Since You've Been Gone (7 page)

It was almost lost in the overgrown bushes on the side of the road, and so faded with weather and time that whole parts of it could barely be seen. Without meaning to, I glanced down at the underside of my wrist before looking away and driving on.

MARCH

Three months earlier

“It’s just up here,” Sloane said as she turned around in the car to face me, pointing. “See the driveway?”

“I can’t believe you’ve never been to the Orchard,” Sam said from the driver’s seat, and I heard the capital letter in his tone.

“No, remember?” Sloane asked, and I could hear a laugh tucked somewhere in the edges of her words. “Because I’d never been before we came here last month.”

“That doesn’t mean Emily couldn’t have gone on her own,” Sam said, shaking his head. Sloane turned her head back to look at me again and we exchanged the tiniest of smiles—probably not even perceptible to anyone but us. I didn’t want to contradict Sam, or argue with him, but of
course
I wouldn’t have come here if I hadn’t been here with Sloane, and we both knew it.

She raised her eyebrows at me with a bigger smile, and I understood her meaning perfectly—she was asking
something like
You’re having fun, right? Isn’t this great? Are you okay?

I smiled back at her, a real smile and not an
I need a rescue
smile. The last thing I wanted was to upset the evening that she’d worked so hard to arrange. Her smile widened, and she turned back to Sam, moving as close to him as her seatbelt would let her, reaching over and running her hand through his curly hair.

Gideon and I were sitting on opposite ends of the backseat, in contrast to the snuggling that was going on in the front. I was half on the seat and half pressed against the door handle, which probably wasn’t really necessary, as we were riding in an enormous SUV and it looked like there was probably room for several people in the space between us. I looked across the expanse of the dark backseat at Gideon, who I had met just a few hours before.

Sloane had been talking up Gideon Baker for weeks, ever since she and Sam had become whatever they were now. “We don’t need a label,” Sloane had said, when I’d tentatively asked what, exactly, they were doing. She’d smiled at me and straightened her vintage cardigan. “You know I hate those.” But when whatever they were doing had become more serious, suddenly I had started hearing a lot about Gideon, Sam’s best friend, who was also single. And wouldn’t it be so great if . . . ?

That sentence had always trailed off, never really stating
what exactly she was asking, but always with a hopeful question mark at the end. Somewhere along the line, I’d agreed that it
would
be so great, which was how I now found myself wearing more makeup than usual, sharing a backseat with Gideon, going to someplace called the Orchard.

Gideon took up a lot of space in the car—he was tall, with broad shoulders and big hands and feet, and when we’d been sitting across from each other in the diner booth an hour before, and Sloane had been stealing fries off Sam’s plate, I’d asked him if he played any sports. He looked like an athlete—I could practically see him featured on the Stanwich Academy website, a lacrosse stick slung over one shoulder. But he’d just taken a bite of his burger as I asked this. He’d chewed, swallowed, taken a sip of Coke, wiped his mouth, then said, “No.” And that had pretty much been the extent of our conversation so far.

“What is this?” Sam asked, letting out a sigh as he slammed on the brakes. I leaned forward and saw that we were now behind a long line of cars, and that there was a bottleneck around the entrance to a gravel driveway.

“It just means that this is
clearly
the place to be,” Sloane said, and I could hear in her voice how happy she was. Happy we were going there, happy to be with Sam, happy that I was there in the back, with a boy of my own, not a third wheel.

We edged closer to the turnoff, Sam sighing loudly and drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. I glanced across
the car at Gideon again, trying to think of something to say, when I saw the sign. It was out his window, and I edged a little away from my door handle, trying to get a better look. It was dark out, but the SUV’s headlights—which were sci-fi bright, and also clearly made out of something expensive and fancy, unlike my Volvo’s regular old lights—were right on it, illuminating it.

“Do you guys see that?” I asked, pointing at the sign, aware as I did so that my voice felt a little scratchy—it was the first thing I’d said during the car ride. Everyone turned to look, but Sam just shrugged.

“It’s the sign from when this used to be an actual orchard,” he said. “It’s always been there.”

I moved over a little farther into the middle, trying to get a closer look. It was mostly faded, but you could tell that it had been brightly painted at some point.
Kilmer’s Orchards!
it read in stylized script.
Apples/Peaches/Cherries. Berries in Season! Pies!
Underneath this, there was a cartoon-style drawing of two cherries, attached at the stem. They had faces and were smiling big, looking up like they were reading the message at the top. I looked at all the exclamation points, now faded and unnecessary, selling a product that no longer existed. You could also tell the sign had been hand-painted, and not by a professional—the cherries were admittedly a bit lopsided—which somehow made things worse.

“What?” Sloane asked. I glanced over at her, and saw
she was looking at me, and that she could tell something was wrong.

“Just . . . that sign,” I said, hearing how silly it sounded. It was something I would have said easily if it were just Sloane and myself, but the presence of the guys in the car changed this. “I don’t know,” I said, forcing a laugh and moving back to my side of the seat. “It just . . . seemed really sad, I guess.”

Sloane had started to reply when Sam laughed and drove on, talking over her. “It’s just a sign, Emily.”

“I know,” I said, trying to keep my voice light as I looked out my own window. “Never mind.”

Sam leaned over and said something I couldn’t hear to Sloane, and I watched the trees passing slowly in the darkness. I was wishing I’d never said anything at all when I felt something touch my arm.

I jumped, and looked over to see Gideon, his seat belt unbuckled, suddenly sitting close to me, right in the center seat. He gave me a half smile, then picked up my arm and brought it a little nearer to him.

He had literally kept his distance from me all night—so why was he holding my arm? I took a breath to say something when he pulled a thin Sharpie from his pocket. He nodded down at my arm, and then held up the marker, like he was asking if it was okay.

I nodded, mostly just because I was so thrown. He uncapped the marker, then started drawing on the inside of
my wrist. The marker strokes felt feathery and light against my skin, almost tickling me but not quite. I tried to lean over to see what Gideon was drawing, but he pulled my arm a little closer to him and turned it slightly, carefully toward him and away from me. I was still trying to get my head around the fact that this was happening, and I was suddenly glad that Sloane and Sam were oblivious in the front seat, because I knew how strange this must look.

Gideon’s head was bent over my arm as he worked, and I couldn’t help but notice the texture of his dark hair, so short it was almost a buzz cut, and how big his hands were, how it seemed like, if he’d wanted to, he could totally encircle my wrist with two fingers. The car lurched over a bump, and my arm flew up, almost smacking him in the face. He looked over at me and I gave him a tiny, apologetic smile. He waited a moment, steadying my arm, holding it with both hands—maybe to make sure there were no more bumps—and then started working again, drawing faster than before. He straightened up and capped his Sharpie just as Sam parked the car.

I pulled my hand back to see what he’d done and saw, to my surprise, that he’d drawn the cherries from the sign. He was clearly a much more talented artist than the sign painter, but he’d managed to capture them perfectly in their slightly irregular glory. One of the cherries was saying something, and I lifted my wrist closer to my face to see what it was.

Don’t worry, Emily! We’re not sad!

I smiled at that, running my fingers over the words, their neat block print. I looked up at Gideon, who was still sitting close to me. “Thank you,” I said.

Sam cut the engine, and the car’s interior lights flared on. I could see Gideon much more clearly now as he ducked his head like he was embarrassed and slid over to his side of the car. But before the lights started to dim again, I saw him smile back at me.

The Orchard looked, from my parking spot, about the same as it had the last time I’d been there. It was a huge open space, covered with grass that was always flattened by cars driving and people walking over it. People tended to park haphazardly and then congregate by the picnic tables that ringed the space, left over from the Orchard’s previous incarnation. There were still some ladders to be found leaning up against the trees, but most of them had at least a rung or two broken, and only the bravest—or drunkest—people ventured up them. More than once, I’d seen someone go crashing to the ground when a rung had collapsed under their feet. Sometimes people were organized enough to get a keg, but mostly they brought their own beverages with them, and there was usually some enterprising person selling not-quite-cold cans of beer, for a heavy markup, from a cooler in the back of their car.

It looked like I was still on the early side—you knew a night was really getting going when there wasn’t any room to park on the grass and people ended up parking on the road that led to the turnoff. Orchard etiquette dictated you parked, at minimum, half a mile up the road so as not to attract cops’ attention.

An open convertible, stuffed with people, screeched into the spot next to me and parked at an angle. I didn’t recognize anyone, but before I could look away, a few of them glanced at me as they got out of the car. I turned away quickly, and in that moment, I suddenly realized what I had done. I had been so focused on following Sloane’s list that it was just now hitting me that I had shown up to the town party spot, all by myself. The only people I’d ever seen alone at the Orchard were creepy guys from Stanwich College, trying to pick up high school girls.

The Volvo’s engine started to whine and I reached forward to turn it off, then sat back against my seat. Reading the list and making the plan for tonight, it had seemed like Sloane was here with me. But this was the reality. I was alone at the Orchard, and had no idea what I was supposed to do next. I could hear, across the clearing, the low bass of music thumping and occasional shouts or laughter. I couldn’t make out anyone clearly, but I could see that there were a lot of people there, groups of friends in clusters. Was I supposed to just walk in there by myself?

A car swung in to park on the other side of me, and I picked up my phone, pretending to be absorbed in it, until I realized
that nobody had left the car—and, in fact, the couple inside had started furiously making out in the front seat.

It was enough to get me out of the car, slamming my door and locking it shut. I looked ahead of me, to the Orchard. For just a second, I tried to rationalize that maybe I could just go home now—after all, I’d shown up here, and Sloane hadn’t provided any other instructions. But even as I was thinking it, I knew that wasn’t what she meant. And if I was going to do this, I needed to do it right. I took a big breath and made myself put one foot in front of the other as I walked to the clearing, wondering what it was that I normally did with my hands.

I was just not used to having to do things like this on my own. It had been me and Sloane, joined at the hip for the last two years, and she was so good at this kind of stuff—utterly fearless about walking into places she hadn’t been before, or talking to people she didn’t know—that any skill I might once have had in that department had withered away, since I knew Sloane would lead the way. And before she had moved to town, I had been part of a group of other freshman girls, and we had basically navigated the first year of high school by going everywhere in a pack.