It’s hot for November. And wet. The kind where it’s as humid as it can possibly be without actually raining, and you wish the sky would just put itself out of its misery and wring out the clouds already.
And it does. A single cool raindrop on my cheek. Another on the back of my hand. I slam the door to the truck, and Dean and I race for the steps to the porch, even though it would probably feel pretty good to get caught in the rain. You can almost hear a hiss of relief with each drop that hits the ground. Sunshiny rain has always been Hope’s favorite weather to run in.
“Pam, do we have any more SunChips?” yells Dean as he walks inside. He’s been home for forty-eight hours and at least half of them have been spent eating.
“They’re in the pantry.” I hear the sound of my brother banging around boxes and jars. “Top shelf,” she calls.
The rustling stops. “Oh. Right.”
He walks into the kitchen eating a mini-bag of Harvest Cheddar (read: the inferior choice to Garden Salsa). I stare out the window. In the Birdsongs’ backyard, outfitted from head to toe in running gear, is Hope. She tilts her face toward the sky and lets the rain fall on her cheeks. And it’s hard to say from here, but I bet you anything she’s smiling.
In the next second, she’s off. Streaking up the dirt path that winds through the woods behind our houses. It kind of makes me want to go for a run myself, or maybe a bike ride.
I sniff-shrug-sniff in rapid succession.
Pam’s head shoots up. “How are your tics doing?”
“Fine,” I say quickly, even though I’m pretty sure it’s not true. Ever since we went from two pills a day to one, things haven’t been right.
“You getting the headaches again?” she asks.
“Yeah, but I got those the last two times, too.” Headaches and a little bit of a heart-racing feeling, but the doctor said those are totally normal withdrawal symptoms, especially since the medication was originally developed to be a blood pressure drug.
I keep tic-ing (well, of course I’m tic-ing now that Pam’s eyeing me like that), and she keeps watching. Yep, it’s definitely time to go.
“I think I’m gonna bike around the neighborhood,” I say.
“Not in that, you’re not,” says Pam.
“It’s just a little rain.”
“Yeah, right now.” She taps the screen of her phone. “We’re in for a thunderstorm. Maybe even hail.”
“Hail? Does that even happen down here?” asks Dean, just as I say, “Are you sure? Hope just took off running.”
There is only one logical course of action—I’ve got to stop her. I don’t wait for Pam to protest. I run outside and sprint across the yard and up the path. Most of the leaves have been crunched until they’re nothing but dust under my feet. The rain soaks my hair and T-shirt (which feels great) and my jeans (which feels absolutely disgusting). I run faster. The sooner I catch up to her, the sooner I can go home and change. I’m in good shape. I play a varsity sport. How fast can she be?
Damn fast. That’s how fast. Leave-Spencer’s-sorry-ass-in-the-dust fast.
I’ve been flat-out sprinting, and I haven’t caught sight of her. Not even a flash of white hair. And now, for added fun, the water has dripped down my legs and into my shoes and socks. Whenever I take a step, it makes a double squelching noise. Once for my soggy shoes. Once for the mud that doesn’t want to let me go. I try to avoid it, but my jeans are stiff and heavy, and I’m not exactly a master of dexterity right now.
“Hope!” I probably should have thought of this before, this whole yelling her name thing.
“Hope!” There are tree roots and briars grabbing at my feet and fallen branches to leap over. The rain’s coming down so thick, I can barely see the path.
“HOPE!” And then my foot punches through some loose dirt and into a hole in the ground, and I fall with a splat into three inches of mud.
Well, that’s great. Just great. I can’t find Hope anywhere, and I’m soaking wet and covered in mud, and ow, fuck, I just tried to move my foot and something feels really wrong.
This is all kinds of bad. If it keeps me from wrestling . . . No. I don’t even want to think about it. Let’s worry about the things that are important in the present. Namely, I’m all alone in the middle of nowhere and who knows if I can walk right now. I wiggle my foot out of the hole. It looks like a place where a tree died and the roots and everything rotted out. I take a tentative step. Okay. Okay. It hurts, but I can do it. That probably means it’s not broken. I try another step.
“Spencer?”
I freeze. Hope stands in the middle of the path, her eyebrows crinkled in confusion, her hair more blonde than white now that it’s soaked with rainwater, and—
Oh, crap. Her shirt is soaked with rainwater, too. And it’s white. It clings to her body in see-through patches, and her sports-bra thingy underneath is hot pink, and okay, I can’t look at her anymore.
“What are you doing out here?”
I keep my eyes carefully trained on her face. “I was looking for you. Pam says there’s gonna be a thunderstorm with hail and stuff, and we saw you run into the woods . . .”
“Hail? In South Georgia?”
I shrug.
As if in response, hail starts falling all around us. Hard little chunks that tear through the trees like bullets and land with soft thumps in the leaves below.
“Mother scratcher,” Hope hisses, rubbing her arm. She pulls her hand away to reveal a dime-size pink welt.
We look at each other, and I know we’re thinking the same thing: If we try to make it home, we’ll get slaughtered.
I shift my weight and have to put my hand against the tree to steady myself. Twenty yards past that tree is another tree. Well, we’re in the woods, there are trees everywhere, but I mean a tree I actually recognize. Dad’s tree stand—the one where he and Dean hang out—is at the top.
“C’mon,” I yell.
I take her hand and nearly pull her down in the mud with me when I try to run.
“What are you doing?” She looks kind of annoyed, not that I blame her.
“My dad has a tree stand over there. We can wait it out.”
Hope cups her hand to her brow. “Yeah, okay.”
Then she slides an arm around my waist.
“But—”
“Don’t pretend you don’t need my help.”
I think about protesting again, but she glares me into silence. Somehow we walk/tumble/crash through layers of vines and undergrowth and make it to the ladder under the tree stand. I apologize about a billion times. But now we have to make it up the ladder. And did I mention we are still being pelted with hail?
I climb up first, with Hope spotting me. At one point, I slip, and she has to grab my butt to keep me from knocking us both to the ground. I mostly try not to think about it. When I finally feel the boards of the platform, I could cry, I’m so happy. I roll myself onto the deck with Hope’s help and crawl inside. It really is like a grown-up tree house. The roof isn’t tall enough to stand up, but it keeps out the hail and most of the rain. I lie on the floor panting.
“That. Was awful.”
Hope laughs. “Maybe you shouldn’t try to rescue me so much. It doesn’t really work out for you.”
I scoff. “This was an excellent rescue. We’re safe, aren’t we?”
“Oh, sure. It was, um, super manly. Especially the part where I had to push you up here by your butt. Very gallant.”
“Thank you.” I cross my arms over my chest and sit up so I’m leaning against the wall.
Hope sits next to me, and because the tree stand is so small, she has to sit rightnext to me.
“Glad to know my skills are appreciated,” I say. “Meanwhile, if you could stop putting yourself in life-threatening situations, it would make my life a whole lot easier.”
“Are you kidding? There’s no way I was passing this up. It’s perfect running weather. I mean, before it started hailing.”
“Ha.” I take off my socks and shoes because they’re still so squishy and gross. I wish I could take off my pants, too, but that would probably be awkward.
Hope fusses over my ankle, which is A) swollen, B) already turning purple, and C) still hurts like a mofo. Then, she settles back in beside me, and we’re shoulder to shoulder, but that’s okay because we’re friends. I just need to be cool with it. I mean, if I scoot away, that would only make everything more obvious.
“Do you ever have a day that feels like a metaphor for your whole life?” she says.
“Um.” I honestly don’t know what she’s talking about.
She smiles. “So, that’s a no.” She twists her shirt to wring some of the water out of it, but despite the trickle of droplets that hit the floor, she still looks like a cat that just had a bath. “I was just thinking about how I ran out into the storm because I’m so worried I’ll miss something. I’m so scared all the time because there are so many things I want to do and see, and what if I don’t get to?”
“Hey, you’ll get to. Of course you will. I don’t know anyone who’s as driven as you.”
She shakes her head. “But she didn’t. And I want to do a lot of things, Spence. A lifetime wouldn’t be enough time, and that’s, like, a Mimi lifetime. But what if I don’t get that much? Janie had so many plans and now she’s just gone. Why do people have to die? It’s so horrible.”
I don’t know what to say, so I press my shoulder and hip against hers like I’m trying to send her messages. It seems to work.
“I’m sorry. I know that normal people don’t spend tons of time thinking how sad it is that people die, but sometimes it’s all I can think about. I think about never reading one more book or thinking one more thought or having one more kiss, ever again, and it’s so terrifying. Sometimes, I just sit and think about what it would be like to not be able to think anymore. What it’ll feel like when I’m gone.”
“I don’t think it’s weird to be scared of that,” I say. I chew on my lip and think about it for a while. “Do you believe in heaven?”
“Yeah.” Her eyes go a little desperate. “Yeah, I have to, because I have to believe I’ll see her again.”
I nod. “Me, too.”
Neither of us says anything for a while.
Hope brushes her hair out of her face. “Did I tell you I’ve been e-mailing with her boyfriend?”
“Oh, wow, I didn’t know that. What was his name?”
“Nolan.”
“Right, Nolan.” I think I remember meeting him at the funeral.
“We’re actually going to visit him in South Africa for a whole week. Like, Mom, Dad, all of us.” She smiles at the thought of it. “We’re leaving in a few days. Oh. That reminds me. I’m supposed to ask you if you’ll check our mail while we’re gone.”
“Sure. So, uh, what’s he like?”
“He’s . . . interesting.”
I snort, and Hope laughs.
“No, I don’t mean it like that. It’s just. Her other boyfriends were a lot like Dean, and this one was more of a—” She blushes. “Well, he’s different.”
I guess I’m not surprised to hear Janie’s boyfriends were like Dean. The Deans of the world get the girls. It’s like a law of nature.
“I guess I’m realizing that maybe my sister didn’t have everything all figured out. Maybe she was still figuring things out, too.” Hope shivers and rubs her arms. “Anyway, thanks for listening to all of that. I could never talk about this kind of stuff around Mikey. That’s kind of why I broke up with him.”
“Oh, yeah?” I try not to sit up straighter or anything, but she almost never talks about them breaking up. “What kind of stuff?”
“I don’t know. Honest stuff? Maybe that’s not right. I’m not pretending when I’m happy. But sometimes I’m not happy. I felt like I could never be serious around Mikey—but at least I could be angry? And I can’t be sad or angry around most people.”
Is it wrong that it feels so good to hear her say that about Mikey? Oh, she’s looking at me expectantly. This is the part where I’m supposed to say something. “That has to be really hard.”
She shrugs. “It’s okay. I think as long as you’ve got at least one person you can tell all your stuff to, that can be enough.”
She holds my hand and rests her head against my shoulder. But it’s okay, because friends can do that, right? And our fingers are cupped and not interlocked, so it barely counts.
“Thanks for being my friend. Again. I’m glad you didn’t give up,” she says.
She’s talking really close to my face, but it’s okay. I think friends probably do that, too.
Then she leans in like she’s going to kiss me. Okay, if the past has taught me anything, it’s that friends definitely do not kiss each other. Like, ever. Like, it causes a friendship apocalypse, in fact. So, even though our mouths are so close together, and her eyelids are halfway shut, and I can feel her breath against my cheeks and see the rain dripping from the ends of her hair—
She kisses me.
Lightly on the lips and just for a second. Atomic bombs go off in little thought bubbles over our heads. And then we’re staring at each other, watching the fallout on each other’s faces. Her eyes are saying everything I’m thinking: This can’t be a one-time thing. It has to happen again.
Now. It has to happen now.
I lean forward again, and her lips are parted this time, and I can see the smallest crescent of tongue inside her mouth, and I want so many things.
But before we can kiss again, she says, “I can’t.”
My mouth opens and closes. Did I misread everything? Again? I don’t understand. She kissed me first.
“No, it’s not that.” She squeezes my shoulder like that’s supposed to tell me something.
It doesn’t work. There are hummingbirds where my lungs should be. “I’m sorry. I thought—”
“It’s okay.”
I cup my hand over my mouth. “Oh, gosh. I’m so sorry.”
“I wanted to.” She takes a deep breath. “I want to. I—well, there’s something I need to do first.”
I’m so scared this is all going to disappear. “But after?”
“After.”
It feels like a promise.
Hope helps me up my back porch, and I watch her walk into her house, waiting until that last flash of white hair disappears with the close of a door. Then I tear (read: hop clumsily on one foot) upstairs to my bedroom. Rip open my blinds. Hope’s window is right across from mine, and if I see her it means, well, I don’t know, SOMETHING. I need to know, is she dancing around her room? Is she brushing her teeth repeatedly?
There she is! She’s walking to the other side of the room! She’s—oh, holy crap, she’s looking out her window, too, and she just saw me. I flip to the side, my back against the wall. I’m huffing and panting. I can’t believe she saw me. It’s so embarrassing. Hey, wait. She was looking, too. SHE WAS LOOKING, TOO. I peek back, and she’s still there. She gives me a wave before she pulls the blinds shut.
I clutch my heart. That smile. That wave. I float over to my bed and fall spread-eagle onto my back.