Elizabeth Scott - Between Here and Forever

Jack was glad to be done with Saint Andrew’s, because he wanted to go to a school where he didn’t know everyone, and he hadn’t had a girlfriend since the girl he’d been seeing on and off for a few years dumped him right after her school’s final formal (Milford schools never had proms, only formals) and then went off to backpack around Europe until she left for col ege.

Tess never knew any of that stuff. But I did. I asked questions, and he answered them.

That came later, though. First, I had to see him with Tess. I’d wait and watch him walk her home every night, watch him listening to her talk until she’d smile and wave and walk away in this way only she had, a way that left him and everyone smiling and glad to be seen by her. A way that somehow made sure they never noticed that she’d left them.

After about a week of this, though, she’d told him good night and gone inside and he’d stood at the end of our little driveway, shoulders slumped again, like he’d final y understood what her smiles and waves real y meant. That they were nothing.

His shorts were a little too big for him, and hung down a little past his knees. The skin under his arms, from his wrists up to the wide-open sleeves of his T-shirt, glowed pale in the moonlight, and when he turned to walk to the ferry I knew he wasn’t coming back.

I don’t know how I knew—maybe the slump of his shoulders matched how I felt, invisible—but I did. I slipped away from the house and caught up to him.

“I’m Tess’s sister,” I told him. “Abby.”

“I know,” he said. “She’s told me about you. I don’t think you look like an elf, though.”

“An elf?” Tess was always describing me that way, and I think, in her mind, she was being kind. But did I real y look like a magical creature? Of course not. However, since I was short, and had my grandmother’s unusual y colored eyes—wel , describing me as “elf-like,” was, for Tess, pretty nice. She always liked the idea of magical things. Of pretend.

“No, that’s not what she said,” he said. “I mean, she said—”

“It’s okay,” I said. “She thinks she’s being nice when she says it. And I bet she told you that you look like an elf too.”

He grinned at me even as his shoulder slumped a little more. “She doesn’t date elves, right?”

“She doesn’t real y date,” I said. “She’s—I think she has this perfect guy in mind or something, and he’s not—wel , who’s perfect?”

“She’s just so … it’s like there’s something secret about her,” he said. “Something sad, I think.”

Tess was about as sad as any extremely popular and beautiful girl could be, which was, of course, not very, but I didn’t say that. I liked that he thought there was depth to Tess.

I thought if he could imagine it in her, he would see it was truly in me.

“I can help you with her,” I said. “Like I said, I know the kind of guy she’s looking for. Do you like poetry?”

He shook his head.

“Wel ,” I said. “You do now.”

That first night we talked for an hour, until the last cal for the ferry came, the lone whistle from the dock echoing into the night.

Granted, al we’d talked about was Tess, but I’d talked to him, and I floated home, happier than I’d ever been.

I had no luck with guys. Not that there were any in Ferrisvil e to even want luck with. Oh, there were a few who were cute, but I knew al their fathers and brothers and cousins, and I knew what happened to guys in Ferrisvil e. They grew up and got a job in the plant. They grew up and grew bel ies and lost their hair and sat around scratching their stomachs on the beach in the summer, slowly turning red in the sun.

I wanted more than that.

As for friends, back then I had those. Everyone in school said hel o and invited me to their parties and al that stuff. But I had nothing in common with them, and most of my “friends” just wanted to be near Tess, wanted her to notice them and invite them into her world. There were a few that maybe did like me, but they weren’t like me.

I wanted to get out of Ferrisvil e, and they didn’t. They might go off to the community col ege, or even the state col ege an hour away, but they would come back. No one in their families had ever left town for good, so why would they? People came to Ferrisvil e and stayed. It might be smal , and life might be slow-paced and smal too, but nobody but me seemed to mind that.

“Stuck-up,” my so-cal ed “friends” said about me when I stopped talking to them that summer. I guess they thought I believed I was too good to talk to them, that I thought I was going to somehow become Tess.

I didn’t think I was too good for them, and I knew I wasn’t going to be Tess. I didn’t want to be. I just wanted a world that was me and Jack and nothing more. I wanted him to be mine and, for a while, I thought he could.

And then, after it was over, I didn’t want to go crawling back to my “friends.” I didn’t want to ask for forgiveness, didn’t want to beg to be let back into something I didn’t real y want any part of. I didn’t want to live in Milford, but I didn’t want to live in Ferrisvil e either. I didn’t want to hear about boys or clothes or parties or anything. I just wanted to be left alone. And so I was.

And so I am.

But that’s now, and I stil had to get to that point.

I stil had to break my own heart.

In the end, it was easy. Jack kept talking to Tess, kept walking her home. He was volunteering to col ect water samples from the Ferrisvil e side of the river as part of some project the state was doing to see if the water was less ful of chemicals than it had been. And I kept talking to him.

He tried to talk to Tess about poetry, and I talked to him about biology, about the latest medical trends, about countries that needed doctors. He asked Tess out to dinner, and when she said no I made him sandwiches that we’d split as we sat in the dark on the beach, talking.

We talked about Tess less after a while, and talked more about him. About me. He was—and wil always be—the only guy I ever told the truth about how I sometimes felt when Tess was with me. About how I hated being her shadow.

“You shouldn’t think like that,” he said to me one night. We were down on the beach, like always, and he pushed his glasses up his nose and turned to look at me, moonlight gilding his hair to a shade that was a richer blond than Tess’s could ever be.

“You’re not like Tess at al , so why compare yourself? She’s beautiful on the outside, but you—you have the …” He cleared his throat. “You have the most beautiful soul. I know that sounds stupid, but it’s true. Any guy would be lucky to be with you.”

How could I not kiss him after he said that?

So I did, and he kissed me back. He dropped the rest of his sandwich, and when we separated he stared at me like he’d never seen me before.

“Abby,” he said, and the ferry whistle blew.

“I see what Tess doesn’t,” I said. “I see you, Jack. And I think you’re amazing. Meet me here tomorrow night. Just—just you and me.”

“Amazing?” he said. “Me?” He sounded so surprised I had to kiss him again.

And the next night, he took the ferry over earlier, and I slipped out of the house after dinner and met him down on the beach.

My parents didn’t ask where I was going or what I was doing. They never worried about me. Tess was the one who got phone cal s al the time, who had guys get into fights over her—including a memorable one during my parents’ company picnic—and who used to come home way past her curfew, mutely shaking her head when my parents demanded to know where she’d been.

The parties had stopped when she’d quit hanging out with Claire, replaced with her tel ing us over and over that she had to get into a good school and always fol owed by long, frequent bouts of sitting in silence in her room. But the guys stil cal ed, and people stil wanted to see her. My father would sometimes joke that it felt like we were al part of “Tess’s Messenger Service.”