When I pull my cell phone from my backpack after school, I find two missed calls from Grace and one voice mail. My heart jumps into my throat. I listen to her voice mail as me, Ruthie, Adam, and Freddie walk out to the bike rack.
“Hey,” she says. “It’s me. Grace. I—I was calling to say hi. Just wanted to catch up is all.” She’s quiet for a moment. “I miss you.” Her voice makes it sound like a question.
My body can’t move fast enough. I need to talk to her. Or text her. Or go somewhere I can actually call her in private. My fingers and toes tingle like they’ve been asleep for days and are just now feeling a rush of blood.
I open up a new text message. I got your voice mail. I should be home in about ten minutes. Call me whenever you want. It takes all my self-restraint not to type in all caps littered with emojis and exclamation marks.
“Hey, this morning wasn’t so bad, right?” Freddie asks.
“What’d you guys do?” asks Ruthie.
Still staring down at my phone, I say, “We, uh, went to the Y. Swam a few laps.”
Ruth turns to Freddie. “Wait, you actually got her to work out with you?” She whips her head back to me. “You never go running with me in the morning.”
“Running is the worst,” I tell her. “And it’s so hot and sticky and gross. And where are you even running to?”
She shakes her head. “It’s better than swimming into a wall.”
“I gotta go,” I tell them. “I’ll see y’all in the morning.”
“You don’t want to ride home together?” asks Freddie.
“Can’t,” I say as I’m unlocking my bike.
He nods and waves as I swing my leg over the seat, and he and Adam veer off toward the car wash.
Ruth runs to catch up to me. “I’ve got the Jeep. I’ll give you a ride.”
I bite down on my lip, thinking. “Yeah, okay. Thanks.”
My bike hangs out the back of the Jeep as Ruth pulls out slowly into the street at the pace of a snail.
I moan. “School zones.”
Both of Ruth’s hands are perfectly placed on the wheel and her eyes dart across the road, constantly surveying her surroundings. It must be exhausting to be so responsible. “What’s the hurry anyway? Today’s your off day, isn’t it?”
“You’re going, like, eight miles an hour. I can bike faster than that.”
“You’re avoiding the question.”
“I want to get home so I can call Grace.”
“Ahhhh,” she says. “Still pining for summer love?”
“Come on. Don’t give me shit about this.”
She doesn’t say anything.
“You’ve never even really been in a relationship,” I tell her. “Someday you’ll see how much love can suck, and you’ll feel like crap for giving me a hard time.”
She shakes her head. “Doubt it. And I’ve avoided getting involved with anyone for good reasons.”
“Yeah, like what?” I ask.
We reach the end of the school zone, and she hits the gas so hard her tires squeal. I can see that this conversation is pushing Ruth to the edge of her comfort zone. She’ll gladly talk about her future or Saul or their rocky relationship with their parents, but love? Not on her agenda. “Well, first off,” she says, “my options here are limited.”
“I’m hurt,” I say.
She rolls her eyes. “Secondly, I have enough to worry about. I don’t want anything to distract me from my goals. I’m not getting caught up with someone who might expect me to stay here.”
Someone like me or Saul or even Hattie? We will probably live and die here. I tell myself not to take it personally, but the idea that life here—my life—isn’t good enough for her still bruises.
We pull up to my house as my dad is unlocking the front door. Today was his early shift. His blue pants are covered in permanent stains, and his freckled arms are slick with sweat.
“Hey, Mr. Leroux!” calls Ruth.
Ruth has a little soft spot for my dad. Maybe because he’s pretty much the opposite of her parents.
He turns. “Oh, hey there, girls. Ruth, I guess Saul trusts you quite a bit to let you drive that thing around?”
She smiles. “He’s off with some new guy.”
Dad nods knowingly. “No greater distraction than love.”
“I don’t know if I’d call it love,” she comments drily.
Dad winks at her and ducks through the door.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I just—maybe it isn’t the craziest thing to think Grace and I could figure it out.” I shake my head. “I’m not stupid, though. I know she’s not moving here or something, but our options here are limited,” I say, mimicking her.
She scoffs at that. “That’s not what I meant.”
I sigh. “I know, I know. And hey, we always have Vermont.”
A small laugh bubbles up from her chest. “There’s always that.” She reaches behind me and pulls a paper bag from the backseat. “Give these to Hattie. They’re prenatal vitamins. Has she been going to regular doctor visits?”
I stuff the bag into my backpack. “I guess. I don’t know?”
“You should know,” she says.
“Okay, fine, I’ll ask her about it.”
“I don’t want to be pushy or anything, but she, like, is growing a living thing in her body, and that requires medical attention.”
“Aww,” I say, “you care!” I reach across the Jeep and hug her tight with her arms pinned to her side.
She groans. “Stoooooop.”
“You love it,” I tell her.
She growls and bites my arm as a warning.
“Okay, okay,” I say, hopping out of the Jeep to grab my bike. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Inside, Dad is sitting in his recliner reading a Clive Cussler paperback. “Hey, sugar,” he says as he dog-ears his page and pushes his reading glasses on top of his forehead—a ridiculous pair with multicolored frames he picked up at the dollar store.
As I chug a glass of water, I check my cell to find no new messages from Grace. I sit down on the arm of his chair, and it’s then that I realize my legs are a little achy from this morning. Working out is for rich people. I don’t have time to feel this exhausted for no reason.
Dad immediately pulls me to him, and I curl into a ball in his lap while he hugs me tight. Being held by my dad is one of the few times when I still feel small. All six-five of him wrapped around my six-three frame reminds me who gave me my height and that maybe life up here isn’t always so bad.
“I needed a good Ramona Blue hug,” he says.
Sometimes when I don’t know how to explain my relationship with my mom, I can only describe it as a void. Whatever she is to me is everything my dad is not, and vice versa.
He lets go, and I plop down on the couch across from him.
“I checked the medicine cabinet and noticed you were running low on your cholesterol meds and a few other things, too,” I say. “Have you gone to the pharmacy to refill?”
“Waiting for payday,” he answers.
“Well, is that gonna last you until then?” I ask. “I could float you the cash.”
He shakes his head. “Who’s the parent here, okay?” He smiles. “How was school?”
I shrug. “Went to the Y this morning with Freddie and Agnes.”
He laughs a little too loud. “How’d you get conned into that?”
I roll my eyes. “Freddie.”
“He’s a good man. Glad you’ve got a real friend.”
“I had friends before Freddie, Dad.”
“Hattie’s your sister,” he says. “And Saul is, well, Saul.”
Saul is Saul. He is the sun, and the rest of us are just orbiting around him. He doesn’t have friends. He has an audience. “I have Ruth.”
He laughs. “Ruth barely likes you.”
I pelt him in the arm with the TV remote. “Ruthie barely likes anyone—except you.”
“Jeez! That’s gonna bruise.” He grins. “Go do your homework or something like that.”
I stand and pull my backpack up by the strap. “Don’t read too many books. They turn your brain to mush.”
I grab half a box of Triscuits for dinner and head to my room. We never really have family dinner. Since all of us work in the restaurant industry, preparing and serving other people’s food, none of us is too quick to volunteer homemade meals.
I spread out my homework across my unmade bed like I might actually do something besides wait for Grace to call me back.
My phone vibrates and my whole body twists into a knot of tension. It’s only a text from Freddie, asking where I ran off to so fast, but I’m too anxious to respond.
And then my phone really rings. It’s Grace. I force myself to let the phone ring three times before I pick it up. I take a deep breath, and even though my door is shut, I whisper because nothing about our walls is soundproof. “Hello?”
She sighs into the receiver. “Hey, you.”
It’s melodramatic, I know, but I could cry. Instead, I try my best for nonchalance. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing, really. Everyone’s at my brother’s soccer game.”
“Why aren’t you?”
“I stayed home from school, so now my mom won’t let me leave the house for the rest of the day. ‘On principle,’ she says.”
I nod, even though she can’t see me. “Are you sick?” I ask with real concern.
For a moment, all I hear are her steady breaths. “Yes. No.”
There’s this wall between us that wasn’t there before. I can feel it. And on the other side of the wall is some piece of her life that she doesn’t know how to talk to me about. “Hey,” I say. “You can talk to me. Even if it’s about other people.”
It’ll hurt, I know, to hear about her life without me. Her friends. Her more than friends. But I’d rather her be transparent with me than to be left out of any corner of her world.
“It’s Andrew,” she says.
“So . . . I guess y’all are still together?”
She’s quiet for a second. “Well, yeah. He’s my boyfriend.”
My mouth goes dry. I don’t hate straight people, I swear. But the word boyfriend. I hate it. Especially coming out of Grace’s mouth. It makes my toes curl. “I thought you were going to break up with him,” I say, but it’s more of an accusation.
“I was. I am.”
I’m angry. At the both of us. Because somehow I had tricked myself into believing that he didn’t mean anything to her. That what we were doing wasn’t cheating.
“You don’t get it,” she says.
I don’t respond, because she’s probably right. I don’t know what it’s like to live a double life.
“I’m back here,” she says. “And you’re not, and now I can’t remember why I was supposed to break up with him. I cheated on him. But I still like being around him.”
I’m here. And you’re not. It’s all I can hear. Anxiety fills my lungs. And maybe she cheated on him this summer, but I feel like I’ve been cheated on, too. “Shouldn’t you at least tell him about us?” It’s hard not to feel like she’s stomping through the memory of us with a giant eraser, removing any evidence of me.
She shrugs with her voice. It’s this sound I can’t explain. “We only have our senior year left. It feels silly to ruin it now. He’s going to Iowa anyway. And—”
“I know how you feel about long-distance.” I’ve felt lots of things about Grace. Sadness. Frustration. Confusion. But now I’m just pissed.
“Yeah.”
I expect for the conversation to be over, but it’s not. There’s a moment or two of weighted silence before Grace says, “Oh my God. My mom started subbing at my school.”
I’m both annoyed and relieved by the change in subject. I breathe in through my nose and out through my mouth a few times. I have to make a decision right now. I have to decide if I’m going to hold on to this anger, which could downright ruin my already fragile relationship with Grace, or if I’m going to stifle my emotions in favor of any future we might have.
“Awww,” I finally say, “your mom’s not so bad.”
She laughs into the receiver. “No. This is bad.”
I listen as she tells me all about how embarrassing her mom is and how she’s only doing this because it’s Grace’s last year of high school and she’s feeling sentimental. Her mom cries every time she sees her in the hallways and always checks in with all her teachers. I tell Grace about swimming at the Y and Freddie and how I knew him and Agnes when I was a kid. She asks lots of questions about Freddie. She has no reason to be jealous, but the idea that she might be satisfies me a little too much.
We talk late into the night, taking breaks for dinner and for Grace to catch up with her family to get the play-by-play of the soccer game. When Hattie and Tyler finally come home, they head straight for Hattie’s room. I narrate their actions and moans for Grace as we giggle back and forth, and I try not to gag. It’s well past one in the morning when our conversation dissolves into heavy, sleepy breaths.
Hattie tiptoes into my room and looks at me with pleading eyes as she crawls into my bed, sighing into the cool sheets.
I flip my bedside lamp off and creep out to the kitchen for a glass of water as I whisper, “We should probably hang up.”
Grace groans into the receiver. “What are you doing right this moment?”
I grin and sink into the couch. “Standing in my kitchen. Maybe turning on some TV.”
“What would you even watch right now?” She yawns, and then adds, “All that’s on is soft-core porn and infomercials.”
“Hey, both of those things have the potential to be interesting.” I reach for the remote and hit the power button. “And what do you know about soft-core porn?”
She laughs.
“Where are you?” I ask.
“In my house.”
“Where in your house?”
“In my dad’s den.” Her voice sounds like a cat’s purr. “Do you want to know what I’m wearing, too?”
Her words suck the air out of my lungs. “The answer to that is always yes, but you should go to bed.”
She laughs. “I miss talking to you, but I miss other things, too.”
My brain knows exactly what she means by other things. My lower abdomen aches like an unsatisfied itch. “Me too.”
Grace wasn’t the first girl I had sex with. That honor goes to Samantha Alice Jones, who I always called by her full name because it sounded so good all together. She was an incoming freshman volleyball player at Mississippi State and was down here at a camp training with her team. We met at Boucher’s the summer before tenth grade. She was white with a port-wine stain on her shoulder, wore her curly hair in two braids, and snorted when she laughed. She was from Kansas and told me she was bi.
On the other line, Grace’s breathing gets heavier, like she’s fighting to stay awake. “Shit,” she says. “I really should go to bed.”
“You hang up first,” I tell her.
“No, you,” she says.
I sigh into the receiver and she giggles. “On the count of three,” I say.
In bed, when I close my eyes, I see Grace. I see her in the moonlight of her bedroom at the vacation rental. The shadows drape across her bare skin like a robe.
Every inch of my body is on fire just thinking about it.
My eyes spring open as Hattie flips over on her back beside me. I try to remember what it felt like to have privacy.
Quietly, I tiptoe to the bathroom, which is the only place in my entire house where I can be alone with my memories of nights spent with Grace.