The Way Back to You (17 page)

“So they’re still married?”

“No. When I started high school, my dad went through a special spousal-abandonment process to get a divorce; he could never find her.”

My fingertips brush a jagged metal edge between two rocks. I’ve located the key. I’m about to pull it out to show Cloudy, but her eyes are so sad that I let my hand fall to my side without it.

“Kyle, I’m sorry.” Her voice is gentler than I’ve ever heard it. “It must be hard for you, not knowing where she is.”

I want to say it isn’t hard at all, but I tell the truth instead: “I like to believe I don’t care what she’s doing, but I know I’m fooling myself.” Cloudy waits, so I explain. “If I were indifferent, thinking about her would make me feel nothing. I don’t feel nothing. And my dad. He really is a good dad, but we’re too much alike. After Ashlyn’s accident, he was giving me all this space, but maybe it wasn’t what I needed? As pathetic as it sounds, I kind of started missing Shannon again.”

“That’s not pathetic,” Cloudy says. “Of course you’d be thinking about her more when something like that happens. She’s your mom.”

People say I look like my dad when he was my age, and that’s true, with my height, build, and coloring. But I went through pictures of Shannon when Dad and I were packing up to move and realized that my forehead, nose, mouth, and chin are all like hers. Biologically, she is my mother. I can’t deny it. She isn’t my
mom
, though. She’s chosen not to be.

I sigh. “I pretty much avoid talking about Shannon, and then I get you out here and it’s like . . . word vomit. Sorry about that.”

“You’re allowed. And I was asking. As long as it’s words and not the other kind, you can vomit around me any time, okay?”

“Thanks.” I touch Cloudy’s arm. “Seriously.”

She smiles. “Of course.”

I no longer have the urge to go inside the house where Dad and I spent years surrounded by reminders of someone who
didn’t want to be with us. Reaching between the rocks again, I push the key until it wedges back so far I can’t feel it anymore. “My entering idea’s a bust,” I tell Cloudy. “What should we do now?”

“SO THE PLAN,” Cloudy says, pulling her hair into a ponytail, “is to jump, swim, slide. Right?”

I stare over the edge of a twenty-foot cliff and into the gurgling greenish water of Oak Creek, which I know from experience is achingly cold. (Especially now, since there are still scattered patches of snow on the property.) “We don’t have to jump. We can climb back down and wade to the slides.”

“No way. We’d get in ankle deep and change our minds like we did at the ocean. And that cannot happen.”

After Cloudy and I left my old house earlier, we wandered Uptown Sedona and bought a necklace for Hannah’s birthday, as well as cactus-print beach towels and clearance swimsuits from a sidewalk sale. Now we’re at Slide Rock State Park because Cloudy insists she can’t miss the natural waterslides Matty talked up.

The red-rock formations at Slide Rock follow the length of the creek on both sides. During spring through fall, they’re covered with picnickers and people wanting to cool off, but it’s only us here now. I spotted tourists heading through trees to the hiking trails when we arrived, but absolutely no one is in the water like we’re about to be.

“Matty’s only come here when it was, like, ninety degrees outside,” I say. “Not sixty-five. Even then, he said this water was—”

She lifts her shirt over her head and drops it onto one of our towels, which she’s spread over a level section of rock. Then, turning her back to me, she slides off her jeans. She’s wearing her new two-piece swimsuit underneath the clothes, but still. Watching her undress herself has stunned me to silence.

As she faces me again, I look away quickly and focus on the water rippling below.

“Matty said this water was what?” she prompts.

If she has any idea I was checking her out, she isn’t letting on. “Um. He said it’s ‘so fricken icy, you won’t find your nuts for a week.’”

“That sounds like a potential problem for
you
, not me. Admit it, Kyle. You’re chickening out. I’ll be swimming to the waterslides while you’re still up here.”

“Please. I’ve been jumping in this creek since before you were born.”

It isn’t true, since she’s about three months older than me, but it makes us both laugh anyway.

She lowers herself to sit on a towel. Her knees, thighs, and upper arms have bruises of every color like Ashlyn always had from doing cheer. “Immersing yourself in cold water is good for your body. It produces endorphins.”

“And frostbite,” I say.

“You’re so paranoid. I swear, I’m going to push you in, if it comes to it.”

“You can
try
.”

While she unfastens her earrings, I strip down to my swim trunks and then sit on my own towel about two feet from hers, keeping my eyes on my clothes as I fold them.

Cloudy’s phone goes off. “Oh, Zoë,” she murmurs, glancing at it. “Do we honestly need a real-time play by play of each other’s days?”

“Your sister does text you a ton. Is she lonely with you and your parents gone?”

“She’d be like this even if she weren’t home alone. Ever since she started high school, she’s been so needy. She snapped up the team manager position when Misty moved to Alabama, and she’s my constant shadow.”

“Did she at least pass along some Slide Rock fun facts to ponder?”

“If I’d told her we were coming here, she would have.” She tips the screen toward me and cups her hand around it, blocking the sun’s glare so I can read Zoë’s message.
Matty seems to think I’m your dog. He stopped by with Danielle and asked if I wanted to take a walk. I convinced them to take me to lunch instead.

Cloudy tucks her phone into her bag without sending a response. “You knew about those two, right?”

“Matty and Danielle? I kind of walked in on them last week. Inside an empty church.”

“You went to church?”

“Let’s just say I was having an off day and leave it at that.”

Cloudy grins. “Interest fully piqued now.”

So I tell her about last Thursday (leaving out most of the details that make me sound super-depressed). As I describe Danielle’s head appearing from the front row followed by Matty’s, Cloudy’s grin gets bigger. “He has no shame. I mean, in a church?”

“Actually, he told me it was Danielle’s idea. He didn’t have a clue she liked him until, surprise! She’s kissing him in front of a wooden cross.”

“Ha. Now he knows what it’s like!”

I side-eye her. “Do I want to hear this?”

She bursts out laughing.

“What?” I can’t help laughing with her. “Why is that funny?”

“Your face! And the way you said it.” She forces composure as she puts on a frown and speaks in an extra-deep voice. “‘Do I want to hear this?’” She switches back to her regular voice. “What I was referring to is the important lesson I learned last year: when Matty Ocie catches your eye in the middle of an assembly, points at himself and then at you, returning his nod might set you up for something unexpected. Like, surprise! You’ve just agreed to be his date for Winter Formal.”

I’d watched the whole thing and I interpreted Cloudy’s nod the same way Matty had. “Why didn’t you say something if you didn’t want to go with him?”

“I didn’t
not
want to go with him. Like I said, it was a surprise.” She peeks down at her chest and tugs the triangles more toward the center. “But you think he really likes Danielle?”

I search her face. She seems more curious than anything, but I get a stab of jealousy at the idea that she might be jealous. “We didn’t have a conversation about that part. She’s the first girlfriend he’s had in a while, though.”

The first since he was with Cloudy in the fall, actually.

“Remember the Redmond High girl he was with last summer?” Cloudy asks. “She came to his first football game wearing
cutoffs and that blue bikini top? Big support for Ocie number twenty-one! Except she painted the numbers on her cleavage in the mirror so they turned out as a one and a backward two instead of twenty-one.”

“Breanna. Ashlyn couldn’t stand her, for some reason.”

“I thought Breanna was sweet in a puppyish way. But Ashlyn thought she was standing in the way of Matty and me. She refused to accept that we were never going to happen.”

“Didn’t stop you guys from trying, though. Twice.”

I was in such a fog after Ashlyn’s death that I don’t know when, how, or why Matty and Cloudy got back together. I only found out it had happened at all because he showed up at my house in mid-October at two in the morning to tell me he’d just broken things off with Cloudy; he said he’d figured out they were better as friends.

“What can I say?” Cloudy snickers. “Matty’s a magnet. Or, better yet, a rip current. He makes it easy to get pulled in and I was constantly losing my balance. I could never be still or get my feet on the ground.”

“Ah, but isn’t that how love’s supposed to be?”

“I think that’s vertigo,” she says, tapping her chin. “The worst part was that I was
such
a disappointment to my best friend. I wasn’t doing my part to make her big dream come true that our children would be second cousins.”

Now it’s my turn to laugh. “O-kay. That’s quite a dream to have.”

“
Very
specific.” Cloudy rolls her eyes, grinning. “She came up with this whole plan. To start with, the four people who
could make it happen needed to go to college together. Then we’d get these unbelievably great careers and settle down in the same amazing city. And obviously, you and Ashlyn would have kids, and Matty and I would have kids. They’d be second cousins and best friends and our lives would be perfect forever and ever. If only Matty and I could have stepped up for the sake of Ashlyn’s dream. And for the hypothetical second cousins, of course.”

Our lives would be perfect forever and ever.

“Yeah.” My voice comes out in a croak. I clear my throat. “Anything for those rascals.”

My attempt at keeping the joke going fails and both of our smiles disappear.

Every single day that Ashlyn was my girlfriend, I was in love with her. I never once thought about what would happen beyond high school. I never considered that we might get married, or break up, or (especially) that I could lose her in a sudden accident.

Cloudy traces her fingertips over her towel’s cactus design. “I shouldn’t have told you she said that. She’d be mortified.”

I hate that talking about Ashlyn caused this heaviness to press down on us. Because she was funny. She loved being dramatic and saying off-the-wall things to get a laugh out of people. She also loved traditions and being surrounded by her friends. So whether she was teasing with this “dream” about the second cousins, or if it was her genuine wish that her favorite people would always be part of one another’s lives, it’s still a compliment.

“I don’t think she’d be upset about you telling me. And it’s cool that this perfect future she said she was imagining had me in it.” I give Cloudy’s leg a little jolt with my bare foot, causing her to glance at me. “That it had both of us in it.”

“Don’t forget your cousin,” she says.

“As if I ever could.”

Cloudy hops to her feet. “Come on. Let’s do this now. Jump, swim, slide. Like you promised.”

She reaches for my hand and I let her pull me up. Even after I’m standing, she doesn’t let go. We walk to the cliff’s edge. We look past our toes at the rolling creek beneath us. We count to three.

And together, we jump.

“HERE WE ARE at the cafeteria,” I say, with a dramatic swoop of my arm.

Cloudy and I are wandering around my old school after having already stopped at the baseball field so I could say hi to the coaches and players I knew when I went here. (Sedona’s season starts a month earlier than Bend’s.) Now we’re waiting for practice to end, so we can drive with Will for eighty miles to go to Hannah’s birthday party.

Most people over the age of nine don’t get too excited about a place like Bedrock City, but Cloudy was right about the endorphins; I’ve been on a high ever since we jumped into the creek two hours ago. I can hardly wait to show her the rides-less Flintstones park. I’m also excited about taking her to the Oatman donkeys tomorrow, and about us attending the wedding
of Ashlyn’s heart recipient, Sonia, the day after that. The only thing I’m not looking forward to is going home. I like getting to spend my days with Cloudy.

We slow our walking so she can look through the window. “I love it. This is the cutest school ever.”

“
Probably
not what the architect was going for,” I say.

“You don’t know that. All these little buildings remind me of a college campus. Except scaled down to adorable proportions. And with these great views, who wouldn’t want to go to school here?”

“You’re right,” I say as we continue the tour. “Every day of freshman year I was like, ‘Three-sixty views? Heck
yeah
, I want to sit in these classrooms for seven hours.’ I even tried coming in on weekends, but, you know. Locked doors.”

Cloudy grins. “Your lack of breaking-and-entering skills is starting to become a problem. But speaking of skills, I thought for sure shit was going to go down when your friends saw you wearing a Lava Bears shirt in the ‘Home of the Scorpions.’”

“Why would you think that?”

“You were one of their best players, right?” Cloudy asks. “And now you’re wearing other colors. That has to sting. Scorpion pun not intended.”

“
Not
intended?” I give her elbow a nudge. “Yeah, right. You’ve been waiting to say that since you saw it on the sign. Admit it.”

“I admit to nothing,” she says, elbowing me back. “You must have been Mr. Popular when you were here, being such a good ball player.”

“Oh, yeah.
Every
one knew me.” I chuckle. “By the way, there are only five hundred kids in the whole school, so everyone knows everyone. And it was just like Bend with baseball. It isn’t the big-deal sport. There aren’t cheerleaders at the games. Some of the guys’ parents or girlfriends come, but nobody else. If people bother to think about ball players at all, it’s that we’re these dorky milk-drinkin’, pledge-of-allegiance-sayin’ good ol’ boys.”