Our Song (19 page)

One of the attendants came out of the men’s locker room, pushing a cart of dirty towels. He was Hispanic, which meant he probably had to drive really far to get here every day. There were barely any Hispanic people living in Vista Valley, even though it was a so-called Spanish town, and the few who did live here weren’t members of the club. Instead they worked there, cleaning the bathrooms, mowing the course, and preparing the food. Something about that seemed wrong to me now. How had I never noticed it before?

“There’s really not that much else to see,” I said. I didn’t feel like being here anymore.

“Do you play golf?” Nick asked, as if he didn’t hear me. It was the first time he had spoken since we’d gotten there.

“God, no,” I said. “Unless driving the golf cart counts. That’s my specialty.” Or it used to be. “Why, do you play?”

Something flashed across his face. “Badly.”

I thought about him swinging the club like a baseball bat from the roof of his car and almost chuckled. “Then you can give me a lesson in what not to do.”

“They have pros for that,” he snapped. His face darkened and suddenly he was somewhere else. His features appeared sharper and more severe. I almost didn’t recognize him.

“I was only joking,” I said, taking a step back.

“I just meant you could do far better than me,” he said, with less edge. “Isn’t there a pro here?”

“There’s always a revolving door of pros,” I said. “They’re
all from the PGA and usually only stay for a few months between tournaments. Why, do
you
want a lesson?”

He gave me a weak smile, and I noticed something different about his eyes. They no longer looked gray, but colorless. It reminded me of what I had heard in Derek’s voice earlier, and I felt a new tear in my heart.

“Our last one died,” I blurted. “The golf pro, I mean.”

Nick snapped his head up. “How?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know the details, just that it happened at the beginning of the summer. I completely forgot with everything else that’s happened since…” I said, my voice trailing off.

“Did you know him?” Nick asked. He was looking at me with such intensity that I felt guilty for not even knowing the guy’s name.

I shook my head no. “I never even met him. He was only here a few weeks before he died. My dad took a lesson with him though,” I said as the memory returned. “He said the pro helped him shave a few strokes off his game. Whatever that means.”

Nick’s shoulders relaxed and he smiled. Wherever he had gone, he seemed to be back and I felt my body relax too. That is, until I heard her voice.

“Oh shit.” I saw her round the corner at the other end of the hall.

“What’s the matter?” Nick asked.

“Shhh,” I whispered, pressing my hand over his mouth. “It’s my mom.”

She was talking on the phone. Her telephone voice was always loud enough to suggest that the person on the other end of the line might be deaf.

“Follow me,” I said.

We slipped out the nearest door and ended up by the second hole. I figured she was going to the locker room and that we’d be able to sneak back inside. But my mother’s voice didn’t disappear. It got louder, which meant she was still headed our way.

Nearby, a middle-aged foursome in clashing pastels and plaids were arguing about the scorecard. Spying their cart, I tugged on Nick’s arm and motioned for him to hop on. It was our only way to escape.

Without hesitation, I powered up the cart and started driving onto the course.

“Hey! That’s ours!” one of the cotton-candy men called out after us.

“Try to catch us!” Nick yelled back. I let out a full, deep belly laugh and pressed down on the pedal. I couldn’t stop laughing as we zigzagged our way across the pristine carpet of grass beneath us on our slow-speed chase. When I looked back, my mother was standing at the edge of the course. It was too late. She had seen us, but I kept going anyway. I didn’t want her to meet Nick. Not yet, anyway. It would only invite all sorts of questions I wasn’t ready to answer, starting with where we met.

I drove around the entire course, past the twelfth hole and the driving range and all the places that I always associated
with Derek. It felt like I was passing through a cemetery, with gravestones commemorating a past I was finally willing to let go of.

I glanced up as we got to the other end of the course, by the parking lot, but Nick’s expression didn’t give anything away. I wondered if he would ever open up and admit that he had been here before. But I had secrets of my own. And I knew that secrets didn’t come out just because someone else wanted them to.

“OLIVE?”

Even through the closed bedroom door, I heard my mother rattling down the hall, her gardening apron stuffed with every tool imaginable. Sometimes I wondered if she slept in that thing. Five seconds later there were three rapid-fire knuckle taps as the door came swinging open.

“There you are.” She charged in as if she’d spent the last thirty minutes searching for me. “What were you doing?” Her tone was accusatory.

“Homework,” I said, waving my unopened copy of
Mrs. Dalloway.
I slid my phone beneath the pillow. I’d really been texting with Nick since I got home from school.

My mother had been more on edge the past few days, ever since the incident at the club. Mr. Fitzgerald, the club’s newly elected president, filed a formal complaint for the theft of his cart. Apparently I messed with the wrong foursome and now my mom was on overdrive trying to make it up to him with flower deliveries and cookie baskets. She was worried about
her reputation and the fact that this might ruin her chance of being elected the club’s social secretary.

She’d started to keep a closer eye on me again, voicing her concern that I was falling into the wrong crowd. Just as I predicted, she wanted to know who Nick was, or as she put it, “that scruffy guy I was running around with.” I told her he was just someone I knew from school and that I had bumped into him at the club. She would never let me go back to another meeting if she found out that’s how I knew Nick, or that he wasn’t from Vista Valley. My mother was always suspicious of outsiders, probably because she had spent her entire life within the same five-mile radius. This bubble was all she knew.

I could tell she was also starting to question if the support group was helping. The last couple of days she’d started to ask more questions, like how many others were in the group and the kind of things we talked about. I told her that there were usually fifteen of us, and that we shared our stories with a group moderator. I knew my mother probably pictured fifteen depressed teens just like she thought I was, but I wasn’t technically lying.

My phone sounded with a new text. It was from Nick. I had already given him his own special chime so that birds sang every time he called or texted.

We had been going back and forth, trying to stump each other by texting acronyms that the other had never heard of. Things that I thought everyone understood were completely foreign to Nick because he had grown up in England. It all started when I texted
IMHO
in reference to what I believed to be the best movie ever made (
Amélie
, starring the adorable
Audrey Tautou), and I couldn’t believe he didn’t know what it meant:
in my humble opinion
. (The fact that he had never seen the movie was an entirely different conversation.) I texted
LOL
in response to his confusion, adding
laughing out loud
in brackets, just in case that one hadn’t made it across the pond.
Cheeky girl
, he fired back, and from there the challenge was born. I was completely mystified by Nick’s latest—
TTFN
—and officially surrendered. I knew this incoming text would have the answer, and I couldn’t help but sneak a look.

TTFN = Ta-ta for now
, it read. Another text came in right after.
AKA: CUL8R

I started to laugh, imagining Nick uttering those words:
Ta-ta
. I was about to respond, asking if he was secretly a sixty-year-old woman in disguise, but thought better of it when my mom loudly cleared her throat, reminding me she was there. “Sorry,” I said, wiping the smile off my face. I thought she’d at least be satisfied that I was in a better mood these days, but clearly my happiness wasn’t good enough for her. “Do you need something?”

“I was just coming to tell you that there’s someone here to see you. Didn’t you hear the bell?”

For a second I imagined it was Nick. For all I knew his latest text was sent from the front hall. But before I could ask who it was, Derek appeared in the doorway.

“Hey, Olive.”

My phone chirped again with another text from Nick, but I slid it back under the pillow and hopped out of bed, smoothing out my clothes. “Oh, it’s you.”

Derek stood awkwardly behind my mother, who shot me a
pointed look. I knew that look. It meant
be polite
, because politeness was a virtue valued above all others in her universe. She scrunched up her nose and went directly to the windows. “You need some air in here,” she said, flinging them wide open. “There, that’s better.”

“The front lawn is looking better than ever, Mrs. B. I keep telling my mother that she needs to learn your secrets,” Derek said.

I rolled my eyes as my mother giggled like he was actually flirting with her, as if Derek and his family hadn’t been ignoring us for the last two months. It was the same way she had reacted when Derek complimented her on her orchids that day in the greenhouse. He was good at finding people’s soft spots and remembering them, another check in the politician box. “Shall I shut this?” she asked, her hand resting on the doorknob.

“No,” I said at the exact same moment that Derek answered “yes.” The ball in my stomach started to grow and harden as I put my hand out in front of the door to stop my mother from obeying him.

Once I heard her apron jangling back down the hall, I went to stand by the window. Derek’s father’s old silver Lexus was parked across the street, in front of the Millers’. He had been driving it since the accident. Derek always used to park in that spot, where stray purple wisteria petals couldn’t litter his windshield. I had forgotten what a neat freak he was. Just then a red robin perched itself on the outstretched branch by the window and began to sing. It sounded just like my phone, like the bird was delivering a message straight from Nick.

“What’s so funny?” Derek asked, stepping in closer.

I didn’t realize I was smiling. For a second I had forgotten he was even there. “Nothing. So, like, what do you want?” It came out harsher than I intended.

“Can’t old friends catch up?” He came up behind me by the window. His clothes still had that Downy scent, like they came straight from the dryer. “We’re still friends, right?” When I shrugged and didn’t turn around, he backed away and plopped down in my reading chair, right on top of a pile of laundry. “I think I left a book here.”

A book? He had come all the way over for a book? Couldn’t he have texted or just asked me about it in school? “Which one?”

“What happened?” he asked, gesturing to the broken bedpost that jutted out like a splintered spear. The canopy was gone but I still hadn’t bothered to fix the rest. “Things get a little too rowdy?”

My stomach turned and I steadied myself against the wall. He was trying to be funny, but his voice said something else. I knew he saw me leave school with Nick last week, and what he was getting at. Was
that
why he was here? Was he checking up on me? “What book?” I asked again.

“Chem textbook. Can’t find it anywhere.”

“I haven’t seen it,” I said, trying to pull the clothes out from under him. I knew Derek well enough to know when he was lying. He’d never lose track of a book he used on a daily basis.

“Oh sorry,” he said as the strap of a lace-trimmed tank top got caught on his shirt. I bit the inside of my cheek as he dangled it from his fingertip.

“Where’s Betsy?” I asked, snatching it from him.

“I don’t know. Probably the mall.” He sank deeper into the chair and draped his left leg over the side. “I told her I had debate. I don’t think she’d like that I was here.”

“She’d probably like the truth more. It’s just a book, right?” A tiny throb began to pulse beneath my scar, taunting me with thoughts about that night.

“You don’t know Betsy.” He looked up into my eyes. “She’s not like you.”

I pretended to search for his book, even though I knew I didn’t have it. I had already done a sweep and gotten rid of everything Derek related. Or almost everything. I dug through the bottom drawer of my desk and came upon an old photo of us. His mom had taken it when we were hanging out in his backyard one Sunday afternoon at the end of last summer. We were tan and smiling. “It’s not here,” I finally managed to say.

“This feels familiar, doesn’t it?” I could feel his eyes still trained on me. “Hanging out in here?” The weird thing was that it didn’t actually feel familiar. It felt strange and uncomfortable. Like I was doing something I wasn’t supposed to. “There’s another reason I came, Wollie.”

I froze and fixed my gaze on the rug. I hadn’t heard Derek call me that in ages. He’d made up the nickname in honor of my second-favorite movie,
Wall-E
. He rarely used it though, only when he really wanted something.

He came closer and tugged on the ends of my hair, just like he used to when it was long. I wasn’t sure where this was going. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to know. Just a few weeks ago,
this would have been the answer to all my wishes. But I didn’t know what to wish for anymore.

“I’ve been wanting to talk to you for a while but I didn’t know how. I guess I’ve been too embarrassed and figured you probably never wanted to see me again.”

If he’d said this earlier, like the first day I came back, I would have stopped him right there. I would have told him that I understood exactly what he meant and that we could just put it all behind us. But that was before. Before eight weeks of pain. Before Betsy and before Nick. Before I had Annie’s voice in my head telling me not to let him off the hook. Before I thought about the choices I’d made and if they’d really even been choices in the first place. And before I had any doubts or confusion about what I really wanted.