The Space Between Us (17 page)

“Yeah.”

“I thought it’d be better to really talk, you know?”

I wasn’t sure. Hearing about our scandal seeping through Tremonton like poison—how would that be any less sickening than reading it?

“Why aren’t you saying anything?” she asked.

“Because you’re freaking me out.”

“Don’t freak out.”

I waited for a reason not to freak out, but she didn’t give me one. She wanted me to ask what she was talking about, I could tell, and was most likely pissed that I’d lied to her—like that was even close to the worst part of all this. But I was too sapped to play along.

“It’s Will,” she said finally.

“Will.” His name, coming from my own mouth, sounded ridiculous. So short and dull and insignificant.

“He got back together with Luciana.”

“Will,” I said again. It sounded different this time. That single lame syllable stung. My whole body felt singed, and my lips ached with the effort, but I had to say his name once more. “Will did.”

“Yeah. But it’s more than that. They’re
engaged
. As in, going to get married. I keep thinking she’s got to be pregnant or something, but the rumor mill says she’s not and that they’re just total idiots. I mean, seriously, they’re seventeen. Supposedly his parents are freaking out.”

She waited for a few long seconds that I should have been filling with something dismissive, like
surprise, surprise
or
give it up for this year’s prom king and queen
, but I couldn’t. I might break if I tried to speak.

“I’m so sorry, Amelia. Maybe I shouldn’t have told you. I feel terrible for, you know, making you think he might still be into you.”

Oh, that. She
had
done that. But this sensation of my heart being squeezed and crushed had nothing to do with anything Savannah put into my mind. I’d pretended my own way into this pain.

“I really did think he was going to try to get back together with you. Are you okay? I know you were kind of hopeful about things.”

Kind of hopeful. That was an interesting way of saying it. Humiliatingly and inexcusably
kind of hopeful
.

“Hey, crazy,” Charly muttered, “what’s with the pacing? I’m trying to watch TV here.”

I stared at her. She was on the couch, wrapped in a black crumb-covered throw, shoving the last cookie of an entire sleeve of Oreos into her mouth. I’d forgotten
she was even in the room. And I
was
pacing—circling the couch, then the island, then the couch again, then the island again—but I didn’t even remember getting out of the chair.

I shook my head at her and turned the next corner of my figure eight. She had no idea. The devastation was so painful my chest might explode if I stopped moving.

Charly shook her head in disgust and turned back to the TV. “And I’m the one who has to go to counseling.”

Teenagers screamed out from the television. Montel was doing some my-kid-is-out-of-control intervention, and the delinquents were all getting sent to boot camp for a couple of days, wailing and kicking like it was death row.

“Amelia, are you okay?” Savannah repeated.

Will was engaged to Luciana. Was I okay? I didn’t own him. I’d never owned him, or if I had, it’d only been for a short while, before I’d been eclipsed by Charly. We’d been together for so long—eighteen months?—but how much of that had he spent falling out of love with me?

“Amelia?”

“Yeah. Sorry. I’m okay.”

Tears burned behind my eyes, so I squeezed them shut. It was all so screwed up. I’d wanted him, and I thought he’d wanted me, but then he’d wanted Charly, and then he was
with Luciana, and I was with nobody, and Charly was with child, and that made me think he’d want me all over again? So stupid.

But if she hadn’t been so
Charly
in the first place, he would never have stopped wanting me. That I knew.

“You’re way too good for him,” Savannah said.

“No, I’m not.” I sunk down on the couch beside Charly. She glared at me and turned up the volume. Apparently my pacing the room was preferable to being this close to her.

Savannah moved on to vilifying Luciana, but the chanting audience members were louder. I couldn’t focus. I ripped a hangnail off with my teeth and watching a single drop of blood spring to the surface.

“—supposedly she called him every night sobbing for the entire time they were broken up, but—”

I should have been loving her for this. This was what best friends were supposed to do, and she was good at it, so emphatic and blindly supportive. So why couldn’t I stomach it? I just didn’t want to be cheered up or lied to anymore. I closed my eyes and willed her to understand that I was finished pretending that Will was ever going to come back to me. But of course she couldn’t really know me anymore—there were too many layers of lies between us. It wasn’t her fault. My secrets, my deceit, my isolation. All for Charly.

“—and everybody knows that while they were broken up she hooked up with half of the—”

“Enough!”
The anger in my own voice startled me.

A sharp intake of breath on the end of the line made my stomach lurch. Regret washed through me.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s okay. I’m okay. I didn’t mean to yell.”

“Go somewhere else,”
Charly hissed in my ear.

“What was that?” Savannah asked. “It sounds like you’re in a movie theater or something.”

“Nothing. Just Charly.”

Charly scowled and turned up the volume three more bars.

Savannah sighed, and pretended I hadn’t just yelled at her. “I feel like you need me. I hate that I can’t be with you right now.”

“Yeah, me too.” It was the right thing to say, and I wanted to mean it. I’d thought I did need her, up until a moment ago. But now I felt like metal, hard and cold, like I was beyond needing anyone at all.

“You know he wasn’t right for you, don’t you?” she asked.

“Whatever. It doesn’t matter anymo—”

“Go. Somewhere. Else!”
Charly screamed without warning, her face so close spittle sprayed my cheek.

I turned and stared into her eyes. Huge pupils, bared
teeth, she was practically vibrating with rage. She looked like a wild animal.

“I’m watching TV!”

I’d lost Will to this beast.

“Amelia, are you okay?” Savannah asked. Too much. The concern was thicker and sweeter than I could stand. “Is that the TV or Charly? Are you sure you—”

“I have to go,” I said. “I’ll call you later,” and hung up before she could say another word.

In a single second my blood surged from cold to boiling, pumping too fast to control how hard I slammed the phone down on the coffee table. The back flew off. The battery clattered to the floor.

No Will. No friends. No life. No Columbia. No future.
My chest felt raw, like claws had ripped me open and scraped my heart.

“Hey psycho, you broke her phone!” Charly pointed to the piece that had spun to a stop in front of her. Montel hugged a blubbering reformed teen.

“Her phone?
Her phone?
” I was yelling now, louder than Charly, louder than the TV, louder than the screaming in my brain. “You broke my life, Charly! And if you weren’t such a
slut
I’d be at home right now. Instead I’m stuck here, watching both of our lives end.”

“Oh, poor you!”

“I wish you’d never been born!”
I screamed, and paused
long enough to suck in air for the death blow. “And if mom was alive she’d feel the same way.”

“So leave!”
she yelled.

Suddenly I was watching, not acting or feeling, but watching myself get up off the couch, fumble with my boots, rip the door open, and slam it behind me.

O
utside.

It took a moment to grasp what I’d done. At first it was all pain and heat and blood screaming through my veins as I ran down the stairs and onto the sidewalk.

But then I realized.
Outside.
Still in Canada, still winter, without a coat, I was
outside
and I couldn’t turn around. There could be no slinking back in for my coat and wallet.

My cheeks burned. I put my hand to my face and felt tears. Were they freezing to my skin? I wiped them with my sleeve as a gust of wind blew right through my sweater, wrapping cold fingers around my rib cage.

I stumbled forward. I had no choice. I walked. A gift shop, a bank, a church, the post office, a Sushi bar, another gift shop—I didn’t want to go into any of them. They were all too small and well manned to hide in. I needed somewhere big and warm and impersonal that didn’t want me to spend money, where nobody would come and ask me if I was interested in buying maple candies or how the weather at Lake Louise was. And preferably not somewhere with a
CANADIAN GIRLS DO IT BETTER
T-shirt in the window.

I closed my mind, and let the wind push me forward, farther away from Bree’s apartment, the opposite direction of school and McSorley’s and the roads I’d already explored. I couldn’t go back. I zigzagged, right on Caribou Street, left on Beaver, right on Bear, and then right again on Wolf, around and around until I had no clue which way I’d come.

Will didn’t want me. Columbia didn’t want me. Had Dad ever wanted
anybody
? And after everything I’d done for her, Charly didn’t want me either. Grandma only wanted me to be the Amelia she required me to be, and she clearly didn’t want me
with
her. Or if she did, she wanted her dignity and the Mercers’ tidy Christian image more.

My skin stung and my ears ached, but the pain felt deserved.

Block after block, I wandered on, the blur of garish ski jackets all around me, everyone moving forward, pushing toward the warm places they were heading.

Why was I trying to live in this godforsaken ice tomb when all I had to do was call Dad and tell him everything? I’d known that all along, hadn’t I? That I could just pick up the phone and this whole stupid thing would be over. But what if I did? Grandma would never forgive me and Dad would never forgive Charly. We’d be permanently broken.

Suddenly, the anger wasn’t enough to keep the cold out. When had I started shaking? I had my hands curled into balls, the sleeves of my sweater wrapped over my fists, but it hadn’t helped. I couldn’t feel my fingers at all. I had to get inside.

It was dark now, and the sidewalks were even busier with people still bundled from the slopes, the post-ski glow on their chapped cheeks. Out here in nothing more than a flimsy sweater and jeans, and surrounded by mountain-bundled diehards, I was practically naked. But invisible too.

My thoughts were fuzzy and the muscles in my legs felt weak. I just needed to sit down for a minute, but a snowbank seemed like a bad idea.

I hit Bison Street and saw a group of girls across the way who looked vaguely familiar. Had I seen them in
school? I had. They were standing in a cluster under a streetlamp, laughing. I ducked left so they wouldn’t see me, turned the corner, and saw my sanctuary: the Banff Public Library. Warm and free and perfect. My body shuddered in anticipation of relief, and I forced my feet to move faster.

I hurried across the street, ignoring traffic and ice patches, ignoring numbness, letting the glowing windows pull me in by my eyes. I was a mosquito charging toward a bug zapper. A flight of stairs led from the sidewalk down to the entrance of the wood building, as if the library had sunk a full story into the ground over time. I ran down the stairs, nearly tripping over the uneven steps, catching myself on the railing. It took me three tries to curl my fingers around the door handle and pull it open, but when I finally did, the heat rushed out and sucked me in.

Warmth!
The door clattered shut behind me. I felt the heat, but I didn’t. I’d imagined it just pouring into me and filling me up, but I was encased in too many layers of cold. I stood perfectly still, body clenched, eyes closed, my muscles like strings tightened to near snapping.

Then finally, my face started to burn. Pain and relief—who’d have thought they’d be such a horrifically beautiful mix? It meant I was warming up, didn’t it?

I hobbled forward, my legs feeling like somebody else’s, then glanced around. The library was almost empty and
blurry around the edges, like an antique photograph. An old man sat on the far side of the room reading a newspaper at a table. And off to my left a middle-aged woman was twirling the romance novel spinny thing. What was that word? “Merry-go-round,” but books didn’t ride merry-go-rounds.

I tried to sigh but my chattering teeth stifled it. No tourists, no canned retail music, no cozy ski-town aura. Just quiet. Books. Heat. A tacky maroon chair at the end of one bookshelf sat empty. It looked velvety. Maybe I could curl up in it and sleep forever.

“What are you doing here?”

I turned toward the sound and the room spun. When it stopped, there behind the circulation desk was a guy. A guy I knew? Yeah,
that
guy, the cute one from the airport. Why couldn’t I think of his name? Ezra. Yeah, Ezra, except he looked different.

“What are
you
doing here?” I tried to ask, but the words slurred together. Why did I sound drunk? He looked good. And annoyed.

“I work here.”

“Here?”
But wasn’t he a ski guy, a skier, a patroller guy whatever? Ski guys didn’t work in libraries. Librarians had master’s degrees and bifocals and hot flashes. Hot flashes. Was that what was happening to me, or was I still cold?

“I work part-time here. My mom’s the librarian. Are you okay?”

“Okay?” My whole body was burning and I was shivering. No. I wasn’t okay. Charly and Will and Savannah and Columbia and Dad. No. Nothing was okay, or would ever be okay. I thought about nodding, but instead I just stared at the chest of his mustard-colored shirt where the words
FREE TIBET
floated over a setting sun. Or maybe a rising sun. Yeah, rising.

“Did you walk here?”

This time I managed to nod and the sun on his shirt left streaks behind it. Sunshiny sunbeam trails.