Thousand Words (6 page)

I ran my fingers through his hair. “That’s exactly why I sent it, though,” I said. “I want to be with you, too. I wanted to show you that.”

“Yeah, but what if it got out somehow? I’d have to kick the ass of every guy who laid eyes on it.”

“It’s not going to get out. I only sent it to you. I didn’t even show it to Rachel or Von.”

“Good,” he said, running his finger along my chin. “All that ass-kicking would be so exhausting, and I’d rather do this.” He pressed up against me and kissed me some more.

By the time we headed home, my skin felt tight and sun-drenched, my hair stank of lake water, and my smile reached so far down inside me I felt like I’d never frown again.

Kaleb had a baseball game to go to, but I didn’t even mind. When he wrapped his arms around my waist and kissed me good-bye, I knew that his “boys” didn’t really matter. Soon they would go their separate ways and I would
be the one sticking around. I would be the one he remembered while he was away. I would be the one whose picture he’d be looking at.

Mom was sitting in the den when I came in, frowning over her computer keyboard. She glanced up when I passed by, and pulled her glasses off.

“Hey, stranger,” she said. “You home for the night?”

I rerouted and slipped into the den, sinking into the puffy leather chair beside her desk.

“That’s a cute dress. Vonnie’s?”

I nodded. “Yeah. But it smells like the lake now. I should wash it before I give it back to her.”

Mom smiled. “You have a good time with Kaleb?”

I nodded again, hoping that how much of a good time wasn’t registering on my face. She’d have been disappointed to see me rolling around in a bikini with Kaleb, making out in a boat. What would she say about the photo if she knew about it? I couldn’t even imagine the lecture I’d get. She would totally freak. I made a mental note to erase the photo from my phone as soon as I got upstairs.

“You look tired. Everything fine?”

“Frog fur,” I answered. That was our thing. The way Mom had checked out my mental well-being since as far back as I could remember. It came from something her dad said a lot when she was growing up. If Grampy was having a great day, he’d proclaim he was “fine as frog fur!” If his day wasn’t going the way he wanted it to, he’d say, “I’m
fine, but my dandy could sure use a tune-up.” It had always made Mom giggle. So she passed it on to me. She always asked, “Everything fine?” and I was supposed to answer either “Frog fur” or “Dandy needs a tune-up.”

“I’m just tired,” I continued. “Didn’t get much sleep last night.”

“Ah,” she said. “Well, neither did I.” She put her glasses on and turned back to her computer. “Trying to finalize this budget, and it is not coming together. I don’t suppose your father would be willing to trade places with me this week—he can manage the preschool and I’ll run the academic world?”

I wrinkled my nose at her. “Doubt it.”

Dad and Mom had met in college, both of them majoring in education. They’d graduated, gotten married, and Dad had started teaching fifth grade while Mom got a job directing a preschool. After I was born, she took me to preschool with her every day while Dad worked his way up to principal at his elementary school. He’d been principal for almost as long as I could remember, but then last year, when the superintendent had some sort of public breakdown and it was discovered that the school district needed a whole lot of cleaning up, Dad threw his hat in the ring and got the position. Mom loved her job, even though it didn’t pay much, and she loved the little kids she worked with. She always said she was glad it was Dad and not her working for the school district, but she called him Superintendentman and said he was forever “busy saving the world,” and when
she said those things there was an air of… something behind her voice. Sarcasm? Jealousy, maybe? Dad’s job was important, and it seemed like we couldn’t go anywhere without someone recognizing him and wanting to talk to him about an issue or a change he’d made.

“Well, then. I suppose I’d better get this budget figured out,” she said now. “Eating dinner with us?”

“Sure. I’m going to take another shower first. And maybe a nap.”

She wrinkled her forehead and slipped the glasses off again. “You sure you’re fine?”

“Frog fur, Mom. Totally.”

In fact, I was better than frog fur. After the day I’d had with Kaleb, I was so much better.

I trudged up the stairs to my room, my thighs aching from yesterday’s run, my whole body feeling wrung out and dehydrated, but I totally didn’t care. I kicked off my flip-flops as I shut the door, then fired up my laptop to check my email.

I had a message from my friend Sarah, whose brother Nate was on Kaleb’s baseball team.

It was one sentence.

A sentence I would never forget, no matter how long I lived.

“Tina wants you to meet with Kaleb,” Dad said by way of greeting when I slid into his car after school. I paused, one leg still hanging out the door.

“What?” I hadn’t heard my lawyer’s name since my court date.

Dad put the car into drive, and I pulled my leg in and shut the door, wrapping the seat belt around myself.

“But I thought the judge wanted us all to stay away from each other,” I said. “I’m not supposed to have anything to do with him. Did something happen?”

Dad checked his rearview mirror and pulled into traffic. “Apparently, there is an apology involved. I believe Kaleb’s attorney is looking to set it up. I don’t know if maybe he’s trying to work a plea in his case or something.”

My heart thudded in my chest. I hadn’t seen Kaleb since the day I slammed his truck door and walked away. I hadn’t heard from him since that last, ugly phone call. I’d thought about him lots of times, about how his life had changed, about whether or not he’d decided if everything that had happened was worth it. I’d wondered if he was happy with the way this had all turned out.

Happy.

I remembered when Kaleb and I were happy. Before all the fighting, before all the… everything.

I thought about us curling up against each other on the bus to and from meets. It didn’t matter then that he was two years older than I was. Nobody thought twice about it. We were happy. Even after everything that had happened, I still couldn’t look at those moments as something bad. Those moments between us were good no matter what. Surely he still saw them as good, too.

“When?” I asked.

“Well, I haven’t agreed to it yet,” Dad said. “I wanted to make sure you were okay with it. Certainly, I have my own opinions about what he owes you, but if you don’t want to see him, I would understand that.”

I thought it over. After a day like today, cowering in the library during lunch, walking down the hallways alone while Vonnie and Cheyenne and Annie and all the people I’d once called my friends were joking and laughing and forgetting about me, knowing I would get crap from Kenzie and Angel while doing community service, did I really want to see him?
Would an apology feel like enough? Or would I end up feeling sorry for him? I was so not ready to feel sorry for him.

But I decided that he really did owe me an apology, and even if it was meant to help him reach some plea deal, I wanted to hear it. “Where?”

Dad shrugged, turning into the Central Office parking lot. “I’m not sure. At the courthouse, I suppose. Or maybe at the police station. I’d have to talk to Tina about that.” He sounded tired of the subject. The media had continued to hound him over this. He’d been embarrassed, publicly, and I’d even read that some members of the community were going to be at the next board meeting, demanding he step down as superintendent or that the board fire him. He hadn’t mentioned any of this at home; I only knew about it from my own research, and I was afraid to bring it up with him.

Mom, too, was tight-lipped about everything that was going on. She put on a smile every evening when I got home. We cooked dinner together, like always. She talked about her kids and about the owner of the preschool, who sometimes drove her nuts. But we never talked about what had happened with the photo. We never talked about what was still happening, with the community service and with Dad. And she never asked me if I was fine anymore. I guessed she already knew the answer to that question.

Or maybe she didn’t care. Maybe she figured if I wasn’t fine, it was my own fault.

“Would you go with me?” I asked Dad now.

He eased the car into his parking spot and turned it off. “It
might be best if Mom went with you to this one, Ash,” he said. He didn’t sound angry or upset, just weary and afraid. “I’m not sure how close I should be to this now. And I don’t know if I could trust myself to be in the same room with him.”

I understood where he was coming from. He probably wanted to beat the crap out of Kaleb, and the last thing he needed was the media breaking yet another story involving the Chesterton Public Schools superintendent, this time about him assaulting someone in a courthouse. Especially someone who was trying to apologize. Dad didn’t need to look like he was coming unhinged on top of everything else.

We opened our doors, letting the fresh fall air tumble in on us. I took a deep breath, readying myself for another session of community service. “Okay,” I said. “Tell her I’ll meet with him. It might be good to hear him admit what he did.”

And I realized how true that statement really was. How much I wanted, after months of denials and lies, to finally hear Kaleb admit that he’d betrayed me. In some ways, that was all I’d ever wanted from him.

It was too little, too late, but it was something.

The first thing I noticed when I walked into room 104 was that we’d gotten a new kid in Teens Talking. It didn’t take long for Kenzie to let everyone know that his name was Cord and that he was there for drugs.

“Total bullshit, though,” she whispered to Angel, loudly enough for everyone in the room to hear her. “His principal
said he was selling in the parking lot, but nobody ever actually caught him doing it. They searched his locker and everything. Finally, like the third time they searched his car, they found a plastic Baggie and they all starting crying dope on him. I mean, he’s been selling since seventh grade, but they didn’t have no proof, because he’s that good at hiding it.”

“Shit, how do you know, anyway?” Darrell said, taking a really long time at Mrs. Mosely’s desk with the stapler. Mrs. Mosely had stepped out, leaving all of us alone, including Cord, who was sitting a couple of computers down from me, listening to his iPod. “You don’t know nothing.”

“Bullshit I don’t know nothing,” Kenzie shot back. I turned in my chair and could see that the backs of her ears had gone scarlet and she was waving a pair of scissors idly in the air in front of her. Not a threat, but close enough for Darrell to get the hint. “My friend goes to that school and she bought from him all the time.” At this point, Kenzie was no longer whispering, and I shot a glance at Cord, who seemed to be oblivious. Which was probably a good thing. I didn’t know what they’d do to you if you got in a fight in community service on your first day, but it couldn’t be good.

Darrell chuckled. “Your ‘friend,’ ” he said, making quote marks with his fingers. “Right, whatever.”

“Yeah, whatever,” Kenzie said.

“Why don’t you lay off, Darrell?” Angel said, but she said it quietly. Everybody knew Angel and Darrell were friends and had been for a long time. “It ain’t about you, anyways.”

He glanced at Angel and shook his head. “Kenzie, you’re always so full of it. You think you know everything about everything,” he said, but he finally snapped the stapler shut on his papers and ambled back to his computer. “Don’t know shit,” he mumbled as he scooted his chair in.

“That’s right, keep talking, Darrell,” Kenzie said, then added something under her breath, and she and Angel cracked up.

I went back to my computer, glad nobody had tried to drag me into this. I’d had my share of exchanges with Kenzie—she was always calling me Supermodel and making little comments about getting texts about me. I wished she would finish up that pamphlet or have her baby so she would leave and we could all get some peace.

Mrs. Mosely came back into the room and checked her watch. “Anyone need a restroom break?”

We all got up, like we did every day. Whether you had to use the restroom or not, sometimes the break was needed simply to rest your eyes from the computer or your ears from Kenzie.

We headed down the hallway en masse. Kenzie and Angel made a beeline for the women’s restroom, and Darrell ducked into the men’s room. Cord stood over by a bulletin board, staring up at it as if it was the most interesting thing he’d ever seen in his life. And Mack went for the candy machine back under the stairs, as he always did.

I wandered near the stairwell, mostly wasting time, but also looking in toward the candy machine. Other than telling
Kenzie and Angel to leave me alone, I had never heard Mack utter a word. Day after day, he sat quietly in his chair, clicking, clicking, clicking his mouse, earbuds in his ears. Mrs. Mosely never asked how his project was going. She never offered to read his work. She never gave him any advice. Not even when she was standing at my computer, her shoulder literally rubbing up against his.

I wondered about Mack. A lot. I wondered what his story was, and how come his was pretty much the only story Kenzie didn’t seem to know. Or at least the only story she didn’t blab around to everyone else, if she did know.

I watched his shadow as he put coins into the machine and punched some buttons. The denim of his jacket had worn away at one elbow, and his skin, white and pasty, poked through. His pants rode low and were filthy and torn up at the cuffs.

“Want some Hot Tamales?” he asked, and at first I didn’t realize he was talking to me.

“Huh?”

He didn’t turn around, but repeated, “Want some Hot Tamales?” and then added, “I’ve got extra quarters if you want something.”

“Oh.” I took a couple of steps forward, pushing my hair behind my ears. “Okay. Sure.”