. I just—I haven’t seen them since … it’ll be a year in two weeks and one day. They both travel a lot, and thought I should … they thought sending me to school here would be good.”
“Is it?”
He shrugs. “It’s different. Milford is very …”
“Scenic?”
“Small,” he says. “Milford feels small to me.”
I bet he’s from L.A. or something. “Where did you live before?”
“Connecticut.”
Not what I expected. But then, this whole conversation has been like that, hasn’t it? I toss my soda into the trash can near us. “You miss it?”
“Not really,” he says. “But at least there people didn’t—I get tired of explaining what I am to people here.”
“Well, even in Milford, there aren’t many people as—I mean, you’re like good-looking times a hundred,” I say. “When Tess wakes up, she can help you deal with it.”
He stares at me.
“I mean the fact that I’m not white,” he says. “I get tired of explaining that.”
“Oh. I hadn’t—I mean, I didn’t think …”
“You think people here don’t care?” Eli says. “They care. Everyone’s always, ‘Oh, it’s so great that Saint Andrew’s embraces diversity,’ which means, ‘Oh my God, there’s a non-white boy attending, test scores might slip, and my darling Winthrop might not get into Yale!’”
I laugh because he’s right, that is how people over here talk, and when he looks at me, I say, “No, it’s not—it’s just—that is how they talk. Once in a while the school sends their choir over to sing at the town retirement home, and the guys act like walking through town is so daring. Like, ‘Look at me! I’m in a place where people don’t have numbers after their names!’ I just never thought—I mean, I wouldn’t think you—”
“I know what you think about me,” he says, and for the first time, there’s something sharp in his voice.
I swallow, hard, and wonder why there’s such a look of confusion and longing in his eyes. Must be about how things are for him here. I can understand that, and take a deep breath. “It really sucks that people are assholes to you. How come you don’t tell your parents?”
“My dad grew up here,” he says. “So it’s not like he didn’t know what would happen to me.”
“Wait, your dad grew up in Milford? Do you have relatives here? Wait, of course you do. Why don’t they tell all the assholes to—?”
“It’s … complicated,” he says. “Have you ever known someone who lived in their own little world?”
“Like, an imaginary one?”
“No, just like—I don’t know. The past, basically.”
I shake my head.
“Well, that’s how my family is. They all want things to be like they used to be.”
“I guess I do get that,” I say slowly. “I want Tess to wake up because—I mean, I want her to wake up just because, but I also—it’s like everyone’s life is frozen because Tess is that way.”
“You don’t like the word ‘coma,’ do you?” he says.
“I know she’s in a coma, I know what the doctor says. But you don’t—‘coma’ is this word without hope, this word that means gone, and Tess isn’t gone.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“Yeah, you did.”
He pauses for a moment. “Here’s the thing. I … I’m half Japanese, part black—and this is what counts in Milford—part white,” he says quietly.
“And?”
“And that, just now, was me telling the one person who doesn’t care what I am exactly what I am,” he says. “It’s—you know. You don’t like to say ‘coma.’ I don’t like being divided into little pieces of color. And I … let’s just say I understand what it’s like to be angry. But you … you’re so—”
Horrible. I wait for it, or some word like it.
He swallows.
“Strong,” he says very softly. “I think you’re strong.”
“Strong?” My heart starts to pound, and he nods.
And then he says, “And sad. You’re … I think you’re the saddest person I’ve ever met. It’s like you’re drowning in it.”
I push away from the table and stand up so fast my chair falls over as I rise. I grab it before it hits the ground, then slam it into the table as I grab my bag.
And then I pretty much race out of the cafeteria. I force myself not to run, but I’m moving fast and my eyes are stinging and I’m angry, I tell myself, I’m leaving because I’m angry.
But I’m not. I’m scared.
I’m scared because he saw me. Because he sees me.
“Abby!”
I hear him behind me, but I ignore him, cutting around a cluster of people waiting by the elevators and heading for the entrance.
When I get outside I force myself to stop. I know he isn’t going to follow me. I am not the kind of girl that guys chase, much less guys like Eli.
I’ll find him on Monday and I’ll just take him straight in to see Tess. No more talking to him.
“Abby,” he says right behind me, and to my embarrassment, I jump, I’m so startled.
“Do I look like I want to talk to you?” I say, trying to throw as much anger as I can into my voice, but he came out here, he came after me, and I don’t sound very angry at all.
I sound frightened.
“No,” he says. “But I—about what I said before, I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“You didn’t upset me.”
He looks at me then, and I can tell he knows I’m lying. Hell, I know I’m lying and doing a crappy job of it too.
“Okay, you did upset me,” I say. “I don’t want or need you feeling sorry for me.”
“I don’t—”
“Yeah, you do. Drowning in sadness? I look like that to you? Really?”
“Yes.”
That’s it. One word. He doesn’t say it with any sort of force or anger or anything like that. He just says it like it’s true and I find myself spinning away from him again.
“No, wait,” he says, touching my arm, and I still. “I wish … I see what you’re doing here. Every day you come and you hope and you—you’re so fierce. So determined. And I wish … I wish I could be like that.”
I force myself to look at him. To say something that makes this about him again because I can’t believe he sees things that aren’t grubby and awful in me. “So you could go home?”
“So I—so I could do a lot of things,” he says, and shoves his hands into his pockets. “Do you … do you want me to meet you tomorrow?”
“It’s Saturday.”
“I know.”
“I come at night,” I tell him, and I’m not ashamed of having no life, I’m not. Except I haven’t ever been somewhere with a guy on a weekend night. (Or day, for that matter.) “My parents come during the day and I come—they let you stay till eight, so I usually come around seven.”
“Okay.”
“Oh.” I can’t help it. I didn’t think he’d agree. I thought he’d have plans.
But then, Eli is rapidly turning out to be a lot mo
re complicated than I thought he was.
“So I’ll meet you in the waiting room by—by where Tess is?” he says, and I nod, then turn around and walk off to the bike rack.
“See you,” he says, but I pretend I can’t hear him. Not only is Eli more complicated than I thought, he’s also a lot more interesting.
He’s …
No, I tell myself. No. He’s nothing to me. He’s for Tess. She’ll wake up. She’ll see him. He’ll see her. That’s all it will take. That’s all it ever takes, and then he’ll be hers and I’ll be …
I’ll be just fine.
I will.
twenty-two
It doesn’t hit me until I see the Ferrisville shore that I never went back to see Tess. I got so caught up in my strange conversation with Eli that I …
I forgot about her.
I slink home, where Mom and Dad are waiting for me in the living room like they know what I’ve done.
Except they don’t, because when I come in they both say hello, Mom’s voice as warm as ever, but strained, and Dad sounding—and looking—far away.
For all that Mom said I reminded her of him the other day, right now he’s reminding me of Tess and how she was when she was out of public view and got upset, right down to how he’s staring like he’s not here, like we’re not here. Like Tess would sometimes do. Like she did when she found out about Claire, or when she came home from college before the accident.
At the time, I figured she was worried about her grades, but now I think about how Beth said Tess was going to move out, and wonder if Tess had lost another friendship, if Beth had done something Tess couldn’t bring herself to forgive.
“What’s wrong?” I ask Dad, and he blinks like he didn’t see me come in even though he’d said hello.
“It’s nothing you need to worry about,” Mom says, glancing at me before she looks back at Dad, who glares at her so strongly that … well, if I were her, I’d smack him.
“Nothing?” I say, my voice rising, and Mom looks back at me.
“Not now, Abby.”
“Not now? Are you—?”
“Go upstairs,” she says, in her voice that means “no arguing, or else,” and I stomp outside instead, slamming the door hard as I go.
Then I sneak over to the living room window, crouching down so they can’t see me.
“You know what the doctor said, Dave,” Mom says. “It’s not—it’s not that simple. Tess is—” She breaks off.
“I know,” Dad says, and there’s silence for a moment.
When Mom talks again, her voice is muffled, like she’s leaning into him. “I’m worried about Abby.”
I stiffen and press myself against the house, closer to the window.
“Abby?” Dad says. “Why?”
“I don’t know,” Mom says. “And that’s the problem. I looked at her the other night, and she just—she reminded me so much of you when you first came back after John died. She’s so—she’s so quiet. So angry. So scared. But she hides it, or tries to, and Tess was always so—she was—”
I stand up then. I know what Tess was. So happy. So blah blah blah. So not me.
I head down the driveway and walk to Claire’s house. All the lights are off, but Claire is sitting on her front porch, soaking her feet in what looks like a bucket.
“Is that a bucket?” I ask.
“Mom borrowed the footbath she got me for Christmas last week and I haven’t seen it since,” she says. “My guess is she said she thought it wasn’t working right and Daddy took it apart and it’s in pieces out back and she can’t bring herself to tell me yet.” She swishes her feet around in the water. I hear it splashing against the sides of the bucket. I pop open the gate and walk up to where she’s sitting.
“What’s going on with you and Eli?” she says. “Everyone was talking about how you ran out of the hospital and he followed you.”
“It wasn’t like that.”
“No?”
“Nope. I didn’t run. I left. Quickly.”
She laughs. “So he did follow you.”
“Yeah, but it’s not like how you’re saying it. We were talking about Tess.”
“Oh,” she says. “Why?”
“What do you mean, why? What else are we going to talk about?”
“Well, he’s beyond cute, for one thing.”
“Which is why he’s seeing Tess,” I say, and she leans back so she’s lying down, staring up at her porch ceiling.
“Why does Eli have to be Tess’s?”
“You’ve seen him,” I say. “Who else could he belong to? And besides, has anyone who ever saw her decided they’d rather spend time with me instead?”
“I’d rather hang out with you any day.”
“Ex–best friends don’t count.”
Claire laughs again, but the sound is softer now, almost regretful. “That’s true.”
I sit down and lean back next to her. The inside of the porch is easier to look at than the vast, empty nothing of the night sky. It’s real. It’s defined. It has a beginning and an end.
“Beth came to see Tess,” I say.
“Yeah,” Claire says. “I heard. I also heard you got upset.”
“Well, yeah. She said that she was boxing up Tess’s stuff, and made up some bullshit about how she and Tess had talked before, and that Tess was going to move out. As if Tess wouldn’t have mentioned that when she came home.”
Claire sits up, and I hear the water slosh as she lifts her feet out of the bucket. “Beth and Tess were—they weren’t going to live together anymore?”
“So she says. I think Beth just found a new roommate and wants to get rid of Tess’s stuff. What kind of friend is that?”
Claire’s silent, and I kick her, lightly. “You’re supposed to say, ‘A crappy friend.’”
“Poor Tess,” Claire says instead, her voice a whisper.
“What does that mean?” I say, sitting up.
“Nothing.”
“Claire.”
“All right,” she says. “I saw—I saw Tess by herself once when she first came home, at the grocery store. She was buying chocolate wafer cookies.”
“Oh,” I say, because whenever she was really upset, Tess could and would eat enormous quantities of chocolate wafer cookies, the old-fashioned kind that come in a box and crumble if you touch them too hard.
“Yeah,” Claire says. “When I saw that, I knew something was wrong. I didn’t know it was—I didn’t know it was her and Beth fighting.”
“You didn’t say anything to me.”
“I just figured it was Tess being Tess. I figured it was grades. You know how she always—”
“Yeah,” I say. “She did—does—worry about them. Poor Tess.”
Claire sighs. “Abby, you’re dealing with a lot of shit right now. And I know you think Tess waking up will fix it all but it—”
“I know it won’t fix everything,” I say. “I’m not stupid. But at least then she’ll be awake. Be better.”
“And you won’t be poor Tess’s little sister anymore.” She looks at me and shrugs. “I was her best friend for years, Abby. I lived in her shadow too.”
“Do you ever—do you miss her?” I say.
“No,” Claire says, and that one word is so sharp, so final, that I know she’s lying.
I let it go though, and just lean back again, looking up at the porch ceiling, at the squares that create it, a simple pattern where everything is neatly arranged. Where there are no open spaces, no gray areas. No places where you can miss someone even though remembering how they were only makes you wish they’d disappear.
Not that I wish that for Tess. Not exactly. I just want her back in her life. I’m tired of mine being all about her.
twenty-three
When I get home Mom is still up, painting her fingernails with her legs curled up under her on the sofa.
“How’s Claire?” she asks, like our conversation from before didn’t happen. Like Claire is the only person I ever
see.
Of course, she pretty much is. Not that it stops me from saying, “What makes you think I was with Claire?” just to see if Mom thinks I actually have a life.
Or could.
“I saw you walk toward her house when you were done listening outside the window,” she says. “You know, when I tell you to go upstairs, I don’t mean leave the house and then listen to our conversations.”
Caught, but I don’t care. “What’s wrong with Dad? And why are you talking to the doctor about Tess? Has something changed?”
Mom pauses, the nail polish brush over her last nail. “Your father and I want to know how Tess—how her outlook is.”
“And how is it?”
“Nothing’s changed.”
“Then why was Dad upset?”
Mom carefully paints her last nail, and then caps the bottle. “Because we all are. Look, Abby, I love that you spend so much time with Tess, but you can’t—you can’t let someone else take over your life, be everything to you. For you. Trust me on that.”
I shift, uncomfortable with what she’s saying. With how close she’s come to the truth: that Tess has taken over my life.
But what Mom doesn’t see is that there is no me when Tess is around. That there never has been.
It’s not that she and Dad have tried to turn me into Tess or anything like that. But Tess was the pretty one, the special one, the one people loved because she was so sunny and friendly and always knew the right thing to say. And no matter how hard I tried, I could never quite sparkle like she did.
“Are you thinking about what I said?” Mom says, and I nod, watching her eyes. They are calm, collected.
I look at her and almost believe things will be fine.
“I saw Beth today,” I say. “I bet the nurses told you, but the reason I got upset is because she told me she’s boxing up Tess’s stuff. She might as well have said, ‘I don’t think Tess’s ever coming back.’”
“She’s boxing up Tess’s things?” Mom says, and there, in her eyes, for a moment, is a flash of what I know she really feels. Surprise.