Eight Years Ago
SULLY
“I need a new phone,” I groaned after Ellie’s face froze for the fourth time during our video call.
When she came back to me, she was still chatting away about a coding club she’d joined on campus.
They were building some sort of app, but I’d been struggling to keep up with the details when she cut out between every sentence.
“What?” She paused her rambling at the look on my face.
I shook my head. “Nothing. My phone’s just being dysfunctional again.”
A light laugh filtered through the speakers, and for a second, I let it wrap around me. Fuck, I missed that laugh. Sure, I heard it over the phone plenty, but the number of times I actually got to feel it had been reduced significantly.
God, I couldn’t wait for this year to be over.
School was annoying again.
Ellie was gone. My brothers were gone. Cooper was gone. I mean, they weren’t far, but they weren’t here, either.
I had a few friends in my grade, but not many. Every day felt like an unnecessary punishment. I wished my teachers would just give me the rest of the schoolwork I’d need to graduate, and I could bang it out in a weekend, turn it all in, and be done with this.
But my mother informed me that I needed to let my senior year play out for the experience.
When I’d asked her why she wanted to subject her son to the experience of torture, she had not been amused.
It was just weird, being the only one here. The house was quiet. Mom and Dad had been quiet, almost weirdly so. And Ellie had been quiet. Because, well, she no longer lived across the street.
It wasn’t her fault, of course.
“Maybe I should just come over,” I said to Ellie, and she gave me a face.
“Sawyer, baby, it’s ten o’clock on a school night.”
“I don’t need sleep,” I argued. “And I don’t need school, either.”
“You probably don’t,” she agreed with a sigh. “Is AP Lit going any better?”
“Oh, absolutely not.” I threw myself back on my bed. “I’ve read all the words in The Great Gatsby, but I couldn’t tell you what it’s about. Like, I say the words aloud in one part of my brain, but they don’t register in the rest of it.”
“What’s going on in the rest of it?”
I shrugged. “It’s picturing you, mostly. Or the path it takes to get to you. One part of my brain is on the interstate right now, actually.”
“Sawyer.”
It was wistful, the way she said my name. Like she wasn’t disappointed in me and the way my brain worked.
“It’s just…you’re so close but sooo far.”
“It’s, like, thirty minutes,” she laughed.
“Are you trying to convince me not to come or to come, here, El?”
Her smile, even through the slightly blurry screen, was beautiful. “You know I want you to be here, but I’ll see you this weekend. Right?”
“Right.”
I’d rather see her tonight, but I didn’t say that.
Ellie’s roommate was going to be gone this weekend, which meant we’d have her room to ourselves. And that was more than I could really ask for.
I might spend this entire year living for the weekends, but at least I had those. At least she was close. So close that sometimes I wondered if I was holding her back.
Eleanor could have gone to college anywhere, really. She was so talented and bright and had astronomical ACT scores.
She promised me she hadn’t picked the U solely for me, but I knew I was part of it. I was grateful…and guilty. So I was just happy that she was finding programs and clubs that aligned with her interests—like the coding one.
Hopefully, it was enough for her.
Hopefully, I was enough for her.
Hopefully, when I finally got to college, I’d finish in three years so that this one-year gap would never happen again.
I never wanted to be away from her again.
Never.