When We Were Us (Keeping Score, #1)(10)

I managed a smile. “Yeah, I guess I’m cooled off now.”

Sarah cocked an eyebrow at me. “Want a towel? We’ve got them around back by the pool.”

“Nah. I’ll just run home and change.” And I would be literally running home; my brother usually picked me up from this job and took me to the next one. Since he could drive and I couldn’t, I had to depend on him for the houses where we used our own equipment. But if he saw me soaking wet, I’d never hear the end of it.

“Listen, Sarah, can I push the mower over my your house? I’ll just go get changed and come back to finish up. My brother is supposed to take me to the next client in about forty-five minutes. I think I can make it.”

Sarah helped me move the mower and then I booked for home. My mother just shook her head as I grabbed a dry set of clothes and ran back to Sarah’s house. I had just finished the last strip of grass when Simon pulled up.

“That one took you long enough,” he grumbled after we loaded the equipment. “What happen?”

“Sprinklers turned on,” I told him. “Had to wait until they could turn them off until I could finish.” I knew my mom wouldn’t say anything; she was cool that way. I made it to the next client and got back to work. But I couldn’t stop thinking about Sarah and how she had looked when the water soaked her shorts and t-shirt.

I didn’t see her again until the first day of school, when she came over to me in line. Nat and I had been there for a little bit before Ab got to school. The whole thing was weird. First when Nat got there, he asked right away if I’d seen Ab. Well, that wasn’t weird—Nat always wants to know where she is, but there was something different about it that day. He tried to brush it off and said he hasn’t seen her since he got home from vacation and wondered if she had had a good time at the shore, but I swear he turned red when he said her name.

And then to make things even more bizarre, when Ab did show up, she was wearing, like, a dress. I hadn’t seen Ab in anything but jeans or shorts since we were in kindergarten and her mom made her wear a dress on picture day. I was shocked.

But when I said something to tease her, to make her feel better about having to wear a dress—just so she understood that I knew her mom must’ve made her wear it—she got mad. She shot me a snappy comeback, but I could tell she was really annoyed. Who knows why? Nat told her looked pretty, and that seemed to make her feel a little better.

And then before I could really check out what was happening, why Nat was acting so off, I saw Sarah. She was wearing some kind of dress, too, but it just kind of floated around her. I couldn’t take my eyes off her for a minute, and then Ab made some kind of snarky comment about Sarah and how she was dressed. I realized as I stood there, too, that Sarah looked a lot older than Ab did. I wondered if she thought I looked a lot younger than the boys in her class.

Ab changed the subject, and she and Nat started talking about their vacations. I kept quiet. My family didn’t take the kind of regular vacations Abby and Nat’s family did. My mother said that with three boys who were heading to college, we needed to save everything we could. We mostly took day trips and what my mom called backyard vacations.

And then I heard my name, and when I turned around, Sarah was standing next to me, smiling. I tried to play it cool, be nice without doing anything to make Ab and Nat suspicious. We were just rehashing the whole sprinkler episode when the bell rang, and the whole crowd of kids surged into the school.

I lost Ab and Nat, but Sarah stuck with me. I felt bad, because I had promised to help Nat at his locker. But by the time I found them, we were at my homeroom and Nat was going in the room with me. Abby made another comment about Sarah and about her being my girlfriend. I didn’t like how that made me feel. On one hand, she wasn’t my girlfriend. But part of me wouldn’t have minded if she was. On the other hand, I didn’t want to hurt Ab’s feelings, and I had the sense that inviting any girl into our little circle was going to do just that.

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Chapter 7: Nathan

The two weeks I spent with my parents in the mountains of Pennsylvania were a roller coaster for me. I would wake up in the morning, bursting with excitement over my newly-realized love for Abby. And then by lunch time, I’d be brooding and depressed, sure that she could never see me as more than her best friend from childhood. I spent hours trying to remember whether Abby had ever acted interested in any boys in our class, and I spent an equal amount of time remember how often she had chosen to be with me over other people.

By the time we got home, two days before school began, I was nervous and jumpy. My parents turned to their fall-back position of worrying that this was some new symptom of my disease, but I explained that I was just anxious about the new school. They bought that. My mom told me long stories about her life as a teenager, and my dad just kept patting my shoulder, telling me it would all work out.

I didn’t call Abby before school began because we never did that. If I had called her just to talk she would have known something was up. So I suffered in silence by myself until my mother dropped me at school on the morning of the first day.

I scanned the lines of kids milling around in loosely formed lines, but there was no sign of Abby. After a few minutes, Jesse came up behind me and gave me his signature light punch on the arm.

“Hey, Nat. You ready for this?” He spun his finger around in a circle, encompassing the whole school, the kids, everything.