The Space Between Us (26 page)

“Not much.”

“Just so you know, part of your penance is actually answering an occasional question.”

He laughed. “Fine. I’m staying with some friends at U of C.”

“In the dorms?”

“No. They live in a house just off campus. We all went to high school together.”

I couldn’t ask if they were guys or girls without sounding jealous, but the thought of him playing sleepover with a bunch of girls was mildly annoying.

“Most of the guys I hung out with moved to Calgary last year after graduation,” Ezra said.

“But not you.”

“Not me.”

If our conversation was a bike tire, we’d just rolled up to the lip of the curb and were now rolling backward. But that didn’t make it a complete failure. He’d answered a question or two, and had actually volunteered information without having to be grilled.

“So how’s school?” he asked after a moment.

“Not bad. CALM’s lame, but kind of funny. Today Ms. Hill talked about how racial slurs are not nice.”

“Oh yeah, I forgot about that unit that’s like diversity for bigots. What else are you taking?”

“Photography is the only other interesting class, but I suck at it. The tests at the beginning were easy, but I’m
kind of a spaz at the picture-taking part. We have this huge assignment coming up that might actually require me to go sit in the snow for an hour or two.”

“Good thing you love the snow so much.”

“I know.”

“If you need any help with the photography you should ask my mom.”

“Oh. Yeah.” I’d forgotten. “She wouldn’t mind?”

“Are you kidding? She’d love it. She loves you.”

“What? She doesn’t even know me. She met me once for like two minutes.”

“She loves anyone who isn’t Taylor.”

The
T
word. The ensuing pause was our longest and most awkward yet. “Maybe I’ll call her then,” I said finally. I’d said it with just enough noncommittal enthusiasm to keep the conversation from dying completely. But I wouldn’t call Naomi. It was the muddled inverse of the whole thing with Will, and I wanted to be loved because I wasn’t Taylor about as much as I wanted to be unloved because I wasn’t Charly. So, not at all.

“Okay,” he said. “I guess I’ll see you around.”

He hadn’t said to come by the library to see him. “Sure.”

“All right. I should go.”

“Drive safely,” I said, “and pull over if you’re tired.” Hearing Grandma’s words come out of my mouth filled
me with a sudden pang of homesickness. Tears welled unexpectedly before my eyes. I blinked them away, relieved he couldn’t see me.

Ezra laughed. “It’s only an hour. I think I’ll be okay.”

“How do I know you’re not narcoleptic? And laughing at me is no way to start your penance project, by the way.”

“That’s right. I have Florida sunshine to find.”

“Good luck.”

“Good night.”

I hung up and hugged my knees to my chest. I wanted to think about Ezra, to just lie on my bed and analyze every word he said, picture his face and his mouth as he said them. I could believe him.

But then there was the other voice, the cruel one saying cruel things. It was Taylor’s but not Taylor’s, because at some point my mind had melted her words and poured them into a different mold. It was my voice now.

• • •

I almost faked sleep when Charly got home. I could have. I was already in bed, reading some corny self-help book I’d snagged from Bree’s bookshelf, when I heard her come in. She’d done it to me enough times lately, always making sure she was spread from corner to corner of the bed. I’d started to feel like the couch was home.

But I wanted to talk to her. No. I wanted her to talk to me.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hey.”

She took the headband out of her hair and flopped down on the bed beside me, sighing like her lungs had been holding it in all night.

“That much fun?” I asked.

“Yeah. No. I don’t know.”

So that’s where we were. I turned to the next page of my book and went back to learning how to grow my inner goddess.

“Actually, it was pretty good,” she said softly.

Her back was to me, but I didn’t look at her, just to be safe. It was like trying to feed a squirrel—eye contact would be a mistake.

“They were nice. Really nice.”

“Yeah? Was Bree there with you?”

“No. I went alone.”

Hallelujah. Except if Bree had been there, at least the basic questions would’ve been asked. On her own, Charly very well may have spent the entire interview on junk food preferences and favorite bands.

“At first I wasn’t so sure about them,” Charly offered. “She’s kind of odd-looking, and her eyebrows are plucked to almost nothing and then drawn in, you know?”

“Yeah.”

“But then she turned out to be pretty cool.”

Nice and cool. She could’ve been describing a Popsicle.
Please, Charly, please say you got more than just that.
My own list of questions was flying through my brain, but Charly was too skittish for me to just start firing. She’d clam up.

But if I could only get away with asking one, which one? What did she need to think about that she hadn’t already?

I was about to open my mouth when she started up again. “Her name’s Summer. She’s a nurse at an assisted living center for old people, and he’s something geeky to do with computers. I don’t know, I stopped listening. But she wants to quit her job and stay at home after the baby’s born. If . . . you know.

“Anyway, she ordered rainbow trout, which I thought was weird, but whatever, and then when it came I could totally tell she didn’t like it.” Charly stopped to think or to breathe or maybe just to make me wonder where this was going. “Except she didn’t say anything. Maybe because she didn’t want to seem like a snot in front of me, or maybe because she’s just the kind of person who doesn’t complain when they get gross food. I don’t know. But then he traded with her. Ryan. His name’s Ryan.”

Another pause. I pictured the scene: the geek husband quietly sliding his plate toward his wife, her painted-on eyebrows rising in surprise and then appreciation.

“So Ryan ate her nasty rainbow trout,” Charly said, “and she ate his ravioli.”

“That’s kind of nice,” I said.

“Yeah. Amelia?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll pay you a million dollars if you brush my teeth for me and give me a foot rub.”

I chucked the self-help book on the floor and grabbed one of Charly’s feet. “I’m not doing your teeth.”

“Okay.”

T
he envelope was tucked beneath the wiper on the passenger side of Bree’s car.

“Holy crap!” Bree screamed, doing a little spazzy dance. “Which one of you darlings snuck out and scraped the car? Best. Monday. Ever!”

“Honestly,” I said, “it’s never even occurred to me.” It hadn’t. Charly and I’d sat shivering in the car while Bree had scraped every single morning since we’d gotten here. And until this moment, it hadn’t seemed that selfish.

“Wasn’t me,” Charly said, sliding the envelope out from under the wiper. “Oooh, it says
Amelia
on it.” She
waved it in front of my face, then pulled it away as I reached for it. “And it looks like
man
writing.”

I snatched it out of her hands and put it into my backpack.

“Are you kidding me?” Bree squealed. “You’re not going to open it?”

“I’ll open it later.”

“But I need to know who scraped off my car so I can love them for the rest of my life. Isn’t the curiosity killing you?”

“I know who it’s from.” I willed my mouth not to smile, but Charly laughed and the smile won.

Bree lifted her eyebrows. “You and Ezra are still happening?”

“They never
were
happening,” Charly said. “Then they were never
not
happening. And now they’re never happening all over again.”

“Are you even speaking English?” I muttered. “And what makes either of you two think you know anything about me and Ezra? We’re just friends. Again.”

“Works every time,” Charly explained to Bree. “I just have to start spewing nonsense, then she gets mad and tells all.” She turned back to me. “Since when do you make out with your friends?”

I didn’t take the bait. She had no way of knowing about that.

Charly shrugged and said to Bree, “Okay, so maybe not every time.”

Bree dropped us off at school and I made my way to the photo lab, the green envelope burning a hole in my backpack. I was early enough for class to take my time, so I pulled it out and turned it over, memorizing the softness of the envelope beneath my fingertips.
Amelia.
Charly was right. The writing was masculine: all caps, hurried but not messy, no slant.

If there hadn’t been people all around me, I might’ve smelled it too.

It wasn’t sealed, so I slid my finger easily inside and pulled out a folded piece of lined paper. I opened it. Something fell out and fluttered to the ground before I could catch it. It was a sun. A sticker. I bent over and picked it up. No, not a sticker, a temporary tattoo, a gold disc surrounded by triangles, wavy like they’d been bent by heat. A tight gold swirl began at the center of the circle and coiled its way outward.

I read the note:

Not exactly Florida sunshine, but the best I could do.

Ezra

I reread it. And then again. I would’ve kept on doing it, but Mr. Klein finally wandered in and told us to take out our cameras.

“What’s up?”

I turned to the goth guy wearing black nail polish on my left. Why was he talking to me? Nobody ever talked to me in this class. “Nothing.”

“What’s with the smile?”

“Nothing.”

He gave me a look, then went back to defacing his textbook. “Freakin’ crazy Americans,” he muttered.

I let it go.

• • •

It was colder again. I’d wrapped my scarf tight around my head, but the water droplets from my breath kept freezing in the wool around my mouth. I’d already rewrapped twice, moving the icy circle to the back of my head both times, but I only had so much usable scarf.

Snow squeaked beneath my boots. Who’d have thought snow could squeak? It did, though, if it was cold enough and if it was the dry kind. I made a mental note to tell Savannah. Emailing her was easier when I found little details to talk about, things I didn’t have to lie about, but things that didn’t totally suck. Like squeaky snow.

It had to be below minus twenty degrees. Maybe closer to minus twenty-five. There was a big electronic sign that displayed the temperature in red lights, just past the halfway point between school and Bree’s. I’d gotten
surprisingly good at gauging degrees Celsius based on the amount of pain I was in. I didn’t know exactly what minus twenty-five converted to in Fahrenheit, but I’d come to the realization that it didn’t matter. At all. Only the
feeling
mattered, and that wasn’t something anybody back home would understand.

Today I wasn’t going to pass the sign anyway.

The deer-dented Pathfinder pulled in front of me just as I was about to step into a crosswalk.

“Where are you going? I almost couldn’t find you.”

Ezra. I tried to smile normally, like I wasn’t melting inside.

“Errands,” I said. “Hey, you know you’re officially Bree’s favorite person in the whole world?”

“Bree’s? Shoot. Get in so I can roll up my window.”

I hurried around front. It was way too cold to play hard to get.

“If you had your own car I could’ve scraped that off.”

“You’re saying Bree’s car was an afterthought?” I pulled off my gloves and covered the vents with my palms. “Don’t tell her. She’s probably baking you brownies as we speak.”

“Not an afterthought. Just a second thought.”

I thought I could feel him looking at me, but when I glanced over his eyes were on the road. “If I had my own
car,” I said, “you wouldn’t have an excuse to keep kidnapping me like this.”

“It’s not kidnapping if I let you pick the destination. Where are we going?”

“Shopping.”

“Can you be more specific?”

I watched pedestrians scurry along both sides of the sidewalk. Nobody was sauntering anywhere today. “It’s kind of embarrassing.”

“As in zit cream, or as in bras? Because I would be willing to help you shop for either. I mean, I’d prefer the latter, but whatever.”

“Neither, idiot.” I looked away so he couldn’t see me blush.

“You’ve never called me idiot before.”

“Not out loud.”

He laughed again. That was twice now. “I kind of like it.”

I leaned forward, putting my frozen cheek in front of the vent.

“So not zit cream or bras.”

“I need to buy a cactus.”

He did something funny with his eyebrows—one up, one down. “Now that
is
embarrassing.”

“Well . . . ” Was I seriously telling him about the cactus incident? “You know Ms. Lee?”

“Yeah. Guidance.”

“Right. So you know those cactuses she has along the front of her desk?”

“I think so.”

“Well. I, uh, kinda broke one.”

“How’d that happen?”

I gave him a sheepish look, then turned my face away to give my other cheek vent time.

“Seriously?” He laughed.
Again.
Was that three? “So what, you picked it up and threw it?”

“It was more intentionally dropping than throwing. And I was having a
really
bad day,” I added, like that was a justifiable excuse for violent vandalism.

“I should thank you. That woman drove me crazy.”

“Ms. Lee?” Even mid–temper tantrum, I wouldn’t have taken her for anyone’s nemesis. “Why?”

But the minute the question was out of my mouth I knew exactly why. Of course Ezra would’ve been forced in there to talk about Naomi’s suicide attempt, his scholarship, his brother. He would’ve been Ms. Lee’s project of the year.

Thankfully, he just shrugged and lied. “She had a problem with me skipping school to ski. So cactus shopping, eh?”

“Cactus shopping.”

Ezra took me to Cascade Plaza, the closest thing to a
real mall, and we trolled the stores until we came up with something close enough.