Between Here and Forever - Elizabeth Scott [18]
I shrug. “That’s what us dragons do.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“It’s okay,” I tell him. “I know what I look like. What I … what I am.” As soon as I’ve said it, I look at Tess again, but she’s still unmoving. Still silent.
Still not fully here.
“We should go now,” I say, and get up. I force myself to say good-bye to Tess, to not act like how he’s gotten me to admit what I am—and how I did it in front of her—has rattled me.
I force myself not to look at him.
Outside her room, I walk out of the unit and head for the elevators. I don’t look at him when I say, “Same time tomorrow?”
I expect him to say he doesn’t think it’s working, that having me sitting there is annoying or weird or both, but he just says, “Okay.”
I don’t look back when I leave, and I don’t think about him on the way home.
I think about what happened the summer before Tess went to college, when she was eighteen and I was fifteen, instead.
I think about Jack.
fourteen
Tess met Jack first.
She’d gotten a scholarship to college of course, not because of her grades but because she “exemplified leadership potential.” She got a summer job over in Milford, as a checkout clerk for all the overpriced food at the Organic Gourmet market. (Milford doesn’t have things like supermarkets, you see. Just “markets” and “boutiques.” Ugh.)
My parents didn’t understand—didn’t she want to see her friends, didn’t she want to have fun, didn’t she know college was taken care of?—but she said she wanted to work. She said she was going to save money for books and other things her scholarship didn’t cover.
To be honest, I think she got a job because Claire lived so close to us and because Claire had stopped hiding in her house. Instead, she was starting to walk around her yard, walk around town, showing off Cole and smiling like she’d glimpsed something amazing no one else ever had. I think that was when Tess realized Claire was never going to issue whatever sort of apology Tess was waiting for.
So Tess went to work, and Jack came into Organic Gourmet on Wednesday, June 30th.
I sometimes wonder if I’ll always remember that date, and how I felt when I looked up from the book I was reading on the front porch when I heard Tess turn onto our street and saw him walking behind her, shoulders hunched like he was nervous.
And he was. I could tell as soon as I saw him. Jack was cute; tall with sandy hair and wire-rimmed glasses that he was forever shoving up his nose. He had freckles on his cheeks, a broad, quick scattering, and on that first night, as he stood talking to Tess by the steps, I could see the pale underside of his arms sticking out from the T-shirt he wore.
His arms weren’t stick-thin or anything, just pale, but the sight of that skin … it looked vulnerable, somehow. And that got to me.
He got to me.
He looked nervous. He looked like he needed a hug. And I wanted to be the one to hug him. When I looked at him, he looked like how I felt, unsure but eager, ready to fall in love.
The problem was, of course, that his look was aimed at Tess and not me.
Tess was too nice—and too used to adoration—to blow him off, so she let him follow her home. Let him talk to her. And so she—and me, because I would sit on the porch and listen to them talk—learned he was going to college to study biology. He wanted to be a doctor, wanted to join a volunteer organization and work overseas. He wanted to help people who wouldn’t be helped otherwise. He wanted to be someone.
He never said that he wanted to matter, of course, but I understood how he felt when he talked to Tess about his plans. I didn’t want to save the world or anything like that, but I wanted to live and work somewhere where people noticed me. Where I wasn’t only “Tess’s sister.” Where I wasn’t a smaller, uglier version of perfection. Where I was just me.
Jack was glad to be done with Saint Andrew’s, because he wanted to go to a school where he didn’t know everyone, and he hadn’t had a girlfriend since the girl he’d been seeing on and off for a few years dumped him right after