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“Thanks, Dad.”
His dad nodded, shifting on his feet again as he backed to the door and signaled the end of the conversation. He’d reached his limit on heartfelt conversation and gave Nathan a stiff wave as he exited the room. “Study hard.”
In five months, Nathan and the rest of them would leave this school and move on with their lives into new places and new people. In five years, would Nathan look back on these days with a fondness he smiled about in memories, or would he regret not doing what he could to get the girl?
Of all the possibilities in this world, the one that Nathan would not accept for himself is the guy who never tried.
fifty-five
tully
The weeks of winter break were always boring, and that was when she had something to look forward to. Christmas lost its magic when she found out Santa wasn’t real, and she lost her anticipation this year when Eugene said he wouldn’t be coming home. Now she had nothing and no one to fill her days before it.
She spent them wrapped in her quilt with a book in hand, or on her floor doing a puzzle. But after ten books and a five-hundred-piece puzzle in one week she was losing all motivation. She hated the cold, she hated the snow, and she hated the loneliness.
Stephanie was long gone visiting her grandparents in Colorado which made her harder to call than Eugene, who hadn’t picked up in a couple days.
Tully missed them. She missed school, and the library, and . . . and she missed Nathan.
It was pathetic. No one in her house noticed, of course. That had never bothered her much before, though she couldn’t help the pang of being left out every time she saw her mom doing Joliet’s hair or watching a movie together.
One person noticed though—the last one she wanted to.
“You’ve been bumming around the house an awful lot lately, haven’t you?” Joliet entered the room, unannounced as usual, and Tully lowered the book that failed to interest her enough to remember what the story was.
Jolietwouldbe the first one to notice something was off. Despite Tully finally getting some space from her after their public brawl, she still felt her eyes on her every now and then like she was waiting for something to happen.
Instead of answering, Tully simply looked at her, not bothering to reward her with a response.
Joliet narrowed her eyes, and Tully had to repetitively chew her inner cheek to remind herself to keep her face straight.
When Tully didn’t give her the response she wanted, Joliet rolled her eyes, bored. “Whatever. Mom and Dad want you downstairs, we’re opening presents.”
Tully sighed and shooed her sister away with her hand. She didn’t want to go down and watch Joliet open everything she asked for while Tully also got everything Joliet asked for. In their parent’s minds, if one teenage daughter wanted it, then the other must too. That was never the case. So she usually ended up with clothes that weren’t her style, or a new set of brightly colored makeup, or a cassette that had never once been Aerosmith.
And that is what happened, down to the Blondie tape that Joliet had explicitly asked for. Still, Tully smiled half-heartedly and thanked them. When they were distracted watching some Christmas movie, Tully snuck out of the room, and receded into her bedroom where she tossed the tape into a drawer with other gifts she had never used.
What she really wanted was a ticket to New York—one way preferably. The only thing keeping her in Richmond anymore was the diploma with her name on it just waiting to be presented in June. Once she had it in hand, she would run as fast as she could away from everything here. Eugene might not want to come around anymore, but surely he’d welcome her. He was just as desperate to leave when he graduated, and apparently just as desperate to stay away.
She pulled on her Walkman headphones and blocked out the jingle of whatever jolly song was playing on the television with Aerosmith, closing her eyes and willing this agonizing break to be over by the time they opened.
Like everything else in her life, that was just wishful thinking.
Three songs in and the music was cut short as her headphones were yanked off her head. Any other day she could keep her mouth shut, but that was the last straw and she jerked upwards in the dark of her bedroom, cusses and insults aimed to fire.
They were all duds though, falling short when she saw the blonde man standing over her and grinning down playfully.
“Eugene?”
“Merry Christmas, punk.”
Her mouth hung open and her brain took its time catching up with the image of him in front of her. “You said you couldn’t make it.”
“It was a surprise.”
“I bet mom loved that,” she said. Her mother loved surprises, so this would be the perfect Christmas gift for her.
Eugene chuckled but shook his head. “Sure she did,” his voice lowered and he cupped his hands over his mouth secretively. “But the surprise was for you.”
