Heart to Heart (2 page)

We locked the door and fell back on the bed, breathing hard. I was scared. Elowyn was laughing. “Wow!”

“Shhh!” I said. “Don’t wake your folks.”

“Never happen.” She raised herself up on her elbows. “Why’d you run?”

I told her.

“You know guys want to do more if you start kissing them.”

“Not without permission. Don’t you agree?”

“Older guys especially expect stuff. You know that.”

My face got hot.

“It’s okay,” she said. “We’ll never see them again anyway.”

“You think?”

“Positive. What guy wants to be with a girl who almost drowns him?”

We dissolved into a fit of giggles.

In ninth grade, we entered Alpha High School, a place so large we needed maps to find our way around the buildings. Fortunately we made the
junior varsity volleyball team, which gave us a leg up in the dog-eat-dog world of incoming freshmen. Once the team started winning, people began to know who we were. Not a bad place to be. And then, with little warning, my cozy little world shifted.

Elowyn got a boyfriend.

The boy was Wyatt Nolan, a ninth grader with curly brown hair and dark brown eyes. Elowyn pointed him out to me on the basketball court in February during a game where we were sitting in the bleachers cheering for our team. “What do you think of him?” she asked over the noise of the crowd.

He was a purple and gold blur running down-court. “I can’t see his face.”

“It’s gorgeous,” she said. “Don’t you think he looks French?”

“I don’t know. What difference does it make?”

“He’s in my French class.”

“Okay. Does that make him more adorable?”

She tilted her chin at me and smiled. “It does.”

She hooked him. By the end of basketball season,
she was wearing his JV jacket and they were texting each other ten times a day. Not that cells are allowed at Alpha, but she managed to communicate with him. She and Wyatt were inseparable. Which meant I got shoved aside. Okay, maybe not
shoved
, but I definitely took a backseat in her life priorities. Elowyn was immersed in this guy. At first, I moped around feeling sorry for myself. When your best friend gets all preoccupied with “love” and there’s no room for anyone else, your feelings get hurt.

Our friendship caught a break the summer between our freshman and sophomore years because Wyatt went to basketball camp, then to Indiana to visit his grandparents. I didn’t miss him. Elowyn did. Her family’s “vacation” was to Clearwater, Florida, and I was invited—just like old times. I was ready to have fun, but Elowyn dragged around halfheartedly. I couldn’t even lure her into the ice cream parlor for her favorite comfort food, Chunky Monkey. The girl had a bodacious sweet tooth. “I’m buying,” I said. “Waffle cones and toppings!” All she talked about was how much she missed Wyatt.

When I mentioned it, she went off on me. “You don’t know what it’s like to be in love.”

I kept my thoughts to myself.

“You should get a boyfriend.”

“No one I like,” I said. It was true. Guys our age at Alpha seemed immature to me. Deep down, I felt
shy about guys. I never had a dad around to talk to. Men were not really part of my life.

Elowyn and Wyatt talked on their cells for an hour every night while I watched TV or lay on the bed tossing a volleyball into the air endlessly. If they were still attached to each other next summer, I told myself I was staying home instead of going on her vacation.

Once we got home, Elowyn and I went back-to-school shopping and that was fun. She had a calendar on her bedroom wall with the days marked off until Wyatt returned. “What’s this?” I asked the first time I saw it. “I used to mark the days before Christmas off when I was a kid, but I outgrew it.”

She stuck out her tongue. “Don’t be mean.”

When school started, Elowyn and Wyatt were again joined at the hip and I was left to figure out my life on my own. They never really included me and I didn’t want to be a tagalong anyway. But a few months into the new school year, cracks started to form in their “love.”

“I hate him!” Elowyn said, coming into the gym to dress for volleyball practice. Our season started after football season and Coach had us practicing every day after school.

“Who?”

“Wyatt.” She slammed open her locker next to mine.

“I thought you loved him.”

“I’m mad at him.”

“For what?”

“He wants to hang with his friends Friday night instead of going out with me.”

That didn’t seem like a “hate-able” offense to me. “You can’t go out Saturday night instead?”

“He has to work.”

I sat down to tie my sneakers. “You two go out all the time. Maybe he needs some guy time.”

“So you’re on his side?”

“Stop it. You’re my friend.”

She pouted. “I don’t like being blown off.”

“Tell me about it.” My comment, meant to express how she often made me feel, went over her head.

Coach’s whistle blew, signaling that we were all expected on the court.

“Go on,” Elowyn said, looking dejected.

“I’ll hate Wyatt too,” I said, turning backward and moving toward the door. This wasn’t hard since he’d never made any effort to even talk to me.

I never got the chance to hate him, though, because they’d made up by suppertime. The trouble was, problems kept surfacing. If Wyatt broke a date, they’d stop speaking for two days. If Elowyn shunned
him in the halls, he’d sit with his buds during lunch instead of her. She’d ignore his calls and texts. I couldn’t keep track of who was mad at whom and why. Then one December day, Wyatt came up to me while I was fiddling with my hall locker. He slammed the palm of his hand so hard against the metal locker beside mine that I jumped a foot. “What?” I screeched. “Are you trying to give me a heart attack?”

“Elowyn is psycho!”

“Don’t talk about my friend like that.”
She
was usually the one who beat a path to me with a list of gripes about
him
. I hesitated, then asked, “Now what?”

“I walked Jan Frickie to class and El saw us and had a meltdown. I mean it was nothing. We’re in the same class and we were just walking.”

“The blowup—public or private?”

“Private.”

“That’s good.”

“She won’t even speak to me. Ignores my texts and calls.”

I sighed. “Anything going on with you and Jan?”

“No way! El’s the one. She’s crazy jealous. Sometimes I feel like she’s swallowing me whole.”

He looked so dejected, I felt kind of sorry for him. “Any ideas how I can fix this?” he asked. “She’s really wacked-out and you can help. Please?”

The bell rang and I knew I was going to be late.
Inspiration hit me. “Text her in French,” I said, tossing books into my locker and shutting the door.

“Are you kidding?”

“Try it. Make it romantic,” I said, jogging away.

My advice worked, and before I knew it, I became the most-to-be-pitied of human life-forms: the go-between.

Elowyn turned sixteen on December twentieth. She got her license the same day, and her dad gave her the keys to her own car. “Birthday and Christmas,” he told her. She was jumping up and down and screaming; I was staring, awestruck. I wouldn’t be sixteen until March and I was certain there was no car in my future. I’d have to share Mom’s old Honda.

Elowyn dangled the keys in front of me. “Let’s go!”

Her car was bright red, with all kinds of bells and whistles. We hopped inside. The new-car smell was intoxicating and I breathed in deeply.

“Not too far,” Terri called out from the front door.

“We still have cake to eat, Sugar Plum!” her dad yelled.

“Save me a piece!” Elowyn cried as she backed out of the driveway and spun the wheel.

“You be back in twenty minutes!” Terri shouted. “And fasten your seat belts!”

“Twenty minutes. As if!” Elowyn said to me. “Try the radio.”

I found our favorite station. “Where are we going?”

“To show it to Wyatt. Where do you think?”

Not where I’d wanted to go, but I understood. I’d helped to negotiate another truce between them a few days before. Of course she’d want to show him her new car.

“I’ll have a key made for you,” she said.

Her words floored me. “To your car? I’m not legal yet.”

“You will be. And until then, I’ll be picking you up for school every day.”

My mom usually drove us to school and Terri picked us up after practice. “That’ll be so cool. Thank you!”

She grinned. “This will be our best year ever.”

Unless you and Wyatt kill me with your squabbling
, I thought, but I didn’t say it. Elowyn had offered me the keys to her car, and I was happy to have such a wonderful and generous best friend.

Mom and I were in the kitchen when she said, “Your father wants to reestablish contact with you.”

She dropped this bombshell on me right after New Year’s.

“What? Why?” I was startled by the news. We hadn’t heard from my dad in many years, and I hardly remembered him, since he’d bailed when I was three.

“According to this, he’s turning his life around.” She waved several pieces of paper at me. “He’s catching up on back child support too. You may be able to go to any college you want after all.”

I’d asked Mom questions about him when I was younger: “Why did he leave?” “Where is he?” “Why doesn’t he come visit?” Then when I turned twelve,
Mom sat me down and told me the hard truth. My father was an addict, a druggie. She said, “I knew he had drug problems when we married, but I thought he’d give it up once he had a family. He didn’t. When you were three, I told him, ‘Us or the drugs.’ He picked the drugs and I left with you and he disappeared.” The story was unvarnished, unlaced with comforting words like “he loved you.” Nothing but plain hard facts. She wasn’t mean or angry when she told me, just factual. Her eyes held mine and her voice was steady.

The shock of the truth about my father turned me hot, then cold all over. I had started to cry. What ever happened to “just say no”? In my imagination, I’d made up a father who was an adventurer, a world traveler who trotted around the globe and who Mom had divorced because he was always gone. But from the moment since she’d told me the truth, I’d flushed him out of my heart. There was only Mom and me. I’d sprung from her body like a mushroom.

Learning my father was a drug addict repulsed me. At school only kids on the fringe messed with drugs. Alcohol and cigs were common, but not hard drugs. What hurt most was hearing that he’d abandoned us, throwing us away like an old pair of shoes. I felt so ashamed that I’d never told a soul about him, not even Elowyn. Now I was almost
sixteen and he wanted contact. “Ha! What’s he want from me?” I asked Mom.

“He just wants to get reacquainted. Well, acquainted. He’s trying to make amends. You can e-mail him. He gave his e-address.”

“Where is he?”

“Colorado.”

“What should I do?”

“Whatever you want. This has to be your decision, Kassey.”

My mom watched over me and always had. We were a team, mother and daughter braving the world together. I had no place for my father in my life or in my heart. “I don’t want to contact him,” I said. “Why should I? Just because
he
wants to?”

She looked at me for a long time, then finally she said, “Maybe someday you will.”

I was pretty sure I wouldn’t. I didn’t even think about whether Mom would stay in touch or what she would tell him. I didn’t care.

Volleyball season was in full swing by the end of January. Elowyn and I had moved up to the varsity squad and the local paper called us “the dynamic duo.” Coach Collins called us “the Force.” We were on a winning streak and I loved it. My grades were tops, my volleyball skills smoking, my friendships
solid. Maybe Elowyn’s statement that this would be our best year ever would come to pass.

I was at Elowyn’s house, the news about my father wanting contact burning a hole in me. I wasn’t used to keeping secrets from her. “So how are you doing in Wyatt-land?” I asked.

“Good, for now.” Elowyn smiled, toyed with the locket Wyatt had given her for her birthday and Christmas and that she never removed.

“Good to hear,” I said.

“Just wait until your birthday,” she said with a grin, and held up the huge jangling key chain with the words
Friends Forever
set with sparkly crystals I’d gotten her for Christmas. “You can’t lose this one in your purse,” I’d said at the time.

She’d also given me a cashmere sweater plus slipped me a key to her car, which I’d stashed in a zippered compartment of my purse. “Six weeks,” I said. “But who’s counting?”

We laughed like crazy. Mom was to get off work early and I would take my driver’s license test the day I turned sixteen. I couldn’t wait.

On Wednesday night a week before Valentine’s Day, I was holed up in my room with a geometry book, a furious thunderstorm raging outside, and flickering electricity. “Don’t go down,” I pleaded with the fluctuating current. Elowyn had wanted me to hit the mall with her after school, but I’d begged
off. I had a huge test on Monday and this stuff was hard.

Rain slammed against the windows of my bedroom. Lightning flashed. I cringed.

My cell went off with the music I’d downloaded to signal a call from Elowyn. I grabbed it. “You find any bargains without me?” I asked cheerfully.

“It’s over,” she said, crying.

“What’s over?”

“Me and Wyatt.”

I slumped. “What happened?”

“I caught him with Jan Frickie. I was coming out of Macy’s, the door nearest the theater, and he and Jan were standing out front talking and … and holding hands.”

My stomach dropped. “Oh no. El, I’m sorry.”

She cried harder.

I said, “Maybe there’s an explanation—”

“Oh sure! They had an explanation all right. They’d just ‘bumped into each other.’ That’s what they told me.”

My heart thudded. “You talked to them? While they were together?”

“You bet I did! I hammered them both right there on the sidewalk, in front of everyone. I let them have it. Called him every name I could think of.”