Between Here and Forever - Elizabeth Scott [30]
I shake my head.
“Well, that’s how my family is. They all want things to be like they used to be.”
“I guess I do get that,” I say slowly. “I want Tess to wake up because—I mean, I want her to wake up just because, but I also—it’s like everyone’s life is frozen because Tess is that way.”
“You don’t like the word ‘coma,’ do you?” he says.
“I know she’s in a coma, I know what the doctor says. But you don’t—‘coma’ is this word without hope, this word that means gone, and Tess isn’t gone.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“Yeah, you did.”
He pauses for a moment. “Here’s the thing. I … I’m half Japanese, part black—and this is what counts in Milford—part white,” he says quietly.
“And?”
“And that, just now, was me telling the one person who doesn’t care what I am exactly what I am,” he says. “It’s—you know. You don’t like to say ‘coma.’ I don’t like being divided into little pieces of color. And I … let’s just say I understand what it’s like to be angry. But you … you’re so—”
Horrible. I wait for it, or some word like it.
He swallows.
“Strong,” he says very softly. “I think you’re strong.”
“Strong?” My heart starts to pound, and he nods.
And then he says, “And sad. You’re … I think you’re the saddest person I’ve ever met. It’s like you’re drowning in it.”
I push away from the table and stand up so fast my chair falls over as I rise. I grab it before it hits the ground, then slam it into the table as I grab my bag.
And then I pretty much race out of the cafeteria. I force myself not to run, but I’m moving fast and my eyes are stinging and I’m angry, I tell myself, I’m leaving because I’m angry.
But I’m not. I’m scared.
I’m scared because he saw me. Because he sees me.
“Abby!”
I hear him behind me, but I ignore him, cutting around a cluster of people waiting by the elevators and heading for the entrance.
When I get outside I force myself to stop. I know he isn’t going to follow me. I am not the kind of girl that guys chase, much less guys like Eli.
I’ll find him on Monday and I’ll just take him straight in to see Tess. No more talking to him.
“Abby,” he says right behind me, and to my embarrassment, I jump, I’m so startled.
“Do I look like I want to talk to you?” I say, trying to throw as much anger as I can into my voice, but he came out here, he came after me, and I don’t sound very angry at all.
I sound frightened.
“No,” he says. “But I—about what I said before, I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“You didn’t upset me.”
He looks at me then, and I can tell he knows I’m lying. Hell, I know I’m lying and doing a crappy job of it too.
“Okay, you did upset me,” I say. “I don’t want or need you feeling sorry for me.”
“I don’t—”
“Yeah, you do. Drowning in sadness? I look like that to you? Really?”
“Yes.”
That’s it. One word. He doesn’t say it with any sort of force or anger or anything like that. He just says it like it’s true and I find myself spinning away from him again.
“No, wait,” he says, touching my arm, and I still. “I wish … I see what you’re doing here. Every day you come and you hope and you—you’re so fierce. So determined. And I wish … I wish I could be like that.”
I force myself to look at him. To say something that makes this about him again because I can’t believe he sees things that aren’t grubby and awful in me. “So you could go home?”
“So I—so I could do a lot of things,” he says, and shoves his hands into his pockets. “Do you … do you want me to meet you tomorrow?”
“It’s Saturday.”
“I know.”
“I come at night,” I tell him, and I’m not ashamed of having no life, I’m not. Except I haven’t ever been somewhere with a guy on a weekend night. (Or day, for that matter.) “My parents come during the day and I come—they let you stay till eight, so I usually come around seven.”
“Okay.”
“Oh.” I can’t help it. I didn’t think he’d agree. I thought he’d have plans.
But then, Eli is rapidly turning out to be a lot more complicated than I thought he was.
“So I’ll meet you in the waiting room by—by where Tess is?” he says, and I nod, then turn around and walk off to the