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“That kid Jack Naughton wants to be my boyfriend. He’s sweet, but it made me think of myself. It made me remember how I behaved to you, and I felt so ashamed.” She cracked a piece of wood off the dock and threw it into the water. She let out a breath. “I’m sorry I did that. You must have thought I was so ridiculous.”
Eric’s face was pained. He was silent for a long time.
She brought her feet up onto the dock and hugged her knees to her chest. She pressed her chin against one brown knee, afraid to look at him. She could feel the weight of her loose hair drying against her back.
They hadn’t talked about this before. In all their many hours spent together, they hadn’t mentioned the fact that they’d known each other—much less known each other. They never talked about “us.” There wasn’t any “us.”
But now, she was raising the specter of “us,” wasn’t she? Not to reawaken it, she promised herself. That was not it. Her mind supplied a funny version of the famous Julius Caesar line: I come not to praise us, but to bury us.
Eric rubbed a hand through his hair. “I didn’t think you were ridiculous,” he said at last, a little defensively. “It was more complicated than that.”
“But it was all my fault. I know it was.”
He looked terribly tired. One side of his mouth was flat and the other pointed down. She could tell he didn’t want to talk about this anymore.
“I won’t bring it up again,” she said softly. Her eyes pricked with tears that she did not want him to see. “I promise. We can forget it ever happened.”
When he finally talked his voice was so quiet she could barely hear him. “Do you think I could forget it?” He brushed his hand over his eye. “Do you really think it was all you? That I didn’t want it too?”
Brian was over, so Tibby stayed in her room. Brian came to see Katherine almost every day. He was transforming her arm cast into a masterpiece, drawing a fierce and sprawling dragon with her Magic Markers, adding a little more each time he came.
Brian also came to see Tibby, Tibby suspected, but she did not want to see him. He would catch her every so often skulking to the kitchen to forage for supplies and ask her, by his hollow-eyed looks, why she was avoiding him. And she just kept avoiding him because she didn’t have an answer.
Tibby was perched on her bed, having left the door open a few inches so she could hear Brian’s voice but not be seen. That was when Carmen arrived. Brian was careful enough to leave her alone, but with Carmen there was no such luck. Carmen walked in and closed the door behind her.
“What are you doing?”
“What do you mean?”
“Why won’t you see Brian? The poor guy is dying.”
“He’s here to see Katherine,” Tibby said defensively.
Carmen was not a particularly patient person. “Shut up. He loves Katherine, I know, but he wants to see you.”
“Why can’t I just be by myself if I want?” Tibby asked churlishly.
Carmen sighed. She was in one of her tough-love moods. “Because Brian loves you. And I am pretty sure you feel the same way. So what are you doing? Like it or not, you’re going to NYU in a month and a half. You can’t just leave it like this.”
Tibby was tired of hearing it. Her mom had been in her room singing the very same tune not twenty-four hours before. “Why is everybody in such a hurry to shove me and Brian together? Why does he have to be my boyfriend? Are you not a real person if you don’t have a boyfriend? Why does everybody have to be in love with somebody?”
“You don’t have to be in love with somebody,” Carmen replied. “But it so happens that you are. And besides, Brian means more to you than just being your boyfriend.” Carmen looked around distastefully at the mess. “Is this about Katherine?” she asked. “Because Katherine’s getting better fast and you’re the one acting broken.”
“It’s not about Katherine,” Tibby said, just to get Carmen off her back. “It’s not about anything. And anyway, maybe you’re wrong. Maybe I just don’t like Brian in that way.”
Carmen sized her up. “Are you honestly telling me that you don’t like Brian in that way?”
Tibby couldn’t say no without lying, so she decided to say nothing instead.
“Hi, Dad. It’s me.”
“Hey, bun! How good to hear your voice. What’s up?”
Carmen and Al talked pretty regularly on Sunday evenings, so a call on a Thursday night did tend to prompt the old “What’s up?”
Carmen had been, in her slightly sick way, excited to tell her mother she would not fulfill her lifelong dream of going to Williams College. It turned out she was not at all excited to tell her father. She’d put this call off a hundred times.
“I…um…How’s Lydia?”
“She’s great.” Her dad obviously knew she was stalling.
“How’s Krista?”
“I think she’s fine.” Al was always more circumspect on this subject. He didn’t want to make it seem like Krista was the girl who lived with him while Carmen was the girl he talked to on Sundays. In spite of the fact that this was true.
“Tell her I say hey, okay?”
“Of course. She’ll be happy. Now, tell me. Is everything good with you? How’s your job?”
“It’s…fine. Listen, I’m calling because…well, because…” She had to make herself say it. “Because I’m thinking a lot about this fall.”
“Okay…”
“I might not be ready to leave home just now.” She said it so fast it came out like one long word.
“Bun, explain what you mean.”
“With Mom and David, and Mom expecting the baby and everything. It’s hard to picture leaving right now.”
“Okay…”
“I might just stay here this fall. I might even go to U of Maryland. I got accepted there, you know, like, just in case.”
“Oh, I didn’t realize that.”
“It happened recently.”
“So. You say you might stay home this fall?”
“I think I probably will.” She let out a breath she’d been holding for at least a minute.
“No Williams, then.”
“Maybe not.”
“Maybe not?”
“Probably not.”
“Probably not.”
“Yeah. The thing is, I have to call them at Williams and tell them. I can’t just hold the spot if I’m not going to use it, you know?”
“Yes, I’m sure you’re right about that.” Her dad didn’t sound mad, really. He sounded calm.
“So I’ll go ahead and call ’em, I guess.”
She could hear her father switching the phone to his other ear. “Bun, why don’t you let me take care of it, okay? I put down a big deposit already, and I might need to work with them a bit to get it back.”
“Oh, no. Do you think…?” Carmen couldn’t stand the thought of her dad getting stiffed for thousands of dollars along with everything else.
“I think it will be fine,” he said. “You let me handle it, okay?” He was so calm.
Was it possible her mother had gotten to him first? Carmen detected the faint smell of a parental plot. Even divorced parents were capable of such things when they got concerned.
“Thanks, Dad.” Once again, tears jumped into the breach. “Are you sure you’re not disappointed?” Her voice disobeyed her and cracked on the last syllable.
He sighed. “If you want to go to Williams, I want you to go to Williams. If you want to go to Maryland, I want you to go to Maryland. I want you to be happy, bun.”
How did she get such nice parents? How did such nice parents turn out such a disaster of a daughter?
He wasn’t done being nice. “I love you, Carmen. I trust you to make the right decisions.”
Carmen felt that an anvil had mysteriously replaced her lower intestines. Sometimes trust felt like the worst gift in the world.
It’s the same old story. Boy finds girl, boy loses girl, girl finds boy, boy forgets girl, boy remembers girl, girl dies in a tra
gic blimp accident over the Orange Bowl on New Year’s Day.
—The Naked Gun
The rafting went smoothly. This time there were no dive-bombing bees. No splashing or tipping or crashing overboard. Bridget and Eric made a convincing show of knowing what they were doing.
