Georgie, All Along (96)

Levi, Levi, Levi: I tell them so much about Levi, the stuff I haven’t wanted to tell anyone else but that I know I can trust them with. The trouble he was in, the school where he was sent. The night he lost it all.

The things he said to me, once he saw the fic.

The things I wanted to tell him, before he did.

When I’m finally done, the citronellas are burned way down, and my dad’s set his banjo on the chair beside him. It could be four in the morning or midnight; I’m not sure. I’m more tired but less overwhelmed.

“Talk about a long, strange trip!” my mom says.

“Peach, I gotta tell ya!” Dad adds. “You’ve been through a lot!”

I nod seriously, taking a sip out of his mug to moisten my now-parched throat. It’s long gone cold and will probably give me dreams about talking clouds or animals with human feet, but I’m too thirsty to care.

“So what now?” says Mom, and maybe it’s the tea at work already, but the phrasing strikes me as important. It’s different from Levi’s tight, forceful What are we doing?—a demand for the future. My mom says what now? because my mom is a lot like me.

What’s for the moment. What would make things better in it.

I learned it from her. From both of my parents.

“Maybe I should call him,” I say, because wouldn’t it make things better to hear his voice, to make sure he’s okay? To tell him I’m mad, but not forever mad; to tell him that we have a ton to talk about? To tell him—

“I don’t know about that, Georgie,” my dad says, and since he’s not used a nickname I know I definitely should be listening.

“No?”

He shakes his head, folds his hands over his belly. He’s wearing a Legend of Zelda T-shirt and I don’t think he’s showered yet today, but somehow he looks to me like the smartest person in the world.

“Now I understand that Levi hurt your feelings with what he said. And of course I don’t like that one bit, no, I do not.”

“No,” echoes Mom.

“But from what you’ve said, Levi has also done a lot of stuff to recommend himself to you these last couple of months.”

Mom again with the needless but comforting refrain: “True, true.”

“And you did tell him he has some stuff to figure out.”

“Hmmm, you did,” says Mom.

I look back and forth between them. Since I have only had one sip of tea and zero gummies, I’m being left out of the cryptic realization circle they seem to be participating in. I spread my hands, palms up, in what I hope is a clear gesture for “And?! ”, as in, And what am I supposed to do now?

My dad smiles. “You said you love him?”

“Yes,” I answer. No question.

“You want to be with him?” says Mom.

“Yes.”

Dad shrugs. “Then maybe the best thing you can do for him—for you both—is to give him some time to do the figuring you told him he had to do.”

Again I’m stuck staring back and forth between them, and for a few seconds I’m pretty sure they’re waiting on me to make the connection on my own. But it’s either midnight or four a.m. and actually, this time, I need someone to make something better for me in the moment.

“Georgie,” Mom finally says, “ from what you’re saying, it took you two months to figure—”

“Well, Shyla. Longer than two months! She’s telling us she’s been bothered by this blank feeling for years!”

Mom nods, waving that crooked finger along with her head’s bobbing movement. “That’s right, years! It took you years to figure out what that was all about. Took you finding that fic and having a whole two-month hiatus from the life you’d been living!”

My heart sinks.

Years?

“Now we’re not saying it’ll take Levi years,” Dad says.

“No,” Mom adds again, and I cling to this particular echo like it’s a lifeboat.

Not years, I tell myself.

Then Dad leans forward, unclasping his hands and putting one over mine. “I don’t know Levi as well as you do, but I’ve lived around here long enough to know how tough he is. And you know why he’s so tough?”

It’s the kind of question he doesn’t want me to give an answer for.

“He’s tough because he’s never had a soft place to land,” Dad says. “Not a lot of kindness offered to Levi Fanning around here, for a long time, and I bet that makes it pretty hard for him sometimes. Especially when he needs to figure the soft things out.”

I blink through another sudden rush of tears. I want to be Levi’s soft place. Maybe I should have been, that night he saw the journal. He said those things that hurt me; he handled it all wrong. But should I have stayed anyway? Should I have been soft instead of hard, even if it would have cost me something?

I know Dad can tell I’m restless—that I want to get up and make it better right now—because he pats my hand again, stilling me.

“Around here, everyone thinks it’s pretty lucky to be born a Fanning. That family’s awful classy. Got a lot of money, a lot of history. Heck, from what you’re saying, two of those kids never even had to think about what kind of job they’d need to get some day! That’s really something.”