Chapter 1 Everybody’s Favorite Guy #5
But it was too late. Maybe always had been. Any dignity I might have hoped to maintain around my tragic, unrequited, lifelong pining for Walker was already lost.
What the moms did next wasn’t as mean as it sounds—really.
They had no idea what a still-fresh (and as of this weekend, even fresher) wound they were poking at.
They thought I’d had a crush on Walker as a child, and like all normal crushes, it had faded.
And now it was fine to joke about it, and reminisce fondly, and maybe even work to keep our focus as a group on something way less devastating than the actual reason we were gathered here.
Anyway, they reminisced. About me. About all the adorable-slash-pathetic things I did for Walker as a kid: “Remember how she always baked him cookies at the holidays?” “And how she went looking for his baseball cap after he lost it?” “And how she bought those stickers with the initial D on them and stuck them all over her mirror?”
In their defense, I really think they thought we were all fine now.
But I wasn’t exactly fine. And the more they went on, the more un-fine I felt. Before I knew it, I was overtaken by a swell of protectiveness toward my besotted, tenderhearted younger self.
Someone had to defend her.
“Fine,” I cut in at last. “Yes. You’re not wrong.
I was madly in love with Walker every single day of my childhood.
Whatever the kid version of being in love is, I felt it for Walker.
For years. And then”—I looked at my mom—“when Dad died . . .” Just saying those words made my throat tighten a little.
“When Dad died, and the Shaws looked after us, it got worse. I saw even more of Walker, every day, as he drove me home from school. And also because he was growing up, and he got all those”—I gestured at him—“arm muscles.”
We all looked over at Walker’s arm muscles.
Yep. Still there.
I took a deep breath and went on. “And mostly just because he was so . . . so warm to me. You know? The world felt so cold after Dad died—and Walker just warmed everything up like morning sun. I thought he was—honestly—the greatest guy in the world. I trusted him. I adored him.”
I looked over and met Walker’s eyes.
Walker, for his part, looked down.
Now I got to the crux of it. “But it turned out he wasn’t a good guy, after all.
He seems like a good guy. He has the trappings of a good guy.
He’s so good at pretending to be a good guy that even now—even knowing everything I know—I still find myself slipping.
But he’s not who I always thought he was.
And I still can’t figure out how I could have been so wrong about him—how he could have been so heartless all along, and I never knew it.
It makes me second-guess myself about every other person in my life to this day. ”
The moms looked at each other like, That went dark.
Finally, Taffy said, “Heartless?” As if that didn’t—couldn’t—add up.
My mom just looked back and forth between Walker and me, unable to fathom what could have gone down between us. “I knew you grew apart, but . . .”
But that’s when Walker decided to stand up for me. “She’s telling the truth,” he said, looking his own mom in the eyes. “I was heartless to her.”
Taffy gave a headshake of refusal.
Walker went on. “In the spring of our sophomore year, on the night before her birthday. I took her up to that garage by the Trust Bank building to show her the sunset up there. And then I kissed her.”
Oh, god. Were we sharing this with the moms?
Walker had kissed me a lot that night, to be honest. He’d kissed me for hours—through the sunset and beyond. The kind of whole-self, whole-body, wholehearted kissing you only ever do when it’s high school, and you’re infatuated, and you’ve never even had a taste of heartbreak.
When I went home that night, after being kissed like that, I thought I might perish from joy.
But did our mothers need those details?
I shook my head at Walker like, Too much.
But he didn’t care. “The next day was Lily’s birthday. And she told her friend—that girl with the pink streak in her hair—”
My mom frowned at me like, Who?
“Bobo,” I supplied.
“Bobo,” Walker added. “Lily told her she was going to ask me to the junior prom, and Bobo told everybody. This was, like, front-page gossip. Because I was, ya know, a jock, and Lily was—”
“Not in your league,” I offered.
Walker gave me a look. “Smart and bookish and cool,” he corrected. “And so I guess folks were curious to see what I’d say. And so when she came up to me in study hall near the end of the day, I already knew what she was about to ask. And I already knew what I was going to say.”
Hold on. He’d known what I was going to ask?
“Did she ask you to the junior prom?” my mom asked.
Walker nodded.
“And what did you say?” his mom asked.
“He said no,” I answered, suddenly wanting to de-escalate. We didn’t have to tell it word for word.
But Walker looked at me and shook his head. “I said,” he corrected, “‘I’m the last guy on earth who’d go to junior prom with you.’”
“Walker!” His mother was appalled.
But Walker held up his hand. “And then, for good measure, I added, ‘Not with you and your weird eye.’”
There. He’d said it.
The whole kitchen went quiet.
The moms understood, of course, the particular cruelty of that comment.
My mom, who had spent years taking me to Dr. Mason, the ophthalmologist. And a full year making me do an eye-training computer program every day after school.
And who’d had to endlessly remind me to focus, because if you stop using the eye that wants to drift, your brain might forget about it—and then might never be able to remember.
Taffy had been there for all of it, too. Everyone in that room knew what a long struggle it had been.
After a long silence, Taffy looked at her son and asked, “Why?”
Walker nodded, like this was the question he’d been waiting for. “I knew that she liked me. And I wanted her to stop liking me. And it was the meanest thing I could think of to say.”
Wow. Okay. And with that, I was done here.
My brain was at a standstill, but my body shifted into fight-or-flight—and it decisively chose flight.
I charged over to the kitchen table and picked up one of the sandwich bags full of ashes. “Which dad is this?” I demanded.
Taffy blinked at the bag I was holding. “That’s your dad.”
“Okay then,” I said.
I stuffed the bag of ashes in my pocket and walked out the door.
“Put on your columbine shirt first!” my mom called after me.
I weirdly happened to know—because Walker’s dad had once told us on a fly-fishing trip—that columbines symbolized both love and foolishness.
Perfect. I had the rest of my life to wear that shirt.
But right now, I had ashes to scatter.
It was a three-mile hike to the base of Turnaround Pass from the cabin, and the pass itself was so rocky that the only way to get to the top was to take, of all things, an open-air gondola.
We rode it all the time with our dads as kids—until the day, the summer before I started fifth grade, we’d gotten stuck halfway up during a windstorm.
I threw up three times before they got us back down, and the experience had left me with a lifelong fear of open-air gondolas.
All to say: I hadn’t ridden it again since.
Until today. When I would have no choice.
Thanks, Dad.
In a way, Walker’s big confession was useful in this moment.
I’d felt nothing when he apologized—but I felt everything when he’d confessed.
Hearing it all again—seeing it, feeling it, watching flashes of it light up my memories—brought it all back up to the surface. I felt raw, and shaky, and enraged. Enraged at Walker—and wildly, fiercely, animalistically protective of my younger self.
He’d known. He’d known what I was going to ask him. He’d had time to prepare his answer—to think about it—and that was what he’d chosen to say.
“I’m the last guy on earth who’d go to junior prom with you. Not with you and your weird eye.”
Never mind that my eye was 95 percent corrected by then. He had known how ostracized I was for the patch. He had seen how humiliated I felt every time my mom noticed it drifting and told me to fix it, and he’d step in as my rescuer. Throw a dinner roll at me or something and get me laughing.
Of all the things he could have said to me that day—in front of a whole study hall full of kids who quoted him ad nauseam for weeks—he picked the one he knew would hurt the most.
He wanted me to stop liking him?
It worked.
But he overshot the mark.
After that, I hated him.
And when Walker’s sweet friend Ryan walked into study hall minutes later, oblivious to everything that had just gone down, and asked me to go to junior prom with him, I said yes. Out of spite. And then I dated Ryan for the rest of high school.
And I never asked Walker another question again.
At the base of Turnaround Pass, I hesitated.
I really did have a genuine fear of open-air gondolas.
As fears go . . . not really one that came up all that often.
But it sure was having a moment today.
The gondola station was pretty deserted. It was too early in the season for visitors, as last night’s freak spring storm could confirm. I’d be facing this ride on my own.
I stopped at the turnstile.
Don’t think, I commanded myself, just go.
The sooner I threw this sandwich bag of ashes off the peak, the sooner I could get the hell out of here and forget all about Walker Shaw.
Again.
Maybe the second time wouldn’t take as long.
But that’s when I heard steps on the gravel behind me, I felt a push at my waist—and I ka-klunked through the turnstile.
Then Walker ka-klunked right behind me.
“Come on,” he said, hooking his arm around my waist and pulling me into the waiting gondola cabin. “Let’s get this done.”
“I don’t need you to drag me,” I protested.
“I’m not dragging you. I’m helping you.”
“I don’t need your help, either.”
But he was already clanking the metal door closed behind us.