Here So Far Away(12)

Joshua turned around, eyes dark with rage, and it dawned on me that he could hurt me if he wanted to. Then he blinked and the first tear dribbled through his long bronze lashes.

Shocked, I let go of him and he ran. He ran straight into a lady carrying a tray of drinks, and left grape soda footprints in his wake.

The rest of the guys started howling, even Keith.

Fucking boys.





Six


“See you at midnight,” Matthew said.

I laughed. For the record, not because I planned to end up at Long Fellows that night. Oh, I’d thought about it—not going to the bar but the fact of it, sitting beside the highway east of Veinot, luring a Come From Away with its semiliterary name. If only I had a fake ID, I might have been able to manufacture a chance encounter, but I had no excuse for strolling past the farm up on the ridge that wouldn’t be obvious and desperate.

As predicted, Mum and Dad had decided to stay overnight at Aunt Joanna’s in the city, a two-hour drive away, and as predicted, there was a shack party to celebrate the end of the first week of school. I was driving Nat, so I wasn’t drinking, but I wasn’t coming home before I had to either.

“What makes you so sure I won’t tell Dad you missed curfew?” Matthew asked, peering into the pot of chowder that Mum had left simmering for us on the back of the stove. She had also set out two bowls, two napkins, two spoons, and a note reminding us that there was bread in the breadbox. (There was always bread in the breadbox.)

“Because you’re not a tattletale.”

“I’m not lying if he calls and asks if you came home on time.”

“Say you don’t know. Say you went to bed early and didn’t wake up when I came in.”

“But what if I didn’t go to bed early?”

I tried rolling the sleeves of the fitted green tweed blazer that Lisa had found to go with my sloppiest Levi’s. Better down, she’d say. I rolled them down. “You’re in tenth grade now, buddy. You gotta learn to handle this stuff.”

He scowled a pretty scowl at me.

Anyone who thinks that being attractive isn’t an advantage in life, let me introduce you to Matthew Warren, a brainy, frail young fellow of fifteen who was growing up in a place where, for boys, size and athletic ability were the only currencies accepted. I had height and hair, and the rest was makeup and attitude. Matthew had refined features: large brown eyes, perfectly arched brows, and very white, very straight teeth. There was something almost glossy about him, the way light reflected off his surfaces. Being pretty—and you would have said he was pretty, not hot, since he hadn’t sprouted hair below his eyebrows yet—meant that people thought of him as quiet and shy, not scrawny and awkward. He wasn’t weak, he was unthreatening. He wasn’t nerdy, he was smart. And he knew the trick to preserving all this was to say as little as possible at school, which made him slightly mysterious. But in another year or so, once everyone in his grade was driving and going to shack parties, he would be exposed.

“Do you want to come?” I asked. “Check it out?”

He scrunched his well-sculpted nose. “Nah. I’m going over to Tim’s to play Super Nintendo.”

“Suit yourself. Just don’t not come because you’re chicken.”

“Why would I be chicken?”

“The Elevens?” His wince told me I’d nailed it. “You’d be with seniors.”

“Yeah, but you won’t be around all the time, and I don’t need some of those guys knowing my name.”

I reviewed the week with Nat on the way to the party. Mr. Gifford, who we’d had for economics in eleventh grade, was teaching a new class called Modern World Problems, and what with everything going down in Somalia (famine), Bosnia (genocide), and Nicaragua (earthquake), it seemed unlikely to make him cheerier. Someone was pregnant already—one of the headbanger girls—and Doug O’Donnell had been kicked out of class twice. The first time was for having bong breath at nine in the morning, the other for standing on his desk after Miss Aker delivered a moving sermon on the power of poetry.

History and French were the only classes that Joshua and I had together, but it had been hard to avoid him all the same. He didn’t exactly blend into the crowd, and we kept making accidental eye contact. I noticed he’d started focusing on the tops of the lockers as he navigated the hallway, rolling over the occasional tenth grader who got in his path.

Since there was no shack to be had that weekend, the party moved out to the quarry, which was basically a gigantic sand pit. “What are you going to do if Joshua comes?” Nat asked as we turned onto the dirt road that would take us through a patch of forest to the pit. Drunk kids were stumbling out of the parked cars that lined the shoulder.

“Oh, probably make him cry.”

At that moment my headlights lit up Lisa walking with Keith and Joshua. She hadn’t told me they were coming together. After what happened in the food court, did she honestly expect that we were all going to hang out?

I realized then that I should have told her about the stranger. If she knew I’d thought of him approximately ten thousand times over the past week, she’d understand what a lost cause this thing with Joshua was—not because I was being my usual heartless self, but because no matter how hot and adoring he was, no matter how perfect it would be if two best friends dated two best friends, nothing Joshua had said or done since the first grade had filled me with as much hope as hearing the stranger say, See you at Long Fellows!