Her voice was soft but solid as she began to talk. “You have been gone a couple hours and you were gone a couple hours the other day, too. Where were you?”
Her eyes were pleading. Rebellion surged in my chest. Her desperation made me feel like I was a recovering addict and she was accusing me of being on a bender or something equally serious. I didn’t deserve the third degree for being a teenager who went on a walk in a new town and made a friend and even though there was a giant warning alarm telling me not to, telling me to just be quiet and avoid a fight, I said as much.
“I took a walk at the park the other day and I met a kid who goes to the school I will be going to. We talked for awhile and then I met up with her again today.”
“Her?” my mom asked, eyes darting to the doorway.
“Dad’s at work,” I muttered. “Unless he has spies, it’s safe to say her.”
Mom rubbed her face with her thin hands, the skin pulled taut under her eyes. Neither of us spoke, but I could feel the anger start to drain from my body as the muscles in my calves relaxed and my heart slowed back to a normal beat.
I knew it wasn’t my mom’s fault. During the fight before we left Columbus, she had barely spoken. When my dad suggested they send me to a camp to “fix me,” Mom had put her foot down. She was never going to stop trying to keep me from upsetting him and the southern Baptist in her would mean she always put his feelings before anyone else’s, but she also had my back when it got too intense.
And it had been intense.
My dad’s face, normally so stoic, was drawn and ashen as he had taken his seat across from me. He was rigidly perched on the edge of the couch. With his eyes on my face, he slid the pamphlet over to me. I looked at it, amused by the pastel rainbow stretched underneath the scrawled title “Nature’s Promise.”
It wasn’t the first time I’d seen the rainbow used that way. My parents’ friends were constantly sharing memes on Facebook that insisted the rainbow belonged to Christians and it was time we take it back. As if a symbol could even be taken back. Like we could march into some LGBT lair, swords drawn, and demand they return our rainbow.
“What is this?” I asked, not touching it.
He folded his hands together and placed them under his chin, fingertips up in a peak. “I think it’s time we face reality and accept your problem isn’t going to go away overnight.”
They say your life flashes before your eyes in the moment before you die, but mine flashed right then. Rolling my eyes at Mom when she suggested it would be fun to get manicures together. Sulking in my room on Christmas morning because my parents had bought me the hot toys from the girl aisles instead of the monster trucks and nerf guns I’d wanted. The day my dad told me I couldn’t try out for hockey because women should never be competitive with boys.
With a weary sigh, I lifted my eyes to my dad’s tired face. I wondered if mine matched and then I wondered how it was possible to feel so damned tired before you’d even finished high school.
“It seems like the problem is yours, not mine,” I said, trying so hard to keep the defeat from my voice. “But it doesn’t matter. I’m not going anywhere.”
He didn’t try to stop me as I rose from the chair, didn’t call after me as I made my way to my bedroom. Without thinking, I’d started wadding up T-shirts and jeans and stuffed them into my duffle bag. I was ready to leave—not to Nature’s Promise, never, ever—even if it meant I was left with no place to really go. But first, with some degree of hope in my broken heart, I’d gone to my mom to beg.
That night was the only night I ever heard my parents fight. He had yelled a few times, but she never argued, never got cross back at him. That night I heard her, not yelling exactly, but loud enough that her voice made its way up the stairs into my room. My dad, for once, was the more silent of the two.
I couldn’t hear every word and I don’t know how she got him to drop it, but I do know no one ever talked about Nature’s Promise in my house again. It was like a fog that settled into every crack and corner of our home, especially all the air that filled the space between my dad and I, but we just pretended it wasn’t there.
Chapter Five
Hannah
After the mall, all I really wanted to do was snuggle down under my quilt and think about snow, but I was home for less than an hour when I got a text. Not just any text: the text. Lennox wanted me to come over to her house. I texted back asking her when and she responded: Tonight? Whenever you feel like coming over? I texted her to give me a half hour and then melted down into a blur of self-doubt.
The idea was a perfect blend of exciting and terrifying. We’d only ever hung out in the woods and now she was inviting me to her house? With any of my other friends, that would be so much more chill than going out because I could literally just wander out to my car in some pajamas bottoms, but because I liked this girl, it introduced so many new issues. We’d be alone. We’d be alone in the presence of a bed. I needed to find an outfit that was sexy and appealing, but not obvious about it. Nothing that suggested I wanted to actually use her bed the first time I went over there.
Time was passing and no outfits were appealing to me at all. I had just bought the most adorable mustard yellow A-line skirt with buttons down the front but showing up in a skirt to hang out in her room would make it look like I was throwing myself at her. I tried on a pair of jeans and a fuzzy sweater. I was a shapeless eskimo. I changed out of the sweater into a stripy, off the shoulder top and proceeded to stare into my mirror so long that I forgot I was even a person looking in the mirror and started to fixate on the smudges I needed to apply Windex to. To keep myself from getting lost in the Mirror Land, I checked my phone. It had been over twenty minutes since I’d agreed to arrive in a half hour. It was time to enlist help.
LENNOX ASKED ME TO COME OVER!!! I texted Marley. I released the breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding as the three dots immediately popped up on my message screen. DOPE!!! She texted back. I stared down at the screen, waiting for advice until I realized I hadn’t asked for it. Tell me what to wear. I’ve tried on three outfits and they all send the wrong message. My lip was raw where I’d been biting into it.
When Marley’s answer finally came through, I could hear the scorn. Sometimes knowing someone so well that their voice was almost as familiar to you as your own had a downside and in this case, the downside was knowing that she was beyond annoyed by my wishy washiness.
WEAR WHAT YOU HAVE ON AND STOP OVERTHINKING IT. YOU ARE GOING TO HANG OUT AT HER HOUSE, NOT ON A DATE.
Telling me to stop overthinking things was about as helpful as telling the sun to stop being so damn hot, but that didn’t make her wrong. With a final glance in the mirror and a small tug at the hem of my striped shirt, I picked up my keys and headed out.
Lennox’s bedroom was nothing like I had imagined and, as I was beginning to admit to myself, ever since we’d agreed that I would come to her house and hang out, I had spent a lot of time imaging that particular space. In my mind, I saw something a bit more masculine and maybe pictures of old Corvettes or something. I knew that was crazy because she told me she hated to drive, so it didn’t make sense that she would love cars, but I couldn’t get the idea out of my head. Something about Lennox brought the old greaser image to mind and I pictured her at the very least having a thing for muscle cars. She had swagger like James Dean or one of those other smoldering movie stars that were before even my mom’s time.