Meet Me Here (7 page)

Tell her. Right now. Tell her everything
.

“But I know Will wouldn’t be able to get in; he’s already got a job working at his dad’s church as the youth pastor. He might go to Bible college or something, but right now this is it for him. But sometimes I want to go away, pick up and leave. I can’t explain it.”

She stops talking, kicking her heel against the tire of my truck until she looks up and says, “Do you think that makes me a bad person?”

I think about what to say for a long time. “Sometimes you need to do what’s best for you, even if it’s going to make people upset.”

She doesn’t agree or disagree with me, just kicks the tire until I swear her heel makes a dent in the rubber. I watch her, wondering if she really would leave, if she could cut her ties as easily as I’m about to cut mine. And for a second I imagine us with the sun at our backs, leaving North Carolina together.

“Well, I’m going to let myself believe that—at least for tonight,” she says. “So where was it?”

“What?” I ask.

“Your spot. Where were you hiding?”

“Oh. Well, I’m not sure I want to tell you, because it’s pretty much a guaranteed win if we ever decide to do this again.”

She looks bored, almost offended. “The hollow tree.”

“I’m not telling you.”

“The tires?”

“Seriously, it’s not going to happen.”

“You are a man of limited options, Thomas. I’m going to figure it out eventually.”

“
Limited options
? Jesus, that’s the worst thing anybody’s ever said to me.”

She’s smiling as she says, “If you don’t tell me, I swear I’ll never play this game with you ever again.”

It’s childish and stupid, and it totally works.

“Fine. There’s this dip in the middle of the field—”

“Oh.” She turns away unimpressed.

“Hey, what does that mean?”

“Nothing, I just thought you had something good.”

“It’s perfect,” I say.

“It’s in the middle of the field, not to mention completely indefensible. I could get at you from any direction.
What happens if I came up behind you?”

“I’d hear you.” She stares at me until I say, “It’s still a good spot. You can’t see me until you’re right on top of the dip.”

“And you can’t see out of it! Seriously, I’m getting worried about your chances as a soldier.”

For the first time I don’t feel a shock of panic or relief when somebody mentions being a soldier. Instead, I explain how I almost fell in.

“So you wouldn’t have time for a sneak attack because you wouldn’t know it was there,” I say.

She counters this and every other argument I make until the effect of Will’s appearance has disappeared, if only temporarily. She holds up her hand.

“Stop. Please.” She shakes her head in disbelief. “If you’re not going to listen to reason, then—”

Her smile is slanted to one side as she leans forward. And damn it, I know what she’s going to do a second too late. A second before she leans close to my face and says: “Snap! I win.”

Neither of us moves when my phone goes off in my pocket, not the first or second time. Mom can wait. Tonight’s finally over, and we both know it. I keep hoping Mallory will break the silence, but she sits next to me, equally content and quiet, and I decide to take it for as long as I can.

Tomorrow—or today, I guess—is finally here, and I’m only hours away from going. Where? For how long? I have no idea. Up until this point there was no need for planning. I had some money, and I could camp and eat on the cheap. Isn’t that how people start new lives? First they get up the gumption to leave, and then they do it. Let the chips fall where they may, that sort of thing.

I can get a job working at a gas station or in fast food. Make enough money to last until August or however long it takes for Dad to cool down. Christmas at the latest. There’s no way Mom would let me miss the holidays.

Mallory jumps off the gate so quickly I’m sure something’s bitten her. She pats at her pockets like her clothes are on fire.

“Oh, God. Oh, God.” She looks at her hands and then goes back to searching her pockets. “No, no, no.”

“What’s wrong? What’s happening?”

“I’m so
stupid
.”

I hop off the gate and grab her by the shoulders. Her face worries me.

“I lost the ring. I took it off, and now it’s gone.”

“The ring,” I say.

I saw it just after Christmas, when she was checking out a book at the library. Her friends were standing around, cooing and carrying on. When she saw me looking, I could tell she was embarrassed, hiding her hand behind a book she was holding. It was small, the sort of thing you bought at a kiosk in the mall. A ruby maybe. But most likely red glass, cut and shaped to look better than it was. For the next few weeks I’d catch snippets of conversations, girls
fawning over Will, maybe the only guy in high school with enough balls to buy a girl a ring.

She crumples over and then drops into a squat, panicking. “I only took it off because I was pissed at him, but it was in my pocket. I put it in my pocket when I came to your house.”

“Maybe it’s in the truck,” I say, going to the passenger side. I search the floorboards, the seats, even the glove compartment. Then, because she hasn’t moved, I search the driver’s side. When I still don’t find it, I pull out my phone—nine unread texts from Mom—and use it to check under the seats. Nothing.

“I need to find it,” she says, standing up suddenly. Her face is absent, like Jake’s. Void of possibility, of any hope to find resolution. For a second it scares me; how helpless I feel. It’s a ring in a field at midnight.

I turn around and walk slowly, searching for any gleam of light in the dirt.

“Maybe you lost it when you were hiding,” I say, beginning to feel the panic, too. If anything, Mallory is growing calmer by the second, but I’m not. “Where were you?”

“The tree line,” she says. And for a second I’m annoyed. I wouldn’t have ever found her because that’s always been
out of bounds. I wish I could mention it, could see the indignation—maybe it would be guilt—flash across her face seconds before she gave me the definitive explanation as to why I’m wrong.

Instead, I point my cell phone to the ground as we walk, searching for a ring that is likely invisible. Part of me doesn’t want her to find it, which I realize is childish and petty. Then I imagine finding the ring, holding it up. Seeing the relief overtake her face, transforming her back into who she really is.

When we get to the tree line, she points at a large stump, once an even larger tree. “I was sitting there, waiting for you.”

We both drop to our knees, searching through the piles of dead grass, the leaves. We’re not halfway around the stump when she sits on top of it and says, “This is pointless. I probably lost it when we were at the park. Or the quarry. Or the hotel. For all I know, some guy at the campfire just gave it to his girlfriend.”

She hugs her knees, and I have no idea what to say. Part of me wants to be like, It’s just a stupid ring. But then I think about Jake and remember that sometimes even the littlest things will send him spinning. Seeing a kid walking
a dog. A man jogging. Nobody knows the dread of seeing him fade away.

“It’s going to be okay,” I say. “He’ll understand.”

She laughs, which surprises and encourages me until I see her face.

“No, he won’t. Trust me.”

“When I talked to him in the field, he seemed like he’d do anything to make things right.”

“Well, this is different,” she says softly.

All I can do is mechanically pat her shoulder and offer up more and more general assurances. I hate not knowing how to fix this, so I stand up and pull out my cell phone again. I walk around the stump, hoping I’ll see a flash.

“Thomas, stop. Sit down.”

“We might have missed it,” I say.

“Really, you don’t have to do this. And you’re right, it’s a ring. He’ll get over it. Please just sit with me.”

I sit next to her on the stump, easily big enough for both of us. It reminds me of just how enormous the tree used to be, a hickory. We spent an entire summer nailing salvaged pieces of wood to its trunk, creating a makeshift ladder that unlocked the tallest branches, which we climbed, higher and higher until they began bowing dangerously
underneath us. You could see downtown, our houses—to the next state, we liked to believe. It got hit by lightning and ended up getting cut down sometime during our sophomore year. It’s weird to think of something so big disappearing overnight. But even dead, it sticks to the earth like a monument, too stubborn to be completely erased.

When my phone buzzes again, Mallory reaches for her pocket and panics. “Oh, God, my phone.” She looks frantic before I pull it out of my pocket. She takes it, notices it’s turned off, and says, “Did you do this?”

“Will was trying to call you when I was talking to him. I thought that might be awkward.”

“Thanks,” she says.

“We could go buy a ring. In the morning.”

She pauses and then says, “It was his grandmother’s.”

It’s like the roots of the stump reach up and tie me to the ground. Somehow knowing that he didn’t pick the ring up on a whim makes me want to find it more, and I don’t understand why.

“He gave it to me for Christmas. Know what I got him?” There’s an awful weight in her eyes as she says it. “A certificate to play paintball.”

“Sounds pretty good to me.”

“Yeah, but not when somebody gives you a family heirloom. I mean, what a moron, right? Who does that?” She exhales and says, “Anyway, then I put it on and—”

She stops, won’t look at me.

“What?”

“It’s stupid. You’ll think I’m an idiot.”

“I already think you’re an idiot.”

She exhales again, louder and more forceful. Keeps kicking her foot against the base of the stump.

“I felt connected to somebody again.” She stares up at me, her eyes like two hands pushing into my chest. “It had been a long time since I felt that way about someone.”

It’s how I expect it might feel to fall through a trapdoor, to have solid ground underneath your feet and then, suddenly, there’s nothing. Falling and falling into the black. I put my arm around her. She has small shoulders, thin and fragile like a bird’s wing.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

Because she lost the ring and because we lost so much time. Because I’ve been such an ignorant prick and because right now I have no idea what else to do or say. She looks up at me, blinking as a piece of hair falls into her eyes. Those eyes haven’t changed since we were kids, big and
blue and incapable of hiding what she’s really feeling.

And then I kiss her.

I want it to be electric, to have some romantic music swell around us as we realize this is the point of everything. But it’s a mistake. And I know it immediately. She pulls away from me, and the panic in her eyes mirrors exactly what’s happening inside me.

Sirens wailing. A chorus of “Oh, Shit! Oh, Shit! Oh, Shit!” But I can’t move my mouth, can’t apologize or explain why I thought it was a good idea.

I’m going to be sick.

“What was that?” She stands up.

“Mallory, I’m sorry. I don’t know why I did that—” My phone goes off, and I don’t want to look at it—I already know who it is—but Mallory turns away from me, and it keeps buzzing in my hands, so I answer it with a yell.

“Jesus, what!”

“Thomas?”

I can hear Jake breathing on the other line, like he’s been jogging. He used to run everywhere; people always talked about it. He could go for days. Now it sounds like a rattling engine ready to die.

“Jake. What do you need?” I have no idea how to make
my voice sound normal with him on the phone. “Why are you calling me?”

“Do you realize how fucking stupid you’re being right now?”

“Tell Dad I’ll be home soon.”

“I’m not at home,” he says, as if he can’t believe I’d make that assumption. The heavy breathing, the background noise: it sounds like he’s in the middle of the interstate.

“Where are you?”

“At the bridge.”

“What bridge?”

“River Road. I want you to meet me here.”

There was a time when this call would’ve been everything. Jake wanting me to meet him anywhere. Now my entire body fills with panic, erasing any embarrassment I feel about what happened with Mallory. She fades away as I talk slowly.

“What are you doing at the bridge?”

He curses, spits, and then says, “I just need to talk to you before you leave.”

“Are you okay?”

He pauses, only a second or two, but it feels like my entire life is passing by. Then he says, “Can you be here soon? We need to do this now.”

I want to know what, why, but the longer I stay on the phone, the longer he’ll be out there waiting.

“Yeah, fine. I need to drop off Mallory first. But I’ll be there.”

He doesn’t say anything, just hangs up—there one minute and gone the next.

I hold the phone in my hand, unsure of where to start with Mallory. “I need to go,” I say. “Jake’s out on River Road, at the bridge.”

She doesn’t move, doesn’t speak.

“I can drop you off before I go.”

Still nothing. I take a step toward her, expecting she’ll just follow me wordlessly to the truck. We’ll share an awkward ride back to her house, and I’ll live with the guilt of ruining this once again for—how long? Months? Years? However long, I have the undeniable sense that I’ve finally ended everything between us.

But the anxiety about Jake climbs up my neck and breathes in my ear, trumping everything else.

“Either way, I need to go.”

She spins around and faces me. “You can’t do that again,” she says. “Promise me you aren’t going to do that again.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry; just promise you’re not going to do that again. I have a boyfriend, and it’s bad enough that I lost the ring, that I’m out with you instead of him. Plus,
that
isn’t what tonight is about. It’s not what
we’re
about, Thomas. So you have to promise me right now that you’re never going to do that again.”

“I know, Mallory. I promise. And I am sorry.”

She still looks a little angry when she says, “And I’m not going home. So stop being stupid.”

“I don’t know if you should come,” I say carefully. I’ve already told her about Jake, but seeing him, having him focus on her with those empty eyes, is another story.

“Well, I don’t care what you want right now, so shut up about it already. What I want is to go to River Road to see why in the hell your brother feels the need to further screw up my graduation night with all his crazy.”

It stings, and she sees how I flinch immediately.

“Now I’m sorry,” she says quietly. And then we stand there, unable to deny how weird it’s become. But I don’t have time for awkwardness, not now.