Save the Date

Since I didn’t want to interrupt whatever might be happening in J.J.’s bedroom, I had just decided I could sleep in the sweatpants and T-shirt I’d played capture the flag in—my sweatshirt was muddy and grass stained, but the T-shirt had been protected and was fine. I’d taken out my contacts and found a pair of glasses floating around in the kitchen, so I could at least see.

The couches in the family room, thanks to the GMA crew, had ended up at right angles to each other, and looking at them now, they suddenly seemed very close. But I really didn’t think I could move them apart at all without being totally obvious.

“Yeah,” Bill said, looking up from where he was lying on the couch, the blankets pulled halfway over him.

He gave me a smile, and I realized there was nothing to do except turn off the lights and start what was certainly going to be the weirdest sleepover of my life. “Um,” I said, reaching for the lamp but then pulling my hand back. “Okay if I turn off the lights?”

“Fine by me,” Bill said.

I snapped off the light, and the room was thrown into total darkness for a second, and then a moment later, moonlight started filtering in. I blinked, letting my eyes adjust as I looked around.

I’d always loved the family room. There was a big stone fireplace at one end, surrounded by built-in bookcases filled with books and board games, most of which were missing at least one crucial piece. Unlike the kitchen, where we all hung out by chance, while eating or passing through, the family room was where we chose to hang out. This room was the best of us. It was where we watched movies, passing bowls of popcorn back and forth. It was where my parents had faculty parties, where the Christmas tree was always set up, and where we all found ourselves after Thanksgiving dinner, fighting off our food comas. It was having movie marathons with my siblings on rainy afternoons, all of us wrapped up in blankets. It was playing high-stakes games of Pictionary and kids-only games of Cards Against Humanity. It was where most of my favorite memories in the house had happened.

As I looked around now in the moonlight, I felt a wave of loss hit me, even as I was still sitting right here. But ever since my parents had sold the house, a countdown clock had started ticking in my brain—how many more times would I sit in this room? How many more times would we gather here? How many times would I push through the door, hang my keys on the hook, an unthinking motion I’d performed a thousand times?

And it made me furious that I’d ever dared to complain about the fact that the family room floors were always cold and the hot water in my bathroom took too long to heat up. What did I have to complain about when this was my house, before I’d had any inkling that wouldn’t always be the case?

“Charlie?”

I glanced over at Bill, who was looking at me like he was waiting for an answer. “Oh—sorry. What?”

“Nothing,” he said with a shrug. “I just said that I appreciated the help today. Sorry if things were a little disorganized.”

“Yeah,” I said, shaking my head, thinking about Clementine, the decorations, Waffles, Mike. “It definitely was kind of crazy.”

“We got that all out of the way today,” Bill said confidently. “Tomorrow’s going to go perfectly.”

He settled onto his pillow and then adjusted his blankets, and I realized that it was strange for me to still be sitting upright on my couch. I took a breath, then lay down, staring straight up at the ceiling, trying not to think about how close our heads suddenly were. I found myself aware of every movement he was making and how loud my breathing suddenly was. Why had I never thought about how intimate it was, just sleeping in the same room with someone? Because it really was—it was how I knew that Siobhan talked in her sleep, and occasionally sang, and that Linnie stole every blanket she saw and then denied it with a straight face in the morning. When you were asleep, you were who you were, not who you were pretending to be, and now I was going to be doing that with Bill, with someone I’d just met that morning.

I didn’t know anything about him, I was realizing, now that I could hear him breathing just a few feet away from me. “So . . . you said something about New Mexico?” I realized that it was a terrible segue, but I felt like if I was going to be sleeping next to someone, I should at least know where they were from.

“Yeah,” Bill said, and if he thought this was weird, I couldn’t tell from his tone. “My parents got divorced when I was in eighth grade, and my dad moved out there.”

“I’m sorry about that.”

Bill was silent for a moment, but the kind of silence that has something behind it, the kind you don’t want to rush over. “It was hard,” he finally said. “Especially because I was splitting the school year up for a while. I always had the wrong clothes, the wrong slang. . . .”

I rolled over so that I was on my side and could see him now. He was propped up on one elbow, his hair slightly mussed. “And then your mom moved out of Putnam?”

He nodded. “Last year. She got a new job in Mystic, so she sold our house. . . .” There was something in Bill’s tone I recognized—it sounded like the way I’d been feeling ever since Lily and Greg Pearson had first walked through the door.

“My parents sold this place,” I said, bunching my pillow up a little more. “Two months ago. We’re moving out when the escrow is . . .” I paused, not exactly sure what the right adjective was. But then, I wasn’t exactly sure what escrow was, so this wasn’t that surprising. “When it’s done. But they haven’t even found a place here yet.”

“They’re staying here?” I nodded. “And you’re staying too,” Bill said, his tone thoughtful.

“That doesn’t—” I sat up a little more. “That doesn’t have anything to do with this. Stanwich is a great school, that’s all. And I get a discount on tuition.”

“Did you always want to go there?”

I thought for a moment. When I’d visited my siblings at their various schools, I’d always tried to picture myself there—walking across that quad, eating at that dining hall. But I’d never done it at Stanwich, the school I’d been to a hundred times. “I guess not.”

Bill yawned, then covered his mouth with his hand. “Thank you again for letting me stay here,” he said after a moment, his voice still yawn-fogged. “It really was getting kind of cold in the car. And I kept thinking about bears.”

“Bears?”

“Yeah,” he said with a small laugh. “My dad and I went camping in Oregon once, and we had to take all these precautions against bears. Especially in your car—if they smell anything, they’ll basically rip it apart to get to what they think is food.”

“I don’t think that’s a problem here,” I said, trying, and failing, to think of any instance I’d ever even heard of bears in Connecticut. “I know they have them in upstate New York and Pennsylvania.” I started to yawn myself, no doubt because I’d seen Bill do it. “But I don’t think they’re rip-cars-apart bears. I think that might be a West Coast thing.”

Bill laughed. “Probably. It’d be a heck of a way to go, though, wouldn’t it?”

“I can see it on the front page of the Sentinel,” I said, raising my arm to frame a headline. “Bad News Bear.” Bill groaned, which only encouraged me. “Unbearable Pain!”

“Stop,” Bill said, even though he was smiling.

“Trouble Bruin?” I asked, and Bill laughed.

“It would be worth it just to get one of those,” he said, rolling onto his back and folding one hand behind his head. “You should be a writer or something.”

I smiled at that. “Ha ha.” Silence fell again, but it didn’t feel awkward or strange—more like peaceful. Or maybe I was just getting too tired to keep analyzing what our silences were feeling like, if they were comfortable or uncomfortable.

I felt myself yawn, and realized all at once just how tired I was. A second before I had been fine, and now I was struggling to keep my eyes open. I took off my glasses and tucked them under the couch, along with my phone, in the hopes that I wouldn’t accidentally step on either one when I got up. “Good night, Bill.”