The Edge of Juniper (8 page)

“I can’t come to your house, Malcolm.”

“You can.”

I shifted from foot to foot, and considered him.  My mind brought forth the other night, and the compelling list of reasons why he wanted to know me.  “You’re off-limits, so why can’t I stop thinking about you?”

His gaze darted away, and I saw his throat move as he swallowed.  “I’m having a similar problem.”

I looked down at my feet.  “I can’t figure out what the right thing is.  You should probably just make friends with someone else.”

“You’re going to have to let me decide what I want.  I’ll do the same for you.”  He picked up the gas can that sat next to the mower. “If you end up deciding it’s best to keep your distance from me, I promise I’ll leave you alone.”

As soon as he said it, I realized I didn’t actually want him to leave me alone.  “Malcolm, this doesn’t mean I’m coming, but what time do you eat lunch?”

“Noon.”

“Okay.  Good to know.”

He turned his eyes to mine, and we stared at each other longer than was probably normal.  I’d never looked at anyone that long before, but at the same time, I wanted it to last longer than it did.  His gaze flickered down to my mouth, for just a fraction of a second, and then moved right back to my eyes.  I tensed, heat rushing to my cheeks.  Had he really just looked at my mouth?  Finally, he turned away, to open the gas cap on the mower.  “You can come earlier if you want.”

“If I decide to come.”

“Yeah.  If you come,” he said, and tilted the can to pour in the gas.

I walked back down to help Abe and Jeremy pack up the fishing gear, and tried to get my heart to fit back into its rightful place in my chest.  It seemed to have dropped into my stomach.

I saw that Paul had helped the boys pack up everything.  “Want to carry the fish?” he asked me, holding the basket out.

“Uh, I’ll carry the cooler,” I said, and picked it up.

Jeremy rolled his eyes.  “You big baby.  You’ll never survive the apocalypse.”

“Sure I will.  I picked the right people to survive with.”

We had fried fish for dinner that night, courtesy of Jeremy, and it was delicious.  After dinner, I was helping Abe do the dishes when I heard a door slam, and then the indistinct shouting of my aunt and uncle started up and carried through the house.

Abe took the plate I had just washed out of my hands, and carefully dried it.  “Like I said before, they do that.  It’s okay.  They’ll stop in a minute.”

The phone rang then, and I was grateful for the interruption.  I answered it, delighted to discover it was the first phone call from Freya since I left Perry.

I took the phone into the bedroom.  “Freya, thank God.  I miss you more than I can say.”

“I’ve called about ten times this week.  What kind of place doesn’t have voicemail?”

I snickered.  “The kind of place that also doesn’t have an available car, a computer, or cell phones.  I fell through time.”

She laughed, but I felt a sudden ache in my gut, ashamed of my own words.  Mom and Dad were out there doing without technology, in order to help people who had to do without education and medical care.  “Never mind, Freya.  I shouldn’t say things like that.  It’s different here, sure.  But I’m finding a lot of things to enjoy.”

“Like what?”

“I went fishing with Abe today.  That was nice.  He has this friend who’s like a fish whisperer.  He just kept reeling them in.”

“What else?”

“Just stuff like that—you know, the little things.  Ice cream, s’mores, and the town is super cute.  Oh, and I got a job washing dishes and busing tables at the restaurant where Celia works.”

“Please tell me you’re saving that money for a phone.”

“I’m saving it for my car, and you know it.  All twenty-three dollars and seventy-eight cents.”

“Not the best pay, huh?”

“That’s an understatement.  That was my first check.  I don’t actually know how much I’m making per hour, my boss never even said, but I hope that was just for one shift.  At least it gets me out of the house.”

“Think I should try busing tables?”

“No luck on the job hunt yet?”

“No, and Finn got the job I wanted at the theater.  Lucky jerk.”

“No way.  He gets to see all the free movies he wants?”  Usually only seniors and college kids were hired at the theater.  It was lucky indeed that he got such a job.

“Any time he wants.”  Freya sighed.  “And he has the nerve to complain that now he’s seen everything that’s showing, and it’s boring.  At least it gets him out of my hair.”

I smiled.  They both liked to pretend they weren’t the closest siblings to exist in the history of humanity.  “You don’t mean that.”

“Yeah, I don’t mean it.  I guess it’s a little lonely around here with you gone and him at work all the time.”

“What about Gene?  I bet he’d love it if you gave him a call.”  Freya had been after Gene since middle school.

“I can’t call Gene.  We’re still at that stage where he’s pretending he doesn’t like me.”

I laughed out loud.  That stage had lasted for years, off and on, but they both seemed to enjoy it.  “Okay.”

“Don’t ask me anything more about me, there’s nothing to tell and it’s just boring.  Tell me more about Juniper.”

It was the opening I was waiting for, because I wanted to unload all the things that were stressing me out, and get her opinion on the Malcolm situation.  But Aunt Donna walked in then, carrying a basket of laundry.  She set to work hanging up Celia’s clothes.  I thought she might be offended if I left the room, so I just told Freya I’d met a lot of nice people.  Then I talked a little about Heidi and Dan, which was good for a laugh, and Donna seemed to enjoy my end of the conversation.

If I had been able to talk to Freya openly, I would have said,
Donna and Todd yell at each other and snap at the kids right in front of me, which makes me terribly uncomfortable, they have unclear expectations of me—even the curfew changes with the day and the mood, Celia isn’t around much, and I’m forbidden to spend time with the one person I want to befriend.
  I wasn’t even tempted to complain that there wasn’t much to do here and I had no car to get anywhere fun.  I could make my own fun, if I had anybody to make it with.

I ran out of things I could safely say in front of Donna, and grew quiet.  Freya must have sensed something.  “But what’s it like living with your aunt and uncle?” she asked.

I glanced over at my aunt.  “Um, it’s okay.  Different.  I get to share a room with my cousin, and you know how I always wanted to do that with a sister.  Celia’s out on a date now, but my aunt’s in here with me.”  I smiled at Donna, and hoped Freya would understand that I couldn’t talk openly.

“Ah, I get it.  You can’t really talk?”

“Right.”

“Is anything wrong?  Say
pineapple
if something is seriously wrong and I will send my dad to get you.”

I laughed.  “No, no pineapples here.  Bananas are plentiful, though.”

“Fay, I can see right through you, even over the phone.  What you need is a pep talk.”

Freya was the master of the pep talk.

“You, Fay Whitaker, are in the middle of an adventure.  There will be times you might wish for a different adventure, but you must embrace the one you were dealt.  Adventures always involve the unusual, the different, the complicated.  You are there to taste another slice of the world’s pie.”

I laughed, and my eyes stung with homesickness.

Freya continued, her voice rising as though she was speaking to a crowd.  “Good things will happen to you.  Great things.  And probably a bad thing or two, but you’ll brush that off.  Ultimately, your parents will reunite with you at the end of the summer, after having reunited themselves, and all your strife will have been worth it.  What’s a summer, anyway?  It’s up to you.  A summer could be anything you make it.”

Warmth stole over me at the reminder of the real reason I was here.  My family would be whole at the end of this.  I could do anything for one summer.  “You’re the best, you know that?  And you’re right too.  I’m going to chase after the great things.”

“Heck yeah, you are.  And knowing you, you’ll catch them.”

              Late that night, Celia burst into the bathroom without knocking, silent, but brimming with even more of her usual frenzy.  “I don’t care if you’re on the toilet, we have to talk.”

I rinsed the toothpaste out of my mouth and steered her out of the bathroom and onto my bed.  “Talk.”

“Okay, well.”  She picked up a hairbrush from my night table and pulled it through her hair.  “I feel weird.  Part of me wants to tell you it was amazing.  But someday you’ll go through this too, so I want to tell you the truth.”

I found her choice of words odd.  I never imagined sex as something I would
go through
.  “It wasn’t amazing?”

“In a way it was.  It was surreal.  For my whole life people are saying all kinds of things about it. ‘Do it.  Don’t do it. Never do it. You have to do it.  You’ll get pregnant. If you do it you’re a slut, if you don’t you’re a prude.  Know what I mean?  So when I was actually doing it, it felt like it couldn’t be happening.”

I understood that.  It was surreal to me just listening to her recount it.  “Where were you?  How did the surprise part go?  Were you afraid of someone finding you?”

She giggled.  “The surprise part was great.  When we left, I grabbed some blankets from the linen closet, and told him they were for a picnic.  Later, I think he was disappointed I hadn’t actually brought any food.  Anyway, I suggested we drive to the back of his property.  There’s a wheat field behind the house, and beyond that is a woods with a small grassy area in between.  We go there a lot to park and make out, so he didn’t think anything was up, especially because it was daytime.  I spread the blankets in the bed of his truck, because the ground there isn’t very smooth and the weeds were high.  We started kissing, and I just pulled out the condom and handed it to him.”

“What did he say?”  I was breathless with anticipation to hear the whole story, not sure whether worry or excitement was my prevailing emotion.

“He’s not that romantic with words, Fay.  But I knew he was happy.”

“Still though, what did he
say
?”

“Well, he said, ‘Finally,’ but I
had
made him wait a long time.”

My heart sank, and I held my mouth from gaping.  “Three months is not a long time.”

“It was for Ronan.  He’s used to getting it much sooner.”

I let that pass.  There was nothing I could do about any of it, and if I kept criticizing him I knew she’d stop talking.  I was greedy for information.  “Did it hurt?  How did you know what to do?”

I expected her to shake her head at me as though I was a child, but she didn’t.  For once she let me
see
her.  She leaned in close and whispered, “I’ve heard it doesn’t always hurt the first time, but for me, it totally hurt. Not the whole time, though, and nothing about it felt natural.  I mean, I just kind of laid there feeling like I didn’t know what to do with any part of my body.  I let Ronan take the lead. He seemed to know what to do.”

“Does it bother you that he wasn’t a virgin, too?”

“Nah.  I’m not jealous of his past girlfriends, if that’s what you mean.  But I think maybe he wished I had more experience.”

“
What
are you talking about?”  He better not have insinuated that she wasn’t good at it. I was getting worked up and Celia could see it.

“Fay, calm down.  It doesn’t matter anyway; I’ll catch up with the other girls.”

I’d had lots of conversations about sex with my friends back home.  We’d speculated, theorized, parsed Freya’s experiences (Finn and I had none.), and listened to other people talk about it whenever we could.  Nobody had ever said anything that horrified me as much as Celia had.  An emptiness crept up my body, like something solid, and slithered along my spine.  I wasn’t Ronan’s biggest fan, but Celia was, and I had imagined a very different story spilling from her lips.  I couldn’t find anything good in her entire recounting of events, no joy to share with her.  I decided to search for it.  “But did it make you feel closer to Ronan?”

“Definitely.”  She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, a huge smile on her face.  “Fay, I don’t know how to explain it.  He acted so grateful.  I love him so much.”

“Okay.”  I didn’t know why I felt so sad when she was so happy.

“Okay?  That’s what you have to say?”

“Congratulations?”

She narrowed her eyes at me, and stalked over to the bathroom.  “I’m going to shower now.  Thanks for making me feel like crap.”

“I didn’t mean to make you feel like crap.  Wait,” I said as she almost shut the door.

“What?”  She stood in the doorway searching my face for understanding, looking both irritated and unsteady at the same time.

“If you’re happy, I’m happy.”

She brightened.  “Of course I’m happy.”  She shut the door and I heard the shower turn on, but I wasn’t sure I believed her.