Sunday morning, I was dressed in more new clothes that Sara had bought me: jeans, a flannel shirt, an insulated vest, and boots. The boots were real leather. They weren’t cowboy boots. They were . . . cool boots. And they had probably cost as much as everything else I was wearing put together.
Sara had surprised me with the boots—and with breakfast—at five o’clock in the morning. As I shoveled scrambled eggs into my mouth, I stared at the boots and said, “I can’t wear those.”
“Why not?” Sara slid a fourth pancake onto the plate, and my stomach gave a pleased, but slightly distressed, groan. The way the food kept coming, I was going to be lucky if the legs of the chair didn’t spray across the kitchen and dump me flat on my butt. “They’re your size. I checked.”
“Because they look expensive.”
“So?” Sara said, looking curiously vulnerable with her hair hidden under a shower cap and in a terrycloth bathrobe the general shape, color, and consistency of cotton candy. “It’s my money. Are you trying to tell me what I can do with my money?”
I glanced around the kitchen looking for help, but there was no backup. This room, located at the back of Sara’s cottage, looked like something that had survived from an older era. The appliances were new—and by new, I mean, they were probably from 1977, all the same olive color and all with plastic buttons that popped in and out only under a great deal of force. The rest of the room, though, you could have picked up from Little House on the Prairie. The walls were exposed timbers that had once been whitewashed but that had, with the passage of time, peeled and faded. Someone before Sara had run electric fixtures and plumbing, but the light switch was attached to a bundle of exposed wires, and the sink only gave out hot water if you opened the tap all the way. Even then it made an enormous chug-chugging noise that threatened to shake the house to the ground. Overhead, a dusty, wrought-iron chandelier hung in the cramped space. Eying that massively out of place metalwork, I made a calculation. If I ate everything on my plate, I’d probably weigh just about as much as all that iron.
“Well?” Sara said. “Can I do what I want with my money?”
I quartered the stack of pancakes, levered one of the sections into my mouth, and through a bubble of syrup said, “Yes.”
“Don’t talk with your mouth full. So you’ll wear the boots?”
“I’m going fishing. They’ll get dirty.”
“They’re boots. They’re supposed to get dirty.”
After another look at the tooled, fine-grain leather, I doubted that this pair of boots was ever meant to get any dirtier than the dust on Fifth Avenue, but I didn’t press the issue. “They’ll get wet.”
“That’s why you wear waders.”
Through another mouthful of pancakes, I said, “I’ve got shoes.”
“You’ve got your running shoes, and the soles on those shoes are about as thick as a layer of spit and moonshine. I’m embarrassed I let you wear them to tryouts. I won’t be able to look Conrad Zirkle in the eyes for the rest of my life.”
“That’s a little much, don’t you think?”
The heavy wooden spoon in her hand gonged against the cast iron skillet. “What was that?”
“Um, nothing.”
A moment passed, and I could feel her gaze on me like she was the one with the psychic powers and she was ready to cook me in my socks. Then, in a perfectly level—perfectly, scarily normal voice—she said, “So you’ll wear the boots?”
So I wore the boots. And, of course, they fit like a dream. I had the impression, probably from reading a book like Huck Finn or something along those lines, that boots took a great deal of time to break in and to become comfortable. Not these. They might as well have been clouds. And when Austin pulled up outside Sara’s house, I hoisted the fly-rods over my shoulder, grabbed the vest and tackle box, and turned to find Sara drying her hands in the kitchen doorway.
“Oh shi—I mean, shoot.”
Wrestling with the shower cap on her head, Sara squinted at me.
“I forgot to get him a birthday present.”
“Again?”
“He only told me yesterday, and I was at work all day, and I—”
She laughed, still trying to square the shower cap. “I’m teasing, Vie. Look in the console.”
That’s what she called the TV stand: the console. I pulled open the center drawer and found a small, wrapped box, the size and shape of a box that a ring might come in, or some other small jewelry.
“I can’t,” I said.
“You don’t even know what it is.”
“I need to get him something. Myself.”
Outside, Austin honked, and Sara said, “Well, you don’t have much time.”
I glanced at the box and then at the door.
“Just take it,” Sara said. “If you decide not to give it to him, you can bring it back.”
“What is it?”
She smiled, gripped the shower cap, and gave it a final yank so that it almost covered her eyes. “You’ll have to wait and see.”
“Thank you,” I said, slipping the box into my vest pocket and running out the door.
“Be safe,” Sara called after me.
Outside, the October day had not yet dawned. To the east, the first etching of the Bighorn Mountains was beginning to show against the sky, but the rest of the world lay in darkness. Instead of the Charger, Austin was driving his dad’s shiny, black Ford F-350. It looked like it had enough horsepower to drag half the town behind it, and I was relieved that there was no sign of the horse trailer. At least Austin had told the truth about that part.
After dropping my gear in the bed, I climbed into the passenger seat. Austin handed me a coffee. Somehow, he managed to fit the part of early-morning fisherman perfectly: he wore an old trucking hat, with his hair tucked up under it, and his eyes were alert in spite of the hour, and he had on a vest covered with snippers and flies. He kissed me, tasting of coffee with vanilla creamer, but the taste didn’t cover up the essential smell of the truck: a fresh, earthy scent, the way soil smells when it’s first turned.
“You awake?” he asked.
“Barely.”
“Sara gave you some gear? I brought extra.”
“Yeah, she had a bunch of it lying around.”
“You want to sleep on the way?” he asked as we pulled out of the driveway. “It’s at least an hour.”
“I’m not going to sleep on my boyfriend’s make-up birthday.”
Minutes passed in silence as Austin headed east towards the mountains. “I haven’t seen you asleep, have I?”
“What?”
“I was just thinking, I’ve never seen you asleep. Is that weird?”
“I don’t think so.” But the comment made me think of Emmett. Twice, now, I had slept in the same bed as Emmett Bradley. Emmett Bradley had seen me asleep, and my boyfriend hadn’t. My tongue felt thick as I added, “Why would you see me asleep?”
“I don’t know. There’s been so much going on. It would be nice to have it be slow one day. Take a nap.”
“That,” I said, “would have been a perfect make-up birthday. In fact, you can still change your mind. Let’s get this truck headed back into town, and we’ll have breakfast, and then—” I saw his frown. “Nope. Never mind. Fishing. We’re going fishing.”
“If you really don’t want to go . . .”
“I’m here, right? I’m wearing a vest. I have those enormous waders in the bed of the truck.”
“Yeah, you’re here.”
An awkward moment stretched out between us. Finally, I said, “Sorry.”
He shook his head. “It’s no big deal.”
But it felt like a big deal, with all that heavy quiet between us. Somehow, just like that, I’d ruined it. We drove the rest of the way in silence. As we followed the gravel road into the Bighorns, with lodgepole pines thatching the path with their bristly green tops, the sky turned the color of asphalt. The sun was up, even if we couldn’t see it yet. The stars disappeared. The first hints of blue showed at the crest of the Bighorns.
It was going to be a beautiful day. I pushed away the thoughts of our earlier conversation. The sun would be out. The day was supposed to be warm. Even if I made a total fool of myself, I would get to do it with my boyfriend, and I’d get to enjoy a part of my new home that I had never seen.
“Do you like me?” Austin asked.
“What?”
“Do you like me?”
“We’re dating.”
“Right, but me. Do you like me? The person I am, I mean.”
“Of course I like you. Why else would I date you?”
I immediately knew it was the wrong thing to say. He closed up, his face tightening, hiding any sign of what was going on inside his head.
“What do you mean?” I asked after another minute went by.
“I don’t know, I was being stupid.”
“No, come on. You think I don’t like you? What? You think I’m dating you for . . . I don’t know why.”
“Just forget it. Like I said, it was stupid. I know you like me. This is great. We’re great. Let’s just enjoy the day.”
“How am I supposed to enjoy the day when you think I don’t like you?”
“That’s not what I said. I was just—Jesus Christ, can we drop it?”
“Is it because I don’t like fishing?”
“You haven’t even been fishing!” The words exploded out of him. “You’ve never been. You told me that yourself.”
“So it is about the fishing.” My skin prickled all over. This had been coming a long time. I had known it, over the last few weeks. I had known that it would only be a matter of time before Austin got to know me, before he saw the real me, and then, poof, bang, bam, he’d be gone like a shot.
“It’s not about the fishing. It’s not about anything. I just—you’re just hard for me to read, sometimes. Maybe I can’t tell when you’re joking.” He looked at me, his blue-green eyes shiny like sea glass in the sun. “Drop it, will you? Please?”
I couldn’t think of how to respond. I couldn’t think, to be honest, of what I could say that wouldn’t make everything worse. But somehow my mouth got away from me. “What? Do I have to like everything you like?”
“No.”
“I mean, you don’t have to like running. You don’t have to like—” I was at a loss to think of something else I liked, a hobby, anything. But I’d spent the last sixteen years trying to survive. I hadn’t grown up with time to go fishing, or with time to learn how to ride horses, or with any of that.
“Yeah, well, you know what?” The truck rolled across a cramped gravel lot, and Austin parked. As he killed the engine, he said, “I do like running. Believe it or not, I like it a lot. And I’ve done every single thing I can think of except ask you if you’ll invite me to go running, and you never have. Did you even know I liked running? Did you catch one of those goddamn hints?”
He kicked open his door and climbed out. I shouted after him, “Why were you dropping fucking hints? Why didn’t you just say something?”
His door slammed shut.
Jesus Christ, I thought, pounding my fist on the dash. The ache traveled up my arm and lodged somewhere in my chest. Near my heart, I thought absently. Right where my heart should be, that’s where. So I hit the dash again. What I wasn’t going to, what I wouldn’t do, was cry. Not under any circumstances. Not hell or high water. Not because this stupid, self-absorbed boy thought—
—I didn’t like him—
—he could talk to me like I was a piece of shit.
Wrestling my door open, I dropped out into the cold. “You know what?” I bellowed, starting towards the tailgate. I cut off, though, when I saw two other shapes standing in the middle distance. In the morning half-light, I hadn’t noticed that another car was already parked here, and my voice dried up when I realized we weren’t alone.
“What?” Austin asked, his voice hard and emotionless.
Squinting to make out who else was there, I suppressed a groan. Kaden, of course. And Colton. Colton, with his hair in that stupid faux hawk that must have cost as much as I made in a week. Austin’s two asshole best friends. He invited them to his make-up birthday fishing weekend.
“What?” Austin asked again. “Do I know what?”
“Nothing.”
With a quick glance over his shoulder, he said, “I’m sorry, all right? I was out of line. Can we have a nice day?”
“Yeah,” I said, but my voice sounded like a branch about to snap in a strong wind. “Yeah, it’s going to be fucking perfect.”
And then, as though right on cue, Emmett Bradley pulled into the parking lot.