Elizabeth Scott - Between Here and Forever

I look at Tess. “Can you see me there?” I ask her. “I’d pul my bike into the parking lot and people would faint in horror.”

“Did Tess ever go?” Eli says.

“Sure,” I tel him, careful not to look at him, to keep watching Tess. “She dated this one guy for a couple of weeks and he took her to some dinner they have. Remember that, Tess? Mom painted your fingernails for you, and Dad took about a hundred pictures. I can’t even remember the guy’s name. What was it?”

Nothing, and as I watch her, the silence stretches out, becomes uncomfortable. I glance at Eli and see him looking at me again. This time he looks upset. Almost angry.

Good. I’ve final y done it. Made him angry, and I bet he’s going to leave. I try to ignore the way my insides feel al hol owed out at the thought of not seeing him again, or worse, seeing him here and having him not talk to me, or worse stil , say hel o and move on like I’m nothing to him.

“Eli, what’s wrong with you?” I force myself to say. I try to sound like I’m pissed off, try to say it with chal enge in my voice, but it comes out quietly.

Sadly.

“You’re as bad as everyone who lives in Milford,” he says, and it’s so not what I’m expecting him to say—it’s so not true—that I’m too startled to react at al .

“Yeah,” he says when I don’t say anything. “You are. You—look, I don’t like Milford either, but you act like anyone who lives here is … I don’t know.

Evil or something. Like the fact that I go to Saint Andrew’s means you can’t ever possibly …”

He clears his throat. “Just because I—I can’t help that my parents have money, or that Clement does, any more than you can help that Tess is here.”

“You can’t compare those things! You—you’ve never had anything bad happen to you or—” I break off as I realize what I’ve said. How wrong I am.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I shouldn’t have said that, but I’m not a snob. Not like you think. I just … I don’t belong at Saint Andrew’s.”

“Why? It’s just a place, like here or—”

“Like here?”

“Okay,” he says, and gives me such a shy, tentative grin that my heart gives a sharp, painful y joyous kick-thump in my chest. “Not exactly like here. Here the gift shop doesn’t charge fifty bucks for a coffee mug with a motto on it.”

“I bet gum is cheaper, though.”

“Not when I was working,” he says, and now I smile at him. I can’t help it. He’s so … he should be il egal.

He real y should be. He’s got me thinking things and wanting things, and looking at him looking at me like he’s happy to be doing so, I can’t help myself.

I say, “Al right, if I do meet you for lunch tomorrow, what time should I meet you? And where?”

And I’m happy. That’s the worst part. I’m joyously, stupidly, overwhelmingly happy. I’m not thinking about Tess. I’m not thinking about what I learned when I fel for Jack.

I’m not thinking at al . I’m happy, and I don’t care.

to, wel , to do something other than visit Tess, I get caught. Or at least my guidance counselor, with his shiny, worn pants and constant cup of coffee in hand, sees me leaving and says, “Abby, do you have permission to leave early?”

“Of course,” I say, because even if I wasn’t planning on leaving, I would now because I don’t want to hear about how I can come see him if I want to “talk,” or worse, hear how Tess is “missed.” As if I don’t know that already.

As if I could ever forget.

“How’s Tess?” he cal s out as I’m getting on my bike. “Everyone misses her, you know.”

See?

“I know,” I say, and head to the ferry.

I don’t get nervous—okay, I don’t get real y nervous—until I’m off the ferry and in Milford and have biked by the hospital. Saint Andrew’s is close by, just a few orderly, overly manicured streets away, but I haven’t been anywhere in Milford in ages. Not since—wel , not since I came over here to visit Tess back when she was working at Organic Gourmet.

Back when I wanted—hoped—to see Jack. Even if he was watching Tess.

I turn onto the road that leads to Saint Andrew’s. It isn’t a long one, as the school starts almost right away, its old and clearly expensively kept brick buildings dotted al over the impossibly green lawn. I turn onto a narrow road, fol owing a neatly lettered sign that says PARKING.

There’s a bike rack at the far end of the parking lot, forlorn and rusty, and I leave my bike there, wondering if it’s stupid to lock it up. I mean, in Ferrisvil e, or maybe even at the hospital, someone might want to take it, but here? Here my bike looks even worse than the bike rack.

“Hey,” I hear, and look over, see Eli.

“Hey,” I say. He’d told me he’d meet me in the parking lot yesterday, but my heart’s kick-thudding inside my chest anyway, like I’m surprised.

Or happy.

“I wasn’t sure—I thought maybe you wouldn’t come,” he says, and how can someone who looks like him sound unsure? How?

“I’m here,” I say, trying—and failing—not to stare.

I can’t help it, though. Eli looks like an idealized private-school guy, like a model dressed up in clothes for a brochure, a vision of what guys are supposed to look like but never do.

Standing there looking at him, the sunlight shining onto him and highlighting his hair, his eyes, his face, al of him—I have no idea why he wants me here. I know what the sunlight shows as it shines on me. I am too short, I am scrawny, I am as far from perfect as you can get.

“You ready to go?” he says, and I notice his hands are clenching and unclenching by his sides, fingers flexing like butterfly wings.

He isn’t perfect either, and I understand that. I know how it feels.

I put one hand on his arm. “Are you al right?”

It’s the first time I’ve asked anyone other than Tess or my parents or Claire if they’re okay in forever, and it staggers me.

But I have to ask. I want to make sure Eli is okay. I … I care about him.

“Just the usual,” he says. “I’m glad—I’m real y glad you came.”

My heart kick-thuds in my chest again and I know al the feelings I had on the way here weren’t nerves. It was never nerves. It was excitement.

Hope.

It’s him .

I let my hand linger on his arm, feel the warmth of his skin through his shirt, and say, “Me too.”

We walk toward what he tel s me is the cafeteria. It looks just like al the other fancy, old brick buildings, except there are slightly more windows, as wel as tables and chairs outside, and as we head in, I glance at him.

Now that I’ve gone and done it—touched him (even if it was only on his sleeve) and admitted to myself that I’m glad to be here, that I want to be here—I can admit something else too.

The “deal” I struck with him, the one that was about Tess—it hasn’t been about her for a while. I stil want her to wake up, but I don’t want her to fal for him. I don’t want him to fal for her.

I want him to fal for me.

It’s weird, but after being so careful for so long, after forcing myself to remember the pain of final y seeing that Jack didn’t love me and wasn’t ever going to, I’m not scared of how I feel.

I thought I would be, but the truth is I feel like—I feel like I did during those few heady weeks with Jack, when the world seemed like it had a place for me, not as Tess’s sister, but as just me, in it.

I’m not saying I want to run around hugging everyone or skipping through fields of flowers, but the hard knot of anger—the one that’s lived and breathed across and around my heart—has loosened.

And so my first glimpse of Eli’s classmates doesn’t make me want to find large rocks and hurl them at their heads, even though I see them eyeing me and writing me off, able to spot my cheap jeans and not-faded-on-purpose shirt for what they are, where they show I’m from.