Boomerang, page 14
“Love is bullshit,” I mumbled. When Trip said it, he’d sounded decadent and certain. From me, it just sounded whiny.
She laughed. “You’re a shitty actor. You’re just like Rory. You don’t believe that for a second.” She looked smug. And beautiful. I wanted to prove to her that everything she thought about me was wrong.
I leaned into her so slightly, I wasn’t sure she’d notice. I just wanted to close the distance between us. I was afraid that if I moved too much, she’d take her hand back and I didn’t want her to. It felt like an IV line to some sort of normal life.
I thought of Rory’s warning and told myself that Emery’s cynicism and her knowing about Trip made her safe. Nothing that happened was going to change either of us. Still, I wanted to kiss her. I wanted to make her believe in something. I wanted to be the one to cut through her armor as naturally as I’d cut through Trip’s. If I could prove her wrong, I could let myself believe that I was who I wanted to be, instead of who I really was.
She turned her head and I was drawn in. Goosebumps raced up my arms as I wrapped my free hand in her hair and pulled her into a kiss. Every nerve in my body came alive in bursts of fireworks. Then I kissed her again while the sound of applause and champagne corks celebrating the New Year echoed behind us.
When we broke apart, she brushed my neck with her hand and cupped the boomerang in her palm. My entire body trembled. The way her fingers softly rubbed the wood Trip had carved was more intimate than anything else she could have done. If she’d been looking for a way to completely disarm me, she’d found her target.
Out of breath, I waited for her to say something.
Someone threw a handful of translucent confetti at us on their way out the door and it glittered like falling stars.
“Happy New Year,” Rory said, appearing out of nowhere, and pulling Emery into a hug.
My heart thumped out of time as I watched them.
Rory’s phone rang and they took turns sharing wishes with their parents.
While they were talking, I put my empty cup on the table and left.
I figured that the walk home would take me about twenty minutes, and I didn’t mind being out in the softly falling snow. I could hear the sound of parties winding down through open windows, music mingling with the clinking of glasses. “Don’t you know that I fucking love you?” someone shouted. I didn’t hear a response.
I thought of calling Rory to tell him that I’d left and that they shouldn’t worry, but then realized that Emery still had my phone. As I walked, I fantasized about a scenario where Trip would call and she’d answer and the idea of them talking made me smile. But my reaction was probably because of the alcohol.
Trip would love Emery’s wild hair and her floaty dresses and her dislike of bullshit. I’m sure he would have been brave enough to do more than kiss her at the stroke of midnight. I’m sure he would have stayed.
I brushed my fingers across my lips, thinking both about Emery’s kiss and about Trip. Then I swallowed down a lump of drunken jealousy while I looked up at the snowy sky. The cold felt good against my face and I started to snake up and down streets. I wasn’t ready to go home. I came to a gas station that hadn’t been there five years before. The lights were garish, and no cars were fueling up. Only one thing caught my eye: the pay phone. I wasn’t sure that it would work, but I dug around in my pockets and found two quarters.
It was a new year. A number that couldn’t be traced back to me. And I was more than a little bit drunk.
“Hello?” Leon Marchette’s voice was filled with New Year’s cheer. I wondered if Trip was even there.
“Hello?” he said again, louder this time. I pulled the phone away from my ear and stared at it. I had nothing to say to Leon and no clue what I’d say to Trip. So I just listened to the sounds of the party until he said “damned kids” and hung up.
I followed Main for a few blocks before I noticed the police car trailing me.
“Need a ride?” Chief Perkins asked, rolling down the passenger’s side window.
I licked my lips and hoped he couldn’t smell the alcohol on my breath. At least I wasn’t driving. “I kind of like walking in the snow.”
He nodded. “Yeah, me, too. But people get all kinds of crazy tonight. Come on, let me give you a lift.”
I figured that it wasn’t a great idea to argue with a cop when I’d been drinking underage, so I got in and did my best to keep my face pointed toward the window so that he couldn’t smell my breath. I expected him to grill me, but he just talked about crime stats on New Year’s Eve. When we pulled up to my house, he cut the engine and turned to face me.
“I was pretty darned pissed at you for what you pulled. The whole running away thing, but I have to say that I’m glad you’re back. Your mother is happy. She says you’re doing really well in school. I guess everything has worked out in the end, right?”
It was odd to think of him keeping tabs on me.
From the outside, it looked like things had worked out. But, I’d yet to unravel the issues with my trust. I hadn’t kept my promises to Trip or even come close to sorting out my tangled feelings. And then there were the possible repercussions I was going to face for kissing Emery.
“Happy New Year,” I said, and slid out of the car.
FOURTEEN
I always made New Year’s resolutions, and more often than not, whether out of some old superstition or lack of anything better to do, I kept them. In the past, my resolutions had to do with challenges: Read War and Peace; chop an entire cord of wood; devise a system that Trip could follow for the complicated regime of medicines that Maggie needed to take. I’d only failed at the last.
This year, my resolutions were less concrete. I resolved to find a way to make up with Jenny. I resolved to be nicer to my mother now that we’d gotten over the hurdle of her pressing charges. It wasn’t as if I thought I could make up for the time I’d been gone, or worse, the time I was going to be gone after June. But I wanted to at least try to meet her halfway.
The last thing on my list was less a resolution and more of a flashing beacon: talk to James Gordon about my trust fund. The Gordons were due home later in the afternoon and I was hoping to kill two birds with one stone and see both him and Jenny.
I took a shower under water so hot it made me wince. When I toweled off and rearranged my hair in the mirror I noticed that the roots were coming in blond—not the whitish shade my hair had been as a kid, but a kind of dull beige that looked stark and colorless against the black that was growing out. I’d have to do something about it soon.
I wasn’t hiding anymore. Still, when I thought about letting my hair grow out, I felt a little like I was betraying Wilson and Maggie. What would my mother would say if I re-dyed it? Would anyone even place as much importance on the color of my hair as me? Trip, probably. Everything I did seemed important to him.
I threw a baseball cap over my head so I didn’t have to look at my hair anymore and got dressed. On the way out of my room, I grabbed the sweatshirt Jenny had given me that first night I was back, then told my mom that I was going to see James Gordon to talk about the trust. She asked if I wanted her to come with me, and I said no. It was hard to think that, after all this time, she’d turned into just who I’d always wanted her to be. But this time I would be the one letting her down.
I wove a path through the suitcases still stacked in the hall and followed Mrs. Gordon to the kitchen. It was good to see her, and I was looking forward to seeing Mr. Gordon, but I was also a little nervous about seeing Jenny. I didn’t know if she’d spoken to Emery or if they’d have talked about my drunken New Year’s kiss. And really, we were barely on speaking terms as it was.
Mr. Gordon almost bowled me over with a bear hug as he flew out of his office off the kitchen. He was dressed in royal blue silk pajamas, a huge difference from the lawyer suits I used to see him in.
“I heard you were home. I just … I guess I didn’t believe it until just now. How are you? Do you want something? Steph, get him a drink.”
“Oh, no thanks,” I said, and laughed. “A lot has changed in five years.”
Mr. Gordon laughed, too. “You aren’t kidding. Are you here to see Jenny?”
“Yeah,” I said. “But I was hoping I could talk to you for a minute first.” He looked confused. “About my trust.”
“Oh,” he said. For a minute, I think he’d forgotten that he was the trust’s executor. Maybe he’d forgotten that he’d ever been a lawyer. “Sure, come have a seat in my office. I have to find the files.”
I thrust the sweatshirt at him. “Jenny lent this to me. I thought you might want it back.” He stared at it. Maybe I’d given him the wrong idea about Jenny and me.
When we got to his office, he shut the door behind me. The room hadn’t changed. It still had the wooden desk, burgundy padded chair, and diplomas on the walls. Mr. Gordon looked completely out of place, as if he’d wandered in from the street and had stopped to rest his legs.
He unlocked a drawer and rummaged around. “Sorry, Michael … um … Sean. I haven’t looked at this in a long, long time. Give me a minute.”
I waited while he pulled out a file, flipped papers around, and made hmm noises.
“Okay,” he said. “What can I do for you?”
I didn’t see a reason to beat around the bush. “Is there any way to unlink the money from Davidson?”
“Well …” He rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Did you want to go somewhere else?”
I took a deep breath. “Not really, sir. I was more hoping I could cash it out.”
He stabbed the cap end of his pen into the desk a couple of times. “What do you have your eye on? A sports car? There isn’t … I mean, you haven’t … There isn’t a girl involved or anything is there?”
I laughed and assured him that no girl was involved. He looked relieved.
“Here’s the thing. Your grandparents were pretty adamant on the terms of the trust. Davidson or nothing. I’d tried to give them options to work in more flexibility. I mean, what if you’d wanted to go to Harvard? Would they actually pull the funding? But, no, it was their money, and this was what they wanted. I’m afraid it’s pretty much what you’re stuck with.”
I swallowed. “There’s nothing you can do as executor?”
“I’m happy to check with someone at my old firm to see if they can find a loophole, but I was unfortunately very good at my job. If you want to use these funds, you’re going to California.”
I nodded, wondering what weird fates were at work to bring me back to Millway only to have all of my plans pulled out from under me.
I thanked him and got up to leave. “Just think, though,” he said with a wistful glance out the window at the frozen trees. “You won’t have to put up with winter and you’ll be surrounded by all of those sun-bleached blondes.”
I tried to smile. I knew he was just trying to help me. But I got out of there as soon as I could. I didn’t have the energy to face Jenny or even myself.
This time, even my mom noticed I was upset. “Did you want to go to a different school? Something closer?” she asked. “Maybe I could take out a loan against the house.”
I shook my head and hugged her, afraid that if I began to talk, I was going to lose it.
Rain started as I trudged up the stairs—one of those cold, sleety storms that was a mix of everything at once. I didn’t have the patience for homework, so I dug out the box of my mom’s letters and propped myself up on the pillows of my bed.
I read them in order from the first panicked scrawls she’d written right after I’d left, up through the most recent ones.
Nothing in those pages was news to me. My mother might have kept my father’s identity out of her drunken ramblings when I was a kid and wasn’t giving up that secret here, but the rest of it I’d heard or at least pieced together.
She summed up my conception and her downfall in one letter:
My freshman year at college, I went to a frat party that ended up like so many of them do—a girl “in a bad way.” Sorry, that was your grandmother’s phrase. Basically, I got knocked up.
My parents had drilled into me the importance of helping others, but surprise, surprise, that didn’t extend to their own daughter. Not after my “big mistake.” Oh, of course, they gave me two options. ONE: They’d pay for and support an abortion. Or, TWO: Since I obviously wasn’t capable of making mature decisions, I could give them custody of my baby. Of you.
No way was that going to happen.
I won’t make you relive the following years with me, Michael. I would have liked to have broken ties with my parents completely, but I was nineteen and on my own with a baby. I’d exhausted the offers I had from friends to crash in their guest rooms and frankly, and I’m sure this comes as no surprise to you, I had no idea what I was doing.
Someone I barely knew offered me a job here in Maine, but the company went bust before I even got my first paycheck. I’m ashamed to say that I broke down and asked my parents for help. They cut some sort of deal with a mortgage company (your grandfather had friends in high places) and that covered a large portion of the cost of this house. Since this was your grandparents, they were careful not to cover the entire thing. That way, I’d have to “stand on my own two feet” and make up the difference.
It wasn’t that I didn’t want to take responsibility. You were an easy baby, charming and engaging. But I still needed to feed you. I tried to cobble together part-time jobs that would let me pay for day care, but I ended up working just to pay someone else to look after you. I still had to come up with the rest of the mortgage and pay for food and utilities and clothes.
I took in some freelance office work and watched other kids. Then I answered an ad for dancers. On a good week, I could pay our bills. Do you remember those days, Michael? When I’d come home with baseball cards and chocolate for you?
I’m so sorry that they weren’t all good weeks.
I tried, I really did. I hated dancing. Not the physicality of it, but … well, the rest of it. The men would buy me drinks that made it easier to forget what I was doing. But Michael, please know that I never forgot you.
In one of the later letters, she wrote that the one hope she held onto was that I was alive and being raised by someone who loved me.
I thought I’d known her story, but I realized I hadn’t really. Knowing the facts was like reading a history book. You could remember names and dates and even understand why something happened. But that wasn’t the same as knowing how it felt.
Reading the letter forced me to reframe my memories of my mother. She wasn’t all that much older than I was now when she got pregnant. She grasped at whatever solid ground she could just so she could take care of me. Was that really any different from what I was doing trying to take care of Trip?
In another world … if things were different. If it weren’t for Trip …
I let myself consider the possibility of playing by the rules for once. Using the trust to go to Davidson. Maybe I wasn’t what Trip needed after all. Maybe, like my mother, my being gone would spur him to do something to get away from Leon. Maybe, like her, he’d be better off without me to worry about.
In some way I couldn’t quite put my finger on, reading my mother’s letters had turned my view of myself upside down. All my life, it had been easy to pin my problems on her: genetics, upbringing. I figured I’d gotten screwed on the entire package and that justified everything.
I thought about lashing out at Trip after the party. About how I’d crossed a line that had been so horrible and unlikely, I’d never known enough to draw it. If I was capable of hitting Trip after everything he’d been through, what else was lurking inside me?
When Trip deposited me and my one bag of belongings at McKuen Park, he’d looked at me with those gray eyes, daring me to look away. I was terrified he was going to let me go without a word.
Then he said, “I’m never going to hate you, Sean. Stop trying to make me.”
My mother’s letters, without meaning to, made it clear that anything lacking in my character was my own fault; any fear of what I was capable of was well deserved.
The only person I had to blame was myself.
FIFTEEN
On our first day back at school, Emery held out my phone. “I thought you might want this back.”
It looked so natural in her hand, I considered giving it to her. It certainly wasn’t doing me any good.
“I’m sorry,” I said. Inside, I was freaking out a little. I thought about finishing the sentence with “for kissing you,” or “for leaving the New Year’s Eve party without saying goodbye” or “for saddling you with my phone, which probably didn’t make a single damned sound the entire time you had it.” Instead, I opted for silence.
“It’s okay. It wasn’t that heavy,” she said with a small smile.
I was transfixed as I watched her lips and surprised to realize I was thinking about kissing her again.
She pushed the phone into my hand, and I clumsily slipped it into my backpack. Once I had that sorted out, I stood there watching people race through the halls on their way to class.
We were both running late. I’d had one of those mornings where nothing seemed to work: the milk was spoiled; the shower head came off in my hand; and the first shirt I put on had a stain on it.
“Thanks,” I said and started to turn toward East Wing.
“Sean,” I heard her call.
I glanced back over my shoulder.
“The kiss was nice, too.”
As she was swept away in the crowd, I stood there with a stupid smile on my face. Until I realized I was in danger of missing the second bell.
I slid into English with no time to spare and replayed Emery’s words over and over again. I was pretty sure she’d meant it. But the fact that I’d spent all of New Year’s Eve talking about Trip now seemed like a huge waste. My focus always seemed to be in the wrong place.
