Nobody but Us (11 page)

Because it hadn’t.

“Do you want to tell me anything else?”

He makes a sound of disbelief.

“That wasn’t enough?”

“I mean, is there anything else you need to … deal with?”

“This ain’t a counseling session, babe.”

“Don’t talk to me that way. Like you’re better than me.”

“Me?” His voice pitches high, then lowers again. “It ain’t even like that. I never thought I was better than you. Smart as you are? I just wanna move on, you know?”

“Me too.”

“You still wanna be with me? After what I told you?”

“It doesn’t change anything, Will. It happened a long time ago. And it was an accident. We have to learn how to … I don’t know … live. Survive these things.”

“Survive. Yeah. But not just that.” He sucks in a breath and blows it out, hard, as though he’s casting away a demon. “Like, really live, even with it all breathing down our necks. You ready to really live?”

I nod and he leaps to his feet, pulling me up with him. “When’s the last time you jumped on your bed?”

I struggle for balance, thrown off by the question, by his quick movements. It’s been a long time since I jumped on a bed. I tried it once. A few months after my mom died. It was loud and he could hear it downstairs and didn’t like the sound of it, and I never did it again. I can’t imagine how Will can switch like that, how he can go from that story to jumping on a bed. Sometimes his quick changes, the way he goes from calm to angry, from happy to sad, sends my head spinning.

I shake my head at Will and he starts bouncing. Little hops, where his toes don’t completely leave the mattress but the waves of movement force my own heels off the bed. I grasp him to keep my balance.

“The … guy at … the office … is going to … hear … us,” I gasp in between bounces.

“Not … through … the logs!” Will yells.

I give in, just a little. Just enough that I can feel gravity protesting my calves, my butt, my breasts moving against it like illegal friction. We’re not on the same bounce wavelength, and my teeth chatter as Will speeds up his bounces, building height so that his head is inches from hitting the ceiling.

“Let go!”

I need to. I need to let go and let this fun, let this childish action that never fit anyplace in my life, take me over.

I bend my knees and spring of my own volition, no longer using Will’s jumps to set me in motion. Our bounces are still off; we land a quarter of a second apart and I think my ankle is going to roll under my leg as I stumble, but Will hangs on to me and we build a rhythm. I coil and I leap, launching myself toward the popcorn pieces glued overhead with a forced abandon.

I will do this. I will have these fun moments and these forward-thinking moments and this future.

We hit our stride, finally, Will going up as I’m coming down, our breath passing the same space in the blink of an eye. He’s grinning every time I pass him and watching me with overly bright eyes so that I wonder how much of his elation is real and how much is forced.

We can do this. We can have these moments. It is allowed.

I don’t realize I’ve been silent all this time, concentrating, taking short puffs of air, until the first giggle escapes me and shatters my glass box. It’s a strange sound: broken and delighted and free all at the same time. And it gets bigger and louder with each leap until I’m trying to match the strength of my jumps with the strength of my joy.

I lift my knees to my chest as I jump and Will spins around completely as he jumps and we’re doing the craziest things with our arms and he hits his head on the ceiling with a cracking noise but doesn’t stop, just hollers “OW!” and laughs and we’re flying, shaking the blood in our veins like a baby’s abused rattle, and my brain starts to hurt. But I don’t mind. It doesn’t matter until Will collapses in a pile of heavy breathing on the bed and I crumple next to him.

We reach for each other at the same time and kiss, gasping for air in quick spurts and still laughing because this is life. It happened to us before, terrible things, and even not-so-terrible things, but now we’re going to happen to it. We’re going to decide and create and play and laugh and forget how to draw air in because we’re so consumed with beauty and with possibility with each other.

Will’s eyes are sparkling and there’s a flush of color in his cheeks. I can only imagine how pink my face must be.

This is life.

We found it.

I’M HIGH. SOARING FROM THE ENDORPHINS, SOARING away from things I did a long time ago.

I’m hungry, too.

I kiss Zoe again ’cause, damn, she tastes so good and she’s so happy right now. But I gotta get real food.

“Let’s get something to eat.”

She pokes out her bottom lip, but I press it back in with a kiss and pull her to her feet. My stomach gurgles, and whatever this room and one bed and me and her lead to, I ain’t gonna be doing it while my stomach makes sick noises like that.

“We’ll run down and get some food and come back and I’m gonna kiss you all night, ’kay?”

“Yes, please.”

We walk to the Denny’s, just a couple of blocks down the road. The hostess-waitress woman don’t give us a second look when she seats us, and I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding in. Feels like there’s always someone, something, tracking us, grabbing at us, pulling us back to places we ain’t good enough to escape.

“I’ve never eaten out so much before,” Zoe says as she opens and looks at her menu. I drum my fingers through the silence between us.

“Hey, you think we’re crazy?” I scratch my ear and look around at the people in the diner. Free people. “Doing this?”

She stops reading her menu for a second and I wish I hadn’t asked her that question. What if she says yes? What if she says she don’t really want to be here? With me, going someplace, starting something with me. But then she shakes her head. Stops and nods.

I laugh. “It’s like that?”

“Yeah. It’s like that.” She says it the way I say it, making fun of the way I talk. It’s pretty funny. “It’s crazy that we got out of there and we’re in the middle of nowhere and are just sort of hoping everything will turn out okay. But it’s not crazy, too. It’s not crazy to be with you. It’s not crazy to think we can do this. We should do something really crazy. Like run down the road naked.”

“Ain’t it too cold?”

“Or win the lottery.”

“Yeah, that’d be nice. But you gotta play first. I’ll buy you a ticket when we get to Vegas. We been lucky so far. Maybe it’ll keep up. We’ll win a few million, set us up for a while.”

She’s cute and her eyes are twinkling at me. I like the idea of our whole life being set up in one day, with one piece of paper with silver scratch circles.

“We’ll travel, when we win. You ever wanted to travel? We’ll go to the rain forest or on a safari. Take a cruise or something. You and me. Sound good?”

She shrugs. “Go, stay. I don’t care. Long as I’m with you.”

“See? You’re already thinking crazy.”

“I’m thinking it’s time to order,” she shoots back, shoving me with her shoulder and nodding at the waitress making her way to our table.

WE ORDER, AND I WATCH HIM FOR A MINUTE. HE sips his water. Peeks out at me from under his lashes. I think about his face and how it’s like a mixture of everything.

He smiles at me. “What?”

“We should go see the town where you were born.”

“Why the hell would we wanna do that?” The words are sharp and they sting. But he can tell and he backtracks, tries harder. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. I understand.” I get why he, why anyone, would want to forget about the place they were born. Would want to pretend the incident of birth never happened at all.

So many times—too many times—I’d wish my birth had never happened. Like when my dad was testing the strength of the walls with the back of my head. Didn’t my mom know better than to bring a child into that man’s world? What was she thinking, to get pregnant and then die, leaving a little girl to the mercy of a man who had no control? It’s so very, very easy to blame my mom for everything, just because she made the choice to have me.

Now, looking at Will, at the way he’s rolling around my suggestion in the lobes of his brain, now I can feel grateful for my life. But this life-wanting is such a new feeling. Before Will, before I knew
escape
, life was something to be endured, passively. Now I hunger for it.

Will tucks his fingers into my hair and kisses the top of my head. He’s avoiding my question, I can tell. But that’s all right. We all need our own time to deal with things. Maybe it will take Will years to come to terms with being abandoned. Maybe it will take forever. I’ll stay with him no matter how long it takes to prove that people don’t always leave, don’t always give up on you.

“Is there anyone you wanna call? From back home?” He pulls his phone from his pocket and holds it out to me. “It’s prepaid. I put a whole bunch of minutes on it before we left. You can call anyone you want.”

“Who would I call?”

“I don’t know. Lindsay?”

My best friend, Lindsay, and I met in the girls’ bathroom at school when we were twelve. I was hiding in a stall, scrubbing my hands raw with a wet paper towel, when she walked in. Humiliation drowned me with a tidal wave of red. I bit my lip, stifling sound, until I thought she’d left. But she hadn’t. She’d known someone was there and held her breath, waiting for me to whimper again, then knocked on my stall door. When I didn’t answer, she got on her knees on the filthy floor and crawled under, facing me with a jaw set in a determined line but eyes soft and pitying. Lindsay made the same face every time she saved something: a baby bird fallen out of its nest, a dog hit by a car, the houseplants her mom couldn’t help but kill with her lack of a green thumb.

She lent me the skirt she was wearing, even though her shirt wasn’t quite long enough to cover the top seam of her leggings. We went to the nurse, Lin talking incessantly in the office when I felt too mortified to say a word. That year, she became the girl in my life who knew about things a motherless girl didn’t know, like periods and bras. We ate together at school and studied together in the library, but I never let her come to my house and I rarely could get my dad to let me go to hers. Sometimes I told my dad stories about after-school study groups or Brain Bowl competitions that didn’t exist just to have an afternoon where we could pretend we had a friendship like the ones on TV, where the girls giggle over boys and watch movies and eat popcorn and paint their nails. Always, I scrubbed off the polish and brushed away the scent of popcorn with mint toothpaste before going home again.

“What would I say to her?”

“Did you tell her you were leaving?”

“I didn’t tell anyone.”

“Could be she’s worried ’cause you missed school.”

She’d probably wonder what he did to me this time, when most things he does I try to pretend aren’t that big of a deal, at least not big enough to keep me from the one place I felt safe. I never missed school.

“Okay, I’ll call her.” I take the phone from Will and dial Lindsay’s number. It’s late enough that she would be home from drama club, the only part of the school day she liked.

It rings twice. I don’t realize I’m frozen, eyes not blinking, lungs not filling, until I hear Lindsay’s voice on the other end and my muscles relax.

“Thank goodness you picked up.”

“Zoe?”

“Yes, it’s me.”

Lindsay doesn’t speak for a minute, but I can hear rustling and the heavy thud of feet climbing stairs on her end.

“Lin?”

“Shh!”

Another minute passes and I hear some muffled talking. Lindsay tells someone I’m Gabe from school calling about an assignment. I have to listen, longer than I want to, to her sister, Blaire, tease Lindsay in her high-pitched voice about a boy calling. Finally, I hear a door close and Lindsay breathes into the phone again.

“Zoe,” she whispers. “God, I’ve been worried. Where are you? Are you with Will? The police came, wanting to know if I knew where you were. They have a warrant for Will’s arrest. For assault on your dad. They want to find you. What’s going on?”

I stare at the wall across from me, even though Will’s trying hard to catch my eye. I can’t look at him yet or I’ll panic over all this.

“Are they tracing your calls?”

Lindsay snorts. “I don’t think so. This isn’t a movie, you know. But my mom and dad got so pissed when the police came. They threatened to ground me for the rest of the school year if I didn’t tell them everything. But, geez, Zoe, you didn’t even tell me you were leaving.”

“It was a last-minute thing. We had to get out of there. You understand?”

“Yeah, we all understand. But that doesn’t mean the cops care. Did you know Will’s been busted for assault before? They think he stole some money, too. They told us he was dangerous. He isn’t holding you captive or anything, is he? I’ll get it if he’s right there and you can’t say anything. If he is, just say, uh, goldfish, and I’ll call the cops right now.”

“Lin, stop. It’s nothing like that. He’s never done anything to hurt me.”