Chapter Twenty-Nine
Eliza
“I want you to try and remember what it was like to have been very young. And particularly the days when you were first in love […] Will you remember that, please?”
—Thornton Wilder, Our Town
Reed didn’t say a word as I led him away from the party and into the woods that eventually ended at the small gravel parking lot of Bud & Bloom, our local florist. I motioned for him to go up the ladder of my brother Robbie’s old treehouse and followed him, sitting so our legs touched and dangled off the edge.
The treehouse’s roof blew off in a storm a few years ago, but the floor, railings, and ladder were still sturdy enough.
“I shouldn’t have worn the damn tie.” He yanked the knot till the tie hung loosely. “I looked like an idiot.”
“You look great.” I placed a hand on his shoulder, but he shrugged it off.
“Everyone else was in a suit.”
“Why should you care about what everyone else wears?”
“Good point. I never used to…till recently,” he muttered.
“Recently”?
I opened my mouth and then shut it quickly. Something was seriously stirring inside of him. I had never seen him so tense before, even on the mound.
After a long moment of silence, Reed finally spoke. “She’s not wrong, you know. Ms. Gratton, I mean.”
“Not wrong about what?” I asked.
“About it being a lot of pressure.” He rolled an acorn back and forth. “It has been hard to keep it together.”
I placed my hand on his leg. “But your team is undefeated. You’re all playing so well—”
“We’ve gotten lucky more than once. We almost lost the last game.”
“But even if you had, you’d still probably make it to the championship. You still will. It’s just one more game.”
“A championship I have to win.” He leaned his forehead against the railing, keeping his eyes toward the noise from the party. “If I don’t…”
“Your grandparents lose some of their sales. I know—”
“Forty percent isn’t ‘some,’ Eliza. That’s almost half. They’ll lose the farm.”
“I know.” Hollowness settled into my gut. “And if we lose, we’ll have to move. It sucks either way.”
“What?”
My empty stomach turned sour. “A new town my senior year. I won’t know anyone. Wherever I go, the theater department won’t put a new girl in the booth. And everything I worked for will be for nothing—”
“Moving is hard. I get it.” He flicked the acorn into the brush below. “But your family will still be together. You’ll still have your money. You guys will be okay. Mine may lose everything, Eliza. Everything.”
“I know.” My palms started sweating.
“You just can’t understand what people like us go through.”
“ ‘People like us’?”
He sighed. “My family. Farmers. You just…you don’t understand what it’s like to live paycheck to paycheck or harvest to harvest.”
That’s true.
But I had seen it with others like Lauryn or the Browns.
How it wore on them, made them look tired and sad.
Lauryn gave up a lot of her earnings when she first started making jewelry just so she and her mom could pay the bills or fill up the tank for the car they shared.
And once, while getting a haircut, I overheard Mrs. Brown, two chairs away from me, speaking about their thrift store and how they’d need to take out a second mortgage just to keep their house.
I didn’t even know you could do that—take out a second mortgage. That must’ve felt so scary.
Something sharp pinched in my heart as I turned toward him. “So why don’t you tell me about it?”
“It’s not something I can explain. You’ve been a Crowley your whole life.” He looked toward the treetops and then to my wrist. “Your watch probably cost twice as much as the down payment on my granddad’s truck.”
I tucked my arm under the folds of my dress. “Grandpa left it for me in his will.”
“You have two cars.”
“I didn’t ask for the BMW. I told you—”
“I know.”
But do you believe me?
The silence and tension between us for the next few minutes was so thick I could’ve cut it with one of Mom’s spiky heels.
“Why don’t we just get out of here?” I finally asked, blinking away the burning feeling in my eyes. “Far away from Greedy Gratton, the fancy lemonade, all of it.”
“And go where?” His voice cracked. “We can’t outrun this, Eliza.”
“This”?
The burning in my eyes turned to tears. “We can try.”
“You’ve got rehearsal tonight.”
“I’ll skip.”
He ran a hand over his face. “You and I both know you can’t do that. And I wouldn’t want you to. Not for me.”
I brought my legs up and let my dress spill around them like a blanket, wishing I could hide under the light fabric and wake up to all of this just being a bad dream.
“I should get going.” Reed stood. “I promised Granddad I’d help him work on the B Field so we’d stop rolling our damn ankles before the championship.”
“I can talk to my dad about letting you guys use the main field for your practices,” I said.
He made a face. “Your dad will never let that happen. They’ve got a championship to get ready for too.”
But I can still try.
“I just think…” He ran his hands over his khakis. “Maybe we both have too much going on right now. I’m throwing slower than usual. I’ve been late to a few practices because I’ve been with—”
“I’ve been late a couple times too, you know.” I scooted back. “Maybe if you got a new battery for that watch sooner—”
“It belonged to my dad, Eliza, just like these.” He pulled at the chain around his neck. “I would think someone who wants to spend every waking minute in a broken-down old theater because her grandmother did would get that?”
Dizziness washed over me. “It’s old, but it’s not broken.”
“Exactly.” He dropped his head. “I don’t need you to buy me a new watch, Eliza—”
“I don’t want to buy you a new one—”
“You can’t fix everything…every problem I have. This is bigger than a radio on my bike or bee stings from the creek or a fancy new shirt.”
Is that what he thinks of me? That I’m just some rich girl looking for charity cases to fix?
The hollowness returned but instead of staying in my gut, it moved directly to my heart.
“I’m sorry. But I”—Reed took a deep breath in and then released it—“I think we need to take a break. At least until my season and your show are over. It…maybe it’ll help both of us focus on what’s important.”
“What’s important”?
I wanted to shake him.
Smack him.
Kiss him and tell him that he was important to me. That I didn’t want to fix a damn thing about him. That it was okay to want both him and the theater.
But maybe none of that mattered.
Because maybe I wasn’t important enough to him.
“Look, you’ve got a really important opening night coming up.” Reed straightened himself. “And I—”
“—have a championship to win.” I stood and faced him. Ms. Sparrow’s words swirled around me with the humid passing breeze.
They need a Doolittle in that booth.
She was right. We did.
And if this was my last summer working with her or in that theater, then I’d have to give it my all.
Which meant I couldn’t give my all to the boy standing across from me. Suddenly, everything inside of me started to hurt.
“It’s like your dad said…” Reed sniffed. “I mean, it was probably just going to be a summer thing anyway, right?”
“Right. Just a summer thing.” I turned away so he couldn’t see the tears falling down my cheeks. “And now you don’t have to worry about finding the ‘right time’ to tell your grandparents.”
He took a step back. “Right.”
Everything around me changed to white noise, a loud static filled with blurred and shadowed answers.
Reed headed down the ladder, skipping the last three rungs and landing with a soft thump on the leaf-covered ground. He started walking away and then turned around. “Break a leg, Crowley. I know you’ll do great.”
My chest ached so much that I could barely breathe. I waited until Reed disappeared through the edge of the woods before I sank back down onto the worn planks of the treehouse and cried until I ran out of tears.