Aftermath(63)

Three days later, Jamil barged into his room to take his deodorant, saying, “Not like you need it yet anyway.”

As Jamil was walking out, he spotted the posters. “What the hell are those?”

“All-Time Five and Doctor Who. Skye gave them to me.”

“A boy band and a geek show? Tell me you just put them up to score points with her.”

Jesse could have said yes. Ended the conversation there. But that wasn’t true, so he said, “I put them up because I like them.”

His brother’s face screwed up in disgust. “You don’t even try, do you? Just keep this door closed when I have friends over.”

Jesse walks to his closet, opens it, reaches into the back corner and pulls out the posters.

They made him happy. He liked seeing them neatly displayed on his wall. He took time with that, measuring the distance from the room corners and using a level to get them just right. Then he lay in bed and admired his work and thought about Skye, and remembered listening to the album and watching the TV show, and her giving him the posters, and how she lit up when he was pleased.

He tugs off one rubber band, and he’s just about to unroll the poster when his phone beeps. A polite beep. Quiet and unobtrusive, but he’s been listening for it.

It’s a text. Just one word: talk?

Jesse: here.

Silence. Silence. He checks his signal, but of course it’s fine.

Skye: that sounds ominous.

Jesse rereads his text and realizes she misinterpreted the single word as terse. He forgot that about Skye. Her own communication is so expressive – her face, her gestures – that she flounders when she doesn’t get that from others.

He remembers that as kids, even after they’d been hanging out for weeks, Skye was still wary, as if she expected him to stop talking to her at any moment. Finally, she gave in to her blunt side and said, “If you’re not okay hanging out with me, just say so. You don’t have to do it to be nice.”

He asked what made her think that, and she said, “I can’t tell with you, Jesse. You seem to like talking to me, but… I just can’t tell.” Which made him laugh, because he’d been worrying he was giving too much away, making a fool of himself.

Skye: Jesse?

He snaps out of his thoughts and sends: here. Then he curses under his breath, and quickly types: everything’s fine. well, not fine, but ok. i think they’re disappointed in me and —

Skye: if it’s a bad time, just say so.

That’s the problem with not using text-speak. It takes so long to type a message that the other person thinks you aren’t answering.

He switches to video chat. It pings Skye, and when she picks up, at first all he sees is… well, boobs. She’s holding the phone at chest height, and his screen fills with her T-shirt, stretched tight across — “Whoops,” she says, and then starts raising the camera. “Better?”

“Uh…” He starts to laugh, except it’s more of a snicker, a completely embarrassing thirteen-year-old-boy snicker.

“Okay, bad choice of words,” she says, laughing. “It’d be kinda weird if you said, ‘Yes, the view of your neck is much better, Skye.’” The camera continues shifting until he has her face. “There. Perhaps not better, but more appropriate.”

The camera moves again as she flips onto her back, holding the phone over her face. She’s lying atop bedcovers, hair out of her ponytail, fanning around her face, and he’s close enough to see her freckled nose and the birthmark just over her lips, those wide lips parted in the ghost of a smile, green eyes still dancing with her laugh.

He swallows and sits up, cross-legged on the bed. “So, as I was trying to text – very slowly, in full words, because someone is eighty and can’t read text-talk – I spoke to my parents. It went… pretty much as one would expect. Confusion. Disbelief. Quickly disguised disappointment. More confusion.”

“It’ll be okay.”

He has braced for her to offer some meaningless platitudes, tell him his parents weren’t disappointed. Lie to him. Which only proves that he’s still adjusting to having her back.

“Feel better now?” she says softly as she tucks stray hair behind her ear.

He smiles. “Yep. Ripped off the Band-Aid. Hurts like hell. Wish I’d done it long ago.”

“And… exhale.”

He chuckles. “Exactly.” Which is true. That’s how he felt. Like he could finally breathe again. “So how about you? Glad to get it all in the open with Mae?”

Dismay and regret flash, and then she blinks. “Oh, you mean telling her what’s happening.”

“Uh-huh. But that’s not all you got in the open, apparently.”

“Yeah. I… I tried not to. I went into it totally calm. But what I expected was hurt and confusion, like with your parents.”

“What happened?”

“She didn’t believe me.”

“Huh?” He stretches on his stomach, phone in front of him. “Which part?”

“All of it.”

“What?”

“She thinks I set the fire and made that video. I’m clearly in need of attention, having been neglected by my entire family, including her.”

“Her?”