Luke, stop,” Annabelle said, laughing. “I can’t draw you if you keep doing that.”
“You mean doing this?” Luke asked, using his feet to push them off from the ground and move the tire swing in a wide arc.
“Yes,” Annabelle said. She’d been holding her sketch pad with one hand and her pencil with the other, but now the hand holding the pencil had to hold the tire swing chain, too. “Come on,” she said. She tried to be serious, but she was still smiling. “I want to show what I learned in my figure drawing class this summer. I’ve really improved since the last time I drew you.”
“Okay. We’ll stop. Just . . . one more swing, okay?” Luke said, pushing off again. He wanted her to draw him, if that’s what she wanted to do, but he wanted to keep swinging, too. When the tire tilted up in the air and then tilted back down again, it made him feel the same way on the outside that he felt on the inside. Which was . . . light. Free. Like he could swing forever. He felt that way about skateboarding sometimes if he was lucky, and the board was right, and the pavement was right, and his mood was right, but this was different. This was better. Annabelle was here. And when he lifted his feet up and hitched them on the inside of the tire on the upward swing, his knees bumped against her knees. When he leaned toward her on the downward swing, her long, loose hair, which was blowing around her face, touched his face, and that was nice, too.
It was weird how fast things could change. A week ago, he’d thought Annabelle hated him, and now . . . now he knew she didn’t. When he’d asked Cal about her on the steps of the library, he’d half expected some big lecture from him about girls. But when Cal had found out Annabelle was at the drugstore, he’d said, “Now? She’s there right now? Then why are you standing here talking to me?”
Luke couldn’t answer that, so he shrugged and went down the block to the drugstore. When he walked in, Annabelle was still there, standing at the makeup counter, using lipsticks to put these little marks on the back of her hand. Luke had thought a lot about what he’d say to Annabelle the next time he saw her, but what he said to her then was, “Why are you doing that? Putting lipstick on your hand?” And she’d said, “To see what it would look like with my skin tone. They don’t let you put it on your lips here.”
“Will your parents even let you wear that?” Luke asked because of all the rules they had.
“As long as it looks natural,” Annabelle said. “That’s why I’m not trying the reds. Just the corals and pinks.”
“Oh,” Luke said. And then they just started talking. Not about lipstick, but about other things, like her drawing class, and his hiking trip, and her brother breaking his collarbone, which Luke hadn’t even known about. Afterward they’d come back to Luke’s house, and Annabelle had wanted to go on the tire swing. Luke thought they were a little old to swing, but once they got on it, he didn’t mind. It was actually pretty fun. It was where he’d told her about how he was going to meet his dad in another week, and about his two half sisters. She was really excited, which was good, because it made Luke forget, for a little while, that he was kind of nervous about it. He and Annabelle hadn’t been together on the tire swing since that day over a week ago. Partly because he’d been busy with Nature Camp and going to Minneapolis, and she’d been away on a family trip.
He heard the back door open now, heard his mom call out, “Luke? Annabelle?”
He tried to ignore her, but Annabelle used her foot to slow down the swing.
“Yes, Ms. Harper?” Annabelle called back. She was so polite, Luke thought. His mom had told her to call her Billy at least a hundred times over the years, but she still wouldn’t call her that. It was a church thing. Her parents said she had to call all the adults in their congregation Mr. or Mrs. or Ms., even if she’d known them all her life. It was just the way they did things, Luke guessed. It seemed old-fashioned, but for some reason it seemed nice, too.
“Are either of you thirsty?” Billy asked, standing on the porch. “I can bring you some lemonade.”
“No,” Luke said, not looking at her. He was hoping she wouldn’t come over to them. His and Annabelle’s knees were almost touching, and he was afraid that if his mom came any closer, Annabelle would move her knees away.
“No, thank you, Ms. Harper,” Annabelle said. “I have to go soon, anyway. It’s almost dinnertime.”
It was? He didn’t want her to go. He’d forgotten, though, how early her family ate dinner. That was a church thing, too. Her dad had all these commitments on weeknights, like Bible study groups and things like that.
“All right, then,” his mom said, and Luke could tell she was happy that he and Annabelle were hanging out together again. “Let me know if you change your minds.” Please go back inside, he thought. As if she’d heard him, she said good-bye to Annabelle and did.
“I saw your mom’s boyfriend on Main Street today,” Annabelle said, starting to draw him again.
Luke nodded. It was weird hearing someone call Cal his mom’s boyfriend, but he supposed that’s what he was.
“He was parking his Porsche.”
“He’s selling that. Which is too bad. But he wants something he can drive in the winter. He asked me to look at Jeeps in Duluth with him tomorrow.”
“That sounds like fun,” Annabelle said.
“Maybe.” He shrugged.
Then they were quiet while Annabelle was trying to get something right in her drawing.
“I told my parents about you meeting your dad,” she said finally. “Was that okay?”
“I guess,” he said.
“My mom said it was like a movie,” Annabelle said. “She meant, I think, those made-for-TV movies she watches on the Hallmark Channel.”
“I don’t think it was like that,” Luke said. He was thinking to himself, that if his life were going to be like a movie, he’d prefer Fast & Furious to the Hallmark Channel. He’d already told Annabelle yesterday, when he’d briefly run into her, about meeting his dad at the hotel coffee shop. He hadn’t told her everything. Because he still didn’t know how to describe it. He’d thought about it a lot, though, kind of playing it over in his head and remembering little details. He liked his dad, and he could tell his dad liked him, too. But his mom kept saying “You’ll just need to take things slowly.” It reminded him of Mad Dog saying he needed to be “in the present.” Adults had these things they said that were supposed to be so helpful, but they were sometimes just annoying.
“Anyway, my mom is happy for you. And my dad . . .”
“Does he still hate me?”
“No. He said you were a good kid. Basically a good kid.”
“Basically?” Luke echoed. He wasn’t sure if he liked that or not. But Annabelle didn’t seem to have a problem with it.
“Yes, and he said you weren’t going to be hanging out with Van anymore, either.”
“Yeah. I’m not allowed to. In school, though, it might be hard . . .” School was starting soon, and he felt a little nervous. It was his last year of middle school. So much had changed over the summer. What would Van think when he told him his dad didn’t live in Alaska, but on Vancouver Island instead?
“You don’t know about Van?” Annabelle had stopped drawing and was looking at him a little strangely. The tire swing was still now.
“What?” Luke said. “What about him?”
“He . . . got sent away. I thought you knew. I thought you just didn’t want to talk about it.”
Luke shook his head, confused. “I haven’t seen to him since before I went on the hiking trip. What do you mean, ‘He got sent away’?”
Annabelle looked upset. She even closed her sketch pad.
“What happened?” he asked.
“Well, my dad said . . . and don’t repeat this, okay, Luke? Because a lot of what he hears . . .”
She shrugged. “Sometimes he doesn’t want it to go any further . . . But Officer Sawyer told him that Van and his friend, that dropout—”
“J.P.,” Luke said, and for some reason his heart was beating faster.
“He and J.P.,” Annabelle continued, “got caught breaking into the Greys’ barn.”
“You’re kidding,” he said. And he meant it. He was shocked. He didn’t think they’d really do it. They were always talking about doing stuff that they didn’t do.
Annabelle shook her head. “No. They did. And the Greys’ handyman called the police. And then he called Mr. Grey.”
“Did they get arrested?”
She shook her head. “No, Mr. Grey didn’t want to press charges. But he did want there to be some consequences. So J.P., who’d already been in trouble before, got sent to some program. I don’t know what it was. Something that’s supposed to, you know, get you back on track. But Van . . . when the police called his parents to come pick him up at the station, nobody came. And when they went to his house to talk to his parents, no one was home.”
“It’s only his dad,” Luke said.
“No, I mean, he was gone, too. Van had been living there all alone. There was supposed to be some aunt or something that was stopping by to help, but . . .” Annabelle shrugged. “They couldn’t find her, either. So he was just on his own there. He wouldn’t really say for how long. But there were no groceries. And he didn’t have any money.”
Luke looked away. He thought about Van on the riverbank that afternoon the last time he’d seen him, eating that bag of Cheetos, and all of his ribs showing through his T-shirt. He was afraid he was going to cry. “Do you think he was hungry?” he asked Annabelle.
“I . . . I don’t know. They found someone, someone from his mom’s side of the family, I think, to take him. He went to live with them in South Dakota, and . . . he’ll probably be okay. I mean, they’re probably nice, right?”
Luke shook his head. “Not if they’re from his mom’s family. I mean, she didn’t even want him. She just left him.”
Annabelle didn’t say anything, but she felt bad. Luke could see that.
Finally Luke gave the tire swing a push. “He was my friend,” he said, not really to Annabelle. More to himself.
“I know,” she said. And for some reason Luke glanced at the charm bracelet on her suntanned wrist. He’d always liked the way it looked there.
“I used to talk to him about my dad,” he said. “About finding him.”
“Luke, I’m sorry. I have to go. Are you okay?” Annabelle asked, her light brown eyes worried.
“Yeah,” Luke said. “It’s all right. I would have found out anyway, I guess. Eventually.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow, okay? We can go to Pearl’s.”
“Okay,” he said.
“Here,” she said, opening her notebook and tearing a sheet out of it. “You can have this.” She held it out to him and he took it, but before he could look at it, she leaned over and kissed him on the lips, really fast. Then she got off the tire swing and ran toward her back door, calling bye to him over her shoulder.
Luke looked at the picture she’d drawn of him and smiled. It was actually pretty good.