Aly hated the way things had gotten. As they had grown, so had the distance.
It’d been cold out the last couple of weeks, too cold to find escape in their empty field, not that they would be out there, anyway.
Her dad called her a tomboy, teasing that she always wanted to be outside, playing in the dirt and climbing trees.
But really, she just wanted to be near him.
She quieted her feet as she flattened her back to the wall and slid farther down the hall. It was wrong, she knew, eavesdropping on Jared and Christopher as they talked in her brother’s bedroom, but she didn’t know how to stop herself. Shielding herself from the conversation happening on the other side of the door seemed impossible because she felt drawn. As if she had to hear. As if she had to know.
Still she’d never believed hearing something could cause her so much pain.
For years she’d imagined being thirteen would make her feel mature. Grown-up. She’d studied herself in the mirror as her body had begun to change and thought maybe Jared would begin to notice her in the same way she noticed him.
But now that she was just a few months from turning fourteen, the only thing she felt like was a stupid little girl.
On the carpeted hall floor, she slid her bare feet a little farther down, coming right up to the outside of Christopher’s door. Anxiety twisted her stomach into heavy knots that made it hard to breathe. Or maybe it was the pain in her chest that made her feel as if she were suffocating. She couldn’t tell.
She only knew it hurt.
She swallowed over the pain that lodged in her throat and tried to still her shaking hands.
Christopher’s door was barely cracked open, but she could make out the back of her brother’s head from where he sat on the floor in the middle of the room. Loose sheets of homework and a textbook were spread out in front of him. Every few seconds, Aly would catch a glimpse of Jared’s face whenever Christopher leaned to the side.
She inclined her ear, keeping herself hidden as she subjected herself to their hushed words.
“Oh man,” Christopher said through suppressed, envious laughter. “In her parents’ bed? Dude, that is messed up.”
Jared chuckled as if the whole conversation was absurd. Aly saw him press his hands to his face, then drop them to his lap with a one-sided shrug. “I don’t even know what I was thinking. It was weird, anyway… . I don’t even like her.”
“She’s hot, though,” Christopher pointed out.
Suggestive laughter fell from Jared’s mouth. “That she is.”
Those knots tightened in her stomach, and she was sure she was going to be sick.
“What about you and Samantha?” Jared asked, resituating himself as he pulled a textbook to his lap. “That girl is wound up so tight I don’t know how you’re ever going to undo that.”
Christopher shook his head, his shaggy black hair brushing over his shoulders. “Nah… Samantha is cool. She wants to wait until she turns sixteen… six weeks.” He laughed almost as if he were embarrassed and rubbed at the back of his neck. “I like her a lot. I mean, like, a lot.”
Christopher lowered his head, and Aly caught sight of Jared’s curious expression.
“Yeah?” he asked, completely without ridicule.
“Yeah.”
“That’s cool, man. I want that someday.” Then Jared cracked a smile, wide and cocky. “Just not when I’m sixteen.”
Christopher crumpled up a piece of paper and threw it at his head. “Fuck you.” He laughed, unrestrained. “You just can’t stand it that I have to drive your sorry ass around all the time and I have an awesome girlfriend.”
“Hey, man, two weeks and I’m free.” Jared looked up with a grin.
“Yeah, and I bet the second you get that car your parents are giving you, you’ll have Kylie in the backseat.”
Aly felt sad, a sadness she didn’t know how to deal with. It was as if this disease crawled over her flesh, pressing down, seeping in, taking hold. She wanted to scrape the feeling from her skin, purge it from her mind.
She wasn’t one of those girls. She’d never been able to understand the packs of girls gathered around one another in the bathroom while one girl cried because the boy she liked didn’t like her back. Inevitably, she liked a different boy the next week and suddenly the world was right.
It wasn’t as if Aly really thought badly of them. Most of them were her friends. She just didn’t understand the shift, the distraction from one boy to the next in the matter of seconds, the fleeting attraction that never lasted. Because the only boy she’d ever wanted had been one and the same. She forced out a ragged breath from her lungs and tried to blink away the pounding in her head.
Aly froze when Jared suddenly lifted his face and caught her eye as she stared at him openmouthed through the sliver in the door.
He kicked Christopher on the sole of his shoe to get his attention. “Shh… ,” he hissed in warning. He announced her presence to Christopher with a gesture of his chin. “Your little sister is right there.”
She stepped back, shaking, hating that she’d managed to make herself the fool.
“Aly?” her mom called from the living room.
She hurried to the end of the hall before she allowed herself to speak. “I’m right here.”
Her mom both smiled and frowned. “I thought you were running to your room to get the picture? Helene is dying to see your first-place winner.”
Jared’s mom, Helene, twisted around her seat, smiling at Aly from across the room. “I knew you’d do it, Aly, baby.” Her blue eyes shone with warm affection, her long natural blond hair pulled to one side and flowing down her slender shoulder. “I’ve never seen anyone who can draw like you… ever since you were just a tiny thing… always drawing.” She smiled knowingly at Aly’s mom.
“Let’s see it, sweetheart,” her mom said.
“I couldn’t find it,” Aly lied, shifting her weight from foot to foot. She’d been too busy spying on Christopher and Jared. “Let me look a little more.”
Aly rushed to her room, slammed the door shut behind her, and rested her back against it as she fought against the tears.
Jared’d had sex with some girl and she’d never so much as held a boy’s hand.
She’d been waiting for him.
Anger pulled at the knots in her stomach, knitting them tighter. She stomped across her room, knew she was acting like a baby, like one of those stupid girls at school with a stupid crush and even stupider tears, but she couldn’t stop them. They flooded down her face. She just wanted to curl up in her bed and die.
Instead she jerked up the hem of her shirt and used it to harshly dry her eyes.
He’d promised her he’d never leave her behind.
But he did.
“Stop it. Just stop it,” she scolded herself below her breath, drawing air into her tight lungs. “Stop being dumb, Aly. He’s almost sixteen.”
What did she expect? That he would actually want her?
She had to pull it together, forget about this, shove it aside.
She dropped to her knees and dragged the portfolio from under her bed, retrieving the large charcoal drawing that had been awarded first prize. She’d felt proud when they gave her the ribbon, proud when they gave her the check to put into her savings account for college.
It was a landscape, the mountains stretching up to kiss the horizon as the sun sagged behind the mountain, distorted, as if the two were melting into each other.
But this art wasn’t her treasure.
Her treasures were the faces she kept safe, bound up in sketch pads that she’d never show another person.
Now she knew why. She’d been right.
Jared would have laughed.
She swallowed down the humiliation and rushed back down the hall. At the brink of the living room, she slowed, her movements guarded as she made her way to Helene. Jared’s mom was so beautiful… as beautiful as her own… but different, the woman somehow both exotic and plain. Aly wasn’t exactly sure how that could be, but she’d drawn her face so many times she knew it was the truth.
With shaky hands, she gave Helene her offering.
Helene quietly gasped. “This is incredible, Aly. Absolutely beautiful.” She smiled up at her, reflective tears simmering in her eyes. “You did good, baby girl. So good.”
“Thank you,” Aly whispered, feeling heat on her cheeks and warmth in her chest as she took her drawing back into her hands.
“What’s that?”
Aly jumped when the voice that haunted her thoughts came from directly behind her. She jerked to look over her shoulder and came face-to-face with the boy who stole her breath. Her stomach ached again, but this time in a different way. Her mouth went dry, her mind completely blank except for the fact that he was standing less than foot from her. “It’s nothing,” she finally managed to force out.
“Nothing?”
He touched her shoulder, gently prodding her to turn, and took hold of the top of the large image while she held the bottom. For a long moment, he said nothing and just stared at the thick paper separating them, before he lifted his face. “Aly, did you draw this?”
Blue eyes searched her face, and it hurt and stung and soothed, and again, Aly wanted to cry. “It was just a stupid art project I had to do for school.”
“That ended up winning the state championship,” Helene was quick to add. “It’s really beautiful, Jared, isn’t it?”
He didn’t look away from Aly. “Yeah, it is.” Admiration filled his soft smile. “Is this the kind of stuff you keep in your sketch pads?”
Aly swallowed and shook her head. “No,” she admitted with her eyes pinched shut tight.
“Can I see one of those drawings?” he asked.
Helene tsked, her smile light. “Jared, that’s as bad as asking a girl if you can read her journal. You should know better.”
He stumbled through a chuckle and stepped back. “I guess so.”
A timer sounded in the kitchen. Aly’s mom got up and disappeared through the archway. She popped her head back out a minute later. “All right, time for dinner. You kids get washed up.”
Augustyn and Courtney abandoned the cartoon they were watching in the family room and rushed down the hall.
Their families ate together the way they always did, a jumble of people scattered about the room, their parents at the dining table, Jared, Christopher, and Aly at the nook, and the little kids on stools at the bar.
As soon as dinner was over, Jared and Christopher announced their departure.
“You two be careful,” Aly’s mom ordered, wagging her pointed finger at the two of them.
“Of course, Mom,” Christopher promised, jingling his keys at his side.
“I don’t want to hear any more excuses about being late for curfew, Jared Zachary,” Helene warned. “You be home on time tonight.”
Jared just smiled and nodded, quick to head for the door.
“And just because you’re getting ready to turn sixteen doesn’t mean you’re too old to give your mom a kiss good-bye,” Helene called out.
Jared laughed and rushed back up to Helene. He dipped down to kiss her on the cheek. “Never. Love you, Mom.”
“Be good, bear,” she said with nothing but affection.
Aly focused on her plate as Jared passed behind her. She felt a tug on a thick lock of her hair. Her eyes dropped closed because he hadn’t done that in so long. Quiet and subdued, his words came from behind her. “I’m really proud of you, Aly Cat.”
Aly’s heart pressed at her ribs.
Maybe he hadn’t forgotten her after all.