Chapter Fifteen
Hazel was hiding in the girls’ locker room at her old high school, and she didn’t care if that made her a coward.
Ash had blown her off. The place was swarming with semi-familiar faces. And her father had dumped her on Val, who meandered through the Winter Fest craft fair in the gym while telling Hazel about her father’s two botched proposals before the one that stuck. “He never even said he loved me before the first one. When I pointed that out, he tried to tell me I was mistaken,” Val said, laughing. “Like a woman might forget a declaration of love. But you know your dad. He thinks just because something’s obvious to him, it must be obvious to everyone.”
When a text came from Ash saying he’d be a while yet, Hazel had hastily excused herself to pee, and now she was sitting alone on a hard bench in an alcove with beat-up lockers at her back and a mix of cheap perfume, hair spray, and stale sweat in the air. Across the room, two sinks dripped in mismatched rhythms, the mirrors above them dirty with kiss smudges.
She reread Ash’s brief text. No explanation. No sense of urgency. It didn’t mesh with the guy who, just last night, gave her his childhood tree ornaments. Even though his proposal of an uncomplicated physical relationship had taken her by surprise, he hadn’t been weird or gross about it. In a way, it was the very thing she’d told him she wanted.
She checked her school email to find a message from her lab listserv. Zach, the combative fourth-year, wanted everyone’s spring schedules to establish a new weekly meeting time. If she didn’t suck it up and submit her transfer request to Dr. Sheffield, she’d be dooming herself to work with both of them for another semester or more. She vowed not to chicken out, to just send the document tonight.
Dreading going back out to the festival, Hazel took a picture of herself under the Lady Bulldogs mural by the door. She’d brushed off four texts from Sylvia since arriving in Lockett Prairie, and if she’d learned anything from seeing Franny again, it was that unresponsiveness was a slippery slope. She didn’t want the same thing to happen with Sylvia.
P.S. I’m alive, she texted. But I welcome death. Am being forced to bond with my father’s fiancée. At my old high school, no less.
Sylvia’s immediate reply was a GIF of a guy dragging a stubborn bulldog down a sidewalk. You can do hard things! she added.
Hazel smiled at the platitude, intended to make her groan, from her relentlessly positive friend. Hazel loved her for it. She considered confiding to Sylvia her frustrations with school and her disappointment that Ash was late, but it’d require so much background she didn’t know where to start. Besides, Sylvia was probably with Dave, or working at the restaurant…
These sounded like excuses. Censoring, withholding, avoiding being too needy. So instinctual she hadn’t realized she was doing it. But she realized now. She would open up to Sylvia. Soon.
Hazel replied, Live, laugh, shove me off a cliff. Gotta go. Wish me luck.
LUCK!
On her way out of the gym, a bright blue sandwich board sign stopped Hazel short. Lockett Prairie PALS: Partners in Academics, Leadership, and Service. It was the same one she’d hand-painted nearly seven years ago when the group consisted of her, an advisor, and three other students. Two girls were selling ornaments, and a banner behind them listed all the elementary and middle schools they partnered with now—easily triple the number from Hazel’s days. She wandered closer, warmth spreading in her chest.
“Oh my God,” one of the girls said, her hand pressing over the acronym on her T-shirt. “Hazel?”
Hazel’s phone fell with a clunk onto the table as the voice and face clicked together. Her braces were off now, that adorably crooked front tooth pulled into alignment, and her hair, once kept in sectioned twists with plastic barrettes on the ends, curled tightly in a mature pixie cut. “Amaya?”
Amaya squeezed between the tables and threw her arms around Hazel. The embrace was tight and long, and when Amaya pulled back to explain to the other student, “Hazel was my Big when I was a Little,” pressure pricked at Hazel’s eyes.
“You’re a Big now?” she asked, her voice tight.
“President, too.” Amaya tapped an enamel pin on her shirt.
“That’s amazing.”
“I can’t believe you’re here,” Amaya said. “My mama just left. She’ll flip when I tell her.”
“She’s home?” Hazel asked.
“Three years now.”
“That’s amazing,” Hazel repeated, prevented from saying more by the lump rising in her throat. Her smile was so huge her cheeks hurt. Pride overwhelmed her at the young, confident woman before her, though pride maybe implied a personal contribution to her development, and all Hazel had ever done was crawl under a picnic table with the timid little girl and draw pictures in the dirt with her.
She pulled out her wallet. “Let me get an ornament.”
Boosted by seeing Amaya and hearing all about her college plans, Hazel tried harder to put in a real effort, smiling and playing all the carnival games with her dad and his family. It wasn’t terrible. But by the time Ash turned up, she had a stomachache from eating too much caramel corn, a headache, and a questionable fruitcake from the cakewalk, the one game she’d won. Ash scuffed toward her, hands in his jacket pockets, head bent.
He’d left the rest of his family by the ticket booth, his father in a wheelchair, his nieces tugging Maggie in two different directions. Hazel gestured to him to stop. She wanted to say hello to his family. But he shook his head, kept walking, and his family peeled off in the opposite direction.
“Hey.” He eyed her cake dubiously. He didn’t take his hands out of his pockets, didn’t lift his gaze to hers. Though she’d rallied and made the most of the morning without him, his subdued greeting reminded her that he’d stood her up for two hours. And he didn’t look particularly excited to be here now.
“Hey,” she said back.
“That looks gross.”
“I won it.”
“You sure you won?” His grin faltered, and the quip fell flat.
An awkward silence stretched between them. She’d expected him to immediately explain, to apologize for something that, admittedly, wasn’t that huge of a transgression. She trusted he had a good reason for being late. But he didn’t explain. He just stood there. The irritation she’d quelled earlier reared its head.
“We could have gone with your family.”
Her father, Val, and her kids were two carnival booths down, attempting to topple snowman cans with softballs. Ash moved to close the gap. “Nah, I need a break from them for a bit.”
“Why? Your dad’s in a wheelchair. Did something—”
“It’s a lot of walking. Chair’s easier. Come on.” He nudged her toward her father.
Dark circles marred the skin under his eyes. His shoulders were tense. She’d seen him tired at the café when, at the start of an evening shift, he’d move his laptop to the other side of the counter and keep working during lulls. But even at his most stressed, when he pulled his attention from his work to bug her, refill her coffee, take her sandwich plate, a playful spark usually glinted in his eyes. She’d chalked it up to him taking pleasure in annoying her. The spark wasn’t there now.
She grabbed his arm. “Are you okay?”
He laughed, but it sounded hollow. “You’re stalling.”
She hadn’t been. Not this time.
The tendril of concern that had begun to stretch toward him doubled back on itself. By the time they reached the snowman game, her defensive hackles were back up. Had she seriously asked if he was okay? If anyone had a right to be closed off, it was her.
She grabbed his arm again just before they joined her father.
There was a flicker of emotion in his eyes, a word on the tip of his tongue, muscles on the verge of release. He looked raw. Just as quickly as the glimmer of vulnerability appeared, though, it vanished. He performed polite greetings with her father and the others and accepted an invitation Hazel only half registered to enter a gingerbread house competition.
She heard herself say, “Great. I’m with the architect,” and looped her arm through his, as though she were completely fine, as though he were a boyfriend she’d brought home to meet her parents. Sometimes, it came so easily to plaster over imperfections, to sell an image. She hated herself for it a little bit.
Her father had probably intended for them to build the gingerbread house together, as a group, rather than in competition with each other, but he smiled his TV smile and clapped a hand to Ash’s shoulder. “Architect, huh?” He cast her an approving look, which immediately soured her on the entire concept of introducing any boyfriend to him ever.
“Not yet,” Ash said modestly.
“Lot of school for that. You two study a lot together?”
When she didn’t respond because she couldn’t uncross her emotional wires without tripping a bomb, Ash rescued them. “No, not together.”
Not together. She was only half following the conversation, having some kind of out-of-body experience, and she thought Ash was telling her dad they weren’t in a relationship. Which was true. But him clarifying it so quickly and easily stung a little.
Ash’s easy grin reappeared now, for her father. “She’s very focused. In fact, I don’t exist while she’s working. I just keep her caffeinated and wait for her to resurface.” He looked teasingly down at her, like she might jump in all, Ha ha, funny story, guys, and explain about their rivalry over the green chair and the outlet, like some meet-cute in a movie.
She could imagine a scenario where she did explain about the chair and the way, now that he’d mentioned it, whenever she finally leaned back from her laptop screen and stretched, Ash was nearly always already rounding the counter with a refill, like he’d been waiting for his cue. Even when she’d been single-minded about their rivalry, Ash had been something else. There. Attentive. Thoughtful. Which was why it hurt, this little charade, putting his best foot forward with her father—not so different from the charade she played with her father herself—two seconds after he’d been closed off with her.
Val said, “Well, you may have the official training, but I know my way around some gingerbread.”
Hazel slipped her arm out of Ash’s. He hadn’t responded when she’d taken it, and he didn’t respond when she let him go.
“I thought you’d be good at this,” Hazel said when their gingerbread walls collapsed yet again.
“Why would I be good at this?”
“You make dollhouses for fun.” She squirted a giant glob of icing between two cookie slabs.
Across the large tent, her father and Val were already paving their roof with candies while she and Ash couldn’t get two walls to stay up. Lucy and Raf had declined to join, which Hazel hadn’t realized was an option.
After his performance with her father, Ash had gone right back to quiet and tense and, frankly, kind of miserable, passing her icing and sprinkles without comment, leaving her to do most of the work. She’d tried to catch his eye, to make him laugh, especially when the kids at the next table started jamming jelly beans in each other’s noses, but he was in his own world.
“I make models. With glue.” Ash pointed out, grabbing her hand.
“Hey—”
He turned her wrist. She’d smeared icing along her thumb. His dark eyes held hers for a long moment. When he lifted her hand like he was going to lick it off, her heart stuttered in anticipation, wanted that playful, cute version of him back at the table.
But he swiped the icing with his finger instead, popped it into his mouth, and grumbled, “Gingerbread houses are actually really annoying.”
His guardedness coupled with his unexplained delay left her adrift where, at least lately, she’d grown used to a strong foothold. Her stomach clenched, and it wasn’t from the caramel popcorn.
Just two things she’d needed from him today: to show up when he said he would and to make a damn gingerbread house.
“What was that?”
Apparently, she’d said this out loud.
“Are you mad at me?” He was quiet, resigned, like he was already far too burdened for her slip of frustration.
Well, that made her kind of mad. “No,” she said. “Why would I be mad at you?”
“So, you are.” He ran a hand down his face and back up, raking his fingers harshly through his hair. “I’m sorry I was late, all right?”
She laughed. “Fine.”
“Don’t do that.”
“Don’t do what?”
“Get pissed and then deny it, like I can’t read you at all.”
“Maybe you are misreading me. Ever consider that?” After all, she couldn’t read him right now, not even a little.
“Just like you’re mad at your dad and this whole situation,” he said, even and controlled.
“I’m not mad.”
“But you bend over backward pretending everything’s fine.”
Her cheeks burned.
“Don’t do that with me,” he pleaded. “Hell, you’ve never had a problem telling me how I’m bugging you before.”
This was true, at least after she’d broken the seal on her grievances with him at that party freshman year. Never in her life had Hazel spoken so honestly, with such unfiltered aggression to anyone. But that had been because she’d had nothing to lose—he already didn’t like her.
“Speaking of bending over backward,” she said, “you sure turned on the charm back there. My dad was so impressed. An architect. I don’t even think he knows what I’m studying.”
“You’re the one who told him I’m an architect. And, I’m sorry, I happen to be good with parents. Isn’t that what you wanted, for me to be a buffer from your family? Who are, by the way, perfectly nice people who just want to include you.”
He must have realized he’d hit a sensitive mark because he shook his head, ducking his face with remorse. “I didn’t mean to leave you hanging. I’m— Something came up.”
Still so vague. He hadn’t thought up even the barest bones of an explanation in the last two hours. “Right, a family thing,” she parroted from his text. “It’s whatever, Ash.”
“It isn’t, actually.” He sucked his teeth, shook his head in frustration. That controlled, even tone finally gave way to a flare of heat. “I feel like you should know by now I wouldn’t bail on you if I could avoid it. I hoped you wouldn’t still think I’m that kind of asshole.”
The two kids to their left gasped, their wide-eyed shock at his swearing made ridiculous by the jelly beans bulging from each nostril. Even this didn’t break through Ash’s wall. The parents scolded the kids, and he mumbled his own embarrassed apology, squeezing the back of his neck.
Hazel didn’t know what she knew, besides the fact that something was really off with Ash. I wouldn’t bail on you if I could avoid it. Nice words, sure, but he still hadn’t explained.
“So, what kept you then?” she asked.
Ash tensed even more, if that were possible. Quietly, he said, “I don’t really want to do this here. Can we just get through this and talk later?”
Somehow, this was worse than a family thing. This was an escalation from something so minor they didn’t even need to discuss it to something so big it couldn’t be discussed until later. Later was for difficult conversations, things you said in private so the other person wouldn’t make a scene or feel mortified in front of a bunch of strangers.
Something drastic had changed since last night. He’d pursued her yesterday but could barely meet her eyes today. He couldn’t muster even half the enthusiasm for her that he showed her father.
Oh God, did he even need space from his family like he’d said, or did he not want her around them, getting more attached? It had to be obvious she envied their closeness. She’d stayed so late last night, so happy to be with them. When she’d said, “I guess I should go,” she’d even hoped he might say, “No. Stay.”
Pathetic little barnacle. She hadn’t even realized she’d latched on. But he obviously had. He’d just told her no strings, no expectations, and her very first move was to overstay, to imagine a place for herself, not just in his arms or bed, but in the core of his life. His family. As if writing her name on that laundry room door meant something.
Suddenly, every part of Hazel wanted to slam doors and turn their locks. She let the two slabs of gingerbread slump apart.
Shaking his head, he righted them. “We’re so bad at this.”
He was talking about the gingerbread, she thought, but he just as easily could have meant their non-relationship. She shuffled back from the table.
“What are you doing?” He twisted to look at her. “Hand me that other bag of icing. This one’s too runny.”
“We don’t have to do this.”
“What, just give up? Let them win? You hate to lose.” He made a grabby gesture, moving right on from their spat back to the task at hand.
“We said if one of us wanted to stop, we’d stop.”
His thick eyebrows drew together. He looked from her to their disaster of a gingerbread house and back. Finally, understanding softened his brow. “Last night, you mean. We said…” His back straightened. He let the slabs list to one side. “Okay. Uh…is that what you’re saying? You want to…”
If he was just going to say it later, then yeah, she was saying it now, first. “I’m—”
“Hey, loser. Hi, Hazel.”
June skipped around the table, her blonde hair in a braided crown, Fair Isle sweater tucked into high-waisted jeans, effortless and way cooler than Hazel could have ever pulled off. Across the tent, the rest of Ash’s family were settling in before a fresh gingerbread kit. Annie waved cheerily at them. Hazel lifted a hand.
Ash closed his eyes and drew in a long, slow, bracing breath through his nose. “We’re kind of in the middle of something, June.”
“In the middle of what? Not building a gingerbread house.” She eyed the mess before them, patently unimpressed.
“None of your business.”
June rolled her eyes. “I see someone’s still in a terrible mood. And still shit at this. I figured this was the last place we’d run into you guys. He didn’t tell you about the Gingerbread Meltdown of 2009?”
“June,” he warned.
She raised her hands. “Fine. Don’t be a baby. Give me the icing.” June lifted her chin and boasted to Hazel, “I’m the reigning Campbell family gingerbread champ. Didn’t even need five years of college to do it.”
“We don’t need your help,” he said.
But Hazel saw the opportunity for what it was. Ash had been her buffer from her father, and now June could be her buffer from Ash. She could just keep inserting other people into every tense situation until, eventually, no one was left. Which, okay, that was depressing.
Hazel passed the icing to June, who smirked victoriously at her brother. He stuck around for a minute, eyes boring into the unresponsive side of Hazel’s face, until finally, he gave up and left the tent.
“You’d think the guy would be a little nicer after freaking out and ruining our morning.”
“Freaking out?” Hazel asked.
June bent to get a better look at her work, which was coming along surprisingly well after all of Hazel and Ash’s failed attempts. “Oh, he didn’t tell you he doesn’t trust anyone to make medical decisions for themselves?”
Hazel gripped June’s wrist. “What happened?”
“Dad fell, and Ash was convinced it meant he’d relapsed or something. We were supposed to go ice skating this morning, but instead, we all had to sit around while they went to the hospital, worrying about something that wasn’t even wrong.”
“Relapsed?” Hazel felt like an idiot having to ask for information that June clearly thought she already knew.
“Dad’s MS. What, Ash didn’t tell you?”
Hazel shook her head. “MS…multiple sclerosis?”
“Oh. That’s surprising. He’s kind of weirdly high-strung about it. Or maybe that’s why he didn’t,” she offered gently, as if this might soften the blow.
That was why he’d seemed tired, why the glint was gone from his eyes. He’d been through something stressful—not a family thing, a family crisis. And she’d assumed it had been about her. God. God. She’d been snippy with him. She’d maybe even ended things.
“Your dad’s okay, though? It’s not a relapse?” She searched for Ash and June’s father across the tent and found him seated in his wheelchair behind his family. He was holding Ash’s younger niece in his lap.
“Yep. Just my dumb brother overreacting, as usual.”
Ash didn’t return to the tent. June and Hazel made a respectable gingerbread house, then followed several paces behind her father and Val in a group migration to the performance area. The seats filled in quickly, but Hazel spotted her father, Val, and Raf in the front row with a pair of seats beside them. She was saying, “I should sit with my—” when an elderly couple shuffled into the row beside her father, and rather than telling them the seats were saved, he checked over his shoulder, the minutest of scans, before gesturing for them to sit.
“Sit with us.” June pulled her to the back of the crowd. They took seats between Maggie’s crew and their parents.
“What about Ash?” Hazel asked.
June placed the fruitcake Hazel was still carting around at the end of the row for him. He turned up midway through the choir performance, taking the saved seat on the other side of Maggie’s kids. He had just enough time to frown at the fruitcake and slide it under the chair before his smaller niece reached for him, and he pulled her into his lap and bounced her idly on his knee. Over the top of her dark curls, his eyes swung to Hazel’s. She looked away. When she risked another glance, he was still fixed on her, unreadable but strangely insistent, as if willing her to understand something he wasn’t saying.
Like…she shouldn’t be sitting here with his family.
Let me explain, she willed back. After. Later.
She turned from him first, afraid that in two more seconds he would break his silence and tell her to leave.
Students passed out programs as the choir took the stage in angelic-looking white gowns. They would sing a medley of Christmas carols, followed by a handful of jazz and tap numbers by the dance team. Lucy was short, so she stood in the front row. Directly across from her, Hazel’s father held up his cell phone. She could partially see it from here, Lucy singing on his screen, red light recording. It came on suddenly and sharply—an ache in Hazel’s throat, stinging behind her eyes. She refused to blink, willing the chilly air to dry out the brimming tears.
The transition to dancing came as a relief, and soon enough, the show was over. Hazel waited patiently for Maggie to usher her kids out of their seats and, in the other direction, for Ash’s mother to unlock the wheelchair. Now that she had the chance to speak to Ash, she wished she’d spent the last forty-five minutes preparing anything to say. He stood to one side, holding her stupid fruitcake. That seemed like a good sign.
She strode toward him just as her father came down the center aisle from the front seats, nearly running into her. He did a double take. “Oh, you were here.”
She turned a cheery smile on Lucy and somehow managed not to sound as incandescently angry as she felt. “You were great.”
Lucy chirped a quick thanks before running off to join her friends. Val and Raf wandered ahead. But Hazel’s father lingered a moment before rubbing his neck and echoing Lucy’s thanks in a far more subdued tone, clarifying, “For coming.” He squeezed her upper arm, and she couldn’t help it—she flinched away.
Thanks? As if she were some stranger returning his grocery cart for him? As if, after she’d driven hundreds of miles, lost half her wardrobe at his entrance gate, and played her part in their little father-daughter charade, this performance had been optional?
Had it been? Not once had he asked if she wanted to come or even officially invited her. Hazel wasn’t sure which was worse, to be obligated without the courtesy of an actual request—she would have said yes, obviously—or to be thanked for doing something she hadn’t really minded. It cheapened it somehow to be thanked.
“Kiddo,” her father said.
“Of course.” She flashed a feeble smile. “I have plans this afternoon. I probably won’t be back in time for dinner.”
“Okay,” he said.
She hadn’t noticed, but Ash had meandered closer, stood just a few feet away. He offered his hand in a simultaneous greeting and goodbye to her father, his I’m good with parents smile. When her father left, Ash faced the parking lot beside her and said, “That was shitty.” She knew what he meant—the awkward thank-you, the seat her father hadn’t saved.
Hazel blinked, and the first tear fell. She didn’t wipe it away, didn’t turn from him or try to hide. She knew she should apologize to Ash, should tell him she hadn’t meant to fight—and she would.
But for now, there was something cathartic about not saying, “It’s fine.”