Page 19 of Given Our History

“Oh.” I wasn’t sure what else to say. My own father was a man of few words, but I never felt like I couldn’t talk to him. And my mom was a great listener. So I tried to cheer him up the only way I knew how. “I guess that means you’re stuck talking to me.”

The week after Christmas, I remembered to call him on his birthday and he remembered to call me on mine. My mom even let me stay on the phone for an hour instead of the usual forty-five minutes because the holidays always put her in an agreeable mood. After the New Year, the days began to blur together. Dad worked as a lineman, which often took him out of state for weeks at a time, so when I wasn’t working on schoolwork, I’d keep Mom company—cold, gray afternoons huddled around the glass coffee table in front of the fireplace, drinking hot chocolate with marshmallows and working on jigsaw puzzles while Reagan played with Tinker Toys on the braided rug. Mom never asked me much about Teddy after that day in the car, but I had a feeling she listened in on my side of the conversation sometimes. “If you ever decide you’d rather enroll in public school, all you have to do is ask,” she told me unprompted one evening while we worked on the outline of a thousand-piece puzzle of La Grande Jatte by Georges Seurat.

It wasn’t the first time she’d given me a choice. I went to public school until third grade, but in a classroom with thirty other kids, I never really thrived. I was impatient and easily distracted, struggling with the pacing of the curriculum—I’d work ahead, get in trouble because I didn’t wait for instructions, and then turn around and fall behind. I came home one day to find my mom seated at the dining room table, my lackluster report card and a whole mess of paperwork spread in front of her. She had asked me if I’d rather do my schoolwork at home, at my own pace. I said yes and never looked back.

“I know it would be easier to make friends,” she said now.

I shook my head as I sorted out all the edge pieces on top of a coffee table book. 56 Landmarks to See before You Die. There was a photograph of Stonehenge on the cover. “I like the friends I have.”

In May, Izzy had a sleepover for her fifteenth birthday and invited a couple girls from her neighborhood; they listened to music I wasn’t allowed to listen to at home and teased me for not knowing the lyrics. “You should get bangs,” one of them told me. “You have a long face. Bangs would suit you better.” And then she exchanged a look with one of the other girls before bursting into a fit of laughter.

When I got home the next day, I called Teddy to complain about them. But that didn’t stop me from asking my mom to schedule an appointment with her hairdresser, or from sneaking onto Dad’s computer to use LimeWire to secretly download songs by Nelly Furtado and The Black Eyed Peas and burn them to CDs. I wasn’t even sure I liked the music, really; I just didn’t want to be put in the position of not knowing and embarrassing myself again.

June brought with it three straight weeks of rain, and the remainder of summer was too hot and humid to spend much time outside, except for the days my parents would drive us up to Oxford Beach.

And then, before I knew it, it was September again.

It had only been a few months since I last saw Izzy, but it felt like we had a million things to talk about. Her family had gone on a Princess Cruise in June to Cozumel, Mexico, and she’d met a girl onboard from Norway named Ingrid, whom she claimed to be soulmates with and messaged every day on MSN. (When she later moved to Portugal chasing after a college girlfriend, I reflected that it was part of a long pattern that perhaps started here.) Her parents had finally allowed her to get a cell phone, which made me a little jealous until I realized it was a pay-as-you-go phone and they had only loaded ten dollars onto it in case of emergencies, so she wasn’t allowed to make calls to friends.

I didn’t know why, but I hadn’t told her anything about my friendship with Teddy. She must have guessed, at least on some level, that I had kept my promise to be his friend after that day in the cafeteria, but she never asked about it. Maybe it was a simple oversight—it wasn’t like Izzy and I talked on the phone all that often, so when we saw each other in person for her birthday, we had so much to catch up on that mentioning my phone calls with Teddy didn’t feel all that important. But there was also a part of me that wanted to keep him to myself. I was convinced that Izzy wouldn’t understand him the same way I did, and there was the risk that if I welcomed her into our friendship, that illusion would be shattered.

But now that we were back at camp, it was impossible to keep my two friendships separate.

I interrupted Izzy’s story about swimming at the community pool to shout Teddy’s name when I spotted him over by the rec building. He was feeding dollar bills into the vending machine, a weighty-looking duffel bag hanging from a shoulder, but he turned and waved wide-armed when he saw me. I raced across the field and flung my arms around his waist. His duffel bag landed in the grass with a soft thump as he enveloped me in his arms, soft breaths rustling the top of my hair. We never hugged goodbye the previous autumn, but it seemed like the appropriate thing to do, given we’d been friends for over a year now. But even having never hugged him before, he was broader in my arms than I would’ve expected. He was already tall last year, but now he was less gangly, a little more filled out. He’d told me on the phone that he’d put on nine pounds since his birthday, but I didn’t realize the difference nine pounds could make.

“You were supposed to find me first thing,” I said, breathless, as we drew back.

“I wanted to surprise you.” He stooped to grab a Pepsi out of the vending machine, which he handed to me. I stared at it, nonplussed. “To pay you back for last year.”

I didn’t have the heart to tell him that he wasn’t supposed to pay me back, or that my family drank Coca-Cola like it was their religion. From this moment on, I was a Pepsi girl.

His brown eyes flitted over me, everywhere all at once. “You changed your hair.”

I combed my bangs out of my eyes with my fingers—they were long and side-swept, and they kept getting in the way. “What do you think?” I asked. “They’re kind of annoying, but—”

“I think they look great.”

We grinned at each other like idiots—or rather, I grinned like an idiot and he just grinned, because even at his happiest, Teddy’s smile was a little reserved. Like he was scared to let himself be fully happy.

“You’re Darvish’s friend,” a less-than-certain voice said at my shoulder. “From the cafeteria last summer.”

I hadn’t realized that Izzy had followed me over, but of course she had, because I’d left her standing alone in the grass mid-sentence. With a twinge of guilt at my poor manners, I reintroduced the two of them, adding, “He’s not just Darvish’s friend. He’s my friend, too.”

There was something a bit guarded in the way they greeted each other—for Izzy’s part, she was maybe understandably suspicious that I hadn’t mentioned Teddy all year, and even more suspicious that he was friends with Darvish, of all people. After a minute, Teddy offered up a quick excuse about needing to stow his things in the cabin and claim his bunk, and Izzy pinned me under a curious look, her amber eyes wide.

“What?” I asked, self-conscious.

“Nothing. He looks different,” she said, and I got the impression that her piercing amber eyes were seeing right through me.

“Vikings relied on the North Star to navigate, you know,” I announced. It was a warm September night the second week of camp, and I’d planted my butt in the dewy grass beside the telescope, checking items off a list titled “Celestial Bodies.” We’d already successfully located Saturn and Mars, and now I absently added Polaris to the list. It was the easiest to find and we probably should have started with it anyway. Ms. Fischer had given us a worksheet with planets and major stars we were supposed to locate; it would’ve been easy to cheat, I thought, except for the fear that if Ms. Fischer caught us in a lie—like claiming to have seen a planet that wasn’t actually visible—we’d never hear the end of it.

Teddy drew back from the telescope to consult the book splayed in his lap, borrowed from the rec room. “I’m pretty sure most people relied on the stars before they had modern technology.”

“They had already invented compasses in China, like, hundreds of years ago. By the eleventh century, I think it was.” I knit my brow and stared unseeing at the lights on the other side of the dark lake, trying to recall a particular chapter in A History of Maritime Technology—a hefty tome that I’d checked out of the library during a burst of interest in The Golden Age of Piracy. “Or maybe it was the tenth.”

Teddy laughed under his breath as he twisted the knob to adjust the focus. “Where do you learn all this stuff?”

I twiddled the cable to my headphones between my fingers. I’d brought my portable CD player out here with me, but we’d been talking so much that I’d left my headphones dangling around my neck, the music paused. “I read a lot. And I watch documentaries. One of the perks of being home all the time.”