Chapter Twelve
Emmett
I sat out on my balcony and turned a shot glass in my hand, studying the amber liquid swirling around inside. Music streamed through my open bedroom window. I could hear the rumble of thunder in the distance. The wind picked up and shook the brittle leaves with a warning.
I started to text Bryn.
I deleted the lines. I threw the shot of whiskey back and the hot liquid burned my throat like I had swallowed a lit match. My entire body felt warm.
I thought being alone would make tonight easier. But the loneliness was making me wither, like the leaves around me, clinging to hold on. I needed Bryn tonight. I started scrolling through the playlist she sent me and settled on “Twisted” by Frightened Rabbit. It was a fitting song for my mood.
I started typing again.
I hit send.
She texted back.
I stared at her reply and shook my head with disbelief. This girl was hot or cold with me. Deep or shallow. I never knew which side I was going to get.
I was about to head inside when I heard rustling below my balcony. I stood up and immediately felt the alcohol’s affect on my equilibrium. I leaned against the railing to steady myself and looked through the thick wall of branches.
I yelled down and whoever was standing by our front door stopped and backed up. I looked over the railing and saw long, dark hair. My brain snapped into realization.
I slapped a hand over my forehead. I was supposed to meet CeCe for a study date tonight.
“CeCe, I completely forgot,” I shouted down. I could barely see her through the leaves. I figured she was pissed.
She tore some pages out of her notebook. “I’ll leave this at the door. I’m not trying to do you any favors,” she snapped. Yep, she was completely pissed off. “I don’t want to bomb this discussion. I actually care about my grade.”
“Wait.” I rubbed my fingers against my forehead. “I mean, shit,” I said.
She walked the rest of the way down the steps. “Well, I’d love to stay and listen to your poetic attempts at an apology—”
“CeCe, hang on a second.”
I headed down the stairs that wound from the balcony to the ground. The steps were small and narrow and I had to keep my hand tight on the railing.
“Why didn’t you text me?” I asked.
“My phone was dead. Besides I’m not your automated reminder service.”
CeCe met me at the gate and handed me the notes.
I reached out, but instead of grabbing the paper, I grabbed her arm. She froze and looked at me with surprise.
“I’m sorry, okay? I completely spaced.”
Her eyes narrowed in disbelief.
“I’ve seen your games,” she said, calling my bluff. “You don’t space anything.”
Whoa. This was more than a class grade. She was taking this way too personally, as if my issue wasn’t with the study date, it was with her. I dropped her sleeve and she shoved the notes in my hand. That’s when she looked at me, really looked at me.
She dropped whatever hard-ass front she was holding up.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
I shrugged.
“Tired?” she asked. “Sick?”
I smiled. “Just stricken with extreme guilt for forgetting about our study date.”
She leaned closer, probably catching a whiff of the bottle of alcohol I had nearly finished tonight.
“What happened?” she asked.
I shook my head and looked past her, out at the street. I didn’t want to get into it.
“Look, I’m not mad,” she said. “People flake out on these things all the time.”
I gave her a knowing look. “You’re completely pissed.”
She shrugged.
I set my hand on the latch and hesitated. “You want to come up?”
I leaned over the gate and my eyes came closer to hers. She looked at me. Those eyes. Guarded and secretive. Beautiful. They were striking at night. They made something catch inside of me, something unexpected. I opened the latch and leaned away so she could walk through.
She followed me up to the balcony and I sat down on the metal bench. She leaned against the railing and looked down at the bottle on the floor next to my feet.
“Whiskey?” she said.
I nodded. It was my dad’s favorite.
“This is Football Frat,” I reminded her. “There’s always liquor somewhere.”
She crossed her arms over her chest. “You don’t seem like the partying type.”
I picked up a shot glass off the ground. “I’ve never drank during the season before,” I said.
“Then why start?”
I looked up at her and studied her face, half lit by the window and half in shadow. “Don’t you ever break the rules?”
She grinned. “Hello, Emmett’s dark side. Nice to meet you.”
I flipped through her notes. There were six pages. She wrote hard—pushing the ink firmly against the paper until it made indentions on the page. It made the notebook paper curl up at the sides. Or maybe she was just mad when she wrote this.
I held the notes up to the light coming through the window. The last page was an outline for our discussion, broken down into five main sections. I couldn’t decipher a word of her messy scrawl.
“I can’t understand any of this,” I said.
“Maybe you’re drunk,” she figured.
“Maybe you have the worst handwriting I’ve ever seen,” I said.
“I’m a scientist. We think faster than we write.”
I tucked the paper underneath the whiskey bottle. She looked over at me, stalling, probably wondering why I invited her up here. I was still trying to figure out the same thing. Thunder rumbled in the distance and the wind picked up again, whipping the leaves back and forth like a thousand tiny flags.
“If you need help decoding it, just message me.” She took a step back and turned for the stairs. “I’ll leave you to resume your evening of drinking alone in the dark,” she said.
“Want one?” I asked. My voice came out low, like an instrument playing all the minor notes.
She looked down at the bottle. Before she answered, I stood up and walked inside. I crossed my bedroom, stepping around instrument cases and CD’s that littered the floor.
I grabbed a shot glass off my bookcase and brought it outside.
I sat down on the bench and looked over at CeCe, nodding to the open space next to me.
She sat down and I poured each of us a shot. I handed one to her and she threw it back, swallowing the amber liquid. Her face winced and she coughed into her arm.
I smiled and took my own shot. The alcohol ran down my throat, flaring into a fire in my stomach.
“Rubbing alcohol,” she said. “My favorite flavor.”
She coughed again. A streak of lightning lit up the sky and almost on cue, the rain started to fall. Within seconds it turned into a downpour, like a sheet of water was suddenly released from the sky. I grabbed CeCe’s arm and pulled her up. We stood in the doorway, watching the rain ricochet off the balcony like a wild percussion.
I backed into my room and she followed me. I sat on the floor and rested my spine against the foot of my bed. My head felt as heavy as a brick.
CeCe was looking around, at the cluttered floor.
“I warned you it was messy,” I said. At least the usual laundry piles were put away. But CeCe was taking in more than the random mess.
“What?” I asked.
“It’s strange,” she said. “It’s like there’s two different people living in here.”
I looked around. A music stand stood in the corner, next to a giant duffle bag spelling EDGELAKE FOOTBALL on the side, unzipped, with a helmet and extra pads spilling out of the top. Two guitars stood on stands next to the window. Footballs were piled up on top of song books. She was right. It was a strange mixture of personalities—as if the space were occupied by two people.
A streak of lightning blazed across the sky outside my window, followed by a crash of thunder. I looked at CeCe, at her scar that had always reminded me of a lightning bolt, something strong, and powerful, and mysterious.
She slid down on the floor next to me and picked up a CD case, turning it around in her fingers.
“It’s my dad’s college band,” I said.
“He’s a musician?” she asked.
I nodded. “Was”
“Was? He retired?” she asked.
“He passed away,” I paused. I could feel her watching me. “A year ago today.”
A second of silence ticked by. She examined the CD cover, four guys sitting together on a bench next to a bus stop.
“Why didn’t you say anything?” she said. “I would have understood.”
I shrugged. “I didn’t tell anyone. I didn’t want anybody to bring it up. I thought if I stayed busy today, it would help keep my mind off of him.” I looked down at my empty drink glass and rested my head against the mattress. “Plan backfired.”
“That’s why you transferred,” she figured.
“I wanted to stay home, when he got sick,” I said. “Then after he died all I wanted to do was get away.”
“You miss him?”
It was more than that. It’s like I was lost. Life can pull you in so many directions, it’s easy to forget who you are and where you’re headed. Family has a way of reminding you, like a road map, keeping you on track and pointing out which direction is home.
“I miss talking to him. He had this way of looking at life that was different from everyone.”
“Is that why you like to play?” She nodded to a pile of instrument cases on the floor.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“It makes you feel connected to your dad?”
I shrugged. I’d never thought of it that way. But she had a point. Music would always give me an outlet, this way to have a conversation with my dad. A way of keeping him alive. And there was something comforting about that.
My entire body felt warm from the alcohol. I took a long breath. My head was finally calm. I looked out the window at the blowing rain. Lightning tore through the sky and a clap of thunder shook the wood floors.
“I shared my heartbreak story,” I said. “Now it’s your turn.”
“I wear my secrets right on my face,” she said.
“You can do better than that,” I pressed. I nudged my hand against her knee. “I thought you didn’t like small talk?”
“I don’t have any heartbreak stories,” she said. “I’ve never had my heart broken. But, sometimes I like to throw out cosmic questions to the universe.”
I smiled.
“Like?” I asked.
She looked over at me. “A lot of what ifs,” she said.
“What if?” I asked.
She looked away, at the storm. “What if things had been different? What if I never got in that car accident? Would I even be playing volleyball? Would I be at this school? Maybe I wouldn’t be straddling the world, half in and half out.”
I stared at her. It’s like she was picking out all the things I needed her to say.
“Maybe things with my mom would be different. Maybe we’d be closer.” She smiled and shrugged. “Sometimes I envy my friends who are all in. Or maybe I just have too much contained inside of me to be all in.” She pressed her lips together, like she was saying too much. But I didn’t want her to stop.
She looked over at me and our eyes locked. And held. I felt trapped by her stare, caught in a strange vortex. She broke our gaze.
“The storm’s over,” she said. I blinked once. I looked outside and realized the rain had stopped. My breathing had stopped. I inhaled a deep breath.
“I should go,” she said. She pulled herself up and grabbed her backpack off the floor. “See you in class,” she said.
“Sure,” I answered. “See you.”
I watched her go, trying to get a hold of my feelings. They felt misplaced, outside of me, like they got picked up and scattered in the storm. I was forced to piece them back together. All I knew was I texted one girl tonight, and the wrong one showed up. But I couldn’t shake the idea that maybe the right one had.