First Frost (19 page)

“I've been this way all my life. It's just who I am.”

“Do you know where I'm supposed to be? What I'm supposed to do with my life?”

She took a moment to answer, wondering if that was why he was here with her again today. “No.”

“I don't either. And you know what? It's nice to talk with someone who doesn't have a clear opinion about where I'm going to college or where I'm going to work when I graduate.”

“I don't have the answers you're looking for.” She'd had people befriend her before, wanting her to tell their futures, or whatever it was they thought she did, but they'd always walked away disappointed.

“That's okay,” Josh said. “I think I need to find them out myself anyway. I envy you, you know. Your contentment.”

She shook her head. “I'm not content.”

“No?”

“I know where I belong, that's all.”

“That's not content?” he asked.

“I guess it is. But, as my friend Phin pointed out, I'm not the only one who lives in my world, and I can't convince everyone where they belong. I can't make people believe anything they don't want to believe. And that bothers me.” She looked at the orange in her hands. “It shouldn't. But it does.”

Josh seemed to mull that over, maybe thinking of her note. He finally nodded as he ate a section of orange. This felt so weird and intimate,
eating
with him.

“Did you tell Phin thanks for me?” Josh asked.

“Not yet. I only see him at the bus stop, and my mom has been taking me to school lately. Why are you thanking him?” She finished her half of the orange and wiped her hands on her jeans.

“Have you seen the video?”

“Not yet.”

“You'll understand when you see it.” The late buses began to pull in. “I guess you don't want a ride home?”

“No, thanks.” She stood and grabbed her backpack.

“I won't be here tomorrow afternoon,” Josh said, eating the last of his half of the orange, then picking up the peel he'd set beside him. “I have a student council meeting.”

“That's okay,” she said, winking against the sun now in her eyes. “I have to admit, I'm kind of confused why you're out here at all.”

“I told you, I like talking to you. I don't know why I waited so long.” He stood. “Do you want to come hang out at my house tonight? My parents aren't home, but our housekeeper, Joanne, is there.”

Bay thought of how she had run through the woods only last week, just to spend a few moments watching him with his friends. She would never fit in there like that. “I don't really know your friends that well.”

“Oh, they won't be there tonight. That's why I asked. My parents call on Wednesday evenings. It puts their minds at ease when they don't hear a party going on in the background.”

“Don't take this personally, but I don't belong at your house.”

“Let's go out then,” he said. “I mean, private. But not
private.
I can get some takeout and we can eat on the green downtown after dark.”

Keep her a secret, he meant.

But the strangest thing was, she didn't mind. Because she wasn't the secret. The fact that he felt happy about something was. And, for whatever reason, Josh wasn't ready to let other people know it yet.

“Okay,” she said, for purely selfish reasons, ones that concerned eating with Josh and talking after dark, which she considered a date, even if he didn't. Her breath quickened at the thought of something so simple, yet so incredibly wonderful. Eating and talking after dark. Maybe there would even be snow flurries tonight, like the image of how she first saw herself with him that would make things perfect, settled, real.

But then this simple, wonderful thing suddenly hit a snag. Because that's when she remembered she was grounded.

But just as quickly, she decided it didn't matter.
Rules
didn't matter, she found herself thinking.

Not when they were wrong.

Right?

*   *   *

It was cloudy and cool that night, with the moon behind the clouds. It was even darker and cooler on the ground behind Horace J. Orion's head on the green but, truthfully, Josh didn't feel it. He and Bay had on jackets and gloves and hats, and they were laughing too much to truly feel the chill.

Josh finished his sandwich and leaned back against Horace. Bay was sitting across from him, cross-legged, the coffee he'd brought her in her hands. He told her the story of the time he'd almost run away from home because his parents had let his older brother, Peyton, stay up to watch televison, but not Josh. Their housekeeper, Joanne, had caught him and had taken him back to his room before his parents ever knew. “I never tried again,” he said. “Joanne had me convinced there was a camera on me at all times and I could never leave without her knowing. I showered in my shorts for months. I don't think I've ever told anyone that before.”

“I'm glad,” Bay said, laughing. “It's pretty embarrassing.”

He watched her in the shadows. He knew she liked him. And he was certainly fascinated by her, to the point of fixation these days, but he wasn't sure his feelings ran romantic. Then again, he'd never felt that way about anyone, so how would he really know? He'd kissed girls before. And he'd almost gone all the way with Trinity Kale in eleventh grade, before she'd stopped them and said they should just be friends. He'd agreed so quickly that he'd hurt her feelings. Sometimes he wondered if something was wrong with him.

What was he really doing out here? Did he really think this sweet, odd, fifteen-year-old had all the answers? He wanted so much for it to be true. Even if it wasn't true, Bay made him believe in the
possibility
of it being true, which was more hope than he'd had in a long time. She made him feel happy and safe and excited. He'd even begun to look forward to spending time on the steps with her at school. He'd driven by the front of the school on his way home every day for months now, specifically to see if she was really going to wait for him, like she said in her note. This was something he was choosing to do, these were steps he was taking on his own. It felt so strange. He didn't trust it.

Josh stretched his leg out and tapped her foot with his own. “So what are you going to do with your life, Bay Waverley?”

“I'm going to end up at the Waverley house. That much I know,” she said, without hesitation. “I like decorating. Maybe I'll do something like that. I'll know when I get to college.”

“You did a great job at the dance,” he said, suddenly remembering the moment he saw her on the bleachers. She'd stood up in that dress, with those flowers in her hair, looking like a dream he'd had when he was a boy, and all he could think of was getting out of there so he wouldn't have to face the fact that he couldn't live in that dream, that he'd never actually gotten anything he'd really wanted. And none of what he had was really his to keep, anyway. “You looked amazing that night. I should have told you. By the time I thought of it, you were covered in zombie blood.”

She straightened her shoulders and gave him a proud look. “I thought I carried the look pretty well.”

“Yes, you did.” He stared at her a long time, so long that even she, who was a consummate starer, looked away.

“So how does this thing work?” he finally asked. “This belonging together?”

She laughed and scooted over next to him, to lean against Horace's head and look up at the cold night sky, like she was expecting something to fall. She had on a pink knit ear-flap hat, the strings from the flaps falling from either side to rest on her shoulders. “I don't expect you to kiss me or anything,” she said, still looking up.

“No?”

She shook her head. “No. This thing between the two of us right now, how this feels, this talking and laughing, and sometimes the quiet, too?
That's
how it works. My aunt will call my mother and sometimes they'll just sit and not say a word to each other. That's how it works.”

He felt unexpectedly emotional hearing that. It was a relief. She was such a relief to him. Belonging, she seemed to be saying, shouldn't take so much work.

“Do you think it will snow tonight?” she asked, bringing her gaze back to him, and finding that their faces were unexpectedly near to each other. She smelled like cold air and roses. She'd told him she'd been making rose candy at her aunt's house that afternoon. When she'd gotten into his Pathfinder earlier that evening, it was like she'd brought the entire month of July with her.

Their faces were so close now they were almost touching. His eyes went to her lips.

And that's when his phone suddenly rang in his pocket.

They both jumped. Bay spilled her coffee on her jeans and she immediately stood up, trying to brush it off. He reached for the phone in his jacket pocket, confused when he saw the screen. “It's you. How did you do that?”

Bay stopped wiping at her legs. “Do what?”

He turned the ringing phone around and showed her the screen. It had
BAY WAVERLEY
on it. He chuckled. “You're calling me.”

Bay suddenly felt around in all her pockets. “I must have dropped it outside when I…” she didn't finish her sentence.

“If it's not you, then who's calling me on your phone?”

“Wait—”

But it was too late. Josh answered. After a few seconds, he handed the phone to her.

“It's your mom.”

*   *   *

“I'm sorry,” Bay said as they sat on a bench on the green, side by side, looking straight ahead.

“It's okay.”

“I mean
really
sorry,” Bay said.

“It's partially my fault. I knew something was up when you met me at the road instead of in front of your house.”

Bay looked at him in his scull cap and his North Face jacket, calmly waiting for the consequences. He had retreated back into misery, that slow burn curling off his skin again. His problem, she was gradually understanding, was that he was numb with indecision and fear. The only thing he could feel was miserable, until someone offered him an alternative, and then it was like giving him oxygen when he was suffocating.

They were just getting to the gist of this. Why did her mother have to call when she did? She was making this hard, when it didn't need to be hard.

Her mom was so bad at the grounding thing that she'd forgotten to ask Bay for her phone again. Bay had put it on vibrate and, after Josh had called to tell her he was on his way to pick her up with sandwiches and coffee, she'd put the phone in her pocket and crawled out her bedroom window. She met him at the road, telling him her dad went to bed early and she didn't want Josh's car to wake him up. Which, to her credit, was true. But she must have dropped her phone when she'd climbed down the tree (which was harder to do than it sounded). Josh's number was the last one that had called her, so when her mother had found the phone under the tree when she'd discovered Bay missing, she'd hit redial and voilà! Here she was.

Bay watched sullenly as Henry's king cab truck circled the green and came to a stop. Henry got out wearing jeans, a T-shirt and his barn coat. Her mother got out wearing her red kimono robe. She hadn't even changed.

Bay covered her eyes with one hand, as if she could make them disappear.

They silently crossed the green toward them.

“Come over here with me, Josh,” Henry said as they approached. “We have some things to discuss.”

“Dad!” Bay said, outraged that they thought Josh had done anything wrong.

“It's okay, Bay,” Josh said as he got up.

“You're overreacting,” Bay said to her mother when Sydney came to a stop in front of her and just stood there, glaring at her.

“Do you have any idea how scared I was? I went to your room tonight
to call a truce.
I had two cups of tea and a box of Mallomars. I was going to put an end to this once and for all because we've both been miserable and we needed to talk it out. But I opened your bedroom door
and you weren't there.
Your window was wide open. I thought you'd been kidnapped!”

Oh, God. Mallomars. She'd brought Mallomars. Truce food, they always called it, because no one could argue over Mallomars. There wasn't anything her mother could have said that could have made Bay feel more guilty at that moment. She'd snuck out on the night her mother was going to call a truce. A truce. It sounded so good. She was tired of everything being so hard.

“I called your aunt Claire, asking if you were there. That's when she told me about this strange man you told her you'd seen on Pendland Street.”

This was just getting worse. “He looked like a salesman,” Bay tried to explain. “Just sly and fake, not dangerous.”

“So you're saying I shouldn't have worried when I walked into my daughter's room and discovered she was missing?”

“I wasn't missing.” She looked over to where Josh was standing with Henry. Henry was leaning in toward Josh, his arms folded over his chest. Both their heads were low. Henry was saying something Bay couldn't hear.

A van drove around the green and parked behind Henry's truck. Claire, Tyler and Mariah all got out. Claire was at least dressed. But Tyler and Mariah were in their pajamas, too.

“What are they doing here?” Bay moaned.

“I called Claire and told her where you were,” Sydney said. “She was worried, too.”

“Is Evanelle going to show up next?”

“Maybe.”

“Bay! Hey!” Mariah said, running up to Bay. “What are we all doing here at night?”

“Sydney?” Claire said as she approached. “Sydney?”

Sydney finally turned her evil eye off of Bay.

“Did you leave the lights on in your salon?” Claire asked.

“No.”