Chapter 20
AFTER NORA ASKS ALBERT TO put my “winnings” back in the walk-in, I follow her out the squeaky front door and around the side of the shop, where a four-wheeler is parked in the shade. It’s obviously been through it. The green paint is faded and scuffed, and the tires are heavily caked with mud.
I expect to walk right by, but then Nora plants her boot on the foothold and swings her leg over the seat to the other side. She turns and flicks her head at me as if to say Hop on, but I’ve never ridden one before and to be honest, I’m a little nervous.
“Don’t worry. I have my license.” She smirks, dimples forming in her cheeks that I’ve never noticed before.
Her expression doesn’t reassure me one bit, but I guess it beats walking, considering I almost died of heat exhaustion when we hiked out to the woods the other day.
I step up beside it, unsure of exactly where to get on. It must be obvious by the look on my face, because she reaches back and pats the small space behind her. I climb up about 10 percent as gracefully but finally settle in where I think I’m supposed to be.
She stands up and kicks her foot down onto a metal pedal, throwing her whole weight behind it.
The thing doesn’t start so she does it again and again, until finally, the motor growls to life under us.
As she plops down on the vinyl seat in front of me, I scoot back to give her as much room as possible, but I’m not sure this thing was meant for two people.
I fumble around behind me, trying to find a spot to grab onto, but nothing feels sturdy enough.
“Hold on to me,” Nora says, raising her voice over the sound of the idling motor as she readjusts the bottom of her cutoff shirt.
I start to reach for her waist, but just the thought of holding on to her like that makes me feel a little…
weird. So instead, I clamp my hands over her shoulders, leaving about half a foot of space between the two of us.
She turns her face to the side, and the sun lights up her hazel eyes as she peeks back at me.
“Ready?”
“Ready,” I reply.
I was NOT ready.
Nora twists the throttle and my weight gets thrown backward all of a sudden, sending a screech from my throat that I don’t even recognize as my own voice.
Just as I start to lose my grip on her shoulders, she releases the throttle and I fly forward into her back, completely eliminating the six inches I had left between us.
“I told you to hold on to me,” she says, bringing us to a stop.
“Well, I didn’t know you meant for dear life!” I yell back at her.
I slide backward on the seat, but then this time, I plant my hands on either side of her waist, wondering if it feels as odd for her as it does for me.
“Ready?” she asks sarcastically, and I roll my eyes from behind her.
“Ready,” I reply, sinking my fingers into her skin, my chest tingling as I prepare for takeoff again.
Nora hits the throttle a little softer this time, and soon we’re flying across the field, racing the big puffy clouds as the wind blows them east. When we run over small uneven patches of dirt and rocks, I tuck my head in behind her, blocking the wind from my face.
As we find our way onto more of a path, Nora pulls back on the throttle a little harder and my stomach jumps up into my throat, my hair whipping all around my face.
I let out a gasp as we take a sharp curve, thinking of my stitches that have just healed. “Nora! Slow down!” I yell, and immediately, she lets off the gas a little.
Weird or not, I pull myself forward on the seat until I’m right up against Nora’s back. I slide my hands all the way around her, locking them in front of her body almost like a hug. And for the first time since I got on this thing, I actually feel safe.
A few wisps of blond hair fall out of her ponytail, lightly tickling my face. I close my eyes and rest my chin on her shoulder blade, letting every turn and bump in the path be a surprise. She smells like her room up on the third floor and like peaches and maybe a little like dirt, too.
She smells nice.
There’s this rush in my stomach, now that I don’t feel like I’m about to catapult off this thing. It’s actually pretty fun.
Soon we slow to a stop and everything goes quiet enough to hear the crows and the wind blowing through the tall grass, and the sunshine just feels so perfect and warm on my face.
“Uh… Stevie?” Nora’s voice startles me as my eyes fly open and I realize we’re parked by a roll of wire fence, at our destination.
“Shit. Sorry.” I unclasp my hands and slide them back across her stomach, into the dip of her waist, and then into my own lap as I sit up straight. She twists around halfway, a smile turning into a soft laugh.
“You’ve got, umm… Your hair looks kinda crazy.
” She reaches out, takes a strand from in front of my eyes, and tucks it behind my ear.
The feel of her fingertips against my skin makes my whole body go rigid.
As she switches focus from my hair to my eyes, she quickly pulls away and turns back around to face the front.
My face feels hot and I’m glad she’s not looking at me still, because I have no idea why I’m being so weird. “What can I do to help?” I ask as she scratches at her eye.
“Right.” She hops off the four-wheeler and into the grass, which has grown up well past her knees.
“I’ve been working on pulling some new fence,” she says, pointing down the field at a line of freshly placed wooden posts stretching as far as the eye can see.
I follow her over to the roll of new wire fence and a pile of tools beside it.
Soon she’s explaining to me how all the tools function and what she needs me to do.
Basically, I stand by the “puller,” ratcheting it tighter when she tells me to, and Nora does…
well, everything else. She hooks up the chains between the puller and the stretcher bar, which grabs onto the wire fence so we can pull it evenly around each post. She staples it in when it’s in just the right spot.
And then she moves the heavy-looking roll of the new fencing from post to post.
“Are you doing this whole thing by yourself?” I ask incredulously as she finishes stapling the wire to the next post.
“Albert, that guy in the shop, works on it too, but yeah, mostly. This is basically my entire job for the summer.”
“Speaking of Albert, he said he thought you’ve been sneaking around with some boy this summer. That true?”
Nora snorts out a laugh. “Albert needs to mind his own damn business.”
“Is that a yes, then?”
She drops the staple gun to the ground and gives me a deadpan look. “Stevie, I can’t think of a single thing that I would rather do less than run around with some dumb boy this summer.”
“I believe you,” I tell her, and I do. It’s odd, though. Most girls our age are at least thinking about boys, even me… now.
Nora doesn’t seem like most girls, though.
I watch as she wipes her forehead off on her forearm and then drags it across the front of her homemade cutoff shirt.
“You don’t really care what people think about you, do you?” I ask.
“No. Why would I?” she asks, dragging the heavy wire down to the next post.
“I don’t know,” I reply. She’s so sure of herself. So confident in who she is… unlike me. “Most people do.”
“Sorry to disappoint you,” she says.
“No, that’s not what I meant. I actually kinda love it.” I smile, squinting at her through the sun. Sweat is starting to roll down my back, even though I’m barely doing anything. I don’t know how she does this all day.
“Do you really like this job?” I ask, having a hard time imagining how anyone could.
“Be more specific,” she replies.
I don’t know what other job I could be talking about, but okay.
“Do you like being out here in the blazing sun, pulling a wire fence around an endless line of posts?” I ask.
“Yeah. I do.” She lets out a grunt as she unrolls the fence, her toned biceps flexing underneath her tan skin.
“I like being outside and I like working with my hands, building something. It makes me feel accomplished at the end of the day in a way that nothing else ever has… like school, for example. That was never really for me.”
I haven’t ever really done anything like this, but as I look down the fence line at the hundreds of yards she’s already finished… I find I can understand that.
“Do you think you’ll work here forever? Take the farm over from your mom?” I ask.
“God, I hope not. I was serious the other day about wanting to get out of here someday. I can’t live in Wyatt forever, and if you haven’t picked up on it, my mom and I don’t exactly… mesh,” she says as she squeezes the trigger on the staple gun with a loud click.
“Yeah… I kinda did. You can tell me about it if you want, but you don’t have to.”
“Pull that tighter,” she says, and I pull on my tool until the fence straightens out.
“There’s not a whole lot to tell. I just don’t think she was ever really meant to be a mom.
” She stops to look at me. “I don’t think it’s in her blood, to be able to care about someone the way a mom probably should. ”
“So why stay? Now that you’re done with school? I mean, if you really want out of here.”
Huh. There’s a question I can’t even answer about myself…
She stops and looks at me, squinting like she’s trying to figure me out or something. “You ask a lot of questions.”
I shrug. “Just trying to get to know you. Have you never had a friend before?”
She shakes her head, a smile playing on her lips. “Well, if I leave Wyatt, who are you going to have around to come bother?”
“Hey, I’m helping!” I yell back, dropping my tool slightly to try to shove her in the shoulder, but she dodges me.
“And you’re doing such a good job.” She points back at my post. “Get over there and keep that tight!”
I like this. Talking to her feels so… freeing. No history to bog us down. No underhanded comments or pressure to do something I might not be ready for. No overthinking what I’m saying in case it might not be right.
“So why did you go vegan? If not to hashtag ‘freethecows’?”
She looks over at me and her eyes completely light up.
“Oh my God. Okay. You have to watch this documentary I found. It’s all about the meat industry and its effect on the environment, and how…”
She goes on and on, her voice practically buzzing as she tells me all about it for the next twenty or so minutes while we make our way down the fence line.
“Did you know that giving up meat is the number one thing you can do to help protect the environment?” she says before finally pausing dramatically.
“I did not know that,” I reply with a smile.
“Well, it is. One burger uses up over six hundred gallons of water. Six hundred gallons!”
“That’s a lot of water,” I reply.
“That is a lot of water, Stevie. Anyway, I could literally go on forever about this, but I just… I just wanted to do something good,” she says as she kneels down on the other side of the fence from me.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone speak so passionately about anything before. It’s honestly kinda… cute? I don’t know. My heart feels happy listening to her, like I could do it forever.
“Why not just go vegetarian, though?” I ask, reaching out to help her connect the chain, my left hand slightly overlapping her right.
“I’m sort of an all-or-nothing type of person.” She picks her head up, inches from mine, and looks right into my eyes in a way that makes me feel guilty, like I should look away. But I don’t. “When I’m in… I’m all in,” she finishes.
I’m not sure if it’s just the weight of the chain or if she’s actually pressing her hand down into mine, but I can’t seem to look away from her face to check.
Her eyes flick down to my mouth as a lump forms in my throat. I try to slow my breathing so the rising and falling of my chest isn’t as apparent, but it’s just not possible.
This feeling is… well, I don’t know what it is, but it feels familiar. It takes a few seconds to place it but finally I do.
It’s what I expected to feel when Ryan wanted to kiss me. That thing that I’ve never felt. The feeling that I was starting to think didn’t actually exist.
And I’m feeling it right now.
With Nora.
I sit back on my heels and force myself to look away from her as I stand up and drop the chain. The full weight of it sags and pulls Nora’s hands to the ground. I turn my back to her as the heat of the sun starts to make me feel a little light-headed.
What was that?
She’s just being nice. I just think she’s cool and I like being around her. That’s it.
“Stevie, why are you here? I mean, what are you really doing out here with me?” Nora asks from behind me. “You chose to be out here, working in the middle of a field in the heat of summer, when you could be doing literally anything else.”
“I don’t know. I just—”
… like the person I get to be with you.
… want to get to know you.
… want to ride on the back of your four-wheeler again.
All of it sounds weird. “I—wanted to give you a cow. And then suddenly it wasn’t a cow anymore and… I guess I don’t know why I’m here.” I turn around to face her, pulling my hair off my sticky neck. “I’m actually not feeling super well.”
Nora’s face fills with concern as she takes a step toward me.
“Is it your head? Are you—”
I shake my head, cutting her off.
“Can you just take me back to my car?” I ask, already heading back toward the four-wheeler. “Please?”
“Uh, yeah. Sure,” she replies, but her voice is more distant now. She hops on in front of me without ever meeting my eyes.
She starts it up in one solid kick down, but this time she doesn’t tell me to hold on to her, and I don’t. Instead, I wrap my fingers around the metal rack behind us and hold on tight as she flies across the field, toward the buildings in the distance.
Why did I come out here? Why did I win a freaking cow for this girl? Why do I only feel normal when I’m around her?
I remind myself that it all comes back to the fact that we didn’t know each other before. That’s why I like being around her. I just need a friend for this version of me. She is my friend. And just my friend.
My brain must still be slightly broken. Maybe it’s just sending the wrong signals at the wrong time or something, because I know I can like Ryan. I mean… I do like Ryan. I think.
I just… need to spend more time with him, too.