Chapter Eight
My mother arrives home just before
nine, and we have a silent, somber dinner, both accepting the
excuse of our mutual exhaustion, before we both head upstairs to
our respective bedrooms. She seems drained, and I can't help but
feel responsible for my role in her weariness.
Once back in my room, I
stare blankly at my calculus textbook for about twenty minutes. Sam
and I missed our tutoring session today, obviously preoccupied with
other activities, and I suspect that after how they ended he won't
be tutoring me anymore. The truth is I'm pretty up to date with the
material, and with the final next week, there would have been no
real reason to continue my tutoring anyway. But I'm sad to lose the
excuse to have one on one time with him. Though he's probably
relieved, after today.
I slam the book closed and
rub my eyes. My room feels strange and unfamiliar—completely
transformed by the events of the afternoon. Truthfully it never
really felt like my
room, more like some temporary lodging—an
extended stop on my way to college. My childhood bedroom will
always be my room, but this place, it was neutral territory. But
now…
Now, despite the fact that
I've changed the sheets, all I see is Sam's naked, heated body
curled behind mine. The echoes of his soft, whispered wicked words
still fill the room, and I swear the scent of his aftershave still
clings to my skin, even after my shower. But it's the memory of the
tinge of hurt around his eyes, the resignation in his last murmured
words, that haunt me, and it's a damn good thing he made me get
that nap in, because I know tonight will yield no rest.
I power my phone on,
pitifully allowing myself hope that maybe Sam tried reaching out,
but deep down I know, before I even skim through the four missed
texts, that Sam is not looking to speak to me. That this time, he's
really pissed, and I don't even blame him for it.
I sigh and open Carl's
texts.
You okay? Tuck said you
weren't feeling well and Cap drove you home?
Then there are two
question marks, each spaced out about an hour after the previous
text. I knew I'd have to give her an explanation, so I'm more or
less prepared for this particular line of questioning.
I'm fine. Was just
exhausted. Haven't been sleeping.
She knows this already of
course. My perpetual exhaustion isn't exactly a secret, after all,
it's practically written on my face—in the circles under my eyes
and my constant yawning—and Carl is one of the few people who knows
a little bit about my issues and how nightmares play into
them.
Hope you got a nap in.
Tuck was over earlier. Ran out of here a couple hours ago.
Something about having to pick up Cap. Said he sounded pretty
upset...
Great.
We're not in the best
place right now.
It's the best I can do. I
sure as hell am not giving her details. And I don't know what Sam
has said to Tuck, but if he's finally decided I'm actually to blame
for things I've long known to be my fault, then I can't begrudge
him that. Especially since I've already decided it's the best way
for him to move forward and for us to have a chance at salvaging
our friendship in the long run.
Carl texts me a sad-face
emoticon, because she knows me well enough to know that if she
wants more information, she's certainly not going to text it out of
me.
A full minute passes
before she texts again.
You sure you're okay? Want
me to come over with FroYo? Not the fat-free kind, the good
sugar-loaded stuff you love...
I smile faintly down at my
phone. Because while Carl is certainly attempting what she knows is
likely to be a far more effective way to get her some details about
why Sam and I suddenly aren't in a good place, I know that she
really does care. This isn't about gossip. It's simply about
support.
Thanks kiddo, but I gotta
hit the books now that my calc tutor is pissed at me :(
I close out the
conversation and click on the only other unread text, surprised to
find that it's Kendall. She says she'll be home from Chicago next
week and asks if I want to get coffee.
If Sam and I hadn't just
complicated everything all over again, I would probably accept her
invitation without hesitation. In all honesty, she’s been nothing
but nice to me. But now, I want to give Sam his space, and I worry
he might get annoyed if I hijack yet another one of his friends. I
decide to see how things go tomorrow after I see him in school, and
reply to Kendall then.
I spend the rest of the
evening sifting through my Cam box. I never made it past the album
from photography class the first time I opened it, and have only
gotten through one item at a time the few times I've felt strong
enough to return to it.
But it isn't strength that
leads me to it today, it's loss. I need a distraction from how
things went down with Sam, and this box—this box is magic. It has
given me back random, small-but-significant pieces of the source of
the greatest loss of my life, and I don't know any natural force on
this earth that can achieve something like that. Like I said,
magic.
I slip it out from its new
home under my bed and take a deep, settling breath.
I hate that I feel as if
I'm somehow being disloyal to Sam. It's not rational, and it's not
my own doing either.
I was surprised by his
reaction to my calling him a friend—I hadn't expected him to derive
more hope from our intimate afternoon than there actually was. I
thought he knew nothing had actually changed. But I understand it
after the fact. I realize now that I'd led him on, confused
everything, and that I hurt him all over again when I crushed that
hope by calling him a good friend.
I suspect he never would have hooked up with me
if he knew I wasn't changing my mind about us. After all, he never
even would have been here if I hadn't nearly fallen asleep behind
the wheel.
But his reaction to Cam's
tee shirt still has me perplexed. I understood his jealousy when he
thought there might still be something between Cam and me, but it
doesn't make any sense now. Sam and me—we're not together,
and that aside, he knows Cam is dead.
And he knows what Cam
meant to me. What he'll always
mean to me. Even when Sam and I were still going
to make a go of it, the night I told him about Cam's death, he
seemed to understand. So why the sight of Cam's varsity shirt
seemed to further flame Sam's anger with me, I just don't
get.
I'll never understand you,
Rory.
Yeah, well, that makes two
of us. But why I would have my dead best friend's old shirt—that
seems pretty self explanatory to me. As far as I go, it seems
pretty normal. To want to hold on to this last piece of
him.
I guess there are parts of
Sam I'll never understand either.
But there was some sense
of finality to those words. Because he didn't say he doesn't
understand me, but that he never will, and maybe that means he's
finally accepting that I'm not worth trying to
understand.
I peek down at the items
that remain in the box, running my fingers over the few visible
pieces of Cam that make up the top layer. I don't want to rush
through the items that are left, nor am I emotionally strong enough
to withstand the overload of memories all at once.
I wish wholeheartedly that
Sam wasn't at odds with Cam's memory. Because as much as I love
Sam, as much as I'm sure I'll always love him, I won't choose one
love over another. I won't forsake one to appease the other. I've
been there, and it's my deepest regret, and now that Cam is gone, I
can't take it back. But I can learn from my poor choices and I can
be sure never to repeat them. Because if the fates take pity on me
and Sam does forgive me, I still won't apologize for cherishing my
memories of my best friend, even if it means losing Sam all over
again.
I take out an envelope with
photos from our childhood. Not an album, just a few random, loose
photos in a wrinkled white envelope. There's Cam, Chip, and me down
by the lake, still in our dirty little league uniforms from that
morning's game, fishing off of the old wooden dock. There are few
more like that—us digging for worms, me giving Chip bunny ears
while Cam tries to pants him for the camera, the three of us
looking like drowned rats after Cam pushed me in the lake and then
they jumped in to join me on what I now remember was a particularly
scorching spring day.
Then there are a few from
the game that must have taken place that morning. Cam, Chip, Nick,
Perry and me sitting in batting order on our team's bench. There's
even one of me sliding home—an action shot with my long, unkempt
braid flying straight out, the angle showing exactly how those
brown stains on the knees of my white baseball pants got there. My
father must have taken it. We're only about eleven in them, and in
those days he never missed a game.
Everything was different
back then, when the three of us were still a family—before we
became little more than three separate entities, all coming and
going within the same house. Before my father took the Assistant
District Attorney position, and then proceeded on to DA, and my
mother threw herself into extra long hours at the Public Defender's
office in what, in retrospect, seemed like an attempt to make up
for my father's selling out to The
Man. Before he cared more about networking
and politics, and golfing with Mayor Forbes than either my mother
or me. Before I hit puberty, and it became more and more difficult
for him to deny that I was, in fact, a girl, after all. Before he
began to openly resent me for it, whether he intended it to be
obvious or not. Before I counted myself lucky if he spoke more than
a single sentence to me in a given day, and later, a
week.
Life would've been so much
easier if I could have just been born a boy. It's a thought I've had many times, even in my childhood, and
even more often over this past year.
I put the photos back, and