Every Other Weekend(44)

“Strange and special?” I said, thinking that if there was supposed to be a compliment there I couldn’t find it.

“You know what I mean.”

I wasn’t sure I did, but I also wasn’t going to stand there and force her to say things about me that she didn’t want to on her own.

She spared one last glance after her friend and sighed. “I just hate that he’s like that to her.”

“Yeah, I get that.”

Then she visibly shook herself. “Okay, I really don’t want to think about them all day. This was supposed to be fun. Ferris Bueller fun. So what are we going to do on this beautiful day?”

I just wanted to go somewhere that wasn’t outside. Jolene wanted ice cream. We both won.

She slipped her chilled hand into mine to tug me down the street, and even though she let go the second I started moving, the heat that somehow suffused my entire body stayed with me.

The ice-cream parlor was empty when we entered. It smelled like vanilla and waffle cones, and Jolene drew in a breath so deep that she practically levitated.

“How can you want ice cream right now?” Her hand had been so cold that I’d made a crack about checking for frostbite.

She shrugged and ordered from the sleepy-looking guy behind the counter. When he turned his half-lidded eyes to me, I shook my head. After he handed Jolene her cone—and it was covered in so many toppings you couldn’t even tell there was ice cream underneath—we found a table and sat down. Me to thaw and Jolene to snake gummy bears off her cone with her tongue.

I thawed out very quickly.

I was worried my staring would become creepy in another second, so I said the first thing that came to my mind. “I read your essay.”

Jolene paused in the act of biting the head off a gummy bear but said nothing. Even when she finished decapitating the bear, I could see the tension holding the rest of her stock-still.

“Jo, it’s really good.”

She didn’t relax. If anything, she grew more tense.

I usually felt like I was getting only half the story with Jolene. That she was deflecting with her biting humor and brash demeanor. Sometimes she’d let me see more, but not often. Her essay though... It was Jolene stripped raw.

And it was really good.

If I wasn’t half in love with her before I read it, I was after.

Except there was no half anything with Jolene.

I really needed to talk to Erica. Whether or not I ever had more than friendship with Jolene, I had no business having a girlfriend when I felt this way about someone else.

Jolene looked tense enough to snap, so I knew I had to come at things in a different way than straight compliments. They always made her uncomfortable, unless she was paying them to herself.

“I couldn’t really tell at home but—” I leaned across the table and brought my face close to hers “—did I get all the blood out of my eyes?”

A relieved smile relaxed her face and body. “I’m always so sweet to you, and yet you say stuff like that to me.”

I leaned closer and angled my head. “Right in the left tear duct. That one gushed when I read the last paragraph.”

Jolene smushed her ice-cream cone in my nose.

I licked at a gummy bear that started to slide down my cheek. “Yeah, you’re a sweetheart.”

It was cold, but she was laughing, and I’d been the one to make her laugh.

“Really though,” she said a few minutes later, leaning toward me and scrutinizing a place on my jaw that she’d wiped clean with a napkin. “You didn’t hate it?”

I stilled her hand with my own. There were a few sentences that could be smoothed out, and her opening paragraph was a little scattered, but the heart of her essay—Jolene’s heart—beat beautifully through the whole thing.

“No, I didn’t.”

She gave me a funny look and sat back. “Will you help me though, just a little? I need the film program people not to hate it either.”

We spent the next hour going over it on her phone. I made a few suggestions, but I’d meant what I’d said: it was good already.



* * *



Somehow, Jolene wasn’t frozen after all the ice cream she’d eaten, but that didn’t stop her from shivering in her uniform the second we walked outside. Neither of us were dressed for spending extended time in the cold, but I gave her my jacket and stoically tried to keep my teeth from chattering while she filmed the snowflakes that floated down around us as we walked. She filmed me, too, and when I asked her if she was ever going to tell me about the movie I was kind of starring in, she smiled and shook her head.

“I had this idea for...something. I’m not sure yet but, I think...” She lifted her camera back to her eye and backed away from me, stepping off the curb and into the side of a parked car. She gasped and then lifted her foot from the several inches of icy slush it had sunk into and laughed. “And impossibly, I’m colder than I was a second ago.”

After that she let me talk her into going back inside a heated building, a diner where we drank hot chocolate while we waited for Cherry and Meneik to pick us up. The afternoon ended up being less Ferris Bueller and more whatever movie has the cast wandering around my small, sleepy town and narrowly avoiding frostbite.

It was one of the best days of my life.