Page 18 of Given Our History

I faced forward and folded my arms, sinking into my seat. “Well, she doesn’t need to be curious about my personal life.”

In the end, I had to promise not to hog the phone line all day, and to only make one phone call a week, and a whole heap of other rules Mom had never bothered enforcing when I wanted to call Izzy—maybe because Izzy and I rarely talked on the phone. But worst of all, she insisted I use the green wall-mounted phone in the dining room, where the coiled cord prevented me from wandering any farther than the kitchen.

It took me a couple weeks to work up the courage to call. Mom was washing dishes by hand in the kitchen, the faucet running and silverware clattering around the stainless-steel sink. Reagan was playing with a See ’N Say (she kept winding the arrow back to the same place, to the same refrain of the cat says meow every few seconds). I plugged my free ear with a finger so I could hear better.

A deep voice answered on the second ring. “Harrison residence.”

“Hi, um, my name is Clara Fernsby. I went to camp with your son and I was wondering if—”

“Clara,” the voice said flatly, “this is Teddy.”

“Oh.” Warmth colored my cheeks; I was relieved he wasn’t here to see it. “You sound older on the phone.”

“I know,” he said with a sigh. “Telemarketers are always trying to sell me things.”

It was a far cry from the Are your parents home, sweetie? that I got every time the pollsters called to ask who we planned to vote for. I knew it wasn’t his intention, but it made me feel a little silly and childish by comparison.

“How old are you, anyway?” I asked.

“Fourteen.”

“When’s your birthday?” I demanded, because I was certain he was older than me, if only by a few months.

“December twenty-ninth.”

My mouth dropped open. “Shut up.”

From the kitchen sink, my mom shot me a disapproving look.

“What?” Teddy asked.

“My birthday is the thirtieth.” This seemed like a very significant discovery, more than mere happenstance. He was older than me … by one whole day.

“It sucks, doesn’t it?” he lamented. “December birthdays. Everyone always forgets. Especially when it’s right after Christmas.”

“I’ll remember your birthday if you’ll remember mine,” I promised, and I marked it on my Pirates of the Caribbean calendar—like I’d ever forget.

We didn’t see each other all year, but we tried to talk on the phone every couple of weeks. Teddy lived three hours away in Allentown, Pennsylvania, home to a life-sized replica of the Liberty Bell and Dorney Park & Wildwater Kingdom, a massive theme park that I thought sounded awesome, but he wasn’t allowed to visit because his mom thought roller coasters were too dangerous.

I’d always thought my parents were overprotective. My mom didn’t let me wear spaghetti-strap tank tops because they showed too much skin and she screened R-rated movies before deciding whether or not I was allowed to watch them, but I soon determined that Teddy’s parents must have been worse. My parents had encouraged me to go to camp in order to meet some kids my own age. Teddy had to beg his parents to let him enroll, and only under the condition that he would do twice the chores his first month back home. Sometimes he called me later than we had planned because he got stuck pulling weeds out of the flower bed or washing the dishes after dinner.

The more we talked, the more my mom loosened up on the phone rules. By late October, she let me use the cordless so that I could lie outside in the hammock, watching the leaves float down from the oak in our backyard.

I asked Teddy what he was going to dress up as for Halloween and he told me his family didn’t celebrate.

“My dad says it was made up by corporations like Walmart to sell more decorations and stuff,” he explained.

We both had far too much time on our hands; where public-school students might’ve come home from a six-hour school day only to slog through hours of algebra homework or assigned readings, we lived by our own schedules. We still had curriculums to follow and independent study teachers that made sure our educations were up to speed, but there were days when I’d gotten all my work done early in the month, and so—with no friends nearby—I’d wake up and spend a random Tuesday binge-watching those ridiculous documentaries on the History Channel about aliens building the pyramids, or trying to teach myself how to crochet.

It was a special sort of freedom, one that gave me plenty of room to stretch my legs and grow into whatever I felt like growing into. I enjoyed being homeschooled. Teddy hated it. “Freedom doesn’t matter when you can’t even see your friends,” he argued during one of our many conversations about it. “And I suck at talking to people. If I went to regular school, I’d probably talk to people all the time. I’d have to be better at it.”

It was a stormy November evening and the weather had forced me inside. Rain beat against my dark bedroom window and I had the phone on speaker on the pillow next to my head, my arms burrowed beneath the blankets. “You talk to me just fine,” I pointed out.

“That’s different,” he mumbled, but he didn’t explain why it was different.

“What about your parents?” I asked. “You have to talk to them, sometimes.”

“My dad’s not really the talkative type,” he said, a little awkwardly.