I opened and closed my phone several times, snapping it, just trying to get my brain back. It wasn’t like I felt bad about not calling Dee, because I didn’t think she would’ve picked up when she saw my number anyway. I just felt this raw gnawing somewhere in my stomach, or my head, like I was hungry even though I wasn’t.
“Wake up, Paul.” I kicked my blanket off; it crumpled in a soft heap where Nuala had been sitting. Leaves fluttered to the floor, dry and lifeless. “We’re going to go get lunch with my mom.”
Mom has an inability to be on time. This inability—nay, this essential property of her existence—is so powerful that even her bus wasn’t on time. Couldn’t be on time. So Paul and I sat outside the bus terminal on a bench, the fall sun bright on us but lacking any force.
“I don’t get how you get this to work.” Paul was trying to get a pen to write on his hand. It was one of those where you click the end to make the end come out, and he kept clicking and unclicking it and then shaking it, as if that would make it write better. He was making an army of dots on the back of his hand, but he hadn’t yet managed any letters. “It’s like I’m trying to write the alphabet with a hot dog.”
Cars roared by, but no bus. Without looking away from the road, I held my hand out for the pen. “I will enlighten you. Prepare to be dazzled.”
He gave me the pen and pointed at the back of my hand. “Write ‘manlove’ on there.”
I hovered the pen over my skin. “Why, Paul, I had no idea you felt that way. I mean, I’m universally appealing, but still—”
Paul grinned big enough for me to see it out of the corner of my eye. “Dude, no. We had a, you know, what do you call it. A guest player. A guest oboe instructor. Anyway, she came in this week—and you know what her name was? Amanda Manlove.”
I made an appreciative noise. “No way.”
“Yeah, dude. That’s what I said! I mean, seriously. She had to go through grade school with that name. Her parents must’ve hated her.”
I wrote bonfire on my hand.
Paul made a spit-filled sound in the back of his throat. “Nuh-uh! How did you get it to write? It didn’t make dots on your hand. It really wrote.”
“You’ve got to pull the skin tight, genius,” I said, and demonstrated. I wrote my name, and then drew a circle around it.
He took the pen back from me and stretched his skin tight. He wrote bonfire on his hand too. “Why ‘bonfire’?”
I didn’t know. “I want to put a bonfire scene in Ballad,” I lied.
“We’d have to make fake fire for onstage. That’ll be either hard or corny. Except alcohol fire. Isn’t alcohol fire invisible?” Paul looked at something past me. “Hey, incoming. It’s the girl from your old school.”
I froze and didn’t turn to confirm. “Paul, you’d better not be kidding me. Do you think she’s seen me?”
Paul’s gaze lifted to above my head. “Um, yeah, pretty sure she has.”
“Um, hi,” Dee said, right behind my shoulder. Just her voice made me hear the words again: I was thinking of him when you kissed me.
I shot Paul a dark look that meant thanks for all the advance warning and stood up to face her. I shoved my hands in my pockets without saying anything.
“Hi, Paul,” Dee looked around me at Paul, who was looking a little hunted. “Do you mind if I talk to James for a second?”
“I’m waiting for Mom,” I said. My stomach jostled inside me; I couldn’t think. Looking at her stung me.
“I know.” Dee looked at the road. “My mom said she sent stuff with her. She called me—my mom did, not yours—and said she’d heard on the radio about traffic on 64, so I know she’s not going to be here for a while. Your mom, not mine.” She shrugged uncomfortably, and added, in a rush, “I came with the church bus into town and thought I’d warn you she’d be late, if you were here waiting.” Everything about her face and voice was awkward, conciliatory, miserable.
Paul offered, “I’ll wait here.”
“Thanks, comrade.” Only a little sarcasm crept through my voice. He could hand my ashes over to my mom after Dee fried what was left of my self-esteem. I wondered for a split second if I could say no. “Okay, let’s go.”
Paul made a little rueful face at me before I followed Dee down the sidewalk. She didn’t say anything as we left the station behind, even after we’d followed the rising sidewalk into downtown Gallon. A block away, I saw Evans-Brown Music. I wondered if Bill the pipe instructor was still there or if he disappeared when I wasn’t around to see him, like Nuala. I looked into the empty windows of abandoned shops as we walked, watching our reflections expanding and contracting. Dee, arms crossed across her chest, biting her lip. Me, my hands in my pockets, shoulders hunched, an island she didn’t have a boat to get to.
“I feel awful,” Dee said, finally. It seemed like an unfair statement. Selfish. Dee must’ve thought so too, because she added, “About what I did to you. I just—every night, I just cry thinking about how I ruined everything between us.”
I didn’t say anything. We were passing a shop that advertised menswear, and had a bunch of mannequin heads wearing hats in the front window. My reflection put one of my heads into a derby for a split second.
“It was like—I don’t even know why—I mean, I just am so sorry. I don’t want everything to be over between us. I know I messed up. I’m just, like, broken. Something’s wrong with me and I know I messed up.” She wasn’t crying yet, but there was a little catch in her voice just when she said “broken.” I looked at the cracks on the sidewalk. Ants were marching in straight rows across them. Didn’t that mean it was going to rain or something? I thought I remembered my mom telling me once that ants walked in straight lines to lay down scent trails to find their way back home. The closer they walked, the heavier the scent trail. The easier to find the way back home.
Dee grabbed my hand and stopped in her tracks, jerking me to a stop as well. “James, please say something. Please. This was … this was really hard to do. Please just say something.”
There were words crowding in my head, but they weren’t words to be spoken. They were stark characters, hundreds of letters making words that needed to be written down. So here I was, standing here in the middle of a sidewalk, Dee holding my hand tight enough to hurt, looking at me with too-bright eyes on the verge of tears, and here was me, my head stuffed full of words, and I couldn’t say anything.