Page 36 of Given Our History

“They’re friends, right? Practically best friends. But then they’re more than friends, or Bella thinks maybe they could be more than friends, and she has to decide whether she wants to be more than friends or not. You know?”

“Okay,” I said slowly. My phone buzzed in my pocket and I resisted the temptation to check it.

“And sometimes when you’re not totally sure how you feel, you have to just”—another indecipherable wave of her jelly band—“do something. Try your feelings on for size. See whether it all makes sense.”

I wasn’t sure when or how Izzy had become an expert in feelings—I suspected it had something to do with the tutelage of one Stephanie Meyer—but I gave her a blank look, shaking my head. My feelings were supposed to stay packed away and zipped up tight, and I was terrified that if I unboxed them, tried them on and found that they didn’t quite fit, I’d never be able to go back to not knowing.

“That’s it,” she said. “I’m loaning you the books. You’re all into vampires anyway, about time you actually read them.” I opened my mouth to protest—I wasn’t sure I counted the vampires in Twilight among actual vampires—but Izzy cut me off, pointing a finger in my face. “And don’t you dare tell me you’re not going to read them. You have your whole book club thing with Teddy. You can make time for my book club, too.”

My phone vibrated again and this time I couldn’t resist the urge to check it. My heart sank into my stomach where it sat, a dead weight.

Parental Unit: Why aren’t you answering your phone?!

Parental Unit: you need to come home and watch Reagan. NOW.

Parental Unit: it’s your father. There’s been an accident

“See?” Izzy said, self-satisfied. “I told you. As soon as you stop staring at your phone, he texts back.”

“It’s not Teddy,” I breathed, turning the screen to show her. Her face was illuminated whitish-blue in the dark car and her eyes widened as she scanned the messages. “It’s my mom.”

A fall. That was how Mom explained it as she hurried out the door, keys jangling. He fell while he was on a job. The eventual discharge paperwork was more descriptive: Dad had fallen from a boom lift while away on a weekend job near Richmond, suffering a pelvic fracture in two separate places. Mom made the three-hour drive down to Chippenham Hospital that night. His recovery would be a long and arduous one, filled with surgeries and lots of uncertainty, but one thing was certain: he wouldn’t be going back to work any time soon. There was a chance he’d be able to get worker’s comp, if he could prove that the fall was the fault of his employer and not an error in judgment, but there were no guarantees. Mom sat me down in the living room the week of Thanksgiving and explained, as delicately as she could, that she was going to have to look for a job.

“You can’t get a job,” I said, like it was simple, a matter of fact. She’d always been at home. I knew that she had taken night classes when I was younger and earned a bachelor’s in childhood development—she was still paying back the loans—but that was because she thought it would help with the homeschooling. It wasn’t like she ever planned to work.

“Yes, I can,” she told me. “You have a year left of school—”

“A year and a half,” I corrected.

“—which you’re more than capable of finishing on your own. I’m not sure I’ve taught you anything since you discovered Wikipedia.”

I stared, only half-seeing, at the unfinished puzzle scattered around the coffee table—a picturesque cottage fractured into a thousand pieces. She wasn’t wrong. As I’d gotten older, I’d spent fewer days hunched over the kitchen table with Mom hovering over my shoulder and more days cross-legged on my bed, surrounded by textbooks with my music blaring. “What about Reagan?” I asked, changing tactics. “I can’t sit around babysitting her all day. I still have schoolwork to finish, and I’m supposed to start thinking about what colleges I want to apply to in the fall.”

Mom shrugged. “She’s old enough. We’ll just have to enroll her in public school.”

She applied to every opening she could find, but with fifteen plus years out of the workforce, she only earned a call back for a sales associate position at the Bath & Body Works in Salisbury. It was surreal, how quickly it all changed. My parents had fallen in love young, the perfect, cookie-cutter life practically falling into their laps, and in a second, it was all ripped out from under them.

They argued more. Shouting matches over bills and debts and the future. I’d always thought of them as a cohesive unit, a model of what love was supposed to look like, but I started to see them more as two separate people—a begrudging alliance, tolerating the other’s presence, but there wasn’t any joy in it. I had trouble remembering if there ever was. Maybe if they had taken things slow, I thought, planned their lives a little better … maybe it all would’ve been easier on them.

Maybe, if you were careful, you wouldn’t have to struggle to hold it all together, even as your life was coming apart at the seams.

For my part, I focused on finishing out my junior year. I binged all the Twilight books in less than a week. I also found PDFs of the same papers Teddy was assigned, texting him my thoughts as I went and asking what his professor and classmates had had to say. We talked on the phone a couple times over winter break, on Christmas and his birthday, like always, and he broke tradition by calling me shortly before midnight on New Year’s Eve to wish me a happy new year and promise that things would balance out once he was finished with his senior year of homeschooling and could focus on college full time.

Long-Distance History Club once again fell by the wayside during the spring, which was fine, because both of us were busy. But as the months wore on, I started to feel lonely being at home for the first time in my life. I spent a lot of time blasting music in my room, flipping through books I’d already read, nothing quite holding my interest. Mom worked long hours, Reagan was enrolled in first grade, and Dad mostly stayed in bed watching daytime television, except on the days he had physical therapy.

I missed camp. I missed my friends. I managed to tough it out until spring break, at which point I knew I needed to get out of the house, at least for the day, as a matter of self-preservation.

Clara: What are you doing this weekend? I could use a distraction right about now.

Teddy: My schedule’s wide open.

Clara: Meet in Middletown on Sat for lunch?

It shouldn’t have felt like anything out of the ordinary—we’d hung out before, texted often enough that I counted him among my closest friends, if not the closest. But with my phone lying on the quilted comforter next to my calculus textbook, the hours wearing on, I started to get nervous. Maybe I overstepped, made it sound too much like a date. He’d made it clear he was busy, at least until summer. When he finally texted back, it was curt, to the point.

Teddy: I have another idea.

CHAPTER14