Page 17 of Given Our History

A deep, steady voice echoes in the stairwell—unmistakable—and I rip my eyes from my phone. Teddy’s staring up at me from the landing between floors, laptop bag slung over his broad shoulder and his hands stuffed into the pockets of crisp brown slacks that flatter his long legs. “More than half of workplace injuries happen due to negligent use of staircases, you know.”

“And eighty-three percent of statistics are made up on the spot,” I fire back. The corner of his mouth quirks—not quite a smile, but the ghost of something familiar. It’s that feeling of passing a stranger on the sidewalk, certain you recognize them from somewhere, but when you do a double take to try to place them, you’ve lost them in the crowd. “What are you still doing here?” I ask.

“Just finished up for the night,” he says. “I was coming to check whether you’d locked up the office.”

I nod. “Walk with me to my car?” I ask, tentatively. Wes keeps a close eye on the parking lot, so I’m safe walking alone, but I want a chance to talk. After the meeting earlier, Teddy had left in a rush, almost late for his 4 P.M. lecture.

“Sure,” he says. His dark eyes are glued to me as I stow my phone in my messenger bag and march down the stairs, joining him on the landing. “I’m heading that direction anyway.” He sweeps a hand in front of him, as though to say ladies first, and follows me down the stairs.

We exit the Hall of Letters into the clear September evening, the sky a muted, dusty blue in the fading daylight. “I wanted to thank you,” I say, “for the gala idea, but more so for offering to be on the subcommittee. I know it doesn’t really … benefit you, I guess, to volunteer for a campus you’re only visiting, so I just wanted to make it clear how much I appreciate that.”

He’s quiet for a beat, staring at the pavement as we make our way to my car. “If people only volunteered when it benefitted them, I think the world would be a little worse off.”

I don’t know what to say to that, so I nod. I should know better than to think he’d offer to help just for my sake, but maybe a part of me had selfishly hoped.

“I was thinking maybe we could meet Friday afternoons, maybe around four?” he suggests.

“That works for me.” We reach my old Volvo—easily the ugliest of the faculty vehicles with its peeling blue paint. A pine tree air freshener dangles from the rearview mirror. It lost its freshening abilities months ago. I’ve been too busy to remember to throw the air freshener out, just like I’ve spent the last six years being too busy to go shopping for a new car. “Just for the record, you don’t mean Friday as in tomorrow, do you?”

He arches a brow. “Is there another type of Friday?”

I shake my head. “Scratch that, what I meant to ask is whether it can wait until next week. I’d like to take some time to sort of get my thoughts organized, before we dive in.”

“Completely understandable.” He adjusts the strap of his laptop bag. “I’ll see whether I can figure out a meeting space.”

That should probably be my job, but I don’t argue, because I have more than enough on my plate as it is. I fiddle with the keys in my hand, running my fingers over the tattered Vampire Diaries lanyard I’ve had since I was maybe seventeen, long enough that the print has all but worn off. We’re once again at a strange sort of impasse, neither of us sure how we’re supposed to say goodbye, and it’s making me fidget.

“I’m parked over in Lot G,” he says.

I twist the lanyard between my fingers, nodding. “Right. Well, I’ll see you tomorrow. Or maybe next week, I guess,” I throw out there, because it’s not like I’ve been running into him every day, and I kind of want to test the waters. Figure out what days he’s actually on campus, so I know what to expect.

He holds my gaze for a moment before looking back at his feet, his brow knit. When he looks back up, all he says is, “Good night, Clara,” and he turns to leave.

“Night,” I say to his back. Then I unlock my car and climb into the driver side, wrestling out of my cross-body bag and shoving it onto the passenger seat. I wait for him to disappear around the corner of the Hall of Letters, and then I slump forward with a loud groan, smacking my forehead against the steering wheel. At this rate, I’ll be digging my old iPod Nano out of the closet at Mom and Dad’s house before midterms, skipping around to all the angstiest tracks I can find: Hawthorne Heights or the self-titled album by The Used, probably.

Get yourself together.

When I straighten up, my hair is falling out of my claw clip and into my eyes. I swipe a lock of it out of my mouth and turn the key in the ignition.

CHAPTER7

SIXTEEN YEARS AGO

We kept in touch.

Mom was wary when I flashed her my forearm on the drive home from camp, the first week of October. She wrinkled her nose at the phone number like it was a new tattoo. “No boyfriends until you’re eighteen,” she reminded me. Her voice had a special sort of twang to it, impossible to pinpoint, which always prompted strangers to ask where she was from: half Tennessee, half Eastern Shore.

“He’s not a boyfriend,” I said, tugging the sleeve of my sweatshirt back over my wrist.

“Why?” Reagan asked from the car seat behind me.

I pivoted to look at her. Her blond hair was chopped into a lopsided bowl cut—the handiwork of our mother and a pair of dull sewing scissors—and a packet of Annie’s Organic Bunny Snacks were crushed in her tiny fist. The bunnies in question were strewn around the back seat of the car, burrowing between the seats. She’d celebrated her fifth birthday while I was away at camp, and though I didn’t mind missing out on the mermaid-themed bounce house, I was sort of bummed that I didn’t get any of Mom’s famous red velvet cupcakes. “Because he’s not,” I said.

“Why?”

“Because I said so.”

“Have some patience with your sister, please,” Mom interrupted. “This ‘why’ thing, it’s very normal at this age, part of natural childhood development. It’s their way of showing that they’re curious about the world around them.”