Anything but Ordinary (16 page)

ryce woke up, and the whole room was full of sunshine. Her clothes from last night lay wrinkled, half off, twisted in the sheets. It was far past morning, probably high noon. Carter’s long-sleeve Vanderbilt University shirt was falling around her like a blanket. She brought a cotton sleeve to her face. It smelled like his Old Spice, and the richer, outside smells—sweat, grass, dirt.

For every day of the exactly fourteen days since she had kissed him, Carter had met her on the curb in front of the Grahams’ big blue house and taken her out to lunch. Bryce knew it had been fourteen days, because each day they had gone to a different restaurant in Nashville. Mexican, fast food, Vietnamese, and even one little place that specialized in different kinds of noodles. The third day in a row he asked her to lunch, Bryce had asked if they were going to do this every day.

“We date now, right?” Carter had asked, wiping hot sauce from his mouth.

“Right,” Bryce said quickly, feeling her face flush.

“This is what dating people do. They go on dates.” He pulled out the pen behind his ear and began calculating the tip.

“Plus I’ve already been to all these places alone, and I want to show the employees that I have a girlfriend. Hear that, Tony?” Carter turned his head to call toward the kitchen. “I have a girlfriend!”

They heard Tony respond, “How much did you pay her?”

Girlfriend
. Bryce shivered with pleasure at the word. It had been a while since she had felt like a girlfriend. And because she hadn’t looked back once, hadn’t even spoken Greg’s name since her conversation with Sydney,
girlfriend
now had a whole new definition. She wasn’t just a girl who rode around in Carter’s car. They weren’t “Carter and Bryce.” When they met people Carter knew around Nashville, he didn’t introduce her as Bryce Graham, the diver, or Bryce Graham, the miracle girl from Vanderbilt Medical, or even Bryce, his girlfriend. Besides the day when he had yelled at Tony, Carter usually left that part up to her.

She gave each of his friends a strong handshake. “I’m Bryce,” she would say. And that was that.

Bryce, a twenty-two-year-old girl who liked to lie in the sun in places where the sound of cars disappeared, who knew every single one of John Wayne’s lines in
The Searchers,
and who could play a mean game of pretty much anything.

When they ran into people Bryce knew, she showed Carter the same respect. Not her boyfriend, her doctor, her anything. Carter was a dedicated student, brother, food-taster, and an avid organizer of pretty much anything.

Bryce and Carter just happened to like accompanying one another to lunch, and dinner if he had time between summer school classes, and to Bryce’s backyard with a rapidly melting pint of ice cream, like they had done last night.

Bryce’s cell phone buzzed twice on the bedside table.

One text was from Gabby, letting her know she and Mary and Zen needed help deciding what shoes to pair with the bridesmaid dresses. Bryce texted back, saying she would give Gabby a call later. Bryce scrolled to the second text. It was from Carter.

wake up we have business


She smiled and wriggled into a stretch.
I’m up I’m up
, she typed.

Yesterday they drove way out of the city, past her house, past streets that had names, to dirt roads, through fences around land that belonged to no one. They tramped through weeds, and he helped her up onto branches she could have climbed before, lifting her up.

She read his textbooks aloud to him while he paced around, climbing on rocks and the remains of old walls. She could barely pronounce any of the diseases or body parts in the books, but at least they could pretend he was studying.

Bryce had spent an hour that way, calling multiple syllable words down to him and listening to him define them, catching his eyes on her when she looked up from the book and feeling her face turn red.

“Isn’t this boring for you?” Carter had asked.

“No,” she said, because it wasn’t for some reason. She liked to watch him think.

He stood on a mound of old rocks, his hand absentmindedly on his lips as he conjured the right words, his long, lean muscles running from one angle to the other in the most natural way, unlike Greg, who sculpted himself at the gym with self-conscious purpose. Carter looked like he belonged out here, like he belonged everywhere.

She did everything around him without worrying, without having to think about who she was hurting, without remembering every little thing from when she was seventeen.

Her phone buzzed again. Bryce rolled like a log over to the bedside table.

k. you have pancake stuff?


“Mom!” Bryce shouted upstairs.

“What?” she shouted back.

“Do we have the ingredients for pancakes?”

After a while her mother called, “Sure.” Then, “Why?”

“Carter can come over, right?”

When Bryce finally made it up the stairs—after a lot of sitting on her bed with no pants on, listening to the Beatles—she found Carter already explaining to her mom the science of pancakes that were fluffy on the inside and crispy on the outside. Sunshine hit the panes of the kitchen windows, leaving patches of warm light on the dark marble countertops.

Bryce’s mom smiled at her. Bryce grinned back.

Carter stopped talking briefly when he saw Bryce. She was still wearing his shirt, and had managed to put on pants.

“Um,” he said, looking at her. “Sorry, I lost my train of thought.”

“You were talking about how to make pancakes,” Bryce said, her eyes locked on his.

“Yeah.” He shook his head, turning back to her mother. “So…”

She saw he still had ink stains on his fingertips from taking notes with his ballpoint pen. He noticed her gaze and smiled, casting his blue-gray eyes downward. He had been in her kitchen before, but not like this. Not after she had had her lips on his.

“You ready to start, then?” he said, rubbing his hands together.

She smiled at Carter. “Hang on,” Bryce put a hand on her mother’s arm. “Is Dad here? He loves pancakes.”

“You’re right,” said Bryce’s mom. “He usually goes on a walk now, but—”

“See if you can catch him!” Bryce said hurriedly. Her mother bustled out of the room.

When she disappeared, Bryce hoisted herself to sit on top of the counter, inches away from Carter.

“Hi,” Bryce said. They were at eye level.

“Hello,” he said. He lifted his hand to brush away a strand of her hair.

“I didn’t know you knew so much about food,” she said.

They heard the footsteps of Bryce’s parents returning.

“…and I was just thinking,” Bryce’s mother was saying as they entered. “It’s been a while since I made them.”

“Well, thank you, Beth.” Bryce’s father looked at her mother, his tone light.

Bryce’s mother looked back at him. Bryce saw her pale pink lipstick turn up at the corners. “You’re very welcome.”

He sat down and spread out the
New York Times
in front of him as Bryce’s mother warmed up the griddle. She pulled out frilly aprons for herself and Bryce. Bryce was pleased to see hers wasn’t the one with the puffy rooster on the front. She hadn’t seen these aprons since she woke up.

“Want an apron?” her mom teased Carter.

Carter glanced at Bryce’s dad and said in a gruff voice, “No, thank you.”

Bryce and her mother giggled.

Carter threw himself around their modern tile with the same furrowed brow he got when taking Bryce’s blood pressure. He whipped pancake batter with precise strokes. He wiped his brow with one of their pristine white dish towels.

Things are better,
Bryce couldn’t help thinking as she watched the batter fall into perfect circles. Her mom had started going for long walks in the morning with ladies from the neighborhood before she immersed herself in her work. Her dad had come home from Vanderbilt and gone straight out to the barn until nightfall, returning to the house with his toolbox and not even bothering to turn on the TV.

Sydney shuffled in at one point in long underwear and an oversized T-shirt that said
OBEY
.

She stood near the stove and stared openly at Carter. “Why is the hospital guy in our kitchen?” Sydney looked at Bryce, and then said, “Oh.”

“What?” Bryce asked. Was she blushing?

“You want to slice up some fruit?” Carter asked, and slid Sydney a bowl full of peaches. Bryce was about to make an excuse for Sydney, who usually only came down to get water, but Sydney just took the bowl and put it under running water.

“Sure,” she said. Bryce’s dad folded his newspaper over to look at his youngest daughter. Her mom looked up from the bacon in surprise.

“I like handling knives,” Sydney said to no one in particular, and turned back to slicing peaches with a quiet fury.

Twenty minutes later, Carter stood there, brooding, as the Grahams loaded their plates. “They
taste
like they could use a pinch of salt, but I can’t believe that. I measured it perfectly.”

Bryce’s dad snorted as he sat down on one of the high-backed chairs. “So sprinkle salt on ’em, what’s the big deal?”

“The recipe doesn’t call for more,” Carter countered, taking a seat next to Bryce.

Bryce’s dad reached for the salt in slow motion. Carter pursed his lips. Her dad tried to hold back laughter as he slowly tipped the salt toward Carter’s plate, raising his eyebrows as if bracing for an explosion. Carter took in a breath. The salt fell. The rest of the table burst into laughter, even Carter.

Bryce dug into her pancakes whole, not bothering to cut them into small pieces like her mom always told her to do. Just like she remembered, her dad rolled his pancake up and dipped it directly into the maple syrup.

“You know what?” Bryce said suddenly, realizing. “I haven’t had pancakes since I woke up.”

“Maybe that’s because you girls are never up before noon,” Bryce’s mom said pointedly, slicing her pancakes into little squares.

“It is possible to make pancakes after noon, Mom,” Sydney intoned. She looked at Bryce. “The fund-raiser last year at Hilwood was a pancake feed. The seniors put it together. The pancakes were kind of gross, though. And then they also had a bouncy castle, which was a bad, bad combination.…”

Bryce let out a puzzled laugh. The rest of the table looked at her. “I was just thinking how absurd it is that I literally slept through my senior year.” Sydney looked sorry she’d brought it up. “No, Syd, it really is funny. What if I was just too tired to go to school and I overslept? That’s basically what happened.”

Carter gave her an amused, thoughtful look. “You slept through a lot of things, then. For some reason it doesn’t seem so bad when you look at it that way.”

“Be grateful you slept through when I had braces,” Sydney said dryly. “It was not pretty.”

Bryce’s father chuckled. “You could even make a list.”

Carter squeezed Bryce’s knee under the table. She nudged him, trying to hold back a smile. She thought about the things she’d done since she woke up, the mental list she’d made more than a month ago.
Sun, clothes, exercise.
Bryce had done all right with those.

“I’m going to do that,” she said suddenly. “Check off items until it’s all done.”

“I do love checking things off lists,” Carter admitted.

Bryce giggled. “Yes, I know.”

Bryce had spent so much time longing for what she’d lost. She’d never thought of actually getting any of it back. But why not?

Bryce’s father cleared his throat. Carter and Bryce looked at him and sat up straighter in their chairs. They had their heads pretty close together.

Her dad folded his arms. “I noticed that you were talking closely with your gentleman caller at my breakfast table.”

Bryce braced herself for a lecture. Sometimes her dad got an old Southern streak in him.

“Gentleman caller?” Sydney asked with disbelief. “Really?”

He looked sternly at Carter. “Can the first item of said list be more pancakes?”

he first on Bryce’s list of things she’d missed was cheesy senior photos.

Bryce had always loved when the Hilwood yearbook came out. She and Gabby would lie on Gabby’s bed and make fun of the kids whose pictures looked like glamour shots from the mall, or who had taken shots with their hands placed lovingly on their pickup trucks. Some kids took pictures with their dogs. Everyone’s smile was forced, their turtlenecks or sweater vests picked out by their parents. The best part was that Bryce and Gabby and Greg were all supposed to have done the same thing. Bryce’s had been scheduled for right after the Trials—so she could give a thumbs-up while wearing an Olympic T-shirt.

But this time around the photos would be even cheesier, Bryce decided. The cheesiest version of everyone’s worst pictures.

“Are you sure?” Carter had asked as they checked out a nice camera from Vanderbilt’s media department. “Don’t you want to look back on these?”

“I’d be betraying my high school self if I took this seriously. Trust me,” Bryce replied.

They went to Percy Lake, and Bryce basked on the rocks in her best clothes, holding her head at weird angles while Carter told her to look natural. They had already done the obligatory “wheat picture” that no Tennessee girl could do without, where Bryce stood in shoulder-high grasses in her letter jacket, pretending to push the yellow blades aside with a mystical look on her face.

The last one was of Bryce surrounded by her diving trophies. Every single trophy or medal they could dig out, they used. It turned out to be about thirty-five. Carter complained he could barely see Bryce behind all the trophies, yet there she was, putting her fist under her chin with a gigantic grin on her face.

The pictures had turned out cheesily excellent. Bryce had even asked Carter to Photoshop them to have a cloudy outline like the mall glamour shots, with the words
Bryce
Forever
engraved in shiny letters in the corner.

The second item on the list was the homecoming football game.

Bryce loved football games. She loved being in the middle of the crowd. She loved how everyone in the stadium stood up when Hilwood was about to score a touchdown. She loved the pep band’s terrible rendition of “YMCA,” and that no one paid attention to the pep band in the first place.

“How are we going to do this in the summertime?” Carter asked as they sat on the walking bridge over Highway 12, swinging their legs. “Football doesn’t start till September.”

A truck carrying lumber zoomed underneath them. Bryce’s Popsicle dripped, hitting the pavement where the truck had just been. “Wait, what day is it?”

“Wednesday.”

“The…”

“Twenty-second.”

She stuck the remains of the popsicle in her teeth and stood up on the bridge. “Let’s go!”

Bryce and Carter sat in the empty bleachers of the third practice of the Hilwood Raiders’ season, wearing T-shirts with scowling cartoon pirates on them, sweating in the August heat. They cheered loudly whenever the team executed a drill correctly. They stood up whenever anyone got close to the end zone, including Coach Farmer, Bryce’s old geography teacher.

When they decided it was “halftime,” they drank cold Cokes, and Carter brought out his iPod speakers to play all the songs on
ESPN Jock Jams
. When “Hey!” came on—the song where everyone was supposed to shout “Hey!” every three notes—the assistant coach had to ask Bryce and Carter to leave, as they were a distraction to the team.

“Bye, Coach Farmer!” Bryce called as they left the stadium. “Have a good practice, guys!”

The third item on the list was laundry, but it was a late addition. Bryce’s mother had caught them on their way out one day, with Bryce’s hamper in her hand.

“You seem to have missed learning how to do this, too,” her mother had said.

The fourth item was graduation.

The morning she was going to pretend to graduate, Bryce felt oddly formal. She had to pull some strings at Hilwood by e-mailing Mr. Schefly, but they were able to get into the auditorium on Thursday morning. They swung by Gabby’s house on the way, to borrow her cap and gown, and Carter had replicated Hilwood’s diploma and printed it with Bryce’s name in curly script.

He sat in the audience while Mr. Schefly stood at the podium in his usual sweater-vest and combover. Bryce stood backstage in a short sundress under the gown, and her Converse. “Pomp and Circumstance” played from the tiny speakers Carter had hooked up to his iPod.

“Bryce Cornelia Graham,” echoed through the auditorium. Bryce strode across the stage, gave Mr. Schefly a firm handshake, and waved at an imaginary crowd of classmates and family. She’d suggested to Carter that they get cardboard cutouts of everyone in the yearbook and put them in the seats, but Carter thought that would be overdoing it.

“Cornelia, huh?” Carter said after Mr. Schefly left.

“It’s my mom’s middle name, too,” Bryce said, flopping on the seat next to him.

“Elizabeth Cornelia,” Carter said thoughtfully, flipping open the diploma he’d made. Then he snapped it shut. “My mom’s was…Carrie Ann, I believe.”

Bryce felt her forehead tense. “Was?”

“Was.” Carter said firmly. “She was in the car with my brother.”

Bryce couldn’t believe she’d never asked about it before.

“Wish she were still here,” he said, gazing at the floor. “It’d be nice to have someone else to visit Sam besides me. Share the load.” He looked up and smiled sadly at Bryce. “And she would have liked you.”

“What about your dad?” Bryce asked.

“He thinks paying the bill is enough,” Carter said, shaking his head.

Bryce had thought she knew loss. She had felt like her family had drifted. Like they had become strangers, irrevocably changed. But…Carter knew what it felt like to
really
lose his family. “Have you asked him to visit?” she asked tentatively.

Carter let out a bitter laugh, putting a leg up on the chair in front of him. “Come on. I shouldn’t have to ask my own
dad
to visit his son
.
”

“Everyone needs a wake-up call sometimes.”

Carter looked up and gave her a winning smile. He put his hands around his mouth and gave a fake shout. “Ladies and gentlemen, your graduating class!”

On cue, Bryce threw up her cap. It landed a few rows away. Then she stood up abruptly, making her hinged seat bounce. “I want to do it for real.”

“What, graduate?”

“Yeah,” Bryce said, moving through the rows to retrieve Gabby’s cap.

“You could probably do your senior year again, no problem,” Carter said, following her.

“Ugh, I don’t want to go back.” Bryce had had enough of the past. She wanted to move forward. “I want to graduate so I can go to college,” she clarified. It was strange to say it aloud.

“I like that plan,” Carter said. His tone became playful. “You have a bright future ahead of you, Bryce Cornelia Graham, Hilwood High graduate.”

She threw off her gown and pushed open the doors to the Hilwood courtyard, feeling his eyes on her legs under her short dress.

When they got inside the Honda, Carter paused, looking at her. He reached over his seat to put a hand through her hair, and leaned his face into her lips.

“No distractions from the future!” she cried. He groaned, leaning back into the driver’s seat. “To the bookstore for a GED prep book!”

Carter started the engine. Bryce scooted near him to tease him a little more, whispering throatily in his ear. “And then to the library to study it…”

“Who knew the future could be so sexy?” Carter muttered, smiling.

Bryce laughed and sat back in her seat. A comfortable silence settled between them. Bryce’s thoughts drifted elsewhere as Carter turned up the Beatles singing “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” on the radio. She would find something she loved to study, like Carter had, and she would walk the steps every day to Vanderbilt’s red brick buildings and listen to lectures. She would pore over books while she ate, and study all night for tests.

Bryce glanced over at Carter and unbuttoned the top button of his Oxford shirt. There was something else that came next, too. The more time she and Carter spent together, the more she thought about having sex with him. Or at least what she imagined sex would be like. She and Greg had never gotten that far. Another milestone Bryce had missed.

Carter glanced back at her and turned the music down, as if he wanted to say something.

“Yes?” Bryce said.

“I was just thinking…” Carter began, pondering. “
The
Jetsons
.”

“What?”

“The clothes they wear in
The Jetsons
. That’s also kind of a sexy version of the future.”

Bryce narrowed her eyes at Carter over a half smile. “Seriously?”

“What?” he said, shrugging. “Don’t judge me. That was what I was thinking about. What were
you
thinking about?”

“Nothing,” Bryce sighed, smiling broadly out the window. “Nothing at all.”