Here So Far Away(58)

“I’m not.” I sat up. “I’m not.”

“Okay. You’re not.”

“I wish . . . I wish we could get out of here, just for a while.”

He’d be able to picture it better, being together. We’d see who we were away from the valley.

He saw me struggling, the floodwaters rising. “How about this,” he said. “I know someone in the city who’s gone to Guatemala for a year. She gave me a key to her place in case I wanted a break from the countryside. I don’t know how we’d both get away the same weekend without people putting two and two together, but—”

“Leave that to the professional.”

At this, Shaggy made a noise like someone was letting all the air out of him.

“You’re not coming,” I said.

“So you and I will go,” Francis said. “And we’ll figure this out. Because I love you, George. You commie bastard.”

“Well, get in line, son. My friend Bill says I’m the girl all the boys want to haul into their boat.”

As I said it, sunbeams poured in through the barn windows. Francis stared at them and he stared at me. “What?” I said. “I didn’t do it.”

If anything, it was the gods stating their approval. Then I noticed the rainbows, dozens of them all around us from the prism-shaped sun-catchers in the windows. “That might be over-the-top,” I said after we watched them, mesmerized, dancing over the rough wooden planks, the hay bales, and the walls.

Francis said, “I need you to say something to me before I go.”

“Where are you going?”

“Work. Say something incredibly romantic.”

“Never.”

“Do it for all the star-crossed lovers, George.” He wasn’t joking now. “I know you have it in you.”

“You’re . . . Ugch. You’re a part of me.”

“And?”

“I’m a part of you. And for the record, you can’t follow someone who’s a part of you.”

He took off one glove and one of my mittens and held my bare hand in his. “Thank you.”





Twenty-Eight


Rupert thought I was working on a big journalism assignment all weekend, and since Francis would be in the city until Sunday night, he arranged for Bobby the Biker Crooner to look in on him. He was worried that Rupert would find the timing suspicious, but Rupert was too huffed up about the suggestion that he couldn’t make do on his own to be making connections.

I couldn’t come up with an artful lie for my parents. There were so many ways for them to poke holes in my story if I said I wanted to visit relatives or go on a school trip or any other excuse I might concoct. The simplest thing, I’d decided, would be to just drive away. Leave a note on my bed that said I was going somewhere on a bus, then meet Francis over at Mr. and Mrs. Dempsey’s place. They were elderly neighbors who’d gone to Florida for the winter, so I could park Abe out of view in the driveway behind their house. If we took Francis’s car, no cops could set their sights on Abe’s license plates—though, if the note said I’d be back by Sunday night, my father probably wouldn’t send the troops after me. He wouldn’t announce that he couldn’t control his own kid if he didn’t have to. I’d get a serious grounding, but it was worth it.

That left Bill, who’d been hoping we could hang out that weekend. “Ugch, two whole days with crazy Uncle Burpie,” I said as we shot hoops after school. I wasn’t great at sinking baskets, but pounding the ball against the floor helped settle my nerves. “You’ve got, like, twenty minutes to give me an injury that gets me out of it.”

More like nineteen. I had to make an appearance at home before meeting Francis at eight.

I passed the ball to Bill and he immediately threw it back to me—or at me. So hard, my fingers snapped back.

“I was kidding!” I said.

“Sorry.”

“Are you?” He looked right pissy, as he had all day. “What’s wrong?”

“I was talking to Lisa.”

“Okay . . . ?”

“She told me she tried to call you.”

“When?”

“The day after that cop drove you home from the shack party.”

“Oh. I don’t think I was around.”

“She said you weren’t around the first time she called, but Matthew told her you’d be home at eleven, so she called you back.”

Matty had taken the message before he went to his friend Tim’s. I was out getting milk for the barrel of coffee I’d need after lying awake all night, replaying my conversation in the car with Francis, and Mum and Dad were staying in the city for my cousin Junior-Junior’s birthday party. The phone went off right at eleven. It must have rung a dozen times. It rang again when I got out of the shower, again after lunch, and when I was doing my homework in the late afternoon. Then it stopped, and when I went to school on Monday, Lisa had kept her distance as usual.

“I went out to the farm,” I said. “She didn’t say anything to me, so what did you want me to do? I don’t get why this is on me.”

It was on me because something that had seemed permanently frozen had thawed slightly—and I couldn’t do it, be Lisa’s friend again, not after I’d gotten back together with Francis. I’d never be able to keep it from her. The choice had been made even before I knew it was going to be put to me; it was made when I followed Francis into the woods.