None of the Regular Rules (16 page)

“No, it turns out I’m not,” he said with a laugh. “Once everyone left for school—and you and I started hanging out—I realized it would be stupid for me to act like a moron for the next four years and then get back on track. I also knew someone like you wouldn’t hang out with a total slacker.” He nudged my hand with his, then he returned it to the outside of his mug.

Johnny’s feet wiggled nervously on either side of me as he spoke. “Seeing your dedication to jumping off Hanging Rock made me realize I’d lost sight of my own goals. So I decided that if I work hard this year, I can try to pay my own way. I’m applying for every random scholarship I can find. I’ll try to get some financial aid on my own. I’m not going to let them dictate my future, just because it doesn’t mesh up with their idea of success.” He shrugged, and I could see the hope in his eyes again.

Johnny didn’t look defeated, which made me like him even more. “Part of the reason I knew we weren’t going to get arrested tonight is that one of my jobs is at the planetarium. I actually have a set of keys, so we could have easily argued our way out of an arrest. I could have turned off the alarm, if I’d wanted to. I’m a shift supervisor, so they give me the codes for stuff.”

I gaped at him. “Are you serious? Why didn’t we just turn off the alarm?”

“Would it have been exciting if we’d just walked calmly out of the front doors? I thought you might enjoy the thrill of possibly getting caught.”

“I did,” I admitted reluctantly. “The itty-bitty wannabe rebel in me liked the sirens.”

He grinned. “I know.” Suddenly, Johnny’s hand was millimeters from mine on top of the table. I could almost feel his fingers touching mine, but they weren’t. Not yet.

Before I could think about it or do anything, our pancakes came. The waitress dropped them on the table and scooted the trio of syrup into the middle of the table, forcing our fingers far apart again. After she walked away, I looked down, focusing every bit of my energy on the big ball of butter that was melting into a yellow puddle in the middle of my short stack. “Sophie…” Johnny said. His foot nudged the side of my leg under the table.

I looked up. Johnny didn’t say anything more, but the way he held my gaze—strong and steady and sure—made me absolutely certain that I knew how he felt about me. I almost felt like I was wrapped up in his arms, even though we were still sitting across the table from one another. I knew this time that he wasn’t just flirting with me the way he flirted with everyone—I knew the dynamic had changed.

We ate our pancakes slowly, talking about everything and nothing. He told me what it felt like when you hit the water below Hanging Rock the first time. I admitted that I hated Ian, and told him about the stupid fight my friends and I had and how
it sometimes felt like
our friendship was falling apart. We talked about our pumpkins, and wondered if they’d come back the next year. “Sometimes,” Johnny said. “A pumpkin vine will show up one season, then disappear the next. There’s no rhyme or reason to why they appear where or when they do. But then as soon as you start to get used to the suckers, when you learn to appreciate that they picked your yard to squat in, they’re gone.”

When we finished our meal, just as the first
brush
of orange touched the black sky, Johnny picked up the check and closed his fist over it. “Why don’t you leave,” he suggested. “Just walk out.”

“Dine and dash?” I asked. “I can’t. It’s on the list, but I just don’t think I can do it. I know our poor waitress is going to get stuck footing the bill, and as much as I want to respect the list and do everything on it, I can’t screw someone else over in the process.”

“Just leave, Sophie.” Johnny smiled, then winked exaggeratedly. “I’ll meet you outside in a few minutes. I just have to…do something.”

I winked back. “Okay,” I said, understanding the hint that he’d pay for both of us when I left. He was giving me the chance to do something on the list without the guilt of stealing. It was the perfect solution.
I stepped outside and waited, wondering how my friends had fared. I had forgotten to text them to check in, and now it was too late. I could only hope they’d forgive me for the night. We still had a lot of list to do.

The air was brisk, and tiny patches of frost clung to the few cars that were in the parking lot. I sat on my borrowed motorcycle and waited. After a few minutes, I heard the door open behind me. Then I felt Johnny next to me. Before I could turn toward him, he slipped one of his hands into mine and straddled the motorcycle so he was facing me. Our fingers were intertwined. My knees tucked between his legs and the bike. Our faces were inches apart.

Johnny’s eyes searched mine, looking for permission. I looked back at him, wanting this to be okay. Wishing this was real. Knowing it
was
real, but understanding it was wrong.

I wondered, though, was I just being
me
again—playing by the rules, playing it safe? Did I need to ask so many questions, or could I just go with this…could I let myself forget about the rules and the safest path long enough to enjoy being with this guy I liked?

I leaned in toward him, momentarily letting myself slip into something, a moment I knew couldn’t end well, but that I wanted so badly that it was worth it. I could feel his breath on my cheek. I closed my eyes when his hair brushed my ear, and breathed in that incredible lake smell that seemed to follow him everywhere.

We both turned, our eyes meeting again. Our lips were so close that I could almost taste the syrup from his pancakes. I wanted so badly to taste him, to get swept up in him…to become the kind of person who could kiss someone else’s
boyfriend
just because it felt right.

“You have a girlfriend,” I said, snapping out of it just long enough to finally break his gaze. “I can’t pretend the rules don’t apply to us.”

“It’s complicated with Mackenzie,” he said, reaching up with the hand that wasn’t holding mine. He tipped my chin up to look at him again. He sighed, and that was enough to tell me that it
might
be complicated, but she was still in the picture. “But this is okay. I like you—”

“I should go home,” I said, cutting him off.

“I know,” he sighed after a long moment. He pulled a bag out of his pocket and opened it up. “I bought us a frosted snowman cookie,” he said hopefully. “Dessert at the water tower?”

I shook my head. “Not tonight.”

“We’ll make this work, Sophie,” he promised. “Eventually. Me, you, the water tower dare. All of it. I promise.” Then he touched my cheek with the softest of touches and turned away from me. As he drove away from Perkins, I leaned forward and gently, secretly, kissed the space between his shoulder blades. It had to be enough.

CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN

That Monday, I woke up to see fat snowflakes tumbling from the sky. They were the size of sugar cubes, the kind of flakes you could chew. I pulled on my fleece pants and stared out into near whiteout conditions. I couldn’t even see as far as the lake out the back window—or Johnny’s house, next door.

I hadn’t talked to my gorgeous neighbor since early the previous morning, when he’d left me off at Grace’s to pick up my car after the pancakes and the almost
kiss. I wanted to see him again, but I was also dreading what would happen later this week, when his girlfriend came home for winter break. I was sure Mackenzie would come home. Everyone came home for their first Christmas after being away at college. Would he forget all about me when she returned? I hoped not. I trusted him, and knew he’d meant it when he said things would work between us. I could wait until he worked out whatever he had to work out with Mackenzie. I had to.

I pulled out my phone to see if Grace or Ella had texted to ask for a ride to school. They both hated walking in the snow, and neither of their parents was ever willing or able to drop them off. Grace could probably get a lift from Ian, but Ella should be texting me right about now. There was nothing. In fact, I hadn’t heard much from her or Grace at all since Saturday night. I hadn’t seen either of them when I went to pick up my car—the keys were on the tire, as I’d requested, and I’d been exhausted and eager to get home.

I’d had only a brief conversation with Ella on Sunday—a short, terse call. She’d made it clear that her mom was sitting right next to her while we talked, but it still felt more cold and distant than usual. I did find out that they’d been busted breaking back into Grace’s house, and Grace was grounded—except for school activities—for a month. Ella had been dropped off at home first thing in the morning, with a full report from Grace’s parents, and Sandy was furious. I was sure the trust issues between Sandy and Ella were shot to hell after she was busted for sneaking out. And the trust issues between me and my friends were more than frayed, especially since they’d covered for me and kept their parents from calling mine by saying I’d felt sick and gone home before they even
sneaked
out.

I knew they were both pissed at me for abandoning them for so long outside the planetarium, and I’m sure they were bitter that they’d been caught and I hadn’t. I felt guilty and ashamed, but comforted myself with the knowledge that I’d done what I could to make sure they weren’t arrested…and if they got in trouble despite my best efforts, they couldn’t blame me. They’d get over it eventually—but I had a feeling I’d be on my own for most of the rest of the stuff on Suzy’s list.

I went downstairs to the kitchen and found my mom sitting at the table. My dad waved to me from the back deck, where he was shoveling. I could hear him yell
“
hello
”
through our thick glass doors, and I waved back. “I thought you’d be at work,” I said to my mom, trying to stifle a yawn.

She looked at me, taking a moment to focus on my face before she said anything. “Everything’s closed—schools, restaurants, offices. The roads are a mess. The plows haven’t made a dent.” She smiled at me. “It’s a good excuse to get caught up on things around here.”

We sat together at the table, her reading the news on her laptop and me reading a book. “What are you going to do with the day?” I asked, trying to make conversation. I wanted to ask her about Suzy again, but had to butter her up with some casual chat first. I knew it was my best hope for getting her to open up so I could uncover more about Suzy’s real life.

“I don’t know,” she said with a shrug. “Catch up on some paperwork, maybe?”

“Fun stuff,” I deadpanned.

“It is.”

“Mom?” I walked toward the fridge. “You want some oatmeal? It’s a good morning for something hot.”

She beamed at me. “What a nice idea,” she said proudly. “Healthy.”

“Only the best for our bodies,” I added, smiling to myself.

While I made the oatmeal in a pot on the stove, I tried to figure out how to approach a Suzy conversation. If I was going to live out her last wishes, I wanted to understand more about the night she had died and the days leading up to it. I felt closer to her than I had in a long time, but I had this sense that I didn’t know the whole story. There had to be some disconnect between my family’s memory of her and the real girl she was.

I put two steaming bowls of oatmeal on the table, along with some skim milk. Then I dropped a pinch of brown sugar into the center of each pile of oatmeal. “A little something sweet
,
” I said with a smile. “It’s organic.”

My mom looked ecstatic.

As we dug into our mushy breakfast, I watched my dad trying desperately to keep up with the snow. He brushed off my car, then shoveled the sidewalk, then returned to the deck to start all over again. Most people would just let it all fall, then pull out their shovel when the sky was done dumping. But my dad liked to keep on top of things, to be prepared for whatever life threw at him. He’d come in wet and panting in a few hours, then would spend the afternoon gloating about how he was ahead of the game. Everyone got their kicks in different ways.

“Mom—can I ask you something?”

“Sure,” my mom said through a tiny, timid bite. She pushed the sugar to the side of her bowl and dug into the plain oatmeal. “What’s that?”

“Why was Suzy alone when she climbed the water tower?” I decided to just lay it all out there, come out with the question that was really bothering me, rather than ask around the issue. It was easier, and I had the surprise factor working in my favor. “Where were her friends?”

My mom stopped chewing. She swallowed. “I don’t know,” she said, pushing her breakfast aside.

“Haven’t you ever wondered about that?” I asked.

She looked at me for a long time before she took a deep breath. She folded her hands into her HR pose and looked at me seriously. It felt like I was being fired. “I know how much you admired your aunt, and how you looked up to her—and we don’t want to ruin that memory for you. But your aunt…well, she had her share of issues.”

“She was rebellious, I know,” I said, irritated. “That doesn’t make her a bad person.”

“You’re right,” my mom admitted. She shook her head. “But she certainly wasn’t a hero, either. She let us all down.”

“Stop villainizing her,
M
om, just because she pushed boundaries and wanted to make something more of herself than the rest of you!” I spat this out, eager to defend my dead aunt’s honor. “You all act like Suzy did this horrible thing to you by dying—like she died just to torture you. But it wasn’t her fault. It was an accident, and it could have happened to anyone. She’s not the first person who ever climbed that water tower. And she certainly won’t be the last.”

My mom focused on me, her expression unreadable. It looked like she was deciding how to deal with my outburst, how to tell me I was wrong again. How I couldn’t possibly understand. Finally, after a long pause, she said quietly, “Her fall wasn’t an accident, Sophie. Suzy killed herself. She took her own life.”

It felt like someone had kicked me in the chest—my lungs collapsed and all the air rushed out of me. My aunt, my hero, this person whose dreams I’d been chasing had killed herself? It was impossible.

“She jumped—she didn’t fall,” my mom said levelly, her eyes filling with tears. It was the first time I’d seen her get emotional about Suzy since the week after she’d died. “They say she didn’t suffer. She died instantly. It was reported as an accident, but it was of her own doing.”

My body began to shake, an uncontrollable, horrifying shudder that started somewhere in my chest and radiated outward. It was as though someone
had put an ice cube into my core and it was melting, radiating frozen bits into each of my limbs. No emotions could bubble up to the surface. I just sat there, stuck and stiff and shaking, staring at my bowl of gelatinous oatmeal.

“I’m sorry,” my mom said. For once, she didn’t try to find a silver lining. There was no silver lining. “Sophie, I understand how difficult this is to deal with.”

I felt sick, hearing my mother say those words. She didn’t understand. Maybe she was sorry, but that didn’t make it any better. Ten years. For ten years, they’d lied to me. I’d finally felt like I was getting to know my aunt again, through her list of goals…but now my mom was telling me that I didn’t know her at all. That everything I knew about her was probably a lie.

Suddenly, I thought of the list. I reached into the pocket of my fleece pants and pulled it out. “She didn’t commit suicide,” I said simply, realizing I was the only one who really knew the truth. “It
was
an accident. It must have been. Look…” I showed my mom the paper. “She was trying to eat dessert. She slipped doing a dare.” I knew it sounded ridiculous, but surely this must be the explanation. It was an accident. My mom was accusing her sister of something horrible, but it was just a misunderstanding. I was going to find my own silver lining, damn it.

My mom stared at the paper, absorbing everything the way that I had when I’d first found it in the car. “Where did you get this, Sophie?”

“In my car
.
Suzy’s car. Hidden away in the glove compartment.” Only then did I realize I’d just shown my mom this secret part of Suzy, something I’d been cherishing as mine and mine alone. It w
as too late to take it back.
I’d pulled it out, and now my mom would find some way to ruin this for me, too. “It’s mine, so don’t even try to take it.”

My mom released a long, slow sigh. “I won’t take it,” she said quietly. After a long pause, she said, “I remember this list.”

“You’ve seen it before?”

“Yes.” My mom chewed at her lip, an old nervous habit that she’d rid herself of during grad school. “She wrote it at the end of that last summer before senior year. I remember her working on it at our house. In her junior year and that summer before senior year, she flip-flopped between sheer joy and total depression in the blink of an eye. She’d attempted suicide several times before the night at the water tower. Mom put her in counseling, and they recommended that she work on a list of things that would interest her—things that might help her reengage with classmates and help her rediscover the joy in her life.”

The way my mom was talking made me feel like I was listening to an audiobook of someone’s psychobabble. She wasn’t talking about Suzy—this couldn’t be true. Suzy wasn’t disengaged. At least, not with me. But what did I know about anything? Obviously, I didn’t have the truth. “You’re trying to tell me she wrote this list for some sort of therapist?”

My mom nodded. She studied the list more closely. “There are some things on here that I haven’t seen before, though. She added a lot of this after the day I saw it.” My mother put her hand to her mouth and tried to stifle a laugh. “
 
‘Borrowing’ a motorcycle is just the sort of thing Suzy would have tried to do that would have frustrated
M
om—your grandmother—to no end.”

I narrowed my eyes. She had no right to get joy out of Suzy’s list. I didn’t want to hear about what Suzy would or wouldn’t have done from my mom. Obviously, she
hadn’t known
her the way I had. “Give it back.” I held out my hand and took the list from her. “Like I said, if she fell off the water tower, it was just an accident. She must have been trying to climb up there and just slipped—it was part of the list. It’s the therapist’s fault, for making her write this in the first place.”

Mom shook her head. “Sweetie
—
”

“Don’t sweetie me! I’m not eight.” I knew I was acting like I was eight, but I hated everything my mom was saying. I wanted her to understand that they had all gotten it wrong. That they’d thought wrong all these years. I didn’t want them to be right. If they were right, it changed everything.

“Sophie, it wasn’t an accident.” My mom shook her head and reached across the table toward me. I dropped my hand under the table and stuffed the list in my pocket. “She left a note.” She studied me for a minute before saying, “We kept it from the police. The note was short, and didn’t tell us a
nything we didn’t already know. T
here was no reason they needed to know it was anything other than an accident. In hindsight, we all should have seen it coming. I’ve been beating myself up for years, wondering if there was something more I could have done that would have changed what happened. She’d abandoned all of her friends, stopped seeing her therapist, had a hard breakup with her boyfriend. She wasn’t happy. She had totally given up.” She paused, then said, “The only time we ever saw her happy at the end was when she was with you. That’s why we had her spend as much time with you as we did—we could see sparks of the girl we all loved when she was with you, and we hoped it would be enough to make things better. Obviously, none of us realized just how bad things were, or we would have figured out some way to help more than we did. We shouldn’t have relied on an eight-year-old girl to fix her.”

As soon as my mom said that, I realized it was my fault. I could have done more—they’d trusted me to fix her, and I’d failed. I was the reason she’d died. If only they’d told me, if they’d explained that it was my job to make her happy again, maybe I could have helped her with the list then. Surely, there were things I could have done if only I’d known. “Why didn’t anyone tell me?”