The Way Back to You Page 7

  “Sedona is a tourist town, too. Probably more than here,” I say to Cloudy. “But the vibe in Arizona is like, ‘Please visit, enjoy yourself, spend lots of money, and come back again.’ In Bend it’s more like, ‘This is rad, and if you don’t live here, then get the hell out.’”

  “Because freezing our asses off for the majority of the year is so brag-worthy. For the record, I am determined to always have a better vacation than that person’s life.”

  I chuckle. “Exotic Sacramento, here we come.”

  “Yes!” She touches her cup to mine and the gentle collision of our lids makes a clunk sound.

  As we approach my vehicle, “I Touch Myself,” starts up on my phone. I stop to read Matty’s text: Hey, maybe this would be a good thing to check out? FindYourTruth.com

  I click the link and a site appears offering “powerful seminars to help you FIND YOUR TRUTH.” The words depression and grief pop out at me. I close the browser and tuck my phone away in a hurry.

  Cloudy recognized the ringtone; Matty’s mission in life is to download that song onto the phone of every Earth inhabitant, so it might be on hers, too. She’s watching me, maybe expecting that I’m about to tell her what he wanted. Instead, I peek in at Arm, still asleep on her Pillow Pet. “You think she’s going to be okay back here all day?”

  Before Cloudy can answer, a loud voice interrupts with: “Well, if it isn’t Miss Teen Royal Galaxy Cheerleader herself! We meet again.”

  We both turn as Jacob Tamsin slams the door of his red Chevy truck—the same red truck I was parked behind while Cloudy left the basket with Jacob’s sister, Lita.

  Dressed for snowboarding, Jacob strolls over in the slouching, cocky way he has. Unsurprisingly, he keeps his eyes on Cloudy and ignores me. By Jacob’s perspective, he “had” to play second base last season because I “stole” the shortstop position from him. By my perspective, he’s a dick. Acknowledging each other is something we avoid equally.

  “‘Miss Teen Royal Galaxy Cheerleader’?” Cloudy scrunches her nose. “That’s so . . . snooty-sounding.”

  “Because you are. You’re Bend High’s most princessy princess.”

  “That means so much to me coming from our douchiest douche.”

  Jacob smirks. It’s the only version of a smile that halfway works on him. As Ashlyn pointed out, Jacob’s yearbook picture last year was disturbing: it was as if he was mimicking what he thinks smiling looks like from having seen other people do it. “A douche is something girls put up their hoo-hahs, right? So I should take it as a compliment?”

  “You really shouldn’t.” Cloudy smiles extra sweetly. “They’re considered unnecessary and harmful to women. Just like you. Now what do you want?”

  “To get some grub before me and Quincy head up to the mountain.” He stares into my backseat. “But since I saw you here, I thought I’d congratulate you on your big-deal magazine interview. Lita won’t stop blabbing about it. It’s great that hopping around in short skirts is finally getting you girls the recognition you deserve.”

  Cloudy ditches her fake smile in an instant.

  I have no clue what magazine interview he’s talking about, but Cloudy’s likely to explode at any second. She owns a T-shirt that reads, “Not a Sport? Meet Me at the Mat” to shut down anyone who says cheerleaders aren’t real athletes.

  “Did you learn nothing last weekend?” Cloudy asks him. “Because if half a bottle of maple syrup didn’t do it”—she holds her drink up high and takes a step toward him—“this time I’m happy to pour an entire latte in your hair.”

  “Always so violent,” Jacob mutters.

  Matty told me about Cloudy’s revenge when Jacob sexually harassed one of the other cheerleaders at last week’s pancake breakfast fund-raiser. Cloudy can always hold her own against him (against anyone, really), but she shouldn’t have to. “Just back off, Tamsin,” I say. “Cloudy, are you ready to go?”

  “Definitely.”

  I open the passenger’s-side door and she leans in to set her drink in a cup holder.

  “Hey, what up, K.O.,” Jacob says, as if he’s just noticed me. “Glad you have it in you to finally crawl out of your cave, since you couldn’t be bothered last night to do it for your team.”

  And with that, he ambles off.

  THE MUSIC’S PLAYING on random and the heat’s on high. I’ve been driving, not long. (Fifteen minutes.) I’ve been speaking, not much. (Three sentences.) I’ve been eating, nonstop. (Breakfast sandwich first, then Junior Mints.)

  With every passing mile marker, the snow on the side of the highway is getting thicker and thicker, and I’m becoming more and more pissed at my cousin. Obviously, Matty went back to the bowling alley with Tyrell last night and complained to everyone about me.

  In the passenger seat, Cloudy’s been quiet while spooning up her oatmeal with berries, but as she turns the music all the way down, I sense our nonconversing time is about to come to an end. Silently, I beg: Don’t speak, don’t speak, don’t speak.

  “I’m so hungry, I could eat an antler!” she announces.

  “Um, okay? I brought beef jerky and—”

  “You haven’t heard of Eat the Alphabet? It’s a road-trip game Zoë and I have played for years. We take turns. Letter by letter. I did A. Antler. Now you could say, ‘I’m so hungry, I could eat an antler and a battery.’ Or whatever you want that starts with B. Then I’ll be like, ‘I’m so hungry, I could eat an antler, a battery, and a chrysanthemum.’ We have to memorize and say the words in order until we get to Z.”

  “Okay.” I don’t especially want to play a game or talk or do anything other than drive while music plays, but I need to snap out of my bad mood. “I’m so hungry, I could eat an antler, a battery, a chrysanthemum, and a . . . douchey ball player.”

  Cloudy laughs. “God. Jacob is the worst. I don’t know how Lita can stand sharing DNA with him.”

  “Yeah.”

  It comes out exactly how I didn’t want it to: sulky.

  “What’s wrong? You’re not letting him get to you, are you?”

  “No,” I say. “I don’t care about Jacob. It just sucks that Matty was complaining about me to him.”

  “He didn’t. Matty would never do that.”

  Cloudy doesn’t even know what happened, but she sure is quick to defend him.

  “I know he did. I was supposed to meet the guys at the bowling alley last night. I wasn’t up for it, so Matty busted into my room, yelling about how I’m always freaking him out and letting him down. And now today, Jacob’s talking about me not leaving my cave. Gee, I wonder where he heard that from.”

  “I think Matty told him the truth. You decided to stay home. And Jacob came up with the rest on his own. Because Matty wouldn’t have complained about you or tried to make you sound—”

  “Depressed?” The seminar link he texted pops into my head. “Miserable? Pathetic? I think he might.”

  She lets out a loud breath. “Kyle, no. He just . . . he worries about you.”

  I side-eye her. She’s biting her bottom lip and staring at her lap.

  That’s when it hits me: she knows. Cloudy knows exactly what Matty said about me because she heard it. From Matty. And suddenly her out-of-the-blue invitation to California isn’t so out of the blue.

  Anger pulses through me. “This trip today. It was his idea, wasn’t it? He filled you in about our argument last night. He asked you to get me out of the house and cheer me up or whatever.”

  “This has nothing to do with him,” she says, shaking her head. “Unless you told him, he doesn’t know anything about it.”

  “Look. I’m not stupid. Before yesterday, you hadn’t really talked to me since, when? A few days after WinterFest? That’s, like, fifty-one weeks. Why do you suddenly want to hang out with me now?”

  “Like I told you”—her voice gets sharper with every word—“my car wouldn’t make it. And you said at Target you wanted to get away, so I figured it was win-win.”

  I don’t resp
ond. I can’t. I’d let myself believe she asked me to do this because she actually wanted to. What an idiot.

  After several seconds of silence, Cloudy says, “Fine. Believe whatever you want, but I’m not lying.”

  “Right. Because you never lie.”

  She turns, glaring at me. “And what is that supposed to mean?”

  “Come on. The whole thing at last year’s WinterFest. You lied to Matty. You lied to Ashlyn.”

  “So did you.”

  “You’re right. And what did I get out of it? You stayed friends with both of them, and treated me like what happened was my fault.” Words are bursting out of me now. Words I never thought I’d be saying to her. “But the fact is, you kissed me and—”

  “I would have kissed anyone that night!”

  “I know!” My heart is hammering now. “It was a complete accident. It had nothing to do with me. You’ve said it all before. And I get it. So why—”

  “Kyle, stop. Please. I don’t want to talk about this.”

  “Haven’t we not talked about it for long enough? We kept it a secret because it meant nothing, right? And it wouldn’t have done Ashlyn and Matty any good to know. But then you stopped speaking to me. Why? And what’s changed all of a sudden? If you needed a ride to California, why not ask one of your actual friends? Like, you know, Matty.”

  Instead of answering my question, she reaches over, cranks up the music, crosses her arms over her chest, and turns to face the window.

  Clamping my mouth shut, I stay focused straight ahead as we pass a sign for La Pine.

  I could turn the car around. I should turn around. But Dad wants me out of the house, I’m definitely not ready to deal with Matty, and I need to experience some warm California weather now more than ever. So I keep driving south even as these four words repeat in my brain:

  This

  Is

  A

  Mistake.

  NORTHERN CALIFORNIA

  Dear Paige,

  My name is Ethan. I am ten years old. My mom said I can write to you and she will write to you.

  I was sick so I got a new liver. I am getting better. It was part of Ashlyns liver that I got. She sounds nice and I like animals to. I like dogs and I like wolfs the best. I also like drawing and comics.

  I want to say thank you to you and your family for my new liver and I hope you will not be sad.

  From Ethan

  Cloudy

  We’d wanted to get drunk, and WinterFest was as good a time as any.

  It’s always in February; the first outdoor festival after a long, frigid few months, and the whole town comes out for it. There’s this eagerness to everyone, like we’re ready to burst, and I felt it, too, especially last year. After wallowing over the cheer team not qualifying for Nationals—which had been a couple of weeks earlier—not to mention everything else, I needed to have fun and forget for a while. So when Lita and Izzy proposed the idea, I went with it. Enthusiastically.

  We’d camped beside the amphitheater, waiting for the bands to start playing. There was already a huge crowd on the main lawn, and farther behind us, booths were set up with fire pits, local shop owners selling food, and people showing off their boarding skills on the snow imported from Mount Bachelor. The moon was a shiny silver and the wind was whipping off the Deschutes River. The alcohol was helping with the cold, though. That was the one and only part of the plan: to sneak it in, mixed with juice, in our travel thermoses—and not get so hammered that we got caught.

  Izzy mentioned Ashlyn once, to see if she was joining us, and I quickly waved it off. Ashlyn was somewhere at WinterFest with Kyle, I’d told her. They’d casually dated up until Formal, and a few days after, Kyle had asked Ashlyn to be his girlfriend. So Ashlyn was occupied that night. Ashlyn didn’t need to forget.

  My eyes went heavy and pinched, like I would cry right there. I didn’t want to be that person, someone who wished her best friend away, whose muscles clenched at the thought of her best friend’s happiness. It felt like a turning point, a place I could never come back from. So I took another gulp to get the bitter taste out of my mouth, and hoped I wouldn’t remember feeling that way the next morning. But then I got hungry—and annoyed that my teammate Danielle had shown up and been a total sober downer.

  It was while I was waiting in line for homemade pretzels that I lazily glanced to my right and saw Kyle. He was only a few feet from me, around the corner of a large canvas tent and out of the crowd, staring down at his phone. His other hand was in his pocket, and it was probably warm. I thought if I held it, I’d be able to touch the tiny scar on his knuckle, and he could—

  My brain yelled at me to ignore him.

  Except the rum had snipped any connection between my body and my brain—and the truth was, I really, really wanted to talk to him. We hadn’t done much of that since our teacher switched up our class’s lab partner assignments at the beginning of January. Standing there, it felt right to go to him, like I had the power to be okay near him. So I scurried over, swerving around a small group until I stood opposite him in the shadow of the tent.

  “HEY!”

  Kyle started at the noise. “Cloudy,” he said sharply. “Where did you come from?”

  “I’ve been waiting in the looooooongest—” I gasped. “Oh, shit, I got out of my line.”

  He barked a laugh. “I guess so.”

  I sighed, jerking a thumb over my shoulder. “I was standing in the pretzel line and then I saw you and . . . now I’m not standing in the pretzel line.”

  He was watching me, his eyes narrowed. “Have you been drinking?” he whispered.

  Cupping my hands around my mouth, I said in a perfect—at least I’d thought so—impersonation of our biology teacher, “A-plus for observation, Mr. Ocie.”

  He held up his phone, smiling. “That explains why you never answered your boyfriend’s texts.”

  “Oops.” By then, Matty and I had been together for over a month. And it’s not like he was a consolation. Matty was fun and hot and actually into me.

  I spotted a row of folding chairs lined up against the tent and hopped on top of one, the seat shaking under my feet. “I left my phone with Lita.”

  “Well, he’s been attempting to tell you he’s running late. And Ashlyn’s in this never-ending bathroom line,” he said, glancing down at his phone again. “We’re supposed to meet up near the ice sculptures. If she gets out before spring.”

  We’re, I’d thought. Ten days as a couple, and he and Ashlyn were already, officially, a We. My stomach curdled, but the sensation passed quickly, and I was back to being fine. Why didn’t people drink rum all the time?

  “Yeah, this place,” I said. “More like LineFest, right?”

  I paused, absorbing my joke, then giggled. A lot. So much my face hurt, even though it didn’t register as pain. It made me bobble on the chair, and the toe of my boot slipped off the seat.

  Kyle swooped in as I fell, his hands ready to spot me. He was the one looking up at me then, and it was borderline obnoxious that he was almost cuter from this angle. No, it was obnoxious, and I was abruptly enraged. This was his fault. If he’d only just liked me back. How difficult was it? To like me? It’s all hormones and firing neurons, so what the hell were wrong with his? Life would have been so much simpler, and not even all that different. This is how I imagined it: the Earth would continue to spin on its axis, and I wouldn’t be lying to my best friend, or dating someone I didn’t totally want to, or feeling guilty for noticing Kyle’s stupid, cute face.

  Maybe I was drunker than I thought.

  I pressed my heels into the metal seat to re-steady myself and studied his eyes. They were a deeper blue—not the in-between-blue-and-green color they normally were—as if they were reflecting off the night sky.

  “You sure it’s safe to stay up there?” he said, surveying the chair.

  I let my head drop; it weighed a thousand pounds. “Kyle, please. I stand on other people’s hands and get launched twenty f
eet into the air on a weekly basis. This is . . . pie.”

  “Not that you’re bragging.”

  “No, I was definitely bragging.”

  “In that case, I think you mean it’s ‘cake.’ Not ‘pie.’ Unless you were going for ‘easy as pie.’”

  I groaned. “Keep that up and your new lab partner will, for sure, stab you with a scalpel.”

  “Sam was pretty enthusiastic with that crayfish last week.” He gave me a pointed look. “He believes dissecting on a computer isn’t as educational as the real thing.”

  “Said every future serial killer ever.”

  “Or maybe future surgeon.”

  I scoffed, my head rearing back. “Like I believe anyone in our class could be a surgeon.”

  Crossing his arms over his chest, Kyle said, “So your theory is everyone in first-period bio will turn out to be a serial killer—including me.”

  “I’m sorry you had to find out this way.”

  “But excluding you, since you do the virtual dissection thing. That’s pretty convenient.”

  “I don’t make the rules, Kyle!” I said, flinging my arms out wide, and when I did, my entire foot slid out from beneath me. This time, I reached out for Kyle’s shoulders just as he placed his hands on my waist.

  “You okay?” he breathed, spooked.

  I dug my nails into his coat. I didn’t want him to go—and what scared me most was that I dreaded Ashlyn ever showing up. “Uh-huh.”

  My teeth stung from the cold, which meant I hadn’t stopped grinning the whole time, but Kyle was smiling, too. At me. He was so close; suddenly eye level when only a few seconds ago, I could see the top of his head.

  That rightness wrapped me up again like a warm blanket, and I felt myself tipping forward, to him, a houseplant arcing toward a sunny window. And I kissed him, breathing in his Junior Mint-y exhale. I kissed him until I realized he wasn’t kissing me back. He was pulling away, his eyes panicked, checking if anyone had spotted what I’d done.