Chapter

16

Sam silently started the car and drove back to the school. I cried all the way. I knew I could try again, but it just seemed so cruel that I had been that close, had seen the truck but hadn’t looked up. I had missed Mitch by seconds. Eventually, though, the tears began to dry. I had started to theorize that maybe as a teenager I had a certain number of tears allotted for each day. Maybe today I had reached my quota, and when they were gone I could calm down and think clearly. As the sobs quieted into sniffles and finally into a long drawn-out sigh, Sam finally ventured to speak.

“Annie, I’m sorry for whatever I did that messed things up,” he said. I looked over and saw a pained look cross his face. “I just kind of feel like . . . I don’t know. It’s like I have to make sure that you’re—okay, I guess.”

“You feel like it’s your job to make sure I’m okay?” I asked. He nodded slowly. “Wow, that’s really horrible.”

“What? Why?”

“Because even though I’ve tried apologizing and telling you that it’s not your fault and all of that stuff, I still managed to make you feel like you are somehow responsible for my teenage drama. It’s depressing. Look, Sam, I mean it when I say that I’m fine,” I said.

He raised his eyebrows in disbelief. “Really, Annie? You’re fine? Because from where I sit it seems like you’ve been a complete mess for the past three days. You’ve been ripping my head off, getting in fights with your sister . . .”

My mouth dropped open. How did he know about that? He leaned closer, his voice softer, more husky. “And every time I see you, it seems you’ve just been crying or are just about to start crying. So how is that supposed to qualify as okay? I don’t get it. It’s like in the last three days you’ve completely gone off the deep end.”

“So delivering a bogus suicide note to your house was not being off the deep end? This is worse than that?” I shot back. I was not going to be distracted by his nearness.

“I knew the note wasn’t real. I’m not blind. I can see that you tend to be a little, you know, dramatic. This, though, this whole thing with some old guy—that’s scary to me.” He slapped the signal a little too hard, and the windshield wipers kicked up to a frantic pace until he readjusted them.

“If you knew I wasn’t serious, then why did you tell me that it freaked you out?” I almost yelled. I’d been beating myself up for that stupid mistake for years, only to find out he’d known it was a fake all along? How dare he be angry with me?

“Because it forced me to realize what was going on. I wasn’t sure how I felt about the fact that you were interested in me. It was easier when we could just be friends.” He blew out a frustrated breath. “Yeah, it was so much easier.”

That sucked away all my anger and frustration and left me deflated.

“I know. I told you it was stupid,” I said quietly, and I couldn’t keep the bitterness out of my voice. “I keep telling you, though. You don’t have to worry about my being in love with you anymore.”

Sam pulled the car into the parking lot and slammed it into park.

He was staring straight ahead with a grim expression. There was a muscle in his jaw that stood out slightly as he clenched his teeth. “What if I’m not okay with that?” he asked, his voice barely above a whisper. My eyes shot to his face.

“Sam, what does that even mean?” I almost pleaded. “I’m just so confused.”

“You think you are confused,” he laughed, a short sound without any real humor in it. “This is all I know: You have been there when no one else noticed I was alive. At first you were just a little girl, you know. And I thought it was sweet that you wanted to hang around me, but that was it. I mean, I was fourteen and an idiot, okay? Whenever my stepdad was being a—well, you seemed to understand and care about me, and I appreciated it. Probably more than you can ever know. But you had your perfect family. You have no idea what it’s really like to live in my house. I couldn’t tell you about how bad it really was, sometimes still is. No, I couldn’t tell you the whole story, but I craved talking to you. I have always loved that. You have such a crazy, interesting way of seeing things,” he said. He took a deep breath and turned to look at me, and a jolt ran through me, that electric feeling that was so familiar around him. His eyes locked onto mine, and I couldn’t break that contact.

“I never knew, though, Annie. I had no idea that you were interested in me as anything more than a friend. I mean, how could you be? When you left that note at my house, it did scare me at first, but only for a few seconds. I called your mom because I knew I needed to, just in case, but then I went after you to try to catch up and tell you . . .” He paused.

“Tell me what?” I asked breathlessly. The sixteen-year-old in me hoped desperately for a very specific answer.

“Tell you that you shouldn’t love me,” he said.

Disappointment flooded me. How stupid that he still had the power to disappoint me like that.

“Oh, well, then I guess you should be relieved . . .”

“Wait! I’m not finished,” he said. “Just hear me out and stop jumping to conclusions, okay?”

I nodded, and he took a deep breath, holding it for a second and then letting it out in a whoosh. “You said that you are going to marry this Mitch guy. Well, I know we’re still young, but that’s exactly what I see in your future. You are the kind of girl who gets married and has four or five kids and drives carpool and cooks roast beef on Sundays, just like all the other church ladies. You don’t see what life for me is like. I don’t know how to fit into a life like that.” There was a long silence as I digested this new perspective on Sam’s opinion of me.

“You’re right,” I said, finally. “That is who I am meant to be. I am going to get married and have three kids, two girls and a boy, and I’m going to be very happy.”

There was silence again. He was right. I was going to do all of those things, and it was going to bring me joy. So much joy that when it was time for it to come to an end, I would no longer know how to go on living. In that moment my longing for my children was nearly suffocating. Underneath it, though, there was pain in the piece of my heart that had always belonged solely to Sam. Something he had said wriggled up to the surface of my thoughts.

“You are telling me that you can’t be part of my life because it’s not who you are, right?” He nodded. “Then why did you say that you weren’t okay with my not being interested in you anymore?”

He gave me a sad smile but didn’t speak for a long moment. He seemed to be warring within himself. He opened his mouth to speak and then closed it again as he turned to stare out the window. When he spoke, he didn’t turn, and his voice was quiet. I had to strain to hear him.

“I don’t know how to do it, to be part of your life, but I can’t stand the thought of you with someone else, either. You talk about him like you already know exactly what’s ahead in your future, how many kids you’re going to have, when it’s going to happen, all of that kind of stuff, then you turn around and say you haven’t even met him yet. I don’t know what’s going on with that, but I do know this. I’ve tried hard to not think about my future. It doesn’t look that great, you know. My mom and Leonard don’t have any money, my grades are no good, I don’t know if I’ll get to go to college, but I want to get out of that house as soon as possible. That’s about as far as my future planning has gone.” His voice dropped down to nearly a whisper. “Still, whenever I do think about my future, I can’t picture it without you in it. You would be totally fine without me, but I wouldn’t make it through a day without you.” He didn’t look back but placed the keys on the dashboard, opened the door, and dashed into the rain.

Those stupid teenage emotions. I guess my quota for tears hadn’t been reached for the day, after all.