The Way Back to You (5 page)

“Right.” Matty stares straight back at me. “
Nothing
other than the fact that Kyle is quitting baseball.”

So much for him “always covering” for me.

“What?” Dad’s expression matches Matty’s from a few seconds ago.

I’ve put off making this decision forever. Still, I’m surprised they’re this surprised. Baseball is a spring sport, but training is a year-round expectation. During the past several months, I’ve skipped almost as many sessions as I’ve attended. The coach wasn’t getting on my case yesterday for being
too
committed.

Dad makes his way into the room. He moves my jacket to
sit on my chair, while Matty remains standing at the foot of my bed.

“Kyle, what’s going on?” Dad asks.

“I’m not quitting anything. I’m just not trying out for the team this year.”

Matty says, “You started playing T-ball when you were, what? Four years old?”

“So?”

“So, not trying out after thirteen years—after making fricken MVP as a fricken sophomore last year? That’s exactly what I call quitting. Don’t you want to play in college?”

I shrug. “Maybe not.”

“What are you going to do, then? Stare at your ceiling and listen to this god-awful music? Because that’s a useful way to spend your life.”

“Matt,” Dad cuts in, “you should let Kyle and me talk, okay?”

“Good luck with that,” Matty says, scowling.

In a flash, he’s out of the room, his shoes pounding down the stairs.

Ten seconds later, the front door slams and Dad lets out a loud breath. “That was a first.”

He’s right. It isn’t like Matty to get pissed off and aggressive toward me (or anyone). Of course, I don’t blow up at him, either. We’re both
off
right now—all because I’m not Back to Normal Kyle.

“I don’t know where this not-playing-baseball thing is coming from,” Dad says, “but Matt did make a good point. You
need something to focus on. Something other than . . . what happened. We’ve all been waiting it out, thinking baseball season would be the thing to get you on track. You used to be busy all the time. You always had somewhere to go, something to do, people to spend time with.”

I hate Back to Normal Kyle for being so out of reach.

It’s true; I was never alone last school year. I hung out with Matty, along with different combinations of his friends. Being his cousin meant I was instantly more popular after I moved to Bend two summers ago than I was for the entire fifteen years that I lived in Arizona. Then Ashlyn and I got together and, aside from her out-of-town cheer camps in July and August, being with her was a huge part of my daily routine, too. When she died a few days after school started, I stayed home for the next two weeks. I full-on sobbed at least once a day for three months. I didn’t want to be around people who didn’t get it, people who were telling me they’d “see” her again someday when I was sure I wouldn’t. And that meant I didn’t want to be around anyone.

Everyone thinks I changed because I can’t get over Ashlyn. But I know that even if she were to come back somehow, I’ll never be who I was before. I can’t unexperience the shock of having her ripped from my life.

Dad goes on. “If you don’t want to play anymore, I won’t force you. This is a big deal and it deserves serious consideration, though. It can’t be a hasty decision you made because you’re pissed at Matt.”

“It isn’t about him. It isn’t about anyone.”

But really, it
is
about him. It’s about everyone.

“All right. If it turns out this is what you really want, you need a plan for what you’re going to do instead.”

Dad’s a dentist (he shares a practice with Matty’s dad, his fraternal twin brother), and he’s very big on plans. Pretty much the only unplanned things he ever did in his life were getting my mother pregnant and, later, divorcing her.

“Staring at the ceiling can’t be my plan?” I ask.

“Probably not,” he says with a small smile. “I’ve been thinking. How do you feel about talking to a counselor now?”

I sit up taller against my pillow. “Dad, not this again. No matter what Matty says, I’m not suicidal. Okay? I’m
not
.”

“I didn’t say you were. But I know you’ve been having a hard time, which is understandable. Now you’re saying you don’t want to be involved in the thing you’ve always loved most. And since you haven’t been talking to anyone about it—”

“We’re talking now, aren’t we?”

“—maybe a professional can help you in ways I can’t.” He stares at the floor. “Sometimes it’s good to sit down with someone who doesn’t know you, who can give an outside perspective.”

Since Ashlyn’s death, I’ve been thinking a lot more about my mother (who for sure is in the category of Someone Who Doesn’t Know Me), and wondering if she’d be better than Dad at helping me get through this. During conversations like this one, it’s hard to imagine she’d be worse.

“Your aunt Robin recommended a therapist,” Dad says. “We can try to get you in while you’re off from school. I think it will be good for you.”

“No. Look, I’ll leave the house, okay? I’m going snowboarding tomorrow. I’ll find something to do every single day of the week, if that’s what it’s going to take to make you happy.”

“This isn’t about making
me
happy. You know that, right?” I don’t answer, so Dad speaks in a rush. “I’ll call on Monday for an appointment. And I’ll even go with you if you want. Unless it will be easier if I don’t go?”

I shrug.

“Think it over. Now, there’s a
Terminator
marathon on TV. You want to come down and watch with me?”

What choice do I have? Only a therapist-needing person would say no to watching
Terminator
movies so he can spend more time alone in his room listening to “god-awful music.”

“Sure,” I tell him.

Dad gets up first, and as soon as he does, a furry black face peeks out of my closet. I sit frozen, hoping he’ll walk out without noticing her.

Naturally, the next words out of his mouth are “Kyle, are you aware that there’s a cat in your room?”

T
he plastic lei is still in Ashlyn’s room.

After months away, that’s the first thing I notice when I peer in from the doorway. I’ve decided that limiting where I go in the Montiels’ house is my best option. Not that even keeping still is safe. In this hallway, Ashlyn and I would use pillowcases instead of potato sacks and bounce around from one end to the other. Or there was the night we convinced ourselves a ghost lived in Ashlyn’s vanity mirror, so we slept right over in that corner.

Best option or not, the memory booby traps are all over this place.

I did visit twice after the funeral. It was mostly Mrs. Montiel and me sifting through Ashlyn’s stuff. We never threw any of it out, or even moved any of it, but both times she asked if I wanted to take something, a relic from Ashlyn’s life to keep for myself. So far I’ve only taken the cheer camp shirt from our first summer there together. But that was to please Mrs. Montiel. I’m not sure she’s ready to part with any of it yet.

I’m not sure I’m ready to have any of it.

The Montiels didn’t invite me over after that. They needed space to grieve, is what my parents told me, and I understood, even if their choice of words was completely misguided. Grief doesn’t seem to need much space at all; it’s more like it tightens and squeezes until there’s no more of you left. But whatever their reason, I never offered to stop by, either. If I wasn’t around, it was easier to avoid the picture of Ashlyn and me on her nightstand and the grape Kool-Aid stain I left by her closet. And now looking in on Ashlyn’s unlived-in room is like wearing my own old clothes. Not completely uncomfortable but still fundamentally . . .
off
.

I guess Mrs. Montiel finally put away the stacks of laundry and threw out the trash, but the things that matter—the mail from various animal welfare groups, the
Almond Blossom
mug that doubles as a pen holder, the
Cheer Insider
magazines that I’m ignoring—they’re all still here. Everything is still here, pretty much the way she left it before going on that last bike ride with her family. Almost exactly the same as I remember it.

Including the radioactively orange lei hanging from her bedside lamp. Ashlyn almost had a meltdown when I walked into her kitchen with it last May.

“A luau kit,” she said, peering into the Party Town shopping bags. She was sitting at the island surrounded by pre-fruit-punch orange and apple slices, part of the prep for Kyle’s surprise. My job was decorations detail, and I’d clearly screwed up. Epically. “This is what you got for today?”

“You don’t like it?” I reached inside the bag for a tiny pink drink umbrella and stuck it behind my ear. “It’s festive. See?”

A warm breeze blew in through the patio doors, and she lifted her black hair off her shoulders. “But we’re not having a luau.”

“It’s your party.” I grinned. “You can luau if you want to.”

“It’s
Kyle’s
party.” Her voice was getting squeaky—proof she was about to reach panic-button mode. “We’re celebrating him getting MVP! Not . . . Hawaii.”

I hopped onto one of the stools surrounding the island. Everything had been about Kyle then—and everything that fell into Kyle’s trajectory had to be flawless. “News flash: Kyle has no idea he’s even having a party. And”—I leaned across the countertop to take back a bag—“I’m pretty sure he doesn’t care if I wear this kick-ass grass skirt or not.”

She gave me a stabby look.

“What?” I said. “You think he’ll want to wear it?”

“Cloudy,” she warned.

“I’m not judging, Ashlyn. I just would’ve gotten another if I’d known.”

With a groan, she started pulling stuff out of the bags: more paper umbrellas, some cardboard hula girls, a sign that read
Get Low and Limbo!
Her eyes flashed. “They didn’t have anything regular? Like with boy stuff or . . . primary colors?” Ashlyn moved a plate of apple wedges between us. As I bit into one, I could feel her watching me, although her stare had gone softer, more butter knife than machete. “This is because you hate Kyle, isn’t it?”

I choked on my apple. “No, but that is why I poisoned the cake.”

“You could give him a chance.”

My mouth fell open. “Like you gave Aidan a chance?”

“Aidan was a snob.” The twist in her lips was almost a smile. She had hardly tolerated my first boyfriend, and she wasn’t shy about it.

I shook my head, smirking. “You are such a hypocrite.”

“And you are such a brat.” She propped her elbows on the countertop, sitting up straighter. “You and Kyle are the most important people to me in the whole world, and you can barely be in the same room.”

It felt like my insides were getting bigger and bigger, like they were trying to be my outsides. Whenever she talked like that, it made my feelings for Kyle seem a thousand times worse. And any righteous resentment, those dangerous I-knew-him-first thoughts, crumbled into this dusty guilt that coated everything.

I was never supposed to fall for him. But I screwed up.

In freshman year, I had Aidan: a senior with great hair, whose only comment about what would happen with us after he graduated was “let’s play it by ear.” By the time he was set to start college in the fall, he had apparently played it and, by ear, decided to dump me. Somehow, I hadn’t seen it coming. So I did what anyone does when they’re lost: I Googled. Most of the articles about breakups offered the same slice of wisdom: it takes half the time your relationship lasted to get over your ex. Get involved with anyone before that and you were doomed. And so, the day Aidan drove to Oregon State, my five-month guy embargo began.

Ashlyn said it was ridiculous. According to her, I should’ve been dating
more
to get him out of my system. But she’d never liked Aidan, and at the time, her advice seemed like a slight to my hairline-fractured heart, as if Aidan’s and my ten-month relationship wasn’t worth the time it would take to recover from it.

My Boy Ban felt like an extended summer vacation. Like I had all this free time and nothing—no
one
—to answer to. I started running every morning and finally finished reading
Jane Eyre
. I did the bravest thing I could imagine: I went to the movies
alone
. And that’s when I discovered the mural, in an alley behind the Tin Pan Theater. It was taller than I am, and the words “All good things are wild and free”—a Thoreau quote—filled the entire canvas. The letters were painted as if they’d been formed out of wildflowers and tree bark and leaves—a few were coated in actual, velvety moss.

I was stunned. It was nothing like the van Gogh painting Ashlyn was so smitten with.
Almond Blossom
is pretty and soothing and classic. But no matter how often I’d seen it in her room, it never sent jolts through my system like the “Wild and Free” mural. The words seemed crafted just for me in that instant, and the whole piece was energetic and
alive
and looked as if it might explode off the brick wall.

On the way home, I noticed all kinds of flowers and plant life growing around town. I couldn’t believe it had taken seeing them on a canvas to appreciate the real things.

I also kept up the Boy Ban. Even though Kyle and I were assigned as lab partners, and I discovered there was a family of bumblebees living in my chest that zipped around only when
he smiled at me, I never said anything. Not to Ashlyn, because liking someone else so soon would be admitting she was right about Aidan—and certainly not to Kyle. I really did believe in waiting it out. And then, with one month left in the Ban, Ashlyn had pulled me aside in that alcove and told me about Kyle.

Like I said, I screwed up.

“Well,” I told Ashlyn, “I got the luau stuff because I thought it was fun. Not because I hate Kyle—I don’t hate Kyle.”

She sighed, wistful. “My life would be a lot simpler if you’d get back with Matty. Can’t you do that for me?”

I laughed. “For you, anything.”

“Things were the best when you were together. We were neighbors-in-law!”

Ashlyn was always gunning for Matty and me to couple up. It was this fantasy she had—that the four of us would fit in this perfect way, a puzzle made from only her favorite pieces. The most ludicrous thing about it was, for a while, she was getting her wish. The same day she asked Kyle to Winter Formal, Matty asked me. I didn’t have a reason not to, so I said yes. And then Matty and I just tumbled into each other. We weren’t Ashlyn and Kyle, who were taking steady and measured steps into a relationship. We were apart, and as swiftly as flipping a page, we were together.

Until WinterFest happened and I screwed up again.

Three months later and Ashlyn still didn’t know about that. All she did know was that I ended it with Matty the week following WinterFest because “I wasn’t ready for a relationship”—which was sort of true; I
had
broken the Boy Ban early—and
that things were weird between Kyle and me because he was staying loyal to his cousin, which was also sort of true. Keeping that many truths from her was agony, but it was the least I deserved.

“I just want everyone to be happy,”Ashlyn said as she considered the Party Town loot.

“In that case”—I dropped off the stool, my flip-flops slapping the tiled floor—“I’ll go return this stuff.”

“You will?”

“Yes,” I whined, joking, like it was the hardest thing in the world, like the bags each weighed fifty pounds and I would have to carry them back in my teeth. “For you, anything. Remember?”

But I kept the orange lei for myself and wore it until, after a raging sugar high from too much punch, Ashlyn made Kyle wear it. Supposedly, he had it on for the rest of the night, but I only stuck around long enough to catch Ashlyn placing it around his neck as he smiled bashfully.

I KNOW THE Montiels invited us both, but it feels like Zoë has attached herself to me barnacle style. She’s everywhere I am lately, impossible to shake off. It’s also hard to resist telling her she’s preparing the salad all wrong. Once Ashlyn became a vegetarian, she was especially invested in dinner salads. And she never cut the tomatoes like
that
.

“So where’s Mr. Montiel?” Zoë asks, wiping tomato goo from the cutting board.

Ashlyn’s mom dries her hands on a dish towel, then hands
Zoë more vegetables to massacre. “Out at the market with Tyler, buying charcoal for the grill,” she says.

I smile a little from my spot against the doorjamb. Tyler, who’s only eight, must be thrilled. He loves cold-night cookouts. Mr. Montiel is always doing stuff like this in the winter, grilling outside, even opening the pool. “You can’t stop doing things you love just because the outside world is telling you different,” he’d say.

It’s nice that hasn’t changed when everything else has.

“Thanks for having us over tonight,” I say, finally stepping into the kitchen.

“It’s our pleasure,” Mrs. Montiel says. “And you’re more than welcome here any time, especially while your parents are away.”

Ashlyn didn’t look much like her mom, except for the grassy green eyes. That’s how my mom’s been rating Mrs. Montiel’s progress over the past few months; her eyes. Dark circles? Bad day. Bloodshot? Worse day. But now they’re the tiniest bit rimmed in red, which I’m hoping means at least a slightly-better-than-bad day.

I clutch the cuffs of my sweatshirt. “That’s really generous, but you wouldn’t believe how busy we are this week. We’ll hardly have time to eat at home.”

Zoë glances at me, puzzled. It’s not completely false—there’s cheer practice and homework and probably something in our house that needs a thorough cleaning. Lots of things to stop me from coming back here next week.

Mrs. Montiel slings the towel over the sink. “Have your mom and dad checked in with you yet?”

“Right when they landed in LA,” I say. “The ship is leaving tomorrow, so we won’t hear from them until they reach Cabo on Sunday.”

Although the connection is excruciatingly slow, not to mention expensive, my parents still considered calling us from the cruise ship. Then my dad read a horror story about some guy racking up a thousand-dollar phone bill because he’d called outside of the proper zones. The debate ended there. “Good to know what our safety’s worth to you,” I’d said to him. “Your safety is priceless until we’re in international waters,” he’d said back. So Mom and Dad will only be in contact once they make port in Mexico and find free wifi.

Mrs. Montiel grabs a bowl of rinsed-off raw chicken. She stares into it, then smiles weakly at me. “I never thought I’d miss seeing all of Ashlyn’s tofu in the fridge.”

I smile back. I think. I’m too numb and nauseated to know for sure.

She places the bowl on the counter. “Would you mind sitting with me?” she says to us, walking over to their butcher-block table. Her back is straight but her shoulders seem loose, so her body language is one big mixed message. “I was going to wait until we were having dinner, but this feels like a good time.”

My heart pounds hard, just once, like the last emphatic beat of a song. “What’s going on?”

Without a word, Zoë obediently takes a seat opposite Mrs. Montiel. I follow, a little slower, so frozen I’m convinced my knees will splinter when I sit, but they don’t.

Once I hit the padded cushion, Mrs. Montiel flattens her
palms against the wooden tabletop. “You know that some of Ashlyn’s organs were donated when she passed. And that we—Mr. Montiel, Tyler, and I—wrote a letter so that we could contact her recipients.”

Beside me, Zoë nods.

Matty read the letter at Ashlyn’s funeral. Afterward, everyone talked about how lovely it was, and how brave the Montiels were, reaching out to the recipients like that. I’d mostly tried not to think of it.

“Well, we haven’t told this to many people”—suddenly, Mrs. Montiel’s smile is a glow, like its own light source—“but out of the seven, three of them wrote back.”

“Three!” My sister leans forward, entranced. “Who are they? Are they all young? Are they all girls?”

“Zoë,”
I hiss. “Don’t be nosy.”

“Oh, no, it’s fine.” Mrs. Montiel tilts her head at Zoë. “Sonia was the first to write back. And then there was Ethan, who’s only ten years old. And Freddie, who’s . . . considerably older than that.”