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Scout
One month later
Since being fired from cheer, I have an awful lot of free time on my hands.
Free time and Scout Taylor do not mix.
I’ve been using the time to be a better friend, a better daughter, and an all-round better human being. Which is a lot more difficult than it sounds. I guess I’ve learned to be human again. I’ve changed, but I think it’s for the better.
I carry the basket of oatmeal cookies into the hospital and ride the glass elevator to the luxury floor, admiring the Thanksgiving decorations a little longer and the deep ochre and orange of fall leaves on the ground outside.
When the elevator doors open, I smile at the nurses behind their station.
“Hi, Miranda.” I nod to the middle-aged woman always manning the desk, and wave at the nurses filing their reports. “Alex, Marnie.”
“Hi Scout, how you doin’?”
“I’m good,” I say with a smile.
Alex—a male nurse in his twenties with a face like a young Paul Walker—says, “Hey, what’d you bring us today?”
“Oatmeal.”
“Choc chip or raisin?” Marnie asks with a raise brow.
“Choc chip. Is there any other kind?”
I offer the basket and Alex reaches over Miranda to snatch them up. He shoves one in his mouth and his eyes roll back, “Damn ... this girl.” He bites off more cookie. “I’m telling ya, if he doesn’t end up marrying you, I will.”
I laugh and hold my hand out for the basket. I don’t bother telling him it isn’t like that between us ... anymore. I don’t tell them anything about Navrin and I, because it isn’t their business. We’re friends—or I’m hoping one day we’ll get back to that. For now, we’re just two people attempting to heal what was broken.
“Leave the girl alone. She’s not even eighteen yet,” Miranda says.
“Two months and counting. How’s the patient today?”
“He’s a little bit of a grump, actually,” Miranda whispers conspiratorially.
“Let’s see if I can’t shake him out of his mood before it’s time for his sponge bath.” I grin and whisk myself off to the room at the end of the hall.
I don’t bother knocking, because I come every Saturday at this time. Sometimes I visit Wednesday and Friday nights too. It’s hard standing on the sidelines, watching Nova, Blythe, and Violet cheer without me. Their new flyer sucks, for one, but the worst part is looking out on that field at Saint, King, and River, and not seeing Lev and Navrin.
For the most part, school has moved on without the Fox twins, but I can’t.
Friday nights are difficult for Navrin too, so I try to stretch myself between Scarsdale High and the hospital as much as possible. In the beginning, he just grunted and glared at the TV, but a month on and I’m sometimes lucky enough to count more than two syllables in his responses.
“You’re late,” he says, flicking off the television.
“Well, Alex—that cute male nurse—proposed, so I ...” I peter off as his expression falls and morphs into a scowl. “Sorry. Too soon, huh?”
Navrin glares at me.
“I baked cookies.” I sit the basket on the bedside table.
He bites his lip and then lifts his head. “What kind?”
“Oatmeal.”
“And choc chip?”
“Duh.”
“You know when you first started bringing me baked goods, I thought you were trying to poison me.” He smiles, and my stomach leaps because it’s a lot. To many, it’s as innocuous as a wave, or a hello, but I haven’t seen Navrin smile since before I broke his heart. So while it may be insignificant to someone else, to me, it’s progress.
“My baking has never been that terrible.”
He laughs. “Do you remember that time you had to make cookies for the Bears bake sale and you used salt in place of sugar?”
I cringe. “I was kind of hoping you’d forget about that, but to be fair, Ebba never clearly marked her containers.”
Silence settles over us and Nav wets his lips. “It’s never not going to be weird, is it?”
I give a wistful smile, but inside my heart is tearing in two again. “I think that’s why they call it an adjustment period.”
He shakes his head. “I wanna hate you, so much.”
I swallow back the lump in my throat and blink away the harsh sting of tears. “I know.”
“But I don’t. I can’t.” He takes a deep breath and exhales slowly. “I wish I could hate you, Scout Taylor, but I don’t feel anything but love and sadness when I see your face. It hurts when I look at you.”
My tears fall, and they don’t stop. I nod, and take a tissue from my bag. “I’m sorry.”
His smile is sad as he says, “Sorry you slept with my brother, or sorry it ended in heartbreak for all of us?”
“I’m sorry for everything.”
He exhales and his head flops back against the pillow. He holds his hand out to me, and I take it. “I wish I could say this pain is worth it, but I’m not sure that’s true yet. I don’t know how to not love you.”
I shrug and say through my tears, “I don’t know either.”
We stay like that for a long time until Nav tugs on my arm and pulls me toward the bed. “Will you do me a favor?”
“Anything.”
“Will you climb up here? Let me hold my girl right now before she becomes Alex, the hot male nurse’s, betrothed?”
I laugh and wipe my tears from my cheeks with the back of my hand. “Yeah, I’d like that.”
Carefully, so as not to disturb his leg sling, I ease onto the bed and cuddle up beside him. Nav wraps his arm around me and presses his lips to my hair the way he used to, the way Lev used to. It’s nice, familiar, but it doesn’t fill the void inside me. It doesn’t make me whole again. I’m beginning to wonder if anything ever will.