All We Can Do Is Wait(20)
“Scott, that really doesn’t count. That was Maddy Cohen’s birthday party, there were just some soccer guys there. JV ones.”
“I’m just trying to have a life too, Aimee.”
“Oh! O.K. Sorry. Didn’t realize you didn’t have a life before. Or that going to basically a serial date rapist’s big party was going to give you one.”
“Whatever,” Scott said, once again feeling like a bratty child. “I just want to go. If you don’t want to come with me, fine.”
“Oh,” Aimee replied. “I guess I thought we were gonna hang out tonight no matter what. I wanted to tell you more about the trip.”
“There’s more? Good God.”
“You know, you’re being a real jerk right now, Scott.” She was right, of course. He was being a jerk, or worse. “Maybe you should go to Sam’s party. We can talk tomorrow.”
Tomorrow was Sunday, and Scott had work all day. Aimee no doubt knew that. He’d worked practically every Sunday since they’d met.
“No, I’ll stay.” Scott sighed.
“Honestly, I don’t know if I want you to. Not if you’re gonna just shit all over me for being happy about my trip.”
“I won’t, I won’t,” Scott protested. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be a dick.”
Aimee looked at him, hard. “I kinda think you did?”
Scott didn’t know what to say. He’d clearly fucked this whole thing up, this grand reunion when all his fears about Aimee—and about how he’d been reacting to her lately—were supposed to be allayed, the strength of their relationship reaffirmed. “I didn’t” was all he could come up with, probably pouting as he said it.
“Well, whatever.” Aimee sighed. “I’m actually pretty tired from the plane and stuff. So maybe we should just, like, rain check on tonight or whatever.”
Scott wanted to keep talking, wanted to stay and make things better. But he was worried he might mess things up even more. So he just said, “O.K.,” and got up and walked out, not kissing her goodbye or anything. “Scott!” she called out after him, a pleading annoyance in her voice, but only calling for him once. Scott walked downstairs and out the front door, Aimee’s parents looking surprised to see him leaving so early.
Scott didn’t really want to go to Sam Stein’s party, especially not alone, but he didn’t want to just sit at home either. He could have a night out without texting too, just like Aimee had in Ohio or wherever the hell she’d been. So he texted Pete, yo you wanna go to steins party. Pete wrote back quickly, aimee bringing taissa? Scott’s stomach did a little plunge. He wanted to go back and apologize to Aimee. That’s where he belonged. But instead he texted, no Aimee. boyz nite bruhhh. Pete wrote back LIT, and Scott zipped up his jacket and started walking toward Pete’s house—a long walk, but he didn’t really care. He pressed on into the cold, leaving Aimee behind.
? ? ?
At the hospital, months and months later, Scott sat at a table with the grave but funny girl he’d just met. Alexa occasionally looked up and out through the crowd of people, waiting, hoping to spot her brother maybe, but otherwise they kept each other calm by talking. She went to a private school, lived downtown, so they didn’t know any of the same kids. But there was enough else to talk about. Really, anything but the accident and the fate of their loved ones would do. They talked about soccer, about movies, about Cape Cod.
Scott had gone a few times with his parents, packing up the dented SUV and staying in a little bungalow in Barnstable for a few days. Alexa’s experience seemed to have been, well, a little different, out there for whole summers at a time in some big house by the water, way out in Wellfleet. He could almost picture it, all those sunny days and breezy nights, the kind of summer the girls were always having in the books Aimee liked to read, by Judy Blume or whoever else. The perfect kind of summer when magical things happened. Of course, bad things happened too. Alexa mentioned something about a friend of hers, making it seem like something dire had happened, but then she caught herself, looking up once again and scanning the room for her brother, frowning a little when she didn’t find him.
Was it terrible to notice that she was pretty? His thoughts should be on Aimee. Of course they should be. But what was he going to do, blind himself? She was pretty, feathery and pale like something out of a painting at the MFA, one of the portraits Scott’s art teacher, Ms. Li, had droned on and on about during a field trip in ninth grade. All the great families in Boston—great families like Alexa’s, just a hundred years ago—sat for portraits, she explained. It was a sign of status and, of course, a way to preserve the memory of a person in a time when photography was rare. All the people in the paintings looked sad, Scott had thought, or at least distracted. Like there was something just past the frame that was bothering them, some secret or heartbreak or something. Alexa looked that way, like there was a lot happening past where Scott could see. She was worried about her parents, obviously, but there was something else too.
She looked older than she was. More precisely, Scott realized with a sinking feeling, she looked older than Aimee, with her high ponytails and theater-kid fizziness. Alexa was something else. “Still waters run deep,” Scott’s dad would say sometimes, whenever Scott’s mom would chide Scott for being too quiet at the dinner table, or she’d catch him at work at the store, staring off into space. “He’s thinking things through, Inez,” Scott’s dad would say.