Left Drowning(49)

I settle in next to Sabin, and when he lets out a loud morning yawn, I clamp a hand down over his mouth. “Shhh!”

“What time is it?” he whispers.

I lean down and put my mouth by his ear. “Still early.” He starts to snore, and I have to stifle a giggle. “Sabin, Sabin, Sabin!” I pat his shoulders.

He rouses slightly. “What is it, baby?”

“It’s Black Friday.”

“Oh.”

“Wanna go buy an unnecessarily big TV?”

“Totally.” He rolls over and beckons, so I crawl onto him and pin him down by putting my knees on either side of his belly. Sabin rubs his eyes and then blinks up at me. His voice is scratchy and raw, but he once again sounds like the boy I know and love. “Can we get one of those breakfast station thingies, too?”

“I don’t know what a breakfast station thingy is.”

“You know. It’s a combo toaster, coffeemaker whatchamahoozey with a teeny fold-down skillet.” He yawns again. “For half a strip of bacon and one small fried egg. A quail egg or somethin’.”

“Yes, we can get one of those.”

“And maybe a pair of roller skates?”

“If it’s a good bargain, yes.”

“Awesome. Let’s go.”

He sits up, pulls me closer so I’m grabbing onto him like a koala baby, and scoots us to the end of the futon.

“Chris’s room,” I direct him. “He’s making coffee to go.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He carries me easily, opening the door with one hand and holding me with the other.

He takes us down the hall, with me plastered to his chest and my arms and legs wrapped around him. I rub my nose against his. “It’s gonna be a really giant television, okay?”

He rubs my back. “Obscenely so.”

We get to Chris’s door and Sabin pauses before he turns the knob. “I’m so sorry. Last night was f*cked up. Really f*cked up. I love you, B.”

I am not going to cry again today. I’m not. “I love you, too,” I tell him.

***

An hour or so later, after stopping at a diner for breakfast, Chris, Sabin, and I pile back into the truck. I feel more than ready to shop. After what I just went through, and what I put Chris through, something more mindless seems direly necessary.

Sabin throws himself into the small back cab and lies down, giving me the front passenger seat.

“Which mall are we going to?” I ask. Chris pulls out of the parking lot and drives for a minute. “I was thinking the one in Reinhardt.”

I look at him. “Isn’t that, like, two hours away?”

“Yeah.” He takes a right turn and heads toward the highway. “It is.”

“Why that one?”

He shrugs. “Do you have anything else to do today?”

I smile. “No.”

“Good. I thought we could just drive.”

Sabin, who I’m guessing is horribly hungover, falls asleep the minute we hit the highway. I suppose that I should be exhausted, too, but I don’t feel it. All I feel is such a shocking level of tranquility that I can’t imagine sleeping right now because I want to enjoy this new feeling.

Chris turns up the radio and then takes my hand as he settles in for the drive. We say nothing for the first hour. Occasionally he drops my hand to change the music, but then immediately takes it back in his. Perhaps I should find this confusing, given that we are not anything other than friends. Friends don’t go around holding hands all the time. I mean, it’s not like Estelle and I sit around our room holding hands while we do homework. I wonder whether I was wrong to think that we are meant to be more. Then I decide to focus on what I know for sure: that I have found a friend, this spectacular boy, who has saved me from drowning.

Chris turns down the radio. “Blythe?”

“Yeah?”

“Whatever happened to the summerhouse that your parents bought? The one you never got to stay at?”

It seems like such a funny question to me, maybe because I haven’t thought about it in so long.

“Oh. Well, James and I own it, I guess. The last I heard, it was pretty much shut down, and a maintenance guy checks in on it a few times a year. My aunt has been paying the taxes and stuff from our account.”

“You haven’t been to it since that summer?”

“No. It … this is going to sound crazy … but it’s never occurred to me. It wasn’t even officially ours yet when my parents died. They’d bought it, but we’d only walked through it; we’d never moved in.”

“But you haven’t sold it.”

“No, I haven’t.”

“How long has it been? Four years?”

“Four years last July.”

“July?” Chris squints into the bright sunlight. “Huh.”

“What?”

“Nothing. Just … It’s nothing. Well, maybe you’ll go to the house one day.”

“Maybe.”

For a moment he takes his hand from mine and moves his fingers over my forearm. “How badly were you hurt? You said your arm was bleeding a lot, and with all the smoke … Were you in the hospital long?”

I like that he’s not afraid to ask me more about that night. “I was treated for smoke inhalation, but it wasn’t too bad. My arm was … messy. No permanent injury except for the scar, of course. We were not exactly in the big city at a top hospital. I was stitched up and otherwise put back together, but James needed more help than I did.”