All We Can Do Is Wait(53)



But she never showed. Maybe she got stuck in a class and didn’t have time to come by her locker, or maybe she was avoiding him. Not knowing either way was agony, and Scott went into the bathroom to send her a text, the only place a teacher wouldn’t see him using his phone during school hours.

hey where are u, he wrote.

She wrote back quickly. sorry. bad day. ill see u tonite.

Whenever Aimee came over to his house, which was rare, it was always around eight o’clock, after he and his parents had eaten dinner. (They didn’t work late at the store anymore, leaving that to a manager. “We’re old, we’ve earned it,” Scott’s dad said.) Scott ate hurriedly, cleared the table, and did the dishes, watching his phone vigilantly as it ticked toward eight. Then the doorbell rang, and Scott’s heart leapt. Scott heard his mother open the door, say, “Aimee, honey, hello. Scott’s just finishing the dishes.” Aimee came back into the little kitchen and gave Scott a small, timid wave. No hug, no kiss. That was strange. Something was about to happen.

On a normal school night when Aimee came over, they would have gone to the living room to watch TV and pretend to do homework, but tonight felt different; there were apparently serious things to talk about. It was an oddly warm night, so they decided to go out to the little backyard, with its faded patio furniture and overgrown lawn, still a circle of half-grown grass where an ill-advised above-ground swimming pool had been, years ago.

Scott flicked on the floodlight, but it was too bright, made the whole thing seem like an interrogation. So he turned it off, and they sat in the dim light coming from the kitchen window, Scott wanting to pull Aimee close to him, to have her tell him that they were going to be fine. But he sensed something guarded about her. Something between them had shifted. So he sat in the chair next to her and waited for her to speak.

“I’m sorry about school today,” she said, her voice wavering a little. “I’m sorry I missed you. And I’m sorry about yesterday. I shouldn’t have accused you of that.”

Scott shook his head. “It’s O.K. It’s O.K. It’s fine.”

“Maybe . . .” Aimee said, sounding unconvinced, distracted. “I just feel like so much has happened in the last couple of days. Everything feels different, you know?”

Scott did know. But he wasn’t sure if his different was the same as Aimee’s different. Not from the way she was looking at him, a breeze making him shiver.

“It’s just . . .” Aimee continued, “we love each other. Or, like . . .”

She trailed off and started crying. How serious was this, actually? “We do love each other,” Scott said, reaching out to put his hand on hers, which was resting tentatively on the table. But she pulled it back, put it between her knees. She looked down, sniffled some more.

Scott could hear cars whooshing by, the buzzing of the streetlights, a few dogs barking. Normal sounds. And yet nothing about this was normal.

“I want to break up,” Aimee finally said, barely audible.

Was it possible to be both stunned and somehow not surprised at all? The way Aimee had said it, that little, terrible sentence, made it seem like they had already broken up, that her mind had long been made up and she was just now telling him. This was not any sort of negotiation.

“Aimee . . .” he started to say, but she interrupted him.

“I’m so busy with school and grades and shows and stuff. And you’re going through a lot too, and I just feel like it’s all a little overwhelming. This whole thing has gotten too intense or something.”

“Isn’t it supposed to be intense?”

“Yeah, I guess so. I mean, it is. But not like this. It’s supposed to be intense in a good way. But you’ve been freaking out about me graduating, doing stuff that’s not you at all, and now this whole thing with Maddy . . . I just think maybe it would be better for us if we ended things now, so we have some time to, like, enjoy high school before it’s over.”

“Before it’s over for you, you mean,” Scotty said, the words sounding more indignant than he meant them to. Maybe, anyway.

“Before it’s over for me, yeah. But I dunno . . . Don’t you want to, like, figure out who you are without me getting in the way?”

Scott’s face felt hot, he was dizzy. “You’re not in the way, Aims. You’re, like, all I have!”

“See, that’s what I mean!” she said, a sob cracking her voice. “That’s so intense, Scotty. That’s so intense for you to say, and for me to hear, and I just don’t want to do it anymore. I need to not feel all this pressure to keep you happy, to, like, not be excited about what I’m doing next because it’s going to make you sad.”

“Aren’t you sad?”

“Of course I’m sad. I’m sad all the time! But I feel like . . . It’s still early enough that I have, like . . . Like maybe I can actually enjoy visiting colleges and getting excited about that, and graduating, and being with my friends and stuff, without always feeling so guilty all the time. You make it really hard, Scott. You just don’t . . . get it, sometimes.”

Scott was stung. “You mean, I don’t get how exciting it is that you get to go away to college and live some cool life, because I’m never going to do that, because I’m going to be stuck here forever?”

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