Tandem (4 page)

When we were only a few yards from my house, Grant stopped again.

“Can I ask you something?” I nodded. “Have you thought about prom at all?”

What a ridiculous question—
of course
I’d thought about prom. It was all most girls in my class could talk about, now that it was only about a week away. But I hadn’t expected anybody to ask me and, sure enough, nobody had. I wasn’t terribly disappointed—there wasn’t even anyone in particular I wanted to go with—but I couldn’t deny that there was a part of me that wanted to go, if only to see what all the fuss was about.

“In what way?” I asked. Maybe that response was dense, but this whole experience was so odd; I knew that when I walked through the door of my house I would have a hard time believing it had even happened.

“Do you, maybe, want to, I don’t know, go with me?” He held my gaze so tightly that it was impossible for me to look away. His face was full of anticipation and dread, which baffled me. I couldn’t believe that Grant, of all the guys I’d ever known, was standing in front of me now, worrying about whether or not I would say yes.

“Really?”

“Or whatever. You’re probably going with someone else, or already have plans that night or something. You can say no, it’s okay.” He smiled as if to reassure me. “I promise to only be a little crushed.”

“That’s not fair!” I cried in mock-outrage. “You’re trying to guilt me into saying yes.”

“Is it working?”

“No,” I said. He took this as a rejection, and shrugged, as if it didn’t matter, but I knew it did. I rushed to clarify, not wanting the opportunity to slip out of my hands. “I don’t need to be guilted. I’d love to go to prom with you.” Overcome by another wave of awkwardness, I added a stilted, “Thank you for asking me.”

“My pleasure.” He grinned. “It’s going to be fun, I promise.”

“I’m going to hold you to that,” I told him, with a grin of my own. “Now I really have to go in.” Granddad was going to be so annoyed if I was late, and the last thing I wanted after this strange but happy afternoon was to be lectured on the merits of punctuality.

“Okay,” he said, handing me my bag. He started toward me as if he meant to hug me or something, then backed off just as quickly. “I guess I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Yeah,” I said. “See you.”

I turned and walked toward the house, pausing at the top of the porch steps to look back at him. He was still standing there, hands in his pockets, the wind ruffling his hair. He waved at me, and I waved back before disappearing over the threshold into the dark foyer beyond.

TWO

When it came to prom, one week was not an ideal amount of notice. First, there was the immediate obstacle of securing my grandfather’s permission. I’d never attended a school dance before, or even been on a date, so it was hard to predict how he’d react.

Granddad was at the kitchen table when I came down the next morning, hard at work on the daily crossword, a pair of rimless bifocals perched on the tip of his nose. Instead of greeting me like a normal person, he called out, “Eleven-letter word for ‘button seller.’ ”

“Hmmm. Try ‘haberdasher,’ ” I suggested, pouring myself a bowl of sugary cereal. I wasn’t a crossword whiz or anything, but I’d encountered the word recently in a book and had to look it up. This was a thing of Granddad’s. He liked to challenge me.

“Excellent,” he said, pleased.

“That’s a bit easy, don’t you think?” I teased, taking the seat across from him at the table.

“Well, it
is
only Tuesday,” Granddad muttered. He looked up, finally, and regarded me with mild suspicion. “It’s seven o’clock and you’re awake. Why do you look so cheerful?”

“Can’t I just be in a good mood?” The rosy haze of yesterday afternoon hadn’t yet completely faded. For once, I’d had a peaceful night’s sleep and woken up feeling happy and well rested. Of course I was in a good mood.

“I suppose.” Granddad penciled “haberdasher” into the crossword, then opened the paper, shook it, and turned to the front page. “Have you started your college applications?”

I groaned. “Granddad, please. It’s
May
. Applications aren’t due until the fall.”

“You still haven’t told me where you’re applying,” he pressed.

“That’s because I haven’t decided.” I hadn’t told Granddad— it would’ve freaked him out—but I was really struggling with the idea of picking a school, and consequently a future. I had no idea what I wanted to study, and even though I knew Granddad had his heart set on me attending an Ivy League school—or, even better, the University of Chicago, where I could get a reduced tuition and live at home—I couldn’t quite imagine myself at any of those places. There was only one thing I knew for certain: I had to get out of Hyde Park. I loved Chicago, and the little neighborhood where I’d grown up, but I was starting to feel restless. Granddad was content with his compact, uneventful life, but I ached for adventure, and I wasn’t going to find it if I was just following Granddad’s plan for me. It was going to be hard to break that to him, which was why I hadn’t done it yet.

There was something else I needed to talk to him about. Something I hadn’t brought up at dinner the night before, because I’d been too busy trying to decide whether it had actually happened. “Hey, Granddad?”

“Hm?” he mumbled without looking up from his paper.

“Grant Davis asked me to prom,” I said. Not that I thought he’d know who Grant was—Granddad wasn’t great with names or faces, and my best friend, Gina, was probably the only one of my classmates he actually knew.

Nevertheless, the mention of a potential date got his attention. “Who?”

“Grant Davis,” I repeated. “He’s … this guy. From my school.”

“And he asked you to prom?”

“Try not to sound so shocked,” I grumbled. Sometimes I wondered if Granddad assumed I was just as much of a loner as he preferred to be. “It’s not completely absurd that someone might ask me to prom.”

“I didn’t say it was absurd.” Granddad set to work quartering a hard-boiled egg, sprinkling it with salt.

I smacked his hand lightly. “You know Dr. Reingold said to cut it out with the sodium.”

“Don’t lecture me, Alexandra, that’s my job.” Granddad always called me by my given name when I annoyed him, which meant I heard it a lot. I’d gone by Sasha for so long, I would’ve been surprised to find out that anyone except Granddad knew my full name. “And don’t change the subject. This boy. What’s his story? Are his parents professors?”

“His mom teaches at the law school,” I said. Granddad shrugged; he wasn’t interested in anyone who wasn’t a scientist. “His dad lives out in California.”

“And is he a nice boy?” He couldn’t quite meet my eyes. The conversation clearly embarrassed him. Granddad had a history of discomfort when it came to the girl stuff in my life, and I couldn’t blame him, but these moments always reminded me just how keenly I missed and needed my mother.

I had to wonder how my father would’ve reacted to me dating. Like a dad, probably. Cautious and overprotective, like Gina’s dad had behaved when she got together with her boyfriend, Jeff. But I couldn’t really know. My parents had been dead for almost a decade; I’d been seven at the time, so while I had memories of them, they were blurry and fragmented. It was hard to recall what they were like. Granddad was no help, because he almost never wanted to talk about them. Before the accident, his relationship with my parents had been distant; when I came to him, we were practically strangers. I’d never found the courage to ask him why that was, but over the years I’d pieced together what was probably obvious all along—he didn’t like my father. I kind of didn’t want to know why. I loved Granddad
and
my parents, and if there was something dark in their shared past that would change my opinion of any of them, I was happier not knowing the particulars. But still, the question lurked in the back of my brain. What about my dad had caused them to be estranged for so long? I couldn’t even venture a guess.

“Yes, Granddad,” I assured him. “He’s nice.”

“How well do you know him?”

“We’ve gone to school together for, like, ever.” It was best not to tell him that I didn’t actually know Grant that well; it would only feed Granddad’s suspicions, and lower my chances of being allowed to go to prom.

“Don’t say ‘like,’ ” he grumbled. “It makes you sound silly.” I rolled my eyes. “Well, all right. But I want to meet him before you go out. Do you need money for a dress?”

I braced myself. Prom dresses were expensive, and there wasn’t enough time to buy one online, so I’d have to troll the department stores for something off the rack—and on sale. At least I had Gina to help me in the search. She was aces at sniffing out good deals, and her taste was excellent, certainly better than mine. “Yeah, kind of.”

“How much?”

“A hundred, maybe?” I winced. I hated asking Granddad for money, but I didn’t have a lot of savings, and I’d had no reason to budget for a prom dress.

He plucked five twenty-dollar bills from his wallet, handing them over solemnly. “This is a reward for being so good and working so hard. You’re not
entitled
to this. You earned it.”

I took the cash and gave him my brightest smile. “Thanks, Granddad. You’re the best.”

THREE

The days leading up to prom passed in the blink of an eye. Gina and I gave ourselves blisters walking up and down Michigan Avenue before finding the perfect thing for me to wear, a short, strapless navy dress with a sweetheart neckline and a sparkly tulle overlay that was on clearance for $99.99. The dress wasn’t exactly my style—I was definitely more of a T-shirt and jeans kind of girl—but when I looked in the mirror, I had to admit, I felt beautiful in it. I hoped Grant would like it on me just as much as I did.

Before I knew it, it was Saturday evening, and Gina, Jeff, and I were gathered in the parlor of the Victorian, waiting for Grant to arrive.

“He’s late,” Gina said. She was sitting in Granddad’s armchair, wiggling with impatience, while her boyfriend loomed over her, taking nips off a flask he kept in his inside jacket pocket. Gina had met Jeff, a freshman at Northwestern, at a concert a few months earlier. Personally, I thought he was a little morose and weird, but he was really into Gina, so who was I to judge? Jeff was tall and lanky, and usually his clothes and his hair looked like they’d never been washed. Gina had managed to wrestle him into her brother’s old tux, even though it was a bit too short in the arms and legs and a bit too big everywhere else.

“He’ll be here,” I insisted. I paced the floor in front of the fireplace. My nerves were out of control. It was one thing to imagine this moment, to look forward to it, and quite another to find myself on the precipice of experiencing it. Plus, what if Granddad didn’t like Grant? I kept telling myself it was a silly thing to worry about—after all, I wasn’t
marrying
Grant, I was just going with him to one dance—but it was hard to banish it from my thoughts.

My eyes rested on the framed photographs that sat upon the mantle. Most of them were school photos that charted my evolution from a thick-haired, gawky child to a relatively pretty teenager, all things considered. There were also a few of me and Granddad together in various places, my favorite being one of us standing on a pier at Lake Okobogee, hoisting a ten-pound largemouth bass between us. I smiled at the memory. If it was possible for my parents’ deaths to have a silver lining, it was that I’d gotten a chance to know my grandfather. Even though he could be gruff, I knew that he loved me, and that I was lucky to have found a home with him when mine had been ripped from me.

There was only one picture of my parents. It was from our last trip to Disney World; we were standing in front of Cinderella’s castle, grinning into the sun. It’d been taken only a few months before the accident, and we looked so happy in it, oblivious to the disaster looming on the horizon of our lives. The sadness that always accompanied thoughts of my parents clanged like a bell in my heart, but my smile didn’t fade. The clearest memories of my childhood were from that vacation. I’d been deep in my fairy-tale phase, demanding that everyone call me Princess Juliana, a name that bewildered Mom and Dad. I’d dragged them to the castle more than a dozen times and pranced around inside it, ordering them around like servants. I still had the princess hat they’d bought me, a cardboard cone covered in synthetic pink fabric with
Juliana
stitched on the brim and a filmy purple ribbon trailing from the top. When Mom asked me why I was called Juliana, I told her I’d heard the name in a dream.

Other than my parents, I’d never told anyone about the Juliana dreams, but I’d had them ever since I could remember. When I was young, they came often, three or four times a week, but as I grew up they were fewer and farther between, though more vivid. Like most dreams, however, they faded almost immediately after I woke up.

In the dreams, I was never myself, but a girl named Juliana who looked exactly like me. They had a linear, realistic quality to them, as if I was literally living Juliana’s life. But things were different in her world than they were in mine. I couldn’t remember all the differences—there were so many of them, and dreams were hard to get a hold on—but this one thing I recalled with absolute precision: in Juliana’s world, the aurora borealis danced in the sky, not just at the North and South Poles, but everywhere. That was always my favorite part.

My latest Juliana dream had happened two weeks earlier, after months of not having them at all. I’d fallen into bed at two a.m., completely exhausted after a long and painful struggle with my physics homework. I only remembered tiny pieces of it—a painting of a beautiful country house, a small origami star that seemed significant, and, as always, the green ribbons of the aurora borealis in the night sky. The overwhelming sense of foreboding I’d felt when I woke up the next morning had stuck with me through most of the day.

The doorbell rang. I took a deep breath and hurried to answer it. My heart felt buoyant, but over-inflated, like it was straining against my rib cage.