All We Can Do Is Wait(17)

“She’s really pretty,” Alexa said.

Scott nodded. “Yeah. This was her sophomore semi. Last year. It was awesome.”

“My school doesn’t really do dances,” Alexa said, handing the phone back to Scott. He looked surprised.

“Why, because there are no guys?”

Alexa shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess they think they’re dated or something. A tool of the patriarchy.”

Scott frowned. “Wow.”

There was a small pause. Not quite awkward, but not quite comfortable either.

“What year are you?” he asked.

“Junior.”

“Oh, cool. Me too.”

“Are you here alone?”

“Uhh, yeah. Right now.”

“What about Aimee’s parents?”

Scott seemed to flinch. He dropped his shoulders, leaned forward to rest his arms on his knees, ran a hand through his thick hair. “Yeah, yeah, they’ll be here soon, I’m sure. So. That’s good. That’s good.”

Alexa watched him for a moment. They were about the same age, but he seemed very young just then. Scared and confused, out of his depth. She could relate. “I’m here with my brother, technically, but I might as well be alone.”

Scott bobbed his head, which was now hanging between his knees. “Yeah, yeah,” he said, sounding distracted.

A moment passed, and the air in the room seemed to change. Alexa sat still, unsure what to do. Clearly this boy was upset, and she wanted to comfort him, but she felt too ragged to be much help. She looked at her phone and realized that thirty minutes had passed since she’d last seen Jason, who could be anywhere by now. Had he left the hospital entirely?

Alexa opened Twitter and scrolled through her feed—she followed mostly news outlets like the Globe and WBZ 4—to see if there were any updates from the outside world. But it was more of the same. The horrible photos, of billows of dust occluding twisted metal, of the bridge in bent tatters. Her friends from school were tweeting out blanket condolences, some saying they were praying “for all the victims,” but none of them had gotten in touch with Alexa directly. They probably didn’t know. They probably figured that Alexa had just left early for the day, because she’d been weird lately. Odd, changed, more mature, a little lost.

The guilty thing was, Alexa had slowly come to like the part of herself that had changed. She did feel older and more mature. She was ready to tell her parents that she wasn’t the good daughter they thought she was, that she couldn’t do everything they wanted just to offset the failures of their son. She was maybe done with anger and grief and was prepared to just move on. To let selfish Jason be selfish Jason, to let her parents be disappointed, to let old friends be gone. But then the bridge collapsed and the phones pinged and all of Alexa’s impending independence suddenly seemed reckless, careless, like she’d unpinned something that was holding her world up and it had all come tumbling down.

What would Jason say if he knew? That Theo and Linda were on that bridge because of Alexa. That Alexa’s stupid, childish dreams had probably killed their parents. Maybe Jason had the right idea. Better to disengage and self-destruct and be a callous jerk than to try to involve anyone else, to tether your expectations to other people. And what would Jason say if he found out that the meeting with Ms. Reeve and Ms. Cline had been Alexa’s idea, that it really was all annoying, type A, goody-goody Alexa’s fault? She had rebelled wrong. She’d insisted on getting her parents to officially sign off on her plans, and now they’d suffered for it. Jason hadn’t even thought to ask why his parents were on the Tobin that afternoon, but Alexa nonetheless felt like she was lying. She felt like a sneak, like a criminal.

Still, she wanted Jason next to her, helping her. Even if a big, terrible secret was hovering between them, she needed her brother, whatever comfort he could provide. But they’d barely spoken since that Labor Day weekend a year ago. He’d reverted into the same bad, jaded, hazy Jason from before. And as much as Alexa knew Jason might never forgive her for what she’d done to their parents, she wasn’t sure she could ever forgive Jason for his distance, his coldness. Alexa was indeed very much alone as she sat in the waiting room, looking at Scott, who was now rocking back and forth, one knee bouncing up and down, the laces on his beat-up sneaker thwacking away.

She wasn’t sure why, but she reached a hand out and placed it on Scott’s shoulder, gave it a little reassuring rub. He stopped rocking and looked up at her, gave her that same weary, sheepish crinkle of a smile.

Alexa smiled back and Scott sat up, rubbed his eyes. “Should we see if Dolores Umbridge over there can tell us anything new?” he asked, gesturing toward Mary Oakes. Alexa was about to say yes, but then Mary Oakes turned and disappeared once again behind the swinging doors. “Great,” he said with a sigh.

Scott pulled his hood up and leaned his head back against the wall. Alexa sat back too, staring up at the stained white ceiling. They sat there like that in silence, the panic of the scene around them fading just for the moment.

After a minute or two, Scott sat up and turned to Alexa. “So wait, like, not even a prom?”

And they both laughed, together.





Chapter Four


    Scott



SCOTT AND AIMEE had been dating for about a year when Aimee started seriously talking about colleges. It was the beginning of her junior year and Scott’s sophomore year, and though Scott had always known this was coming, that Aimee would eventually start to make plans for leaving Boston—and him—behind, it still shocked him how sad and scared it made him feel when the day actually arrived. The thud of what he always knew would someday happen: that people were going to leave and he’d be stuck in Newton, with his parents, just like they had been stuck in Newton with their parents. But he tried not to show it, listening to Aimee as she listed dream schools and safeties, maybe nodding a little more enthusiastically when she mentioned schools that were closer to home.