AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Tibby couldn’t fall asleep. She sat in her bed and looked out the window at the hazardous apple tree. The apples were growing plump and red now. How had she never even tried one?
She associated them with having fallen, that was part of it. She could viscerally recall the smell of the oversweet, rotting, fermenting apples from seasons past that fell without ever being picked. That smell and the sight of the marauding worms and beetles nauseated her. She loathed the apples wounded on the ground, but she had never thought to pick one from a branch.
The tree seemed to be considering her just as she considered it. She felt its judgment. It wasn’t judging her for leaving the window open. That wasn’t her crime. Her crimes were deeper and more numerous: She wasn’t big enough to love Katherine as Katherine deserved. She wasn’t brave enough to love Brian as he deserved. She wasn’t strong enough to keep the things she loved alive (Bailey, Mimi), nor was she wise enough to grasp the meaning of their deaths.
Tibby was good at hiding. It was the one thing she knew how to do. She was good at sealing herself in a little box and waiting it out. But waiting for what? What was she waiting for?
She thought she’d learned a lesson from Katherine’s fall out the window. The lesson was: Don’t open, don’t climb, don’t reach, and you will not fall. But it was the wrong lesson! She had learned the wrong lesson!
The real lesson embodied in Katherine’s three-year-old frame was the opposite: Try, reach, want, and you may fall. But even if you do, you might be okay anyway.
Flexing her feet under the covers, Tibby thought of a corollary to this lesson: If you don’t try, you save nothing, because you might as well be dead.
Time passed for Bridget in the strangest way, a little forward, a little back. She was vaguely aware of Katie and Allison returning to the cabin. They probably assumed she was asleep, but that didn’t stop them from flipping on the light and gabbing noisily and turning on music. She suspected they’d been partying with the other remaining staff. They smelled like it, anyway.
Sometime after that, Eric returned. He sized up the situation with Katie and Allison. He was furious. “Can’t you see that Bee is sick? Why are you making all this noise? What the hell’s wrong with you?”
Even through her haze, Bridget could tell this was not a side of Eric she’d seen before.
“Dude. Back off,” Katie snapped. “Why are you barging into our cabin and telling us what to do?” She was too drunk to yield her ground, even if Bee was sick.
Eric knelt next to Bridget. He put his hand on her forehead again. He bent down close to her ear. “I don’t really want to leave you in here with the two of them. You want to come back with me? My cabin is empty this weekend. You can sleep.”
She nodded gratefully. She was only wondering how she was going to get from here to there without freezing to death. She wasn’t wearing anything but her underwear under the blankets.
He had an idea for that, too. He put his arms under her and scooped her up, still tucked inside her blankets. He carried her out of the cabin and into the night, with Katie and Allison watching his back in surprise and indignation.
She felt light in his arms. She rested her burning face against his neck. She was shivering again. He pulled the blankets closer around her and rested his chin lightly on the top of her head.
She was trying her hardest to remember each of these things he did, to mark them in her brain permanently, because they were immeasurably sweet. Maybe they were the sweetest things that had ever happened to her or ever would. She kept hoping that this, unlike all those blankets she imagined getting and glasses of water she imagined drinking, that this was real. Please let it be real, she thought wistfully. And if it’s not, let me just stay here anyway.
He pushed open the door of his cabin with his back and put her very gently into a bed—his bed, she hoped. She wanted to smell his smell. He was careful to tuck her blankets around her snugly. She tried to stop shivering.
“I’d put another blanket on you, but I don’t want you to get overheated, you know?”
She nodded. She noticed he’d been carrying a bag, also, looped around his wrist. “Here.” He unloaded a bottle of Advil, a bottle of aspirin, a bottle of water, a bottle of orange juice, a thermometer, and a paper cup. “The nurse isn’t back till Sunday, but I got into the infirmary in case we need anything else.”
She fluttered her eyes, trying to focus on his solemn face. “It was unlocked?”
He shrugged. “Now it is.”
He filled the cup with water and poured two pills into his palm. “Ready?” He helped her to sit up in bed.
She tried to figure out how to get her hand out without letting any cold air in. She stuck her hand out up by her neck, keeping the rest of the blanket tight around her. She thirstily drank the water and another cup and another with her little T. rex arm.
“Poor thing. You were thirsty,” he said.
She took the pills, wincing as they went down. Her throat felt swollen.
“Thank you,” she said, lying back down. She felt tears fill her eyes at the extravagance of his kindness to her.
He put his cool hand on her cheek again. “I am worried about you,” he said quietly. And looking at his face, she could never again question whether they had really become friends.
He took the thermometer out of its case. “Open up.”
“Are you sure you want to know?” she asked. She knew she was hot.
He nodded, so she opened her mouth. He waited for the mercury to settle. It didn’t take very long. He studied it with his eyebrows furrowed. “God, it’s 104.7. Is that safe?”
“I’ve been there before,” she said faintly. Why did she have to do everything in such dramatic fashion?
“Should I call a doctor?” he asked.
“I think I’m going to be okay,” she answered truthfully. “I’m not scared or anything.”
He lay on the bed opposite her, propped on his side, watching her carefully.
“I’m going to call your dad,” he announced, sitting up. He got his cell phone from the top drawer of his bureau.
“Don’t call my dad,” she said softly. “He’s not…there.”
“It’s midnight. Where would he be?”
“No. I mean.” She took a break. “He’s just not there. In that way.” She was too tired to explain any better.
He looked at her, the corners of his mouth turned down. He looked deeply troubled about that.
He lay down across from her again.
The more she wanted to stop shivering, the more she shivered. She didn’t want him to worry about her.
He couldn’t stand to watch her shake. He got up and came over to her. He picked her up inside her ball of covers and moved her over on the bed. To her great astonishment and joy, he lay down alongside her. He put his arms around her and tucked her face into his neck, and she felt as though her fevered heart might burst.
He held her as though he thought he could absorb her fever and her sickness and her sadness at not having a mother or even a father she could count on. He stroked her hair and lay with her like that for hours.
And maybe he did absorb her ache, because in his arms she finally fell
asleep.
By four A.M., daylight was beginning to haunt the sky. Tibby did not want the sun to rise without some real measure of awakening.
After these hours she felt as though she knew the tree in a new way and the tree knew her. It wasn’t an unfriendly tree, but it did pose a challenge to her.
Somewhere around two o’clock, Tibby had remembered she had the Traveling Pants. They had been sitting for a shameful number of days under her bed. She’d been hiding from them. Somewhere around three, she put them on.
She hoisted up the window sash and sat with her elbows on the sill, resting her chin in her hands. The tree waved. Katherine had thought she could reach it from the window but, in fact, she couldn’t. Tibby could reach it but thought she couldn’t. Tibby’s mother’s ovaries seemed to produce a heartier strain of egg as they got older.
Tibby put one foot out the window and then the other. She sat on the sill. She looked down. It was far. She would feel incredibly stupid if she fell. She and Katherine could wear matching hockey helmets. Tibby smiled in spite of herself, knowing what a huge kick that would give Katherine. She wondered if Nicky would be similarly willing to help with the stickers.
Tibby caught a sturdy branch with two hands and held it tight. She knew just where she needed to put her feet. She tried to figure out how to do it so that her weight would not at any time be up for grabs. Then she remembered that this was kind of the point.
When she hoisted herself off the window, she would have to transfer her weight completely to her hands for a second or two until she could place her feet. She would just have to do that.
Okay.
Yes.
Like, now.
Tibby looked at the ground. She could already see a couple of wormy apples languishing in the dark grass. The ground was psyching her out, so she looked at the sky.
She lifted; she swung. She actually screamed in that moment. But before her scream had gotten all the way out of her mouth, her feet were on the lower branch. She was balanced. She was safe.
