Lessons in Love (17 page)

When he returns, it’s not on foot but in one of Hadley’s golf carts. White, and with the Hadley crest on the side, the small thing hums while Jacob leaves it running and helps me into the shaded passenger seat. The carts aren’t for golfing, but for helping elderly alums during reunion weekends, or a student who breaks a leg during ski practice. But right now, it’s my convalescing vehicle, and it’s perfect.

“Thanks.” I keep it short while Jacob steers us along the side of the road, the haze of fading sunlight and a puff of heat remaining between us.

“No problem. I mean, I couldn’t exactly leave you there, fainting in the dining hall.”

I put my feet up on the plastic dashboard. My borrowed sundress trails down onto the golf cart’s floor. “I think fainting might be too strong a word.”

“Too dramatic?” He asks. The whir motor’s whir sounds like music in the background and I can see Jacob’s chest rise and fall with each breath. I look away, over my right shoulder to avoid watching. “So….”

I shake my head and keep looking right as we near the graveyard. “Just don’t, okay?”

“I was only going to say —”

I grip the metal hand rail and bring my knees up to my chest, barely able to stay in the seat. “Please just don’t say anything.”

Jacob stops the golf cart. We sit there, across from the graveyard, both trapped in our own minds. “I won’t.” He looks at his lap. “Not about
that
.”

Any lingering doubts I had about just when exactly he came into the science lab on Friday night are gone. “Now you have to say something. About something else. Anything else.” I put my face in my hands. “And then take me back to Fruckner. I feel like crap.”

“Okay…how about — remember the Vineyard? And sitting on your roof, with you singing? And being at the fair, before it started — in the bumper cars?”

“Of course I remember,” I snap. “It wasn’t like it was years ago. It was months. Weeks.”

Jacob’s dark curls move even though the air is still. He turns so we’re facing each other, the keys jingling in the ignition. I’m sure this isn’t what my father pictured when he asked Jacob to make sure I got back to the dorms safely. “Well, you don’t act like it. I mean, you act like nothing happened.”

My hands fall to my lap and I look him in the eyes. “Nothing did happen, Jacob. That’s what I remember. We had a lovely time —”

“Lovely? What kind of word is that — who are you, Lucy Honeychurch?”

I picture it, that scene in the movie when passionate George finally grabs her in the field of blooming flowers, the air thick with lust and haze, his act of ardency met with surprise. But Jacob doesn’t do that. He doesn’t reach for my clammy hand or try to kiss me. He just waits for my answer. “Didn’t we decide to be friends?”

“That’s what I mean, Love. You haven’t been exactly cordial of late.”

I lick my lips. “It’s been awkward, that’s why. You’ve got Chloe now and it doesn’t seem like…”

“There’s room for you.” He says it in the affirmative. “There is. On Friday when I —”

“I thought you said you wouldn’t bring that up.” I turn away again, focusing on the graveyard, wishing I had my Aunt Mable to call up after this. That she could comfort me. Then a thought clicks. I could call my mother. I could call Gala.

“I won’t.” Jacob starts the cart up again, keeping quiet enough that I know there’s tons he’s not saying. He turns the small wheel and pulls into the driveway, the tires crunching on the gritty road.

“If I were feeling better I’d take the wheel,” I say. I want to show him we can be friends, that I want to. Only, there is that other side to us, that deeper part, and I can’t extricate it completely.

“Maybe when you’re better,” he suggests. He cuts the engine when he’s right in front of the Fruckner door. Then he looks up at the illicit porch off my room. “That’s your room, right?”

“Mine and Mary’s, yeah.”

“Cool.” He puts his lips together, hiding his teeth and god knows what else. Then he moves his hand and I’m sure, positive, that he’ll put it on mine. But he just drapes his arm over the back of the seat. “I want to be friends, okay?”

Feeling shaky from the sickness and from the conversation, from handing my story in, to wondering what the answer is to the question Jacob overheard, I prepare to leave the cart. My dress feels like a sham, and so do I. I want to be that person who borrows dresses and runs through the halls and flings off worries and can be friends with the boy she liked so so much. But I’m not sure I can be. “Okay,” I tell him. From my face I hope he gets what I’m feeling, but you never know what people are going infer, or what they’re going to overhear, and if it matters in the long run.

The next day goes by faster than I expect. In the morning there’s the initial rush of girls showering, eating breakfast, and making too much noise for me to sleep off my heat-induced nausea, and then afterwards, a calm. The quiet coats the house, and I fall asleep until late morning, only getting up for water and to call Gala collect. She accepts and I tell her about almost everything, much to my surprise. She’s more than sympathetic, and even though she doesn’t know the key players as well as Mable might have, she offers this:

“You know, it’s been my experience — and I can’t speak for you — that I can’t hide my thoughts. So if, say, I were in your shoes but suspected I had certain feelings for Jacob lurking beneath the surface, I wouldn’t be able to be his friend, either.”

“But I don’t. Have those feelings I mean.” I hold the pay phone to my ear, wishing we were allowed to have cell phones so I could talk from bed. The house is so still I keep expecting a horror movie soundtrack to cue up.

“Right,” Gala says. “I know. I’m just saying — and this will sound very loaded from someone in my position.” Read: someone who dropped out of my life and my dad’s. “But be true to yourself. You’re the one who’s stuck in your life. Who benefits from things and suffers if you rely on someone else’s vision for how things should be. Respect those feelings that lurk beneath.”

Those words. That’s how I ended the short story. That there might be something lurking beneath the ocean waters for Amelia and Nick Cooper. And what am I really hiding from myself? “Thanks,” I say. “It’s so quiet here is ghostly.”

“You should probably get to bed,” she says. “Listen to me, sounding like your mother.” Cue massively awkward pause. “I am, I know…”

I’m out of it enough not to overreact. I mean, the woman is my mother, and one of the things I learned from Aunt Mable’s treasure map journey this past summer is that you can’t alter the past. You can wrestle with, duke it out, but you can’t change it. It’s okay…” I breath deeply, feeling my fatigue as I speak. “Thanks for listening.”

“And I’ll see you at Thanksgiving, okay?”

This is news to me. “Really?”

She takes a breath and I hear the sound of pages moving in the background. I don’t know if it’s sheet music that she’s working on or a calendar or the newspaper. All I know is she’s on one coast and I’m on the other and my father and sister will soon meet in the middle. “Didn’t your father mention anything?”

“Not about that, no.” I feel weak all over again and decide I’ll grab some crackers from the pantry and sip more water and go to bed. If I can’t be in the health center and I’m not allowed home, I may as well take advantage of my empty room. “But you’re coming here?”

“Yes. I have my ticket.”

“Good.” It’s another of life’s curveballs that I have her, on the phone where this time last year I didn’t know where she lived even. “But Gala?”

“I know,” she says.

“What do you think I’m going to say?”

“Keep the postcards coming.”

“Yeah, that.”

We end the call and I wonder about everything she said. Not the Thanksgiving part — that feels good. She’ll be here, and maybe Sadie, too, and Dad and I will have to put the fun back in dysfunctional and cook a turkey. Suddenly that doesn’t seem so overwhelming. Because I know what I feel about it. What does feel huge, though, is that scene I wrote about for Mr. Chaucer. These characters, on the beach, with lots of unknowns out in the water.

In my room I have the windows open but there’s no breeze to speak of. Outside is a vision of the heat wave — the once-green lawn is edged with brown. The plants have wilted, and even in the shade the campus dogs are panting and miserable. I look at my watch. Noon. If I were at school I’d be eating lunch, navigating the dining hall and trying to prove to Jacob I can be his friend. Or prove to myself. Chris and Chili and Mary and Harriet Walters and Dalton — they’re all up there, proceeding with their days while I stay here, stagnant. And I have no email access so I don’t know if Chaucer’s read my story.

Gala’s words stoke something in me, causing my mind to whir and my pulse to pick up its tempo. When I revisit lying there with Charlie, asking him that question, I realize the person I was really querying was myself. And, even in my sickly fog, I know that the answer can’t possibly be in the affirmative. How could I sleep with him if I have any doubts whatsoever about feelings lurking beneath my own emotional surface? I stretch my legs out on my white duvet, heat coating all of me, and play mind ping-pong with scenarios. I like Charlie. A lot. Don’t I? In the small frames of it, I do. Like when I saw him at the ferry last spring or being with him all through the warmth of the summer months. Even seeing him on Friday night. If I think about our relationship in segments, I come up with a positive feeling. We like each other, it could be serious, and blah blah blah into the future. But when I back up and think of my whole life as one big moment stretched like a canvas, big as the white-hot sky outside right now, everything changes. Seeing high school, summers included, as one long segment, I see how much a part of it Jacob is. Or has been. And how, no matter what, I always seem to come back to him. Or our unfinished business.

It’s so confusing. All this thinking and for what? Just to plague myself with doubts and indecisions? I reach for a piece of paper on my desk and jot down a line:

One of Amelia’s biggest problems was her inaction.

When Poppy Massa-Tonclair taught me in London she had me read piles of books about writing. At the time, I wondered why, why not just write actual fiction or poetry? But having written the story for Chaucer I can see why. And having written that line for another Amelia story, I can begin to understand that everything I’ll write, even stuff that’s set on Mongolia a hundred years ago (which, um, I know nothing about so I certainly wouldn’t pen that instantly), it’ll still be filtered through me. Am I Amelia? No. But do I think writing a story about a person who may or may not do things, may or may not feel things means something? I do. That much I know.

I lean back on my pillow and start to fall asleep. In that nap haze, I’m woken by voices outside. By the flagpole, in the sun, I squint to see them: Chloe and Jacob. Meeting by the flagpole like the Hadley lore. Except it’s daylight and they’re loud. Probably they love each other already and are yelling it for the world. Chloe yells something and I can see Jacob reach for her. I put my hand over my eyes as a visor and lean into the window for a better view. She pushes him away and then they hug. I’m still half-asleep, but even then, if I’m really very honest with myself, it stings. Just seeing her touch him. Like she did in the science center, casually, her arm at his waist. Even though it was years ago, I still can recall the way it felt to have Jacob’s hands tangled in my hair as we stood, kissing for the first time, outside of Slave to the Grind, Aunt Mable’s coffee shop. Has too much changed? Not even enough? I wonder. Then I fall asleep.

When I wake up, I feel much much better, healthy even, but confused as hell. It’s dark out, and so hot I think I have blankets on me but I don’t.

“Finally!” Mary says from her side of the room.

“Why is it so quiet? What’s going on?” I sit up and feel my heart pounding hard, like I’ve overslept and missed a class.

“Don’t panic — you just slept away part of your life, no biggie.” Mary cracks a smile. “Go shower, grab your sleeping bag, and come with me.”

“Huh?” I check my watch. Past dinner, past a lot of things. “I’m hungry.”

“They’ll have food there,” she explains and before I can ask, shoves shampoo and conditioner my way. “Your dad did it.”

“What?” I try to shake of the sleep and confusion. I grab clean clothing and my hairbrush and realize the rest of the dorm is empty when I get into the hallway. “What’s my dad doing?”

“He’s making Hadley history,” Mary explains as I grab my towel. “It’s the first ever sleep-in. The trustees finally pressured him, I guess, and the HVAC guys are already almost done with Deals.”

“HVAC?”

“Heating, venting, air-conditioning. My cousins’s a contractor. Anyway, they’re doing all-night a/c installation and as a result…the unlucky — or lucky, depending on your point of view — are out of Deals, Bishop, and Fruckner tonight.”

“And just where are they putting us for this sleep-in?”

“The board wouldn’t spring for hotels, pity. I guess some people signed out to day student houses but most of us are at main campus.” She pats her sleeping bag and takes mine for me. “In the science center.”

Dorm parents and the resident faculty members have done their best to keep us segregated by dorms and gender, but to it’s to no avail once the lights are out. As soon as the chapel bell rings ten times, the scurrying starts. Like mice — big mice — we all adjust to suit our needs. Mary disappears to wherever Carlton is. Groups of girls cluster near one of Mrs. Ray’s unbirthday cakes, laughing and then being shushed by another group of girls. The shushing only makes a group of guys from Bishop laugh harder.

My sleeping bag is unfurled right near the scene of Friday night’s crime (breaking and um, lack of entering?) and I’ve slept so much during the day that I cannot sleep now. I wish the whole school were here, that way Chris and I could whisper and he could catch me up on anything I might have missed today. You miss one day of school and it’s like the social order has changed — or at least, that’s how it feels. Plus, he might know about Chaucer. But probably not.