Chapter Eight
CeCe
I sat in the hotel room, staring at my phone. Tuba, VanBree, and Aisha were scouring the hallways, stalking the rugby team that was rumored to be staying here, which gave me a rare moment of alone time.
I hesitated as my thumb hovered over the call button. I sucked in a breath and called my parents landline number, willing my dad to answer. I had already tried his cell phone, and it was turned off.
My mom’s voice cut through the line and my back straightened. I cleared my throat.
“Hi. Mom?” I asked, as if I wasn’t sure what role she held in my life.
“CeCe?” she asked, as if questioning the same.
I nodded against the phone. “How are you?” I asked.
“Great!” Her voice sounded pumped with oxygen.
Great. She was always great.
I could hear her doing something through the phone. Cooking? Cleaning? Competing for most productive woman of the year award? Between working at the library and the chamber of commerce, planning church events, and running the city treasury, there was never a spare moment in her day.
“I’m organizing a charity booth at the apple festival this year,” she said. “I’m sewing together tablecloths as we speak.”
I knew better than to bring up her doctor’s visit. Our conversations were like a well choreographed dance, a beat never slipping out of place, never meandering from the routine.
“How’s Dad?” I asked.
“Out on the water, as always,” she said. “He scheduled a last minute fishing trip with some big-leagues from Minneapolis.”
“You’re probably ready for the season to be over,” I said. I took a chance. “It must be hard having Dad gone so much.”
“Hard?” my mom asked.
I rolled my eyes. Hard, as in the course, impenetrable material that surrounds your unwavering emotions, I wanted to say.
“Lonely?” I offered.
She laughed. “Edmonds don’t get lonely,” she said.
My mind flashed back to the football party. I could still see Emmett and Bryn together. I remembered the way he dipped his head down to whisper to her. I wondered what the sensation felt like, to have his voice so close, to feel his breath while he talked.
“We don’t get lonely,” I repeated.
“It’s good money, CeCe, I can’t complain. Your father is a work horse. Besides, if you rest, you rot.”
My mom could write one of those daily calendars, offering doses of wisdom to live by. I always found her optimism strange, since our emotions don’t follow a predictable forecast. You can’t program a brain with happy thoughts. My mom appeared set on defying psychology.
“When you’re dad’s gone, I get to turn the kitchen into my craft room,” she said. “I love it.”
“Great,” I said, falling back into our safe dialogue.
“How’s school?” she asked, and one class jumped to my mind.
“I’m taking Honors Shakespeare for an English elective,” I said. “There’s an interesting guy in the class.”
I felt my face flush at mentioning Emmett. I never talked to my mom about boys. That was strictly girlfriend material. But I listened to the other girls on the team call their moms when we were on the road and talk like sisters, gushing out their feelings. Sometimes it stirred a wave of jealousy in me. I was jealous they had some to confide in. Someone that would support them even if they messed up.
She whistled through her teeth. “Honors? Sounds advanced. Looks like all of those middle school tutors are paying off?”
I held back a sigh. My mom was always looking for vindication that all of the money they poured into my extracurriculars was worth it. Like I was their financial investment.
“Yes, Mom,” I assured her. “It’s all paying off.”
I said good-bye and stared down at the phone. There were all different types of mothers. Some were smothering, some were detached. Some weren’t in the picture at all. And like my scar had taught me, you can’t change what nature hands you. You had to make the most of it. But sitting here, I still couldn’t help wishing I had a mom who knew me. More than anything, I wished she would let me get to know her. You can’t be strong for people without knowing their cracks, their flaws, their broken places. That’s the only way we can hold each another together.
I set down my phone and someone knocked at the door. I scooted off the bed and my feet padded across the carpeting and I opened it. Bryn walked in clutching a laptop against her chest.
She took a seat on the edge of the bed and looked up at me. “I did it. I wrote Emmett an email.” Her eyes were beaming. She looked like she was expecting a trophy. At the very least, a medal.
“Great,” I said. I watched her, waiting for more. Were we supposed to high-five?
“I think it’s really good.” She set the laptop on the bed and opened it. “I just need a second opinion before I hit send,” she said.
I sat down next to her.
“Bryn, I’m sure it’s fine. Just be yourself, you don’t need me read over it.”
“You have to. You’re the one who gave me writing advice. You said to be real, honest, and to take a risk by exposing something about myself that isn’t perfect.”
I was impressed she remembered the list. Now she had piqued my interest. I grabbed her laptop and stretched across the bed on my stomach, supporting myself on my elbows.
I looked over at her and she smiled a triumphant grin and pointed to the screen. I cleared my throat and read the email out loud.
I sat up and stared at the screen, pushing the tips of my fingers in a circle around my temples.
“Headache?” she asked me.
“More like acute nausea,” I said.
“Oh God, CeCe. Was it something you ate?” she asked.
It’s a reaction I have to really bad writing, I wanted to say. “Bryn, let’s go over the elements we discussed,” I said, in my best encouraging tutor voice. I scanned the email. “Where did you expose yourself?”
She stared at me like it was obvious. She pointed at the screen. “I told him I eat a bowl of chocolate ice cream every night.”
I looked at the screen and then back at her. “So?”
“So?”
“It’s delicious, and we live in Wisconsin,” I said. “It’s like one long chain of ice cream stores.”
“It’s a disgusting habit,” Bryn argued. “Especially to eat right before bed. It’s one of the most fattening foods available. And Madison has an ice cream shop on practically every street corner. It’s like being surrounded by drug dealers, pushing it on me everywhere I turn.”
I nodded. It was one of the perks of living here. “Have you tried Michael’s Frozen Custard yet? It’s the best.”
“CeCe. You’re not helping.”
I looked back at her email and laughed. “That’s your vice?” I asked. “That’s your deep, dark, hidden flaw?”
“I guess so,” she said. “I’m really embarrassed about it. I mean, eating right is everything. I want to be a yoga instructor and run my own studio someday. I want to get certified. I need to give up caffeine and sugar.”
Her sincerity made me cough back my laugh. Bryn might be the sweetest, most unassuming girl I had ever met. But I had a feeling that Emmett wanted someone with mystery, with depth, with wounds and stories and inner demons. You don’t send lyrics from Hozier to the girl-next-door.
“Wow. Okay, moving on,” I said. “Where do you take a risk?”
She pointed a perfect red-painted fingernail at the bottom of the screen.
I stared at the sentence You have great hair.
“What?” I asked.
“I gave him the greatest compliment of all compliments. Hair is my thing. A bad hair cut can be a deciding factor on whether or not I’ll go out with a guy. It’s so sad how many guys put no time or money into a decent haircut. It defines their entire face. I spend half the time in class just looking at all the terrible buzz cuts.”
She wrapped her fingers around my arm and her face filled with terror. “Some guys even cut their own hair,” she whispered.
“No!” I feigned horror.
“But Emmett’s hair is perfect. It’s always ruffled. Windblown. Tossed just right. I want to know what products he uses.”
“It’s probably just sweat,” I said.
She lifted a shoulder. “Well, I wish sweat did that to my hair. Seriously, CeCe. I never give that compliment out easily. That is definitely taking a risk.”
“When I said to take a risk, I was thinking more along the lines of something really personal.”
She nodded slowly, but her hesitating look told me she was drawing a blank.
“Try making it about him,” I said. “How did you feel the first moment you talked to Emmett?” Words jumped to my head: heightened. Aroused. Awakened. Stirred.
“Like a dumb ass,” Bryn said. She reached out for the laptop and I blocked her arm.
“No, no, you can’t write that you felt like a dumb ass. Try to be more poetic. How about you felt exposed, vulnerable, naked?”
“Oh, naked’s good,” Bryn said.
“What about the very first time you saw Emmett, before you even spoke? What did you think?”
“That I wanted to jump his bones?”
She smiled and reached out for the keyboard again and I stopped her.
“Bryn, you can’t just write I wanted to jump your bones. Be more descriptive, more sensual. Like, you felt moved, aroused, alive. You felt every cell in your body wake up from a dormant sleep.”
Her eyes widened. “Wow. You should be writing this,” she said.
“I’m just trying to help you open up.”
“I did,” she said. She pointed at the screen. “And I opened up about school and how the teachers can be so controlling. I was honest about that.”
I skimmed through the email once more and pushed her laptop away.
“You can’t send him this.”
Her eyes fell on the bedspread between us. “Oh.”
“It’s a first draft,” I said. “It’s a shitty first draft, but that’s okay. They usually are. That’s what rewrites are for.” I tried my best to balance brutal honesty with constructive criticism.
“It’s not a first draft. I’ve been working on this all day. This is draft twenty, at least.”
I winced. I wondered what her first draft had looked like. I picked up her laptop and sat against the bed frame.
“Let’s go for a more creative opener,” I offered. “You feel like you have no time for yourself, right?” I asked her and she nodded. “Okay.” I deleted the first two paragraphs and I stared at the keyboard. I began to write, and talked out loud as the sentences poured out.
“Quotes tend to stick in my head, even nonsensical ones. Sometimes an image just implants itself in my brain, its meaning evolving over time. There’s a stoner rap song on my classic rock playlist that compares time to a piece of wax. That image—the idea of time as something soft, transformable, flexible—has taken hold because of its contrast to my own experience of time. If diamonds are the hardest substance on the planet, my sense of time is extraterrestrial. Some kind of hyper-solid meteorite, accelerating inexorably towards Earth.”
I stopped typing and looked up at Bryn. Her mouth was dropped open.
“Holy crap, CeCe. That’s amazing.”
I looked down at what I had just written and shrugged.
“You write it,” she said.
“What?” I said.
“You’re so much better at this than me. Seriously, it took you two minutes to write that, and that would have taken me two years.”
I didn’t argue because I believed her.
“Send it,” she begged me. “It’s perfect.”
“It’s not even ready yet,” I said. “It’s just a start. I’m not sure if I like that last sentence. Maybe we should say something about time being structured down to the nanosecond.” I handed the laptop back to Bryn but she held up her hands.
“You do it,” she said. “I trust you. When it’s ready, send it.”
“Isn’t that a little misleading?” I asked, and she shook her head.
“Whatever, it’s fine. It’s just a few emails. I’ll make up for it when I see him in person,” she said with a seductive lift of her eyebrows. “Besides, this is just an icebreaker anyway.” She grabbed the laptop out of my hands and I watched her type. A sinking feeling settled in my throat, slipping its way down to my chest. I didn’t like this plan.
“Here,” she said. “You can use one of my email accounts. I hardly ever check it. It’s the one I give out when I sign up for products. I’ll send you the password and you can just email Emmett with it? Cool?”
She waited for me to nod, her eyes wide and expectant. I opened my mouth to argue but she was already standing and walking toward the door.
“Thanks so much, CeCe, I totally owe you,” she said before she closed the door.
I stared after her and wondered what I had just gotten myself into.