The Space Between Us (2 page)

“And I will be forever grateful to them for saving me from an in-school suspension. He didn’t even threaten to call home.” She pulled the pieces of her grilled cheese apart and held one in front of my face. The mass of congealed orange cheese product was sweating. “Think this is organic?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Seriously? You think?” She wrinkled her nose.

“Of course not. Unless space-age polymers are now falling under the organic label.”

She closed the bread around the greasy cheese and took a bite.

“Since when do you care about eating organic?” Savannah asked suspiciously. She thinks she has dibs on living green since her stepdad bought her a hybrid. She’s
gone as far as to lecture strangers at the mall for tossing empty soda cans in the garbage.

“Since today,” Charly answered. “Now that I’m a protestor of sweatshop labor in . . . Amelia, where are the sweatshops?”

“China, Malaysia, Guatemala, the Philippines, Thailand . . . should I keep going?”

“No, that’s good.”

“Wait a second,” Savannah jumped in, jabbing a finger dangerously close to my face. “You
can’t
go to Atlanta. You guys have a big game! Ha!”

I knew it was only a matter of time until that hit her. “I’ll have to miss it.” The words felt wrong even as I said them. I’d never missed a field hockey game. Not even when I’d had mono.

“What? The team captain can’t just skip out on the biggest game of the season.”

“We’ll beat Baldwin whether I’m here or not.”

That wasn’t true. I took another bite of my apple and stared at the core to avoid eye contact. Baldwin beat us last year, and was rumored to be even stronger this year. Something about a new German coach and brutal three-hour practices.

“What did Coach Hershey say?” Charly asked.

I glared at her. Whose side was she on? “I haven’t told her yet. Today. At practice.”

Coach Hershey is like a stick of dynamite: small, tightly packed, and deadly. I was still trying to come up with the right way of phrasing it so she wouldn’t explode in my face.

“Homecoming is about football,” I said. “Nobody cares about girls’ field hockey.”

“Apparently not,” Savannah muttered, and folded her arms.

“Hey, speaking of Baldwin,” Charly said, “can you give me a lift out there tomorrow night?”

“Why, so you can spend the evening stealing stop signs?”

Charly had come away from her summer job mowing greens at Baldwin Country Club with a paycheck, a tan, and a pack of total morons she now hung out with. Most of them were dropouts or just going nowhere. Unless there was a possibility of keg stands—then they were definitely going
there
.

“We didn’t steal them. We borrowed them and then we put them back. Mostly.”

“I won’t even be home from practice until after five and then I’ve got homework. Plus, I need to practice for my choir audition.”

She closed her eyes and shuddered. “You should
not
be auditioning for choir.”

“I’m doing choir.”

“But you have a terrible voice. No offense.”

Sebastian and No-Name stifled laughs. Savannah coughed.

“Thanks a lot, guys,” I muttered, then turned back to Charly. “Offense taken, and I know I don’t have the best voice, but choir will make me look well rounded.”

“But you’re not.”

“Conversation over.”

“Does that mean you’re not driving me to Baldwin?”

“You need to get your driver’s license.”

That shut her up. She’d already failed the road test twice.

“You don’t want to go out to Baldwin tonight,” Dean jumped in. “They’re the enemy. Come with us to DQ after football.”

If Charly answered, I didn’t catch it. I was too busy watching Will.

He was coming through the doorway to the cafeteria, Luciana in tow, her pearly pink nails and brown skinny fingers curled around his bicep. He was talking, and she was laughing. No, her whole body was laughing—her head thrown back and her other hand touching her throat.

Please. Will is a lot of things, but he’s not that funny.

Adrenaline screamed through my veins, but I didn’t move. I gave myself three seconds. Three seconds to see how happy he looked, still tall and skinny, those same
brown eyes and curly brown hair. Three miserable seconds, then I looked down.

Thankfully, Savannah was too busy canoodling with Sebastian to notice. Her sympathy is my kryptonite.

Charly pushed her pudding cup toward me. “Butterscotch. You can have it.”

She gave me a crooked half smile, crooked because when we were ten she’d been standing on the wrong side of my swing during a softball game.

Butterscotch is her favorite.

“Thanks.”

C
ome out to the tree with me,” Charly whispered, pushing just her head through my open door.

I didn’t look up from my calculus. “I’ve got to finish this. Why are you whispering?”

“I don’t want Grandma to hear me. She’s still pissed about those jelly jars I borrowed.”

Borrowed. Charly had taken ten of Grandma’s canning jars and used them as pins for watermelon bowling at the drama club’s back-to-school party. None survived.

“I’ve really got to work on this,” I said. I did. In the
last hour I’d accomplished nothing—just stared at numbers, and copied out problems, my brain abandoning every effort before I could find the derivative of anything.

I couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that next year at this time I’d be in New York, in a dorm room at Columbia, listening to indie music with roommates who wore funky scarves and glasses and got straight As and had Ivy League boyfriends who played lacrosse. Maybe
I’d
have an Ivy League boyfriend who played lacrosse. Somebody I’d met in one of my political science classes. Then we could go to Yale Law School together and—“What are you thinking about?” Charly interrupted.

World domination.
“Calculus.”

“Tragic.” She shook her head. “You looked so happy.”

Charly pushed the door open all the way. She was already wearing pajamas, a pink tank top and shorts with white eyelet trim, and she’d knotted her hair into messy pigtails.

“You look like you’re five years old,” I said.

“I’ve got snacks.” She lifted a bowl of strawberries in one hand, then two Cokes in the other.

I closed my textbook.

“Are you going to finish my math for me?” I asked as we tiptoed downstairs.

“The answer is
c
.”

“It’s not multiple choice, idiot.”

I elbowed past her at the landing, kept my lead through the kitchen, and slipped out first, the moist night air swallowing me whole. That air. Warm and wet and suffocating.

It can’t be like this up north. I’ve seen pictures of New York in the fall. People wear sweaters.
I
could wear a sweater.

The screen door banged shut behind Charly. “Shhhhh!” I said, and turned to see her sprinting down the steps, giggling as she passed me.

“Don’t shake the Cokes!” I called, breaking into a run. Frogs screeched in the dark and I tried not to think about stepping on one. The crabgrass felt like a carpet of dry sticks beneath my bare feet, but I ran anyway, passing her easily. First one to the tree gets the best seat.

The black walnut is ours, mine and Charly’s. Grandpa carved our names into it after we—the three survivors—came here to live. I was a toddler, so I don’t remember anything, not the name carving, not the crash, not the funeral, not my mother. I think us living here was supposed to be temporary, but then Grandpa got sick so Dad had another reason to stay. And after Grandpa died, we just never moved out.

The tree is the perfect distance from the old plantation-style house for us to sit in its branches and chuck the green walnut hulls at the windows. Five points for a wooden
shutter, ten points for an actual windowpane, and fifteen points for the French doors or any piece of the veranda furniture. Then there’s the impossible: the rooster-topped weather vane on the roof. Fifty points for the vane, but neither of us has hit it yet. Not for lack of trying.

We’re taking a break from it though, since last week Grandma promised if she saw one more walnut hull on the porch we’d be polishing silver till Christmas.

I swung myself up onto the lowest branch, then reached down to take my Coke from Charly.

Can in hand, I made my way down the branch to the first fork. It was too dark to see, but I know every knot and branch and mossy patch on that tree by touch. I didn’t say anything, just settled with my back against the trunk. Charly found the second-best spot farther down the bough, where it forks again and flattens almost enough to resemble a seat.

Charly opened her Coke. I opened mine too. All around us fireflies glowed and sank into the darkness.

She broke the silence first. “Do you think I should dye my hair red?”

“What?”
I stared at her pigtails. Charly has the kind of buttery-blond hair people spend fortunes trying to imitate. “That would look so bad.”

“You think? Ty and Mitch said I’d look sexy with red hair.”

“Ty and Mitch are idiots. I’m telling you, those Baldwin guys have the collective IQ of a chimp. And why do you even care what they think? Dad would kill you.”

“No,
Grandma
would kill me,” she said. “Dad would cry.”

She was right. According to photographs, Charly looks just like Mom—the blond curly hair, the blue eyes, the freckles. Dad really might cry.

My hair is nut brown and I have all of Grandma’s angles, from chin to hips to knees. If I dyed my hair red Dad would be disappointed in me. Grandma would probably ground me, but only because seventeen is too old for the paddle.

When we were younger, sixteen was the legal age for everything fun: boys, pierced ears (one per ear), cell phones,
etc.
But now that we’ve both passed that mark, the list of forbidden activities has only shifted: drugs, skipping church, sex,
etc.
We can’t do any of those until Dad dies. To my knowledge, hair dying hasn’t been discussed, but Charly is a believer in do first, ask later.

She’d earned two weeks of grounding for piercing her ears when she was fifteen. It was dumb of her. I don’t know why she hadn’t just waited three months and saved herself getting in trouble.

“So you’re not over Will,” Charly said.

I took a sip of my soda and held it in my mouth until
the bubbles stung my tongue and cheeks. When the fizz finally died, I swallowed. “Luciana can have him.”

“But you’re not over him.”

She said it so matter-of-factly I almost couldn’t deny it. “Am too.”

“I still don’t get why you guys broke up. A year and a half, and it’s just over for no reason?” Charly flicked a strawberry top off her thumb. “I mean, something must have happened.”

Of course something happened. You happened.

“Nothing happened.”

“You didn’t even have a fight?”

I accused him of being in love with you and he admitted it.

“No. We’ve been over this a million times.”

“Yeah, and it still makes no sense—him just breaking up with you out of the blue.”

I chucked a strawberry top at her, but it fell short. “
He
didn’t break up with
me
. It was mutual. Why doesn’t anyone believe that?”

“Okay, okay, I believe.”

Charly had been oblivious. As usual. She hadn’t noticed the way Will started looking at her last spring, the same way she doesn’t see how Dean and entire legions of other guys look at her now. I couldn’t even hate her for it. She was too clueless.

But hating Will didn’t seem quite right either. It’s
not like he’d actually done anything wrong. I could just feel it, the way his body turned to her when she was around, the way he watched the words come out of her lips when she spoke. He smiled for her like she was sunshine and oxygen rolled into one, like he just couldn’t help it.

If I was mad at anyone, it was myself for not being more . . . something.

“What did Hershey say when you told her you’re missing the game?” Charly asked.

“I chickened out. I’ll tell her tomorrow.”

She snorted.

“What? She worked us hard today. I’d like to see
you
kick that wasps’ nest.”

“I don’t see why you don’t stay here, and just go to homecoming.”

“Why would I do that?”

“To have fun. Go with whoever Sebastian was talking about, and stop obsessing over Will and his trampy girlfriend.”

“I’m not obsessing. I really do want to go to Atlanta.”

“To quote Grandma, ‘And all liars shall burneth with fire and brimstone in hell,’” she recited, then held out the bowl of strawberries.

I took one. “You’re paraphrasing, but I’m pretty sure Grandma was quoting God anyway. And I’m not lying.
I’m finished with high school boys. This year is about getting into Columbia.”

Charly shrugged. “Fine, but Luciana really is a tramp. She sits right in front of me in art, and her jeans were so low today she was showing about three inches of thong.”

“Lovely.” My last swig tasted more like metal than Coke. I propped the empty can beside me.

“Wanna hear my song?” Charly asked, and handed me the bowl.

“Do I ever.”

I’d heard her sing it a thousand times, but
Wicked
tryouts were only a week away. So Charly poured her heart into “Defying Gravity,” and I ate the rest of the strawberries.

In my opinion,
Wicked
is a little ambitious for a high school in the rural South whose talent pool consists of overly confident pageant girls. But Charly is better than all of them, so maybe she can carry the show. She has the kind of voice my choir director loves—clear and sweet and perfectly in tune.

Grandma objects to Charly’s
Wicked
ambitions, but not enough to forbid it. It’s a combination of the play’s name and the fact that Charly’s GPA is bouncing between embarrassing and fatal. I tried explaining that the play is a
Wizard of Oz
spin-off, but that didn’t seem to make a difference to Grandma. And of course, grades are grades. No sugarcoating a 2.5.