The Space Between Us (3 page)

“So how was it?” Charly asked, a little out of breath from the soaring finish.

“Great. You’ll get the part.” If I could just remember what part that was.

“I hope so. I feel like I was born to play Galinda.”

Right, Galinda. The good witch?

I rubbed the branch beneath my fingers, feeling the spongy bark crumble. Dad said Mom had loved the trees in Florida. She grew up in the Canadian Rockies with giant fir trees and other evergreen trees too prickly to climb. I wanted to ask Dad if she ever climbed the trees around the house we used to live in, over on the other side of Tremonton, but I could never quite find the right moment to ask. Besides, grown women,
mothers
, don’t climb trees, do they?

“I’m starting to feel kind of sick,” I said. “Maybe strawberries and Coke isn’t the best combination.”

“I’ll remember that next time I want to stay home from school.”

A halo of fireflies lit above Charly’s head. I reached out to catch one, but she was too far away. They scattered.

“You know what we discovered out at the golf course?” she asked.

“What?”

“When you light a golf ball on fire you’d think you could hit it and it’d look like a meteor, but it doesn’t. The flame goes out right away.”

“Scratch what I said about the collective IQ of a chimp. There are smarter chimps.” I rubbed my temples, picturing the scene. “I can’t believe you actually did that. I’m surprised the golf balls caught fire.”

“Oh, we had to soak them in gas first.”

“What?”

“It’s not like it was my idea.”

“Yeah, ’cause the cops
really
care whose idea it was when they’re arresting everyone. You could have killed someone!”

“It was the middle of the night. It’s not like some innocent golfer was going to get a flaming golf ball to the head.”

Unbelievable.

“Oh, come on, Amelia,” she said. “It was fun. Even you would have had fun.”

“If this is the stuff you’re telling me about, I can’t imagine what you aren’t telling me.”

“I don’t keep secrets from you.”

I hesitated, but not because I didn’t believe her. “I know.”

“So will you drive me out to that party tomorrow?”

“No. Again. I’m not taking you out to Baldwin to get into more trouble. The summer is over, the job is over. You have no reason to hang out with those guys.”

The mugginess and the croaking frogs were suddenly too much. I was being smothered.

“I’m tired,” I said. The thought of tomorrow, of field hockey, and calculus, and seeing Will, and pretending to
be above it all made me want to fall asleep and wake up next year.

I glanced over at Charly. She’d pulled her knees up under her chin and wrapped both arms around her legs, nothing anchoring her to the branch. Her pigtails shone yellow in the moonlight, falling on her shoulders. A gust of wind, or a sneeze from me, anything to shake the bough, and she’d fall.

She picked up the empty bowl from the branch where I’d propped it, and held it out to me. “You take it in.”

I took it.

• • •

Charly went up to bed while I rinsed out the strawberry bowl.

The house was quiet except for the hum of the AC and Dad’s voice floating down the hall. I put the bowl away, then followed his voice to the closed door of his den. The words were muffled, but I could tell he wasn’t on the phone. It was his pulpit voice, or a quieter version of it, but with that same powerful mix of casual and caring he reserved for the Sunday sermon. People heard it and forgot they were sitting in church, not at Starbucks chatting with a friend. A voice like that could call people sinners and they’d still come back next week.

I knocked.

“Come in.”

“Can I talk to you for a minute?”

“Of course.” He stood in front of his desk, dog-eared papers in hand. “I’m just running through the conference presentation again.”

“Do you need an audience?”

He took off his glasses and laid them on his desk. His face looked empty without them. “It’s pretty late, isn’t it?”

I crossed the room and climbed into the leather desk chair. “I guess.”

“Is your sister in bed already?” He rubbed the angry red marks on the bridge of his nose.

“I think so.”

“So, what was it you wanted to talk about?”

“Atlanta.”

He looked confused, but said nothing.

“I just wanted to ask if you’d decided about me coming with you. You know, since we talked about it last week.”

“To Atlanta?” He squinted, as if trying to remember a conversation from last year. “I don’t remember discussing that.”

“We did.”

“Well, I’m sorry. I guess I forgot.” He ran a hand through his silver-streaked hair. “Honey, I don’t think coming to Atlanta with me is going to work. Presenting at this conference is a big deal—I’m not going to have time for sightseeing.”

“It’s not like I’m five. I don’t need babysitting.”

“I know you’re not five, but you’re not an adult,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

He sounded sorry. But he’s good at sounding sorry, or inspired, or pensive, or joyful, or whatever. I stared at the grain in the hardwood floor. “You won’t even notice I’m there. I promise.”

“That’s not the point. Besides, I’ve decided to go up on Monday, and you can’t miss a full week of school.”

“But . . . ” He was right. He knew it. “Can I just fly up and meet you on Friday, then?”

He came over and hugged me, signaling the begging was officially over. “I really am sorry.” He put his glasses back on, and looked instantly wiser.

As I stood up I felt the fight drain from my body. I should have known. Tremonton is a black hole of suckiness and it wasn’t going to let me escape.

“Good night, sweetie,” he said as I left the den.

“Good night.”

• • •

I texted Savannah from bed:

change of heart. can u still hook me up

It took all of five seconds for her response:

done

A
gainst all odds, the state of Florida gave Charly a driver’s license.

“Lord, protect us” was Grandma’s response when Charly came running into the kitchen, waving the temporary license like a winning lottery ticket. Grandma went back to arranging her roses in a glass vase.

“Third time’s a charm!” Charly sang, and turned to me at the sink. She held out her arms for a hug.

“I’m holding scissors.” I snipped the stem of the last pink blossom and handed it to Grandma. Charly settled for holding the little piece of paper up close to my face,
too close to even see the writing, like she thought I would want to verify it wasn’t fake.

“Why didn’t you tell me you were taking the test again?” I asked. “Who drove you?”

“Dean. I wanted it to be a surprise!”

She grabbed the Jeep keys—
our
Jeep keys now—from the hook, and swung them around her index finger. “How do I look?”

“Dangerous,” I said. “Have you called Dad yet?”

“Nope. I’ll call him tonight when he’s back at the hotel.”

His response would be like Grandma’s, but with a smile. Charly amuses him.

“Let’s go somewhere,” she said, twirling around the kitchen, still swinging the keys. “Come on, Grandma, let’s go get ice cream.”

Grandma placed the vase of top-heavy blossoms on the table runner. “Are those centered?”

“A little to the left,” I said.

She pushed the vase an inch.

“Perfect.”

Charly grabbed my arm. “I’m serious! We’re all going to Dairy Queen and I’m driving. You too, Grandma.”

“I’m too young to die,” I whispered to Grandma as we followed Charly out the front door.

“Pray, child. Pray.”

• • •

Charly cut off two people on the way to DQ, an impressive feat in a town as small as Tremonton. “Holy crap,” she shouted after the second time. The other driver honked and sped off, flipping us the bird. “He came out of nowhere.”

“Feces are hardly holy,” Grandma muttered. “You’ve got to be cautious, Charlotte.”

“Sorry.”

Grandma rubbed her temples for the rest of the ride, muttering, “Thank you, Jesus, for letting me live another day,” as Charly swerved into the DQ parking lot.

“Or maybe she’s already killed us, and this is actually heaven,” I said from the backseat.

Charly pulled into a parking spot—two parking spots, actually—then we went in and ordered.

“Now that I have my license, I won’t have to bug you for rides all the time,” Charly said between bites of her banana split.

“Good. Here, eat this,” I said, dropping my cherry into her ice cream.

“This
is
heaven.”

“You’ve cheated on way too many math tests to end up in heaven.”

Grandma raised an eyebrow at Charly.

“She was kidding,” Charly said, sinking her red plastic spoon into whipped cream and fudge sauce.

Grandma turned her steely gaze to me. “Were you kidding, or does your sister cheat?”

I shrugged. Of course she cheated. I’d seen her spend more time copying answers onto the inside of Coke bottle labels than I’d seen her actually studying. “If she cheats, she does a terrible job. What’s your GPA again, Charly?”

Another lie averted.

Charly smiled sweetly and narrowed her eyes at me.

I grinned back.

• • •

Savannah loaned me a dress for homecoming. We would’ve planned a shopping trip to Tallahassee, but we ran out of time—I had my last crack at the SATs to study for, and she had extra cheerleading practices. The entire cheerleading squad (Savannah included) actually believed the outcome of the football game had something to do with whether they shook their pom-poms in perfect unison. I’d learned not to mock her aloud.

I didn’t really need a new dress, anyway. Savannah had a closet full of once-worn formals that nobody at school had even seen. Her dad was a judge and worked at the capitol building, which meant she got to dress up and eat lobster and crème brûlée at political functions in Tallahassee a few times a year.

“The green one with the pleats,” she said, after I’d
tried on a whole pile of them. “It brings out your eyes and makes you look like you have hips.”

“You don’t think it’s too low cut?” I eyed myself in her full-length mirror. I’d have to wear a shrug or something over it if I wanted Grandma to let me out of the house.

“Course not.”

I took it home and hung it in my closet next to the pink dress I wore last year, forcing myself not to think about how Will had bought me a rose wrist corsage and told me I looked beautiful. But I failed. I couldn’t not remember every second of that night. It was before things got complicated.

I was also actively forcing myself not to worry about my date. I’d talked to Nick twice on the phone, and he didn’t seem too annoying, just typically self-centered. All guys are. He’d mostly talked about his chances of getting a football scholarship, but according to Savannah, I didn’t have to actually like Nick or enjoy myself. The important thing was that people see me looking good, and looking happy.

Charly found Savannah’s dress on Wednesday after school while rifling through my closet.

“Yowza, is this what you’re wearing on Friday?” She wedged her head through the hanger so the dress hung over her T-shirt and jeans.

“No,” I grunted between crunches. “I’m wearing it to the field hockey game tomorrow.”

“Spaghetti straps, huh? Good luck leaving the house in this.”

“I’ve got that angora shrug to put over it.”

She twirled around, watching the finger pleats flare in the mirror. “Do you mind if I take the car tonight?”

My abs were on fire. Coach Hershey’s conditioning program was a relentless progression of push-ups, sit-ups, and planks. She made it clear that if we didn’t feel like puking at the end, we hadn’t done it properly.

“The car?” Charly repeated.

I did my last crunch and collapsed on the carpet. “Take it. I’m going to bed early anyway. Where are you going?”

“That party at Mitch’s I was telling you about.”

“You’re going all the way to Baldwin on a school night?”

“Yeah. Cover for me, will ya?” She pulled my new Abercrombie sweater over her head.

I rolled onto my side and started doing leg lifts. “What?”

“I said cover for me. Sisters cover for each other.”

“I’m not lying to Grandma. She can totally tell.”

“That’s because you’re a terrible liar.”

“So don’t make me. And I don’t remember hearing you ask to borrow that.”

“Can I borrow this?” she called on her way out the door.

I didn’t answer.

• • •

After dinner I tried reading the short story assigned for English, but when I pictured the main character, it was Will’s face I saw. I couldn’t help it. And not just his face, but the way he looked at Charly the night I first knew.

I’d been late leaving my study group, and hurrying because Will was supposed to pick me up for a movie. He was always so anal about getting the best seats. But when I got home, he was already there, in the kitchen with Charly. She was wrapped up in telling a story, moving her hands and doing voices and laughing all at the same time. And he was just staring. Staring so hard he didn’t even see me watching from the doorway. Neither of them saw me.

Why do I always end up there? My brain can hijack any line of thinking and force it to Will’s face at that moment, all serious and fascinated and needing.

I hate that face.

I ran my fingers along the edge of my desk. It’s Dad’s old desk, an oak, antique-fashioned thing with lots of drawers and cubbyholes and the name of his high school girlfriend etched into the wood on the far left side—
Caroline
. Weird thinking of him as a teenager, hunched over his own homework. Even weirder to think of him carving some girl’s name into the wood.

It’d never occurred to me to carve Will’s name into anything, though at the beginning of last school year I’d
written
Amelia Harmon
on the inside of my notebook in ink. Just to see what it looked like. Then I’d taken a Sharpie to it before anyone could see.

I glanced out the window to where driveway melted into darkness. Charly wasn’t back yet, but she had thirteen minutes to make her ten o’clock curfew.
Come on, Charly.
I didn’t want to see whether or not Grandma would actually ground her for homecoming. As expected, Charly had turned down Dean, but a big group of her drama friends were planning to go together. She’d be pissed if Grandma kept her home.