Between Here and Forever - Elizabeth Scott [19]
Tess never knew any of that stuff. But I did. I asked questions, and he answered them.
That came later, though. First, I had to see him with Tess. I’d wait and watch him walk her home every night, watch him listening to her talk until she’d smile and wave and walk away in this way only she had, a way that left him and everyone smiling and glad to be seen by her. A way that somehow made sure they never noticed that she’d left them.
After about a week of this, though, she’d told him good night and gone inside and he’d stood at the end of our little driveway, shoulders slumped again, like he’d finally understood what her smiles and waves really meant. That they were nothing.
His shorts were a little too big for him, and hung down a little past his knees. The skin under his arms, from his wrists up to the wide-open sleeves of his T-shirt, glowed pale in the moonlight, and when he turned to walk to the ferry I knew he wasn’t coming back.
I don’t know how I knew—maybe the slump of his shoulders matched how I felt, invisible—but I did. I slipped away from the house and caught up to him.
“I’m Tess’s sister,” I told him. “Abby.”
“I know,” he said. “She’s told me about you. I don’t think you look like an elf, though.”
“An elf?” Tess was always describing me that way, and I think, in her mind, she was being kind. But did I really look like a magical creature? Of course not. However, since I was short, and had my grandmother’s unusually colored eyes—well, describing me as “elf-like,” was, for Tess, pretty nice. She always liked the idea of magical things. Of pretend.
“No, that’s not what she said,” he said. “I mean, she said—”
“It’s okay,” I said. “She thinks she’s being nice when she says it. And I bet she told you that you look like an elf too.”
He grinned at me even as his shoulder slumped a little more. “She doesn’t date elves, right?”
“She doesn’t really date,” I said. “She’s—I think she has this perfect guy in mind or something, and he’s not—well, who’s perfect?”
“She’s just so … it’s like there’s something secret about her,” he said. “Something sad, I think.”
Tess was about as sad as any extremely popular and beautiful girl could be, which was, of course, not very, but I didn’t say that. I liked that he thought there was depth to Tess.
I thought if he could imagine it in her, he would see it was truly in me.
“I can help you with her,” I said. “Like I said, I know the kind of guy she’s looking for. Do you like poetry?”
He shook his head.
“Well,” I said. “You do now.”
That first night we talked for an hour, until the last call for the ferry came, the lone whistle from the dock echoing into the night.
Granted, all we’d talked about was Tess, but I’d talked to him, and I floated home, happier than I’d ever been.
I had no luck with guys. Not that there were any in Ferrisville to even want luck with. Oh, there were a few who were cute, but I knew all their fathers and brothers and cousins, and I knew what happened to guys in Ferrisville. They grew up and got a job in the plant. They grew up and grew bellies and lost their hair and sat around scratching their stomachs on the beach in the summer, slowly turning red in the sun.
I wanted more than that.
As for friends, back then I had those. Everyone in school said hello and invited me to their parties and all that stuff. But I had nothing in common with them, and most of my “friends” just wanted to be near Tess, wanted her to notice them and invite them into her world. There were a few that maybe did like me, but they weren’t like me.
I wanted to get out of Ferrisville, and they didn’t. They might go off to the community college, or even the state college an hour away, but they would come back. No one in their families had ever left town for good, so why would they? People came to Ferrisville and stayed. It might be small, and life might be slow-paced and small too, but nobody but me seemed to mind that.
“Stuck-up,”