The Way Back to You (4 page)

“Basically anything that’ll make a six-year-old’s day.”

He laughs softly and it sounds right, like something I’ve heard before, and maybe if he sounds like familiar Kyle, he really is okay. “Is this a cheer thing?”

“What else?” I say, wandering farther away. “It’s for the library—we’re raffling off some gift baskets to raise money for
the youth literacy program. And from past experience, kids like you better when you throw presents at them. They’re like bridge trolls that way.” I pull a dinosaur—that also launches tiny rockets—off the wall. “Or the really bad kings in the Bible.”

What.

I hope Kyle’s had an embolism and missed all of that.

Nope. He’s looking back at me. “I’ll take your word for it,” he says.

Fueled by desperation, I hone in on these crayon-slash-robot toys from a cartoon—everything’s a hybrid these days; can a crayon not
just
be a crayon anymore? The green robot is hooked on the top-shelf rung, and I put the toe of my boot on the lower shelf to hoist myself up. Before I can, Kyle’s behind me, his chest brushing my shoulder as he snatches the package for me. He’s such a frigging oak tree, he doesn’t even need to stretch much to get it.

Once he does, he steps away quickly. I hold my breath so I don’t inhale the minty Kyle smell that clings to him. It happened all the time in bio—we’d be sitting at our table, bent over our lab workbooks, and he’d move in a way that set off these mini wintergreen explosions. Ashlyn once told me he used this tea tree mint shampoo, and she always mooned over how his kisses tasted like all the Junior Mints he ate. I filed the info away with the other things I shouldn’t remember about Kyle.

“I could’ve gotten it,” I say instead of thanking him.

He looks at me. “I know.” Then he hesitates before handing over the robot. “It didn’t seem worth breaking an arm for.”

We turn away from each other at the same time, facing
opposite shelves. I can’t believe he’s still helping me look for a dumb toy after I was such an ass.

I slip over to a pole stacked high with stuffed Yodas. “So are you stuck here over break?”

Kyle is deeply engrossed in a display of rubber balls. He sticks his hand in and palms a red one. Then he holds it up, and I shake my head, declining. “Yeah,” he says, tossing the ball back with the others. “You too?”

“Yep.” I stroke one Yoda on the head, tug another one’s ear. “My mom and dad deserted us for Mexico this morning.”

“They left you two alone for the whole week?”

“Total abandonment. They’re taking a cruise, so they’ll only be able to contact us once they reach port.”

“That’s not so bad.”

“My mom told me I’m not allowed to use the stove.”

“Ah.” A small smile lingers on his lips, and this warm-honey feeling spreads in my belly. I want to kick him in the shins for it. “It’s cool your parents get to be away, though. I wish I could’ve gone somewhere, just to . . . get out of here.”

I hug a toy Yoda to my chest as I meet Kyle in the middle of the row. I don’t want to know if he said that because he’s depressed, or because he’s as restless as all of us are. “Tell me about it.”

After a few more beats of silence, he bends to pick up his shopping basket again. “I should probably get going,” he says, before I have to say it myself, and my shoulders sag. Being around Kyle is exhausting, but so is examining how I destroy our every interaction once he’s gone.

We’re back in the glaring fluorescents of the middle aisle, and I take a few steps backward, away from him. Kyle switches the basket to his other arm and everything in it shifts, so I peek in this time. It’s filled with cans of cat food and tiny, fuzzy cat toys.

“You’ve got a cat?” I ask.

Suddenly, he finds the cat toys as interesting as I do. “It’s kind of complicated.” Then he raises his head and says, “I’ll see you around, Cloudy.”

“Yeah. Thanks for your help, Kyle.” I spin on my heel to head back into the aisle—I’m not sure the crayon robot or Yoda will make the cut, and I need to keep searching.

But I can’t get my mind off the cat supplies. During the few times I was in Kyle’s house, I never noticed a cat, and Ashlyn never mentioned anything about him having one. Though it’s possible he’s gotten one since she died. People adopt pets when they’re grieving. It’s totally and acceptably normal. The opposite of a downward spiral.

Right.

What else could it be?

All the recycled air in this plane hangar of a store is messing with me.

But I look back anyway, and pretend not to see Kyle go straight to the panda pillow when I do.

D
ad’s car is already in the garage when I get home from Target. Which means he’s back from his office and the gym already. Which means I might have a problem here.

Parking my vehicle next to his, I leave the panda Pillow Pet and a bag filled with canned cat food on the passenger seat. (Yesterday, I picked up a litter box and dry kibble. Later, I read it’s better to feed cats both wet and dry food.) A couple of lights are on already when I head inside through the laundry room, but my dad isn’t in the kitchen or on the couch.

“Dad?” I call out.

A nonresponse is what I’m hoping for, and the faint sloshing of water through the pipes overhead clinches it: he’s in the shower. I hurry back out to grab the stuff, race upstairs with it, and close myself into my room.

All day, I imagined coming home to a kitten-shaped hole in my door like a Road Runner cartoon and no other sign of my secret roommate, so it’s a relief to spot the scrawny black kitten curled up in my walk-in closet exactly where I left her this morning.

“Hey.” I set down the bag and kneel beside her. “How’s it going?”

She opens her eyes. “Mrro
wwww.”

Her voice is low and scratchy. It doesn’t match up. She sounds like a two-pack-a-day smoker of fifty years instead of a tiny new kitten.

“Would you say you had a good day or bad day?”

This time, she yawns in response.

“My feelings, too.”

My closet is for sure a warmer and more comfortable place than wherever she was sleeping before. That’s part of why I felt I had to bring her home; Ashlyn would have wanted me to. She was passionate about rescue shelters and adoption.

But another reason is because I’m hoping this stray animal somehow
is
Ashlyn.

Which is why I still haven’t admitted to anyone that I did this. Not Matty. Not my dad. Not Cloudy—even after she flat-out asked why I was buying cat food twenty minutes ago.

Cloudy Marlowe is the one person I could have shared my thoughts with that this kitten might be (but probably isn’t) Ashlyn. Because, of anyone, Cloudy would understand completely why I’d want it to be true. The fact that she went out of her way to talk to me the day after I brought this kitten home is a major coincidence.

Almost a year ago, Cloudy broke up with my cousin. At the time, I thought it was my fault, but it turned out to be a huge misunderstanding all around. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of trying to talk to her about it afterward. She went off on
me for butting in and said, basically, she’d tolerate my presence moving forward for Ashlyn’s sake, but that was
it
. Even after Ashlyn died, even after Cloudy and Matty temporarily got back together, Cloudy didn’t go out of her way to have any real conversations with me. Not until today.

The kitten stretches herself to be as long as possible while I unfold the panda Pillow Pet. This was an idea I got from Matty. He has a puppy-shaped one for his cat to sleep on, which is his big statement about what a badass he thinks Hercules is. (“Dude, he sleeps on top of a
dog
!”)

I pat the pillow a few times to entice her to sit. She isn’t interested, though. Instead, she tiptoes over to her food and water dishes (which happen to be as far from her litter box as possible), in the exact spot where my shoes were until I chucked them all under the bed last night.

The always-embarrassing clip from the song Matty set on my phone as his personal ring and text tone starts playing (“I don’t want anybody else / When I think about you, I touch myself”), and I check his text:
Everyone’s here but YOU. Am I going to have to drag you from that house? Haha!

I send back:
Haha

Of course, it isn’t an answer to his question and it isn’t going to get me out of anything.

Now that I’ve seen the cat is okay, I should take off. I was supposed to meet everyone fifteen minutes ago at the bowling alley for pizza, pool, and darts. (But no bowling. Go figure.) I still have my coat and shoes on. Keys and phone are in my pocket. I’m set. I just need to walk out of this room, drive back
to town, and do the thing I said I’d do.

I stand up, leaving the closet door open so the kitten can wander around my room if she wants to. “I’ll be back later.”

But as I’m reaching for the doorknob, I imagine the conversations I’ll be forced to have with the guys about girls they’re hooking up with, midwinter break plans, the upcoming baseball season, and whatever else. Then I glance back at my bed and picture myself sprawling across it listening to music.

Even though I should feel like a jerk for this, I breathe easier as I toss my coat on the chair, kick my shoes off, and get started on making my second vision a reality.

HELPING ANIMALS WAS probably Ashlyn’s favorite thing. I’d known from the beginning, but it really hit home when she showed up at my door last January with a sewing machine and a bag of fabric.

“What’s this for?” I asked as I helped her lug it inside.

“Koala mittens,” she told me. “There’s an animal hospital in Australia taking care of koala bears that got severe burns on their paws in brush fires. They’re asking people to sew these little cotton coverings to slide over the wound dressings. You want to help?”

“Okay.”

We settled in next to each other at my kitchen table, and she handed me the pattern: basically a five-by-six-inch rectangle, but it was curved across the top like a cartoon gravestone. I traced and cut out red plaid while she threaded her machine.

Being around Ashlyn at that time was exciting and weird.
She’d invited me to Winter Formal, and we’d started holding hands at school and kissing good-bye, but she wasn’t officially my girlfriend. We still barely knew each other. (She and Matty had lived next door to each other for years, but my summer visits had somehow always matched up with the times she was away at camp or on family vacations.)

“How’d your cat hunt go this morning?” I asked Ashlyn.

Since she volunteered a few days a month for the Bend Spay and Neuter Project, it was a guaranteed icebreaker topic.

“Really good! Except I found out one of the females from last weekend had already been spayed. They noticed the scars right before surgery. If she’d been ear tipped, we’d have known without having to bring her in. Oh, well.”

I wasn’t sure what to say, so I simply nodded. Before I’d started hanging out with her, I had no clue there was a system in place for trapping (
humanely
, she always emphasized) feral cats, taking them in for spaying/neutering and vaccinations, and setting them loose again. I also had no clue that veterinarians cut the tip of one ear so people could spot these feral cats easily.

I slid both pieces of one soon-to-be mitten to Ashlyn, which she lined up and pinned together. “I wanted to tell you,” she said, “the reason I’m late is because I picked up the sweetest little Pomeranian on my way. She was prancing down Greenwood, so I pulled over, coaxed her into my car with treats, and drove to the address on her tag. Her name was Charisma and she was out of her mind with joy when her owners opened the door.”

Chuckling, I shook my head.

“What’s funny? Her name? I think it’s perfect.”

“Oh, no. I wasn’t making fun of it. I’m just comparing our days. You helped homeless cats, retrieved a lost Pomeranian, and now you’re sewing for injured koalas. Guess what I did? Went snowboarding and ate three quarters of a pizza. I mean, really. What could you possibly see in someone this lazy?”

After the words were out, I wished Matty had been there to cut me off midsentence and drag me from the room. Sometimes, he was all I had to save me from my pathetic self. It had been on my mind a lot, though:
Why does Ashlyn like me?
We didn’t have much in common and there were cooler guys she could have picked. I couldn’t help wondering whether she somehow saw me as another stray who needed her help.

She smiled. “There’s nothing wrong with snowboarding. And you’re not lazy. You’re constantly working out and training for baseball season. That takes up a lot of time.”

“Me playing ball isn’t changing anyone’s world, though.”

“Not true. It’s changing mine.”

“In what way?”

“In the way that”—she leaned over, almost whispering—“I can’t wait to see how good your butt looks in a uniform.”

“What?”

She burst out with that wild laugh of hers, and then clamped her hand over her mouth. “I didn’t mean to blurt that out. I’m allowed to be shallow, though, right?”

“Sure.” Suddenly feeling so much better about us, I scooted my chair closer to hers. “So what are you saying exactly? I’m just a piece of meat to you?”

“Kyle Ryan, I’m a vegetarian.” She leaned in and kissed my cheek. “You’re more like a seitan and pineapple shish kebab to me.”

I’M ON MY back with my arm slung over my face as symbols of light migrate through grayness behind my eyelids. The overhead light is causing this distracting effect, but I haven’t turned it off because I’m not sure I want to commit to being
in
bed instead of just
on
it at six o’clock on a Friday night.

Dad and I already got our conversation through my door over with before I cranked up the music. Matty stopped texting me probably an hour ago, so I’m not expecting it when my door bangs open and Matty calls out, “Time to join the living!”

My heart leaps and I move my arm for a better view of the closet. The kitten isn’t visible at the moment. I remain silent while trying to recover my calm, hoping she won’t make an appearance before I can get rid of Matty.

“All right. Tyrell’s waiting in the driveway.” He claps his hands together. “Let’s go, K.O.!”

(
K
and
O
are my first and last initials. They’ve also been used as my baseball nickname since I was a kid. It’s
K.O.
as in “Knock Out,” as in “Knock it Out of the park.”)

I don’t move to get up. Even with Matty here to coerce me, I’m not feeling it. I breathe deeply and exhale slowly, trying to get lost in the music again.

“St. Peter’s Cathedral” by Death Cab for Cutie has been on repeat the entire time I’ve been lying here, and Ben Gibbard is once again singing,
“When our hearts stop ticking, this is the end.
And there’s nothing past this.”

“Hang on.” Matty leans his head close to the speaker on my nightstand. “What did you just say?”

Ben responds in the song, like Matty had known he would.
“There’s nothing past this.”

“Can you repeat that?” Matty cups his hand around his ear.

“There’s nothing past this.”

“Still not getting it. One more time?”

“There’s nothing past this.”

“So what you’re saying is”—Matty stands straight and belts out the next line—
“there’s nothing paaaaaast thiiiiis.”

The phrase keeps repeating through my speakers. It’s soothing, which is why I haven’t been able to stop listening to it. Some days (like every day this week), it’s the only thing that makes me feel (sort of) okay.

“I know you’re all about the atheist anthems these days,” Matty says, “but this shit’s going to make you kill yourself. And if you kill yourself, I’m going to have to kill myself. Then your dad will. And my dad. My mom will be so pissed, she’ll kill herself so she can come kick all our asses in the afterlife.”

“There is no afterlife,” I mumble.

I’m pretty sure he doesn’t hear me, which is fine because I can’t change his mind. I don’t even want to. There have been so many times since losing Ashlyn when I’ve wished I could believe in something big the way Matty does. The way the vast majority of the population does. Having that certainty seems so much easier.

Matty strides to my desk and turns the music off. At this
moment, it’s the worst thing he could have done to me. In a cheerful tone, he says, “I’m telling you. You’ve got to stop with this music. Because only
you
can prevent the Ocie suicides.”

Does he honestly think he’s being funny?

“Fuck off, Matty.”

“Hell, yeah.” He climbs on the bed and bounces by my feet. “That’s the spirit. Cussing is a good sign. A
great
sign. Give me some more. How about an ‘asshole’? Or a ‘cocksucker’? Let’s hear it! You
do
have something to live for.”

Pushing myself up onto my elbows, I shout, “Enough with the suicide jokes, you fucking asshole cocksucker!”

The movement at the end of my mattress halts. He asked for it, but by his wounded expression, it wasn’t what he’d expected. “You’re right. I shouldn’t have said that. I was just—”

“Just get
out
already!”

His mouth moves a few times, making no sound, until he’s finally able to burst out with, “I’ve been texting you for, like, an hour! You couldn’t be bothered to tell me you were bailing on me again?”

“
You
couldn’t be bothered to take a hint?”

He glares at me. “No! Not with how much you’ve been freaking me out lately. You keep disappearing. I’m always covering for you and I don’t know why. It clearly isn’t helping. The season hasn’t even started and you’re already stressing the coaches out.”

“I don’t care,” I lie.

“Well, you should.” Matty’s voice is getting fiercer by the second. “You’re the best player on our team. If your head isn’t in it right now, how do you expect—”

“I don’t care about
any
of this crap.”

Another lie. It isn’t as if I suddenly hate baseball. I just can’t handle the pressure of everyone counting on me when I can’t count on myself.

Matty jumps to his feet. “Since when did it become ‘this crap’?”

“Since . . . I don’t know! But I’ve decided not to play this year.” Matty is staring down at me with his mouth open wide, but it’s a relief, finally having said the words aloud. “I’m done,” I add.

“Are you
kidding
me with this? I mean, what are you even saying? It’s like you’re speaking in tongues.”

“Whatever that means.”

Just then, my dad pokes his head in. “Hey, what’s going on?”

I shoot Matty a warning look. Based on his reaction, I don’t want to have this discussion with both of them at the same time. “It’s nothing, Dad.”