Sarah Allen - The Girl Who Chased the Moon

In the silence that followed, her smile faded and her hands went to her hair. “Do I have something on my head?”

“No, sorry. I was just thinking about your hair.”

She gave him an odd look. “You were thinking about my hair?”

This was the same hiccup he’d felt on the Ferris wheel with her. He couldn’t lose focus. “Yes. No. I mean, I was wondering if you ever wore it down.”

She shook her head. “It’s in that weird growing-out stage right now.”

“How short was it before?”

“Really short. My mom wore her hair short, so I wore mine short, too. But I started growing it out a little over a year ago.”

“What made you stop wanting to be like her?”

“I’ve never stopped wanting to be like her. She was a wonderful person,” she said vehemently. Then she turned back to the water. “It was just a lot to live up to.”

This wasn’t working. They had to shake some of this awkwardness off. “Let’s go for a walk,” he said as he stood.

They left their shoes by their chairs and went back down the deck steps. They walked close to the water and got their feet wet. They didn’t talk much, but that was okay. Walking together, their strides in rhythm, getting used to each other, was enough.

When they reached the cove, Emily looked toward the grotto where his sister’s birthday party had been held. There were two elderly couples sitting on folding chairs there today, away from the crowds and out of the sun. He knew what she was going to do before she took the first step.

Without a word, Emily left him and walked away from the water, toward the trees. He hesitated a moment before following her. She passed the elderly couples and went to the tree where her mother’s and his uncle’s initials had been carved. Win stopped to say hello to the elderly couples, to put their minds at ease, because they were looking at Emily strangely, then he went to stand by her.

The past few months of her life had been marked by a chaos he could only imagine. Looking at her like this, he could see her grief. He could see how alone she felt with it. But he understood that. He knew about things you couldn’t tell other people because they had no basis for comparison. Because they simply wouldn’t understand.

“Will the kids at Mullaby High know about my mom? About who she was here?” Emily finally asked, staring at the tree.

“If their parents tell them. You probably got the worst of it from my dad. I wouldn’t worry about Mullaby High. It’s not that bad.” He hated seeing her like this. He wanted to distract her. “Tell me about your old school. Do you miss it? The website made it seem very… intense.” That was putting it mildly. Roxley School for Girls was so full of righteous, politically correct indignation that a person could get a nosebleed just by reading the literature.

She shrugged. “After my mom died, I wanted to find some sort of comfort in the school, but I couldn’t. There was just this legacy . More than ever, people there wanted me to fill my mom’s shoes, and I couldn’t. Ironic, isn’t it, that I come here and the same thing has happened, just in a different way. And I don’t know which is worse, trying to live up to her name, or trying to live it down.”

“What about your friends there?”

“I started having panic attacks after my mother died, and I didn’t want people to see me having them, so I started spending a lot of time by myself.”

He suddenly thought of her sitting on the bench downtown with her head down. He’d been watching her for a while that morning, and he’d seen the moment something was wrong, the way she’d stopped short on the sidewalk, the color draining from her face. It had been alarming, and had forced him to approach her, when he hadn’t planned to at all. And that had changed everything. “Were you having a panic attack the first day we met?”

She nodded.

“What brings them on?”

“Panic.”

That made him smile. “Well, obviously.”

“They come on when I start to feel overwhelmed, when there’s too much going on in my head.” She suddenly seemed wary. “Why do you want to know?”

“I’m just curious.” She continued to look at him, her brows low over her bright blue eyes. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

“I’ve never told anyone about my panic attacks,” she said, as if he’d somehow forced it out of her. “You now know my weakness.”

“You say that as if you’re not supposed to have any.” He reached past her and started picking bark off the tree absently. “We all have weaknesses.”

“Do you?”

“Oh, yes.” She had no idea.

He continued picking at the tree until she put her hand on his and made him stop. “And you’re not going to tell me?”

He took a deep breath. “It’s complicated.”

“I get it,” she said, and turned to walk back to the shoreline. “You don’t want to tell me.”

He jogged after her. “No, it’s not that I don’t want to tell you. It’s more like… I have to show you.”

She stopped. He almost ran into her. “So show me.”

“I can’t. Not now.” He ran his hands through his hair, frustrated. “You’ll have to trust me on that.”

“I don’t have much of a choice, do I?” she said.

They headed around the lake, quiet again, and eventually circled back to the house. It was a long walk, and when they got back, Penny brought lunch out to them unasked. After she set out the plates of sandwiches and fruit, she passed behind Emily’s chair, still in Win’s view. She smiled as she pointed to Emily and gave him a thumbs-up before she went inside to answer the ringing phone.

He smiled back at her.

After they’d finished, Emily stood and walked to the railing. He followed the line of her long legs, up her body, to her face. He was suddenly fascinated by the progress of her hair tie as it slowly slipped out of her hair as she moved and stretched. Finally, the tie fell from the tips of her hair to the deck. She didn’t seem to notice.

“I wish I had my bathing suit,” she said. “I’d go cool off in the water.”

“Come inside where it’s cool. I’ll show you around.”

When she turned, he reached over to pick up her hair tie. “You dropped something.”

She held out her hand. “Thanks.”

But he put it in his pocket.

“You’re not going to give it back?” she asked.

“Eventually,” he said as he walked into the cavernous living room off the deck. Emily followed, arguing with him about rights of ownership.

She fell silent when she stepped inside. There weren’t any paintings of sand dunes or antique wooden buoys on the walls, the way he knew some of the surrounding lake house rentals were decorated, like they could double as fish-house restaurants. This place actually looked like his family spent a lot of time here, which they did. The furniture was comfortable and had a bit of sag. One wall was dominated by a flat screen, and the floor under it was littered with a Wii and tons of DVDs. Overnight travel was inconvenient for them, so their vacations usually consisted of coming out to the lake and staying here.

“This is a lot more homey than I expected,” she finally said.

“They can’t all be ivory towers.”

He led her to the second story with a cursory wave to the four bedrooms there, then up to the third-story loft, through a door in the linen closet. The space was occupied only by a low couch, a stack of books, a television, and some storage boxes. No one came up here but him. He loved his family, but when they were all out here, sometimes he needed a break from their togetherness . So this was where he went. He didn’t like their house on Main Street as much-with its cold marble and oppressive history-but it was a lot easier to avoid people there.