Foreign Exchange (5 page)

Tristan waved
—no surprise, she was the one to make first contact. She beckoned me over and held out her hand to shake, as though we were adults. The first thing she said to me was, “I’m twelve,” which, for a second, made me wonder if that was her name. But then she said, “My name is Tristan Bishop.” She said it just like that, her whole name, like it was a brand or a label, and little did I know at the time, it pretty much would be, in our town.

“I’m Jamie,” I said, and when she kept shaking my hand—so mature—I felt the need to add, “I’m
almost twelve.”

“I just turned. My brother Sawyer’s thirteen
.” She motioned to the cute guy who’d just walked into the back of the monster moving truck. “But stay away from him. He’s a girlaholic”––that’s what she’d called him—“and you’re
my
friend.”

That was my first of many warnings about Sawyer, which I didn’t think much about at the time. Tristan asked me if I wanted to help them move in and I said, “Sure.” I was going to be watching them anyway. Might as well watch them up close.

On my third or fourth trip to pick up a box from the truck, Sawyer was in there, box already in hand, and he said, “Here, take this one. It’s light.” His first words to me, and I still remember them. When he passed me the box, our fingers brushed and I felt a buzz go all the way up my arms.

Sawyer gently tugs at the earphone cord, and I realize how long I’ve been holding it. How long I’ve been touching his fingers.

“Oh! Yeah!” I let out a loud, embarrassed laugh and let go, but Sawyer doesn’t seem to notice. He’s busy trying to choose the right outlet of their surround-sound system to plug the cord into. He must find it, because the TV goes suddenly silent.

Eddy looks up in alarm.
Even though his hearing isn’t great, the TV volume is weirdly a big thing for him. I think he can feel the vibration of it.

“It’s in here, buddy.” Sawyer holds up the earphones, which Eddy had dropped in his lap. Eddy looks at Sawyer and watches his lips. “Listen,” Sawyer says, tapping the earphones to his ear.

I can’t believe how good Sawyer is with Eddy. There’s this Sawyer I know at school—self-satisfied, egotistical, presumptuous with girls––the Sawyer who’s written about in the upstairs girls’ bathroom.

Then there’s
this side of him I’m seeing with Eddy, this gentle, patient, helpful side. It’s surprising, to say the least.

“What?” Sawyer turns back from the stereo system and sees me staring.

I shake my head.

“Are you thirsty?” Sawyer asks, quieter, like he doesn’t really want to draw the attention of his parents.

The truth is, my mouth is incredibly dry. But at the same time, I don’t want him to have to go to the kitchen and get something for me. I like that Sawyer and I are having a few minutes together without Tristan glaring at us. He’s different here, and I can’t help but warm to him.

Sawyer and I make our way back to the couch, though we automatically sit wide
enough apart that both Sawyer’s parents could fit between us. Eddy is enthralled, watching the menu words go by, and periodically taking off the headphones and looking at them in awe. He must feel the vibration through them too.

“I heard from Tristan, too,” I tell Sawyer, quietly.
Maybe it’s still Tristan’s comments about me staying away from Sawyer, but I don’t want Mr. and Mrs. Bishop to overhear.

“Yeah? Still in Newark?”

I smile inside. I’m proving to Tristan that I
can
keep things casual, even without her around. “Yeah. I really think she’s going to be okay. Her email to me was more upbeat, not so worried.”

“Mmm. Good,” he says, but his downturned face still looks concerned.
He must have inherited Mr. Bishop’s worry-gene.

“
So…how come you aren’t going to Spain?” I ask, just to change the subject. “On the class trip?” I remember what his email to Tristan had said. “At least one of us gets to go to Europe, right?” and I wonder if there was a hint of bitterness behind that statement. I’d always been around to see Tristan’s competitiveness with her brother, but I guess I never paid enough attention to see if it worked both ways.

He shrugs and glances toward his parents in the other room. “I don’t have the funds.”

“You said you were working on weekends, though, right?” I admit, I don’t completely believe him, and part of me wants to catch him in his ruse. Tristan has told me that he hangs out at a college in Detroit on the weekends, scoping out college girls. I’d like to see how he explains that to me, to see if he can be honest.

To see i
f we can really be friends.

Sawyer
shrugs again, and I can tell by the way he shifts and then shifts again that the question makes him uncomfortable. “Yeah. I work pretty regularly at a college in Detroit, but it’s barely enough to pay for the Jeep.”

I squint. First of all, Tristan had led me to believe
that her parents had
given
Sawyer the Jeep. It was another of her ways of showing me how unfair life was in her household. But even if that wasn’t the case, I’m not sure what to believe about this job thing now.

“
What do you do there?” I ask at the same time that Sawyer says, “I guess you must be excited, huh?”

This, at least, is a subject I have no hesitation or confusion about. “Yeah
, I’ve been waiting to get on the trip ever since Mr. Echols announced it at the assembly last year.” It took some work getting Mom to agree to stay home with Eddy, but once that issue was solved, I'd barely been able to wipe off my perma-smile.

Tristan was the one who made me realize how close I’d be to my dad. That was the same day she started looking into exchange programs. My dad lives in Italy. Mom and I moved around with him for the first five years of my life, but when Eddy was born, it was too much for him.
Too much for all of us. I don’t blame him because he couldn’t handle the concept of raising my severely disabled brother. I don’t even hold a grudge because he never calls anymore. I’m pretty sure Mom told him not to. She won’t tell me anything about where he lives now, and she won’t admit that we need his help, but even just his financial help would make our lives so much easier. And it would make Eddy’s life better, I’m sure of it.

The room is quiet after that
––too quiet, as I get lost in my thoughts. Even Mr. and Mrs. Bishop have stopped arguing.

“So my sister really seemed happy to you?”
Sawyer asks, finally.

“Yeah, totally.
Back to her confident self.” My voice is too peppy, obviously covering something. I glance away trying to regain some composure.

Eddy’s head
is flailed back on the beanbag chair. His mouth is hanging open and he’s fast asleep. “Um, I guess I’d better get going.” I stand and turn toward Eddy, wondering how I’m going to manage this. If I wake him, he'll keep me up until after midnight when Mom gets home.

Sawyer jumps to his feet. “Let me get your shoes.”

He reappears with a pair of shoes in each hand. One pair is mine and one must be his. I just realize now that I never bothered to take Eddy’s shoes off. “You can put these on here.” He bends down and places my Converse in front of my feet, then pulls on his own dark sneakers. “I’ll carry the big guy home for you.” He shifts away from me, and looks toward the front door. “If you want, I mean.”

“Yeah. Yes!” I say, too enthusiastically. “That would be so cool of you.” My emotions are flip-flopping back and forth with Sawyer. I thought I’d had him pegged—he’d grown into this self-absorbed player of a guy. But tonight... I can’t help seeing there is so much more. So much of the thirteen-year-old
nice boy who had just moved in next door, and only wanted to play with me and Tristan. That part of him grew up into a good guy.

Mr. and Mrs. Bishop don’t notice us and I don’t want to interrupt them
. Sawyer bends down for Eddy, slipping the earphones off of him. “Stay close,” he says to me. “In case he wakes up, I don’t want him to freak out.”

And that
would
freak Eddy out, so I stay close to the far side of the beanbag while he gets his arms underneath my brother. I catch another whiff of Jean Paul Gaultier, and I stumble a tiny step closer. I can barely manage walking Eddy around the house, but Sawyer picks the kid up like he’s a small bag of potatoes.

“I’ll get the door,” I say when I’m sure Eddy’s not going to stir.

Sawyer follows me through his house, out the front door, and over to our yard silently. I dig out my key and fumble to unlock the front door, but I’d forgotten to turn the porch light on, so it isn’t easy.

“Sorry,” I whisper. “I can
hardly see the lock.”

“No worries,” he whispers back.

Whispering out in the dark together feels like we’re sneaking around, doing something against the rules. And I guess if you count Tristan’s rules, we kind of are. Finally my key finds the lock. After opening the door, I turn, figuring I’ll take Eddy from here, but Sawyer walks straight for the darkened stairway.

I
scurry up behind Sawyer. He hasn’t been in our house in several years, but he seems to know exactly where he’s going. Partway down the hall, he glances through my bedroom doorway, but he keeps walking until he gets to Eddy’s room.

I
reach over the bedrail and pull back Eddy’s blankets before Sawyer sets him down. He’s so gentle with my brother, and as soon as I've slipped off Eddy's shoes, Sawyer’s pulling the blankets back over him. Sawyer stays there, looking down at him for a few seconds.

He
turns to me, a smile uplifting one side of his mouth. A stray piece of dark hair has fallen onto his face with the effort of carrying my brother, and without thinking, I reach over and push the tendril of long bangs back.

“I…uh…it had fallen, I guess.”

His half-smile stays put. “Thanks.”

We’re still whispering, because of Eddy, really, but
I wonder if we’d be whispering even if my brother weren’t here. Sawyer looks away, and the moment is broken. Though I’m not sure what I was expecting.

I follow him out of the room
. There’s a weird anticipatory feeling in the air, and for some reason I get a memory of him hiding out behind the hedges and throwing snowballs at Tristan and me so long ago.

I let out a breathy laugh and he turns back to look at me, eyebrows raised. I decide to just say it. “Remember when you
hid in the bushes and then pummeled us with snowballs?” I swear he must have spent an entire morning squishing the snow into balls with the amount he had stockpiled. Of course the day hadn’t ended well. Sawyer had snuck up and asked if I wanted to join his team. Against Tristan. When she saw us hiding behind the hedges together, all hell broke loose.

Sawyer
remembers that day, too. I see it on his face—a look like he has a secret. Or we have a shared secret. Which reminds me again of how Sawyer felt like he could let me in on Tristan’s secrets from her parents—the ones she hadn’t even told me.

H
e surprises me, stopping in front of my bedroom doorway. When my blinds are open, the streetlight on the road gives it lots of light. 

“You’ve changed…it,” he adds, almost as an afterthought.

If anyone’s changed, it’s Sawyer, and I’m tempted to say so, but then I quickly rush for the safe conversation ground of my room. “They’re not very good, but I like to paint all the places I plan to go one day.”

Sawyer scans my room and lets out a low whistle.
Most of my paintings wouldn’t be recognizable to anyone but me, but I love to let my paintbrush swirl around on the thick paper and dream about the places I’ve imagined myself going.

The air betwe
en us feels so quiet.

“
Is one of them for your Barcelona trip?”

I point to the painting right over my bed.
“Yeah, that one.”

Sawyer nods
. “It’s a good likeness.”

I suppress furrowing my brow. I’m certain he doesn’t recognize
La Pedrera
, but what’s the big deal if he wants to play arrogant? He did just help me so much with Eddy.

Sawyer ducks back out of my room and heads for the stairs.
“I should probably…you know…” he motions to the front door.

“Thanks so much for carrying Eddy home for me
. It would have been a long night if you hadn’t.”

He sta
nds at the bottom of our stairs and looks at me, almost like he’s waiting for something. I scratch my arm uncomfortably.

“I’d better go
,” he says again, after several more quiet seconds. He reaches for the door handle but looks back at me one more time before he opens it.

Does he want me to ask him to stay in this darkened house
, with my brother fast asleep upstairs? Even though any girl at Ainslea High would get her eyes checked if she saw
that
on the disabled bathroom door tomorrow, I can’t quite imagine it being true.

He likes college girls, I remind myself.