If You Find Me(47)

“Hey. Pixie told me to meet you here. Why all the cloak-and-dagger?”

I don’t know what he means, but I get the gist.

“It’s a long story,” I say, stalling as I search the library for Delaney and her court—namely, Ashley, Lauren, Kara, and Marie, but, just as I suspected, the library isn’t their hangout of choice.

“Let’s get out of here, CC. It’s lunchtime, after all.”

I smile when I hear his stomach grumble and mine answer in kind.

Ryan slings my knapsack over his shoulder. I grab my violin case, still not sure why I constantly drag it around. I don’t want to be “Fiddle Girl,” as Delaney called me, either at school or at home. I don’t want anyone to make me play . . . to make me remember Mama, or being in the woods.

The best place for the instrument would be to shoved at the back of the closet shelf. But each morning, I can’t bear to leave the thing behind. I think of Ness’s old blankie, a “security blanket,” Mama called it, worn to a rag. I just wish my version wasn’t so clumsy to carry around.

“I know where we can go,” Ryan says, leading me through the library and its maze of books and out the back door, through a grotto of trees. We cross a sizable snow-encrusted field, the kind people chase balls around, and before I can react, he takes my free hand and leads me into the woods.

The trees grow thick, like in the Hundred Acre Wood, and I smell the familiar old twang of earth and shade. Ryan doesn’t know it, but I’m more Carey among the trees than anywhere else. I breathe in the musky aroma of old leaves and freeze-dried earth. We find a large flat rock.

“You have a strap on your violin case. Like a guitar case.”

“Yeah. Mama—my mother—glued it on. So she could carry it over her shoulder.”

“Just stand there for a second, okay? Don’t move.”

I freeze while he pulls out a camera from his pocket. The click is loud in the stillness.

“Done. Come sit.”

I do.

“May I?” he asks, and I nod. I watch him open my knapsack and pull out a crumpled brown paper bag, which he sets in the space between us. “I brought a bag lunch, too.”

With a flourish, he pulls a banana from a side pocket, a foil-wrapped sandwich from another, and a Baggie of black disks with white between them from a zipped compartment inside his coat.

“Do you like Oreos?”

I nod, acting like I know what he’s talking about.

I empty my sandwich, a green apple, a Baggie of Pringles, and two small containers of apple juice onto the rock. Ryan grins. With a flourish, he pulls a dented package of something named Twinkies from the depths of the same pocket that housed the banana.

We survey the spread before us.

“It’s a feast,” I say, forgetting myself. And it’s true. Where I come from, this is a bona fide feast.

“It’s a winter picnic,” he says, “and this will be our tablecloth.”

He removes his scarf and spreads it on the rock. I help him move the food onto it.

“It’s beautiful,” I say, waiting for him to laugh at me, but he doesn’t.

“I only have one regret.” He hands me half of his meat loaf and ketchup sandwich. I hand him an apple juice and half of my PB&J.

“Which is?” I take a swig of my juice.

“That you can’t play violin with food in your hands,” he says.

I laugh. “I reckon it’d be worse if I were a singer.”

“I love to hear you play.”

I chew my sandwich slowly, and when the familiar heat flushes my neck and face, I let it. Deep down, I like the way it feels. What’s wrong with that?

“I don’t mind playing for you,” I say, giving him a quick look.

I stay still as he reaches out with his fingertips and lightly traces the purple callus under my chin.

“I still think you should play for people—in the Memphis Symphony, maybe, or in the school band.”

I take the Twinkie he hands me, closing my eyes in delight as the cream filling twinkles on my tongue.

“My mother played in public, and she found it so stressful. She lost the joy, she said. I don’t know what I’d do if I lost the joy.”

I search for phoebes in the branches above us. Looking up that way, I see the branches spiral out in overlapping circles, trunk to trunk to trunk, forever and ever.

“You’re not your mom, though,” he says.

I feel it again, the rattling. Someone walking over my grave. I look into his face and see so much, I have to look away. It’s like if I look too long, he’ll know about me.

The only person I’ve ever been close to is Jenessa. It’s amazing to see the same potential for closeness in his eyes.

“I know. But I already stick out so much, coming here in the middle of the semester, not knowing anyone. Being younger.”

“Pixie can help you there. She’s in the same boat, and she sure doesn’t mind sticking out.”

We laugh, thinking of Courtney. If only I could borrow a cup of her gumption ...

[page]“Where did you live, before you came to Tupelo?”

I can’t tell him we lived in the Obed Wild and Scenic River National Park, tucked away like termites inside rotting, lightning-split trunks. But I can tell him the surrounding town.