The Last Days of October (5 page)

7.

In a world without
black crosses on doors, Amber had fallen in love with a boy named Collin
Wells.
 
Tall, with black hair and green
eyes as sharp as broken glass, Collin was a year ahead of her and ran with a
more affluent crowd—civilian kids who never had to ride the bus and wore nice
new clothes even though they didn’t have after-school jobs.
 
They wore hats and sweatshirts from big-name
colleges because everybody understood that when high school ended, these people
were going somewhere.

Collin himself had
set his sights on the University of Virginia, something none of her previous
boyfriends had even considered.
 
He would
major in political science and go to work in Washington, D.C., he told
her.
 
Then law school.
 
He would be a senator someday.
 
This made perfect sense, because Collin’s
grandfather had been a senator, and his father sat on the board at the largest
shipping firm in Norfolk.
 
Collin himself
was vice-president of the National Honor Society.
 
He played soccer and lacrosse.
 
And he was so good-looking that when he’d
approached her in the hallway and started talking to her one day, she almost
couldn’t talk back.

“Just remember
that nobody shits roses,” her friend Tara Beasley said one night on the
phone.
 
“And he’s going to dump your ass
as soon as you don’t put out.
 
You’re a
Navy girl, but you’re also an
enlisted
Navy girl, which to these guys means two things: one, your family is
broke.
 
Two, you’re easy.
 
That’s what all these preps think—that we’re
trash.
 
And as soon as he figures out
you’re
not
trash, that you
don’t
give out blowjobs like Halloween
candy, this is going to be over.
 
So
don’t put too much of yourself into it, okay?”

But Tara had been
wrong.
 
The last semester of Amber’s
junior and his senior year aged like a fine wine.
 
Prom came and went.
 
But as graduation approached Collin grew
quieter, more distant.
 
So much so that
at commencement, she could have cried when he walked across the stage,
would
have cried had she not been
sitting right next to his mother and father.
 
He was leaving, she understood.
 
He would meet someone at UVA.
 
The
girls would all pounce on him before he even got his clothes unpacked, because
Collin wasn’t just deep, Collin wasn’t just real, Collin was
gorgeous.
 
And these wouldn’t be just any girls.
 
College
girls.
 
Holy Grails with feet.

Break
up now
, Tara texted her.
 
Save yrself the wait
.

She thought about
that.
 
She really did.
 
But at his graduation party, she caught him
brooding in the kitchen.
 
She pulled him
out onto the back porch to find out why.

“Everything’s
ending,” he said, near tears.
 
The
wetness in his eyes had taken her by surprise; she had thought him plotting
their breakup, engineering a way to let her down easy.
 
“I love you, Amber, but it’s all falling
down!
 
I’m
leaving
.
 
I’m going off to
Charlottesville, my parents won’t let me take my car and I won’t have any way
of coming to see you.
 
It’s going to be
hell!”

He just said he loved me.

“Are you saying
you want to break up?”

“No!
 
No!
 
I
just…I don’t know how I’m going to make it!
 
When I go off, it’s going to be weeks before we can see each other
again!”

She threw her arms
around him then because she’d started crying, too.
 
The back door opened.
 
Two of his friends stepped out and quickly
darted back inside.
 
Collin didn’t even
turn his head or flinch when the door squealed.
 
He appreciated the gravity of this moment, she knew.
 
This crossroads.

“My dad sails on a
submarine,” she murmured.
 
“Sometimes he
goes away and we don’t see him for three months.
 
But him and my mom have stayed married for
over twenty years.”

“What are you
saying?” he asked thickly.

“I’m saying you
and I are going to be fine.”

He hugged her even
tighter.
 
For a moment, she couldn’t
breathe.

“I’ll die before I
let you go,” he said.

He eventually
released her physically, but in a sense they remained together in that kitchen
all summer.
 
The season passed like
something out of one of the country songs they listened to during long
afternoons on the beach, hot evenings with the windows down on the
expressway.
 
When more creative people
experienced something like this, they had to sing about it or explode.

She cried when he
left in August and so did he.
 
But the parting
didn’t bring the pain she had always feared, because they both knew it was
temporary.
 
Because even though nobody
expected they’d make it, they knew differently.
 
They were special.
 
A little
intense, maybe, but that was okay.
 
Monogamy was hard, especially for guys.
 
Intensity was a good thing.

“We belong
together,” he proclaimed in her driveway the night before he shipped out for
Charlottesville.
 
“But we need to be
careful as we get used to the distance, you know?”

Amber indicated
that she indeed knew.

“Because guys are
worms,” he said.
 
“Girls can be sneaky,
but guys are frigging
worms
—they see
a girl they want and it’s like suddenly there’s no such thing as common decency
anymore.
 
You especially have to watch
yourself.
 
As soon as I’m gone, dudes are
going to be all over you.”

“Believe me,
that’s not true.”

“It is.
 
You’re the most beautiful girl at that whole
school, Amber.
 
At any school.
 
So they’re going to start calling you.
 
They’re going to start inviting you
places.
 
It’ll start out all innocent at
first, but what they’re doing is worming—working on you.
 
Confusing you.
 
Making you question things.
 
And before you know it, you’ll forget all
about me.”

“Never,” she
swore.

“Promise me,
then,” he said.

“Promise you
what?”

“That you’ll be
strong.
 
Against the worm.”

So she promised,
and she remained good to her word.
 
She
actively avoided boys after he left and started staying in on weekends instead
of running around with Tara and the rest.
 
She actively avoided the crowd Collin had introduced her to, because
there were a few guys in that group, he said, who always looked at her a little
too much and a little too long and he didn’t trust them for one second.
 

So she didn’t go
to parties and she didn’t go to dances and she really didn’t have time to talk
to any of these potential worms on the phone because with Collin so far away,
the only times she ever got to talk or Skype with him were evenings and
weekends.
 
The worms Collin feared never
got near her, because she stayed out of the soil.
 

And things went
well.
 
They had their arguments like any
couple did, but never anything fatal; Collin, being far away, naturally felt a
little insecure and threw a fit every now and then.
 
Small fits, minor tantrums.
 
Nothing they didn’t get past before getting
off the phone.
 
And as the autumn of her
senior year unwound, he started talking about marriage.
 
How that could work.

And then it all
went to shit.

Tara Beasley
showed up on her front porch one Friday night after dinner in mid-October and
demanded a meeting in Amber’s room.
 
She’d come over to bitch about Collin.
 
More specifically, how Amber had ditched her girls for this guy, how it
wasn’t healthy, how it was weird, how everybody was talking about her now like
she had a disease or some shit, people were getting miffed about her blowing
them off all the time, blah, blah blah.
 
Typical jealous girl stuff.
 
Amber
sought a breather under the guise of going downstairs to get them drinks.
 
She tarried in the kitchen until she could
tarry no longer, then returned to her room with a pair of Diet Cokes.
 
There, she found Tara scrolling through her
iPhone.

Should have took it down with you, you
should keep it with you at all times, because people are worms and they’ll try
to come between us.

“What are you
doing?” she asked.

Tara looked up,
white-faced, eyebrows knit together.
 
She
shook her head slowly.
 
“Amber…”

“What are you
doing with my phone?
 
Put that
down!”
 
She snatched the phone from
Tara’s hands.
 
Tara flinched.
 
“Who told you you could look at all my shit?”

“What is going on
with you?”

Amber glanced down
at the screen.
 
“What the fuck, Tara?”

Girls will worm, too.
 
Sometimes they’re even worse, because they’re
not after your body, they’re after your
soul
.
 
They can’t stand to see you
happy with a guy.
 
They want you alone
and miserable, like them.

“Amber…absolutely
none of that is normal.
 
I mean…my God,
how can you listen to him talk like that?
 
What’s all this shit about worms?”

“How would
you
know what’s normal?”
 
Amber shot back.
 
“Have you ever kept a boyfriend for longer
than a month?
 
Ever?
 
You ever gotten a valentine from the same guy
that gave you a Christmas card?”

“He’s keeping
track of your movements!
 
You’re having
to tell him where you are every hour of every…”

“I don’t
have
to tell him shit,” Amber spat.
 
Her hands shook.
 
“He’s just concerned.
 
He cares about me!”

“He’s fucking
psycho!
 
Jesus Christ, Amber, who the
hell says things like…”

Tara snatched the
phone back and began scrolling through the screen, backing around the room to
stay away from Amber.

“Like, ‘If you
break up with me, I’ll kill us both?’
 
Like, ‘I would rather blow my own brains out than see you with another
guy?’
 
Oh, and here’s a good one from
yesterday, ‘I’ll shoot everybody at that school before I let someone take you
from me.’
This
is what you call
‘having a boyfriend?’”

Amber began to
shake harder then.
 
Tears welled in her
eyes and her face burned.
 
She wanted to
leap forward and tear the phone from Tara’s hands again, smack her across the
face for this invasion of her privacy.
 
Make Tara go away and leave her alone.
 
Forever.

So she’d never
have to listen to those things out loud again.

“I love him,” she
whispered.
 
“He loves me.
 
That’s why he says that, because he’s scared
for our relationship, he doesn’t really mean it…”

“He’s sick,” Tara
said.
 
“And so are you.
 
You need help, Amber.
 
You need it
now.
”

Amber’s mind
launched a hundred thoughts at once—complex thoughts, a little jumbled, but
taken together they explained the intricate dance that was her relationship
with Collin.
 
Explained him, explained
her, explained his intensity, his raw emotion, his kooky messages.
 
Tara would understand, Amber thought, if she
could only explain.
 
But her mouth mutinied,
and these thoughts crashed together in the back of her throat, where they
formed a lump that would not let her speak.

“Let me show this
to your mom.
 
Can I do that?
 
We can show her together.”

Amber stared at
the phone.
 
Her skin was numb, her fingertips
cold.
 
Her eyes felt red and wet and she
knew without looking that her mascara—mascara, at home, on a weeknight, because
Collin liked to see her that way—was running.
 
She probably looked like a raccoon.
 
Or worse.

“Amber?
 
What do you think?”

Slowly,
hesitantly, she nodded.

“Okay.”

Mom hadn’t reacted
well.
 
Dad had been gone—as usual—so all
of this fell on her.
 
At night, Amber
sometimes caught her crying at the kitchen table all alone, and it struck her
as strange that her mother would experience such a personal reaction to
something that wasn’t her problem at all.
 
She acted like she’d caught Amber shooting heroin or smoking crack out
of a glass pipe; she even talked about sending her “away” for the rest of her
senior year.
 
Like rehab or something.
 
It made no sense.