In This Moment (29 page)

    “But I don’t know why. I don’t know how you
feel.”
Now she sounds more like a thirteen-year-old.

   
“The
why
is because I’m an ass.” I knock my head back against the closet door. “And I
feel
like I’ve been chewed up, swallowed, and then spit back up.”

    “L
ike regurgitated puke?”

    I laugh because
, disgusting as it is, regurgitated puke sounds about right. “Something like that.”

***

One day, I think catch a glimpse of her walking across campus. My heart bucks and for a second I can’t breathe right, then I’m rocketed in motion—running after her, carelessly pushing people out of my way. It turns out to be someone else. The girl is shorter than Aimee. She has dark brown eyes and a narrow nose that hooks downward at the end. She looks at me like I’m crazy and I wonder if she might be right.

    A little while later, i
n a not-entirely-coincidental coincidence, I bump into Mara coming out of the campus bookstore. We exchange stilted hellos while I search her features for any traces of Aimee.

    “How is she?” I try to sound
casual, like my life doesn’t depend on the answer.

    “She’s good. She’s seeing someone.”

    The sentence steals my breath.

    It knocks me on my ass.

    Fuck me. So this is what being eviscerated feels like. My brain flashes to that scene in
Braveheart
where Mel Gibson is lying on the cross with his entrails in a puddle at his feet
.

    Mara catches the expression
on my face and quickly puts her hand on my arm. “No! Not like the way that you’re thinking. God no! I meant that she’s seeing a counselor. It’s a good thing. Good for her. Good for my parents.” She narrows her eyes. “Good for you maybe.”

    “Huh,
” I say like the sun didn’t just collapse and go supernova.

   Life moves forward. Daylight comes. It goes. I’ve started to read at night. It helps me sleep. Maybe it does something to my brain, or maybe I like it because books remind me of Aimee.

    Sometimes I dream about the two of us lying on our backs in my truck bed. I feel her hand in mine, her warmth pushing up against my body. Then the wind comes in and it picks her up and tries to carry her away from me. But I don’t let go of her hand. I can’t. I cling to that kite string like nothing will stop me. And when I wake up, I wish that I could keep dreaming. 

   
On most days, Sophie and I talk. Sometimes she wants to tell me about our mom and I listen to that. Other times she talks about teenage girl stuff—school, boys, the dog—and I listen to that too.

    “I emailed dad a few days ago.”

    We’re on video chat and I can see her eyes get bigger. “You did?”

    I nod my head.

    “And?”

    “It’s good. I think
we’re both going to try harder,” I say. “Sophie, I still haven’t called Mom and I can’t make any promises, but maybe.
Maybe
. I know that as your big brother I’m a miserable fuck-up and my only excuse is that I’m still working things out.”

    “
Well, Cole… When we screw up on the court, our volleyball coach always tells us that as long as we’re still breathing, we’re still trying. And then he usually tells us to get over ourselves.”

   
I laugh. “That’s not bad advice.”

    “His other littl
e tidbit of shared wisdom is to punch every day in the face.” She shrugs. “I actually find that one a little more helpful.”

   
What can I say? The kid is cool.

***

I tell myself that I’m not going to text her again. Then failing to take my own advice, I text her.

    Who cares? It’s not like she’s going to respond.

    One night I send her a picture of the sky after practice. More fake book titles.

    It
’s okay because she never gets back to me.

    Until she does.

Cole

I’m i
n bed reading when my phone chirps. I expect it to be a text from Sophie. Or maybe it’s one from Adam, detailing the myriad of ways that I’m a pussy for staying in on a Thursday night.

    When I see her name
, my entire world stops spinning.

What’s it about?

    At first I’m confused. What’s
what
about? Then I realize that she means the book title that I sent her earlier—
Angels and Demos.
It only takes me a half a minute to come up with something.

It’s a buddy comedy about a group of infielders from a California baseball team as they follow their passion to make it big in the music business.

    My fingers itch as I type out a second text.

You’re it.

    A minute passes. Two. It feels like a million fucking years. Three minutes. Weeds grow over my feet. The polar ice caps melt a few dozen inches. Four minutes. My internal organs petrify.

   My phone makes a sound
and just like that, the world is back in motion.

Aimee

“That was a titillating lecture, don’t you agree?” Jodi rolls her eyes.

   
“Dr. Hillard blew my mind like usual.” I bring three fingers to my temples and rub vigorously. “After an hour of that, I think I need a caffeine boost.”

    “Me too. I
actually want it to be pumped into my bloodstream intravenously.” She fishes around the front pocket of her bag for her sunglasses. Slipping them over her nose to shield her eyes from the sunshine, she turns to look at me. “The Union?”

   
I nod once. “Union.”

    “Hey, I mea
nt to tell you something,” she says as we move down the sidewalk, dodging a couple of guys. One of them looks a little like Cole and I let my eyes linger on his blond hair and the straight line of his jaw.

    “What?” It’s amazing how a few months ago
, when I wasn’t looking for him, he was everywhere, and now I haven’t seen him in weeks. Maybe it’s the universe trying to tell me something.

   
“I saw Cole last night.”

   
The sound of his name spoken out loud makes my heart do a somersault. I stop walking and spin around so that I can look at her. “You did?”

    “Yep
. Kyle and I were having dinner at that outdoor cafe on Southbay. They’ve got a fantastic mango tofu wrap that’s the perfect balance of sweet and salty. Another plus is that you can get onion rings as a side instead of your standard fries. You know that I seriously love
onion rings.”

    “Jodi
,” I say impatiently. “I’m figuratively tapping my foot over here.”

   
“Okay, okay.” She squishes up her mouth and pushes a loose curl back behind her ear. “There honestly isn’t much to tell, which is probably why I didn’t mention it first thing. I only saw him from a distance walking to his truck and all I can tell you is that he looked good.”

    Of course he looked good. He
always
looks good. “Was he alone?”

   
Jodi drops her head so that I can see her eyes over the sunglasses. “Yep. No shirt on so I think he must have been finishing up at the gym. Either that or he was modeling for a calendar.”

    I sta
rt to speak but change my mind and let Jodi babble the rest of the way to the Union. She fills the silence with a complete rehash of the compulsory sorority meeting that she attended two nights ago. I nod and grunt a little but, really, my brain is five minutes back, stuck in the tar pit that is Cole Everly, bare-chested and sweaty after a workout.

   
Once we’ve gotten our coffees, Jodi clears her throat and says, “I want you to tell me again.”

    “Tell you what again?”

    “
Go over it again.” She rolls her hand in the air. “The texts, the photos that he’s been sending… all of it.”

   
I reach for a wooden stirrer from the opposite end of the counter. “Why? It doesn’t mean anything.”

    Before Jodi puts the lid on her coffee, she dips her finger in and brings it to her mouth to test whether or not she needs to add more sugar. “Do you want it to mean something, Aimee?”

   
Do I want it to mean something?
I take a few seconds to answer. “I don’t know. Does it matter?”

   
She shoots me a knowing look. After that night, I told Jodi everything. And I mean
everything—
about Jillian, the accident, and Cole’s mother. She needed to hear something so I gave her the truth. And the whole time that I cried and let her hold my hand, I was thinking about that time that I woke up and Cole was looking at me with sad, shiny eyes.
Didn’t you have anyone else after Jillian died? 

   
“Ah.” She tips her chin. “We’re back to this again.”

    “Jodi, he’s probably already met someone else
by now. Guys like that… they don’t just wait around.”

    “He didn’t sleep with that
Kate bitch, and I don’t think he’s interested in anyone else.”

   
“How would you know?” I shake my head. “It’s been
weeks
.”

    “
Weeks, months! It doesn’t matter. He told you that he loved you.”

    “No
t exactly. He asked me what I would say
if
he told me that he loved me.”

   
I can see that she’s a little disappointed with my response. “Now you’re just being obtuse.”

    “I’m not being obtuse
. I just…”

   
Jodi doesn’t let me finish. She’s moving her head and her hands in ten different directions. “You can lie to yourself all you want, but I know the truth. I
see
it. Cole loves you and you love him.” Her voice holds a certainty. “When you two look at each other your eyes turn into little sparkly red hearts.”

    “J
odi,” I say. “That’s not…”

    “
You’re overthinking it. You’re so busy worrying about what might go wrong that you’re not giving it the opportunity to go right.”

    “No, I’m just…
” I shake my head. “I think that I’ve lost my chance with him.”

    “
Aimee, love is a choice, not a chance.”

    It takes me a m
inute to place my own words, the ones that I said to her after she met Kyle, when I was explaining why I didn’t believe in insta-love.

    “Oh.” What else can I say?

    She takes a sip of her coffee and touches my arm. “Now you get it.”

***

“Hmmm
… Have you thought very much about trust, Aimee?”

   
Have I thought about trust?
Even for a therapist, I think it’s an odd question.

    I stare
at Dr. Bernstein, sitting across from me in a chair covered in an ugly off-white fabric. She
looks
like a therapist. Glasses, hair pulled back from her face, the whole bit. And she makes a lot of
hmmm
sounds from deep in her chest. It’s very doctor-ish and soothing.

    “Trust,” she says again, encouraging me with her eyes.
Beyond her, the room falls away to a bright picture window that’s full of sky.

   
“What do you mean?”

    She uncrosses her legs and
leans forward so that she’s angled over the armrest. “When your parents came to the session last week, do you remember how we talked about trust? About it being a two-way street?”

  
Yes.
Among a lot of things, she’d said that they needed to practice trusting me and that I needed to do the same for them.

    I nod my h
ead, trying to keep my thoughts straight.

    “There’s a certain level of trust between friends, isn’t there
?”

   
Friends?
All of a sudden, I’m nervous. Something is seriously wrong here.

    “And,” she goes on
. “I wonder if you’ve ever given any thought to the trust that Jillian broke the night of the accident?”

   
Jillian…
I think my brain is snapping in two. Breaking. “What do you mean?” I can barely hear my own voice. I’m shivering, shaking. I draw an image out of my mind: Jillian and me standing against the railing of a bridge, our fingers entwined, the wind whirling our hair up around our faces. I think we were fifteen.

   
I will if you will…

    “She
didn’t tell you that she’d been using pills.” Her eyes are heavy and every word out of her mouth is a prick against my sensitive skin. “She told you that she was fine to drive, but that wasn’t true, was it?”

   
Do you hear that sound? It’s the sound of the world ripping apart.

   
“That’s not… that’s—she wasn’t…”

    “
Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not telling you what to feel, Aimee. I’m just giving you the tools to help you work through this and I think this is something that you should at least consider.”

    I can’t think of how to respond
to that. I have so many words inside of me and no idea how to say them so I keep my mouth clamped in a straight line and I rub my hands over my trembling arms. God, it’s cold in here.

   
“One… Two… Three…”

     After an eternity, Dr. Bernstein nods at the clo
ck and closes the notebook on her lap. “Forgiveness isn’t simple,” she says like I don’t already know that. “There’s always a possibility that you aren’t the only one who needs it.”

Cole

It happens the way it began—with her bumping into me on a sunny day.

   
Later I’ll be able to wonder about all the ways that we might have missed each other. I’ll think about how the guy in the car in front of me could have made that light a mile back, or what would have happened if I’d decided to skip the Starbucks run before I stopped for gas.

  But, in this moment, I’m not thinking about stars aligning or fate. Nope.
I’m annoyed because the pay-at-the-pump machine isn’t reading the magnetic strip on my debit card. Again.

    “Fuck,” I grumble, wiping the
debit card against my leg and running it through the machine a third time.
Card Error.

   
I start across the lot of the gas station, tucking the debit card in the fold of my wallet and the wallet in my back pocket. As I reach the swinging glass door, I see the girl coming. Her dark hair is pulled into a messy bun. She’s got a lopsided walk, her back is to the outside world, and she’s pushing against the glass with her bony hip. I just don’t realize who the girl is until after she’s caught her foot on the grated metal threshold and her bottle of orange juice is dripping down the front of my shirt.

    “Agh!”

    “Oh my God!”

    “Sh—” That first split-second of recognition hits me hard. It feels like an earthquake is trapped in
side my body. My skin rumbles with the impact.

    Power lines go down.

    Trees are uprooted.

    Homes are destroyed.

    Cities are leveled.

   
Her hands fly to my chest right before her eyes find my face. “Oh my God.”
Wait for it
. “I’m so s—”

   
There.
I watch the words evaporate right off the tip of her tongue. She goes white and then pink like a human mood ring. Her mouth flaps open and her black eyelashes flutter against her cheeks.

    “Hi Aimee.”

    Her eyes dart between my face and my orange-juice-soaked shirt. She pulls away and covers her face with her hands. “I am so sorry. I am such a klutz,” she whispers, peeking at me through her fingers.

    I gingerly pull the sticky fabric away from my chest. “It could have been
hot coffee. Just tell yourself that.” 

    “I can’t believe—”
She falters, shakes her head. “I have no idea what to say right now.”

   
“A simple hello could lead to a million wonderful things.”

    T
hat gets her hands off her face, which is nice because I want to look at her. I want to examine all the details that make her up and then compare them to my memories to make sure that I haven’t forgotten anything important. Hair, eyes, shoulders, that freckle on her cheek.