Elizabeth Scott - Between Here and Forever

I widen my eyes again and then glance at Tess. “Soon, right?”

“Oh. Right,” he says.

“You can tel him al about col ege,” I tel Tess. “How to survive his freshman year and al that. And you’re real y only halfway through your sophomore year, and twenty isn’t that much older than eighteen. Plus he’s thinking about majoring in English, just like you. If you wake up, the two of you can try to convince me that Shakespeare is interesting, never mind that you can’t understand anything the people in his plays say.”

“I’m not going to major in English. And I don’t get what’s so great about Shake—”

I clear my throat then, to get him to stop, and look at him.

He’s not even looking at Tess. He’s looking at me like I’m some sort of puzzle he can’t figure out. Maybe he’s overwhelmed by Tess or thinks I’m weird. Or both.

“He’s kidding,” I tel Tess. “You know how guys are. Remember when you were Juliet during junior year and the understudy put laxatives in Bil Waford’s lunch so he’d be the one who’d get to kiss you? And then Bil begged to have the play’s run extended so—”

“Did that real y happen?” Eli says. He’s stil tapping his fingers, but now against his arms. It’s like he’s playing the piano on his skin or something.

I nod. “Just about every guy in school tried out for Romeo as soon as they found out Tess was auditioning for Juliet.”

“What if she hadn’t gotten the part?”

“See, now you have to wake up,” I tel Tess. “Show him how there’s no way anyone else could have gotten it. You were the only one who could ever play a girl people would die for.”

“Were you in the play?”

“Huh?” I say, startled.

“The play. Were you in it?”

“Who’d want to see me onstage?” I say. “Plus, because everyone knew Tess was going to try out, they didn’t even open the auditions to freshmen.”

“So you’re a junior now, like me?”

“Yeah,” I say, surprised he’s figured out what grade I’m in. “But you’re clearly way more ready for col ege and stuff than me.”

Eli glances down at his hands, which are stil moving, and then blushes.

He even makes embarrassed look good. He doesn’t turn bright red or anything, but two spots of color appear right below his cheekbones, making them appear more prominent. Making him look vulnerable, and almost accessible to someone like me.

And he sees me looking. I can tel because he stil s for a moment, staring right at me. Damn, damn, damn.

I turn back to Tess, watching her stil face.

“Say something else, please,” I tel him, because I don’t know what else to say, and I don’t want to think about him catching me looking at him.

“Like what?”

“Talk to her like you would if I wasn’t here,” I say. “Just pretend I’m part of the wal or something.” If he acts like I’m invisible, I wil be, and then things wil be normal again.

He’s silent for a moment, and then he says, “I don’t know how I’m supposed to pretend your sister is part of the wal , Tess. She’s very … she’s like a dragon, sort of.”

That hurts. But I asked him to act like I wasn’t there, didn’t I? And got cal ed a big scaly fire-breathing monster. Fabulous.

“See?” I tel Tess, and make sure to keep my voice light. “He clearly needs to be protected from me. So wake up, okay?”

Nothing. I pul my knees up to my chest, curling into the chair, and fiddle with the laces on my sneakers.

“Sorry,” Eli says.

“Oh, she’s just flirting,” I say, and force myself to uncurl, to sound unconcerned, but what more does she need? “You’l see when you get to know her. The summer before she went to col ege, she was working over here, in Organic Gourmet, and guys from Milford would actual y ride the ferry over to Ferrisvil e just to try and get her to talk to them.”

Wel , one guy. Jack.

“You don’t like Organic Gourmet?”

“What do you mean?”

“You made a face when you said it,” he says.

I shrug. “That’s what us dragons do.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“It’s okay,” I tel him. “I know what I look like. What I … what I am.” As soon as I’ve said it, I look at Tess again, but she’s stil unmoving. Stil silent.

Stil not ful y here.

“We should go now,” I say, and get up. I force myself to say good-bye to Tess, to not act like how he’s gotten me to admit what I am—and how I did it in front of her—has rattled me.

I force myself not to look at him.

Outside her room, I walk out of the unit and head for the elevators. I don’t look at him when I say, “Same time tomorrow?”

I expect him to say he doesn’t think it’s working, that having me sitting there is annoying or weird or both, but he just says, “Okay.”

I don’t look back when I leave, and I don’t think about him on the way home.

I think about what happened the summer before Tess went to col ege, when she was eighteen and I was fifteen, instead.

I think about Jack.

She’d gotten a scholarship to col ege of course, not because of her grades but because she “exemplified leadership potential.” She got a summer job over in Milford, as a checkout clerk for al the overpriced food at the Organic Gourmet market. (Milford doesn’t have things like supermarkets, you see. Just “markets” and “boutiques.” Ugh.)

My parents didn’t understand—didn’t she want to see her friends, didn’t she want to have fun, didn’t she know col ege was taken care of?—but she said she wanted to work. She said she was going to save money for books and other things her scholarship didn’t cover.

To be honest, I think she got a job because Claire lived so close to us and because Claire had stopped hiding in her house. Instead, she was starting to walk around her yard, walk around town, showing off Cole and smiling like she’d glimpsed something amazing no one else ever had. I think that was when Tess realized Claire was never going to issue whatever sort of apology Tess was waiting for.

So Tess went to work, and Jack came into Organic Gourmet on Wednesday, June 30th.

I sometimes wonder if I’l always remember that date, and how I felt when I looked up from the book I was reading on the front porch when I heard Tess turn onto our street and saw him walking behind her, shoulders hunched like he was nervous.

And he was. I could tel as soon as I saw him. Jack was cute; tal with sandy hair and wire-rimmed glasses that he was forever shoving up his nose. He had freckles on his cheeks, a broad, quick scattering, and on that first night, as he stood talking to Tess by the steps, I could see the pale underside of his arms sticking out from the T-shirt he wore.

His arms weren’t stick-thin or anything, just pale, but the sight of that skin … it looked vulnerable, somehow. And that got to me.

He got to me.

He looked nervous. He looked like he needed a hug. And I wanted to be the one to hug him. When I looked at him, he looked like how I felt, unsure but eager, ready to fal in love.

The problem was, of course, that his look was aimed at Tess and not me.

Tess was too nice—and too used to adoration—to blow him off, so she let him fol ow her home. Let him talk to her. And so she—and me, because I would sit on the porch and listen to them talk—learned he was going to col ege to study biology. He wanted to be a doctor, wanted to join a volunteer organization and work overseas. He wanted to help people who wouldn’t be helped otherwise. He wanted to be someone.

He never said that he wanted to matter, of course, but I understood how he felt when he talked to Tess about his plans. I didn’t want to save the world or anything like that, but I wanted to live and work somewhere where people noticed me. Where I wasn’t only “Tess’s sister.” Where I wasn’t a smal er, uglier version of perfection. Where I was just me.