Elizabeth Scott - Between Here and Forever

“Sorry” seems too smal a word to use now, and it’s a word I’m sick of anyway, a word I’ve heard too many times and I bet he has too. I take a deep breath and look down at my plate.

“It sucks when people look at you and see someone else instead of you.”

“It does suck,” he says. “Is that how—is that how you think people see you and Tess?”

“It is how people see us. Me. Especial y since—” I clear my throat, force myself to look at him. “Since the accident, I know they look at me and see her. See what she’s going through, see how—see how my family isn’t the same without her. Before, it was just that I wasn’t her. Now it’s that I’m here and she’s not.”

I’ve never said that last bit out loud before. I’ve never even let myself think it.

But that’s how it is, and that’s what is at the heart of al the anger and fear I have coiled inside me. I’m here. She’s not. And that doesn’t seem right to anyone. I can sense it. I see it.

And it makes me something more than angry or afraid.

It makes me sad, so sad.

“You want to get out of here?” Eli says, looking at me, just me, and I let myself see that.

I let myself look back.

I want to leave with him, and so I nod.

And so we do.

the backseat of Clement’s car, Eli heads into the heart of Milford.

I don’t say anything. I like that he hasn’t automatical y turned to the hospital, to Tess. I like that he asked me to come with him. I like that he wants me with him.

I like him.

I could pretend I don’t know where we’re going, but if Eli’s place in the world is like mine—and lunch at his school showed me that it’s maybe even worse, that maybe the only person he has in the whole world is Clement—then I know exactly where we’re going.

His home.

I’m right, and Clement’s house looks like I thought it would: large and old, not the biggest house on the block but somehow the most imposing, a certain starkness to its features that’s missing from the lushly painted and landscaped houses that are within discreet distance.

“Clement’s not much for decoration,” Eli says after we’ve parked and walked into a giant front hal , made al the larger by the absolute absence of anything. It’s just a room with a high, airy ceiling, arched emptiness before the rest of the house. “He says Harriet didn’t like clutter.”

I try not to gape as Eli leads me down a hal with a series of large rooms branching off on either side, but it’s kind of hard not to. My parents’

house is large by Ferrisvil e standards—we have an upstairs, instead of the one-floor houses most people have—but it’s nothing compared to this.

The hal way ends in a large living room, dark with heavy wood furniture and a massive, deep blue Oriental carpet that sinks halfway up my shoes.

Just beyond that I can make out what looks like the kitchen.

“This was my grandmother,” Eli says, picking up a photo in a large, silver frame.

A heavy-set woman with nut brown skin and wide, sparkling dark eyes—Eli’s eyes—grins at the camera, one arm slung exuberantly around Clement, who is gazing at her as if she’s a goddess.

I smile at the photo, because it so fits with everything Clement has ever said about Harriet, with how his love for her stil shines in his voice. “She has your eyes. Or I guess you have hers.”

“That’s what Clement says,” he says. “My mother liked to remind my father of that when they were fighting about me.”

He hands me another photo, silently. A truly beautiful couple—a tal , elegant man and a tiny, raven-haired woman—are in wedding clothes, smiling at the camera. I can’t help but stare at the woman’s wedding dress, the train so long it’s been swept to one side and then arranged so it pools like water over the steps they’re standing on.

“My parents,” he says, and I see he has his father’s cheekbones, high and sharp, and his mother’s hair. There is an intensity about them both, though, a sense of barely contained urgency, that I don’t see in Eli.

“No photos of you?” I smile at him.

He shakes his head. “My parents used to send them, but I made Clement move them when I came. I don’t like—looking at them just reminds me of how hard I used to try to be what they wanted.”

He sees me looking at him and says, “Hold on, I’l show you one.” He heads out of the room, and I hear the sounds of his feet on stairs.

After a moment, he returns with a photo and hands it to me.

It’s Eli—I can tel that right away—and he’s young, maybe three or four. He is smiling at the camera, a hesitant smile, and his hands are clutched tight around a stuffed animal I bet he was supposed to play with, pose with. I think of Cole, with his easy laughter and exuberance, and wonder what could make him look this tense, this anxious.

“You look nervous,” I say, and Eli takes the picture back, putting it facedown on an end table.

“I was. My parents were there, and they wanted me to look happy,” he says. “And to not ‘fidget.’ That’s what they used to say I did. I ‘fidgeted.’ It wasn’t until my first school asked them to take me to a doctor that they admitted something was wrong with me.”

“First school?”

“Yeah,” he says, moving away from the picture and sitting down on a long, low-backed sofa.

After a moment, I sit next to him. “So what happened?”

“What did you look like when you were little?” he says, putting his feet up on the coffee table in front of us.

“Same as now,” I say, not cal ing him out on changing the subject. “Only I used to try and—I used to try and dress like Tess. I mean, I’ve always had to wear her old clothes—” Wil that freak him out? No, he doesn’t look bothered by it. “But I used to try and make my hair look like hers and stuff. It never worked, obviously.”

“And you’ve always lived here.”

“In Ferrisvil e, yeah.”

“Is it real y that different than Milford?”

I place my feet next to his on the coffee table. I point at his shiny, expensive shoes, dark leather that looks buttery-soft. Then I point at my own used-to-be-white-but-are-now-dingy-gray canvas sneakers.

“I have sneakers too.”

“And I bet you didn’t buy them out of a bin where they were tagged ‘Buy One Pair, Get One Pair Free.’”

“My parents do have money,” he says, a bitter little laugh escaping. “Couldn’t have been sent to al the schools I was without that.”

“How many schools?”

“A lot. A dozen, at least.” He holds his hands out toward me briefly. “And al because of these. Wel , these and my fucked up brain.”

“You shouldn’t—you aren’t like that,” I say. “I didn’t even notice you had OCD until you told me.”

“Right.”

“Real y,” I say. “I thought you were nervous around Tess because she’s so … wel , because she’s Tess and she’s beautiful.”

He’s silent for a moment.

“I don’t real y know how to say this,” he final y says. “So, um, don’t get mad, okay?” He bites his lips, folds his arms across his chest, and then slowly unfolds them. “I just—I don’t see what’s so great about her.”

“That’s because she’s asleep. If Tess was awake you’d see. She’s the kind of person everyone wants to look at. Like you.”

“Are you kidding? I got asked to leave my last school because I was taking so long getting ready to work—I had to sharpen my pencil a certain number of times, and then I had to have al my papers lined up along the right edge of the desk and—anyway, there was a lot of stuff I had to do, and I wasn’t getting any work done. And yeah, people looked at me then, and at every other school I’ve been to, but not like how you think.”