I wondered if Dad would be surprised when he finally received it. If he would be shocked that I saw him as a bit villainous. Part of me figured that wherever he was, whatever he was doing, he had to justify it by telling himself he wasn’t the one at fault, but how could that possibly work? How must he spin things in his mind to be able to see it anyway other than just like I saw it?
I decided today would be the day I dropped the thing in the mailbox, but as soon as I sat down to address the envelope, I realized I had a problem: I didn’t have any way to find my dad’s address. It had been over a year since we’d talked, and I didn’t think Mom was likely to secretly be keeping up with his location. I’d have to send it to my grandma on his side, who I hated. She was this uptight, evangelic Christian woman who used terms like “wedlock” and “jezebel” unironically. As soon as I knew I was gay, our parting was inevitable; she was pretty quick to use the word “abomination” to describe me and that pretty much damned any potential for kinship.
It didn’t matter. I had Grandma’s address in my old address book, and I scrawled it quickly across the envelope in my tight chicken scratch cursive. She would know how to find Dad and even if it took awhile for him to get the letter, if I sent it her way, he’d get it eventually. With feet that felt weighed down and heavy, I made my way out to the mailbox and was relieved to see that there were little flags up on a few mailboxes down my street: I hadn’t missed the mail carrier.
It had been a shock when Lennox had called me at seven am the following morning, partly because of the ungodly hour and partly because of what she had to say to me when I picked up the phone.
“It’s going to be a high of forty-eight today and Weather Underground said that’s four degrees higher than the average temperature for this date,” she recited as soon as I picked up, in lieu of an actual greeting.
I pulled my cell away from my ear and stared at it. My eyes were watering from the sudden assault of sunbeams and my mouth was so dry I wondered if I’d even be able to form words. I could hear her calling my name through the phone as I grabbed a bottle of water and took a long swallow, eyes squeezed shut against the harshness of the glare.
“Hannah?” she called to me louder.
With the phone back up to my ear, I responded: “What are you saying to me right now?”
There was a quiet chuckle in my ear as a response and I glared at her voice since I couldn’t glare right in her face.
“I’m saying,” she responded, “that you should come pick me up and we should head on out to Grayson because there probably won’t be another day this warm for months.”
Like a shot, I was up, rubbing the sleep from my still blurry eyes. With a nod of my head, I started thinking about my outfit and ran through the process of getting dressed in such detail that it took me a minute to remember I was still sitting there, tucked into my blankets on my bed. It was mostly Lennox’s enthused voice that brought me back to reality.
“Yeah, I’ll be there in an hour,” I said and hung up the phone, dropping it on my comforter. It didn’t occur to me think about her reaction to me hanging up on her.
For the first time since we had met, I was not excited by the idea of seeing Lennox. Instead, my guts were on fire and my mind was racing with doubts about my own sanity. What on Earth had made me think that I should take my biggest fear and compound it by adding freezing cold water?
Lennox was sitting on her front stoop when I pulled up, her smooth, rounded cheeks red from the morning chill. She said it was supposed to warm up later that day, but just then it was thirty degrees, overcast, and windy. Her face was tilted down towards the ground, so I assumed she was looking at a phone screen, but as I pulled up in front of her house, I realized she was just waiting. She didn’t look up as I approached, but she was quick to jump up and get in the car, so she must have heard my car. With a groan, she buckled her seatbelt and tilted her torso towards me.
“It is early and cold,” she stated flatly.
I could feel myself smirking at her. “You are the one who called me to come get you at this ungodly hour. I was still innocently sleeping,” I answered.
She batted at my arm and I understood that the griping and grumbling was an act; she was far too playful to really be annoyed. I glanced at her quickly and noted the way she leaned heavily against the back of the seat, her body molding against the upholstery. She was all legs and arms, lean and long. I liked the way she was built; she was thin, but strong, and while her muscles weren’t popping below the layers of her clothes, I could definitely tell she was toned.
I blinked back at the road, not wanting to either wreck the car or get caught making googly eyes at my new platonic friend. Asphalt stretched out into the rural setting and my eyes watered from exhaustion. It was way too early to be on a road trip, especially during a break from school. As much as I liked Lennox, I felt the call of my bed and wished I could crawl back between the layers of flannel sheets, quilt, and comforter.
“So, tell me again about the point of this mission,” Lennox said, as she cracked the window. A gust of bracing wind entered my warm car.
“What are you doing?” I asked her with a scowl.
She looked over at me and in an exaggeratedly patient voice explained, “I am trying to wake up.”
With a quick drum of my fingers against the steering wheel, I tried to ignore the howling noise that the force of air was making. Eyes never leaving the road, I picked our conversation back up.
“This summer I drove out here to Grayson with my two best friends. You’ll probably meet Marley and Jake when school starts and you’ll really like them. Especially Marley because everyone likes her. We were going to go cliff diving. Totally Marley’s idea. She always wants to do something, ya know what I mean? Like, she never wants to just sit at someone’s house.” I snuck a glance at Lennox to make sure she was still awake and listening and our eyes met for a full second before I tore mine away to look back at the road. “Honestly, though, everyone around here goes cliff diving at Grayson. It’s a thing. You can even find YouTube videos of it. So, imagine my surprise when we get there and I just freeze. Marley jumps, Jake jumps. I don’t jump.”
Color makes its way into my cheeks and I get that itching feeling again. I know I am blushing, I feel the heat all the way into my earlobes, but I’m not sure why. It’s not like I think Lennox will judge me because I couldn’t just plunge off the side of a hill into the lake below. There was something nagging me, though: a lump like a mass that felt heavy in my stomach. It came on suddenly, just like it had the day I didn’t jump.
“After I didn’t jump, I just felt awful. I can’t even explain it. It shouldn’t have been that big of a deal, but it felt like a huge thing had happened. I was anxious and weird all day, like something was just off and I couldn’t get it back on track,” I paused before summing the whole thing up in a way that should have been clear to me from the start, but wasn’t. “I guess I want to jump so badly so that I can. Get back on track, I mean.”
Again, I risked a quick glance her way. Her face seemed serious, like she was really mulling over what I’d said. We hadn’t known each other long, but it had already started to stress me out when she would shut down or stare off into space, so I liked this side of her that was still kind of quiet and reserved, but more obviously thoughtful. Most of my friends, especially Marley, just said the first thing that popped into their head. Marley chattered so much that sometimes she reminded me of Ari, like she was a little kid who needed to fill every second of silence. Lennox was the opposite. With her, every word counted even if sometimes her words left you craving more.