-SCARLET-
AFTER BREAKFAST, I made myself spend an hour in the library. Then I gave my computer geek friend Luke a call. “Did you listen to the call I shared with you?” I asked him.
“You are starring in a cop show, aren’t you?” he said. “Just admit it.”
“I wish,” I laughed. “I’m ready to ditch the creeps now. Can you clean that off my phone?”
“But of course! I’m working from eleven o’clock until six. Bring it in anytime.”
I was still smiling by the time I got home to Vanderberg. I hadn’t spent much time there these past few days, only dropping by to shower and change clothes. When I pushed open the door to our suite, both Katies looked up from their books.
“Hi, guys!” Since exams were beginning in less than seventy-two hours, I didn’t find it strange that they were both home studying.
But I did find it strange that their eyes tracked me silently across the room.
“What?” I asked, shedding my coat.
“We watched the news this morning in the nail salon,” Blond Katie said.
Oh crap. “The news?” I asked. As if playing dumb would help.
“There was a picture of you,” she went on. “Shannon.”
With a mighty sigh, I sat down on the rug opposite Blond Katie. “Yeah. Okay. I changed my name.”
“You lied to us,” Blond Katie said. “Why would you do that?”
“Because my father…” I got stuck on that word. The idea that he was not my father would take some time to seem real. “I’m not him. And a lot of people don’t understand that.”
They just stared at me.
“He, um, pled guilty this morning.” That was another attitude adjustment that I needed to absorb. I could stop beating myself up now, wondering what had happened. If he told the world that he did it, I didn’t have to go ten rounds in my head every day, trying to discover the truth.
“You’re not from Miami beach,” Ponytail Katie said. “I knew you weren’t tan enough!”
I shook my head.
“You weren’t home-schooled!” Blond Katie yelped.
Again, I shook my head. “But I might as well have been. I was a pariah. And I didn’t want be one in college, too. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I just didn’t know how else to get out from under it.”
Ponytail Katie slammed her book closed and stood up. “That’s not cool. You can’t live with someone and lie all the time.” She stomped into her single. When her door slammed, I felt the reverberation in my chest. Here we go again. Miserable, I looked toward Blond Katie, waiting for her to do the same.
But she cocked her head, studying me. “Must have been pretty bad. To make you change your name.”
“It was hard on me to be the town punching bag. But a boy killed himself. It was worse for him.”
“Did you know him?”
I shook my head.
“Weird.”
“Yeah.”
She chewed her lip for a second, and then she stood up. “I’d change my name, too,” she said. Then she went over to shrug on her coat. “I’m going to the gym.”
“Okay,” I said, wondering where we stood now.
She paused with her hand on the knob. “Are you going to stay a Scarlet? Now that it’s over?”
I opened my mouth to tell her that it was never going to be over. But that would only sound like whining. And for the first time in a year, I finally felt as if my life were headed in the right direction.
“Yeah,” I said finally. “I’m going to stay a Scarlet.”
“I like it,” Katie announced, opening the door. “It suits you.”
“Thanks!” I called after her.
-BRIDGER-
“Bridge!”
At two-thirty, Lucy came tearing out of that elementary school and right into my arms. Today it didn’t matter that she was a big girl with a reputation to uphold. She threw herself at me. I picked her all the way up, and she did her best impression of a spider monkey. “Hey now,” I said. “I told you I’d be here.” I’d called her before she went to school this morning, telling her to look for me in my usual spot by the bike racks.
She opened her mouth and broke my heart. “But things go wrong.”
“They do, sometimes,” I admitted. “We had some trouble, didn’t we?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s going to get better now,” I promised. “There are more people around to help us than I thought.”
“Not Mom,” she said simply.
Fuck. My eyes began to sting. “Not Mom,” I agreed. “We’re going to feel bad about that for awhile. We haven’t really said goodbye to her yet.”
“You mean, like a funeral?”
“Yeah. Like that. We’ll do that next week.”
Hartley and Theresa had talked me into having a memorial service for her this weekend, and the dean had offered up the use of one of the college chapels.
But I drew the line at a casket. “Too macabre,” I’d told them. Lucy had already endured her mother’s slow withdrawal and disappearance from her life. Putting a box of remains in the same room with her would just be too much for her to process. So I’d chosen cremation. And when Lucy was older, I planned to let her scatter the ashes.
I’d explained this carefully to Hartley and his mother, at which point Theresa’s eyes had welled. “You’re really good at this,” she said. “You’re already one of the better parents I know.”
The praise had made me feel unworthy. “I just make it up as I go along,” I’d stammered.
She squeezed my shoulder. “That’s how it works, honey. That’s all any of us do.”
I hoped she was right, or else I was in way over my head.
Setting Lucy down on the sidewalk, I took her hand and led her down the concrete pathway. Being her legal guardian — being her parent — was absolutely what I wanted. There was no part of me that regretted it. But that didn’t mean I knew what to do with Lucy’s grief.
A couple of hours later, I found myself hugging Amy goodbye, while Lucy hopped from foot to foot, eager to leave.
“Call us any time,” Amy said to me. “If you have a babysitting emergency, or just need to vent.”
I didn’t see myself taking her up on it, but it was an awfully nice offer. “Thank you.”
“You have a lot of people to support you,” Amy said, reading my mind. “But it’s always good to have one more.”
“You’ve been great,” I said, meaning it.
Rich offered me his hand to shake. “Even so, you hope you don’t see us again, right?”
“Take care,” I chuckled.
“You too,” Amy said. “All of you.”
Lucy ran out of the house, her winter coat under her arm.
“Put that coat on,” I called after her.
“Good luck with that,” Rich smirked.
By the time I got into the car, Lucy had already buckled herself in behind Scarlet. “Are you sure it’s okay with the college that I’m in your room?” she asked, biting a fingernail.
“They know about you now,” I explained. “And it’s just for a few nights. Soon we’ll have our own place.”
“What does it look like?” she asked. “Tell me again.” She seemed nervous, which didn’t make that much sense to me. I’d hoped that tonight she’d finally be able to relax. But the last week had really shaken her. I was just going to have to ride it out.
“Well, I only saw the apartment for a minute,” I told her. There had been a harried young mother at home when the housing office had sent me over for a peek. She’d had a fussy baby in a sling around her neck, and a toddler tugging on her skirt, too. So I’d spent only two minutes checking the place out, trying to figure out what I’d need to furnish it. “Let’s see. The kitchen is at the end of the living room. There’s no wall between them, but there’s a counter that divides it.”
“Tell me about my room.”
“Um, the walls are white…” It was small, and the graduate students who’d been living there had somehow wedged two cribs into the room. Space was probably the reason they were leaving. “There’s a window over the bed,” I said, grasping for details. “We’ll find you a little desk for homework.”
“Will it look the same as my old room?” Lucy wanted to know.
I didn’t know quite how to answer that. Smaller, actually, but without the meth lab in the dining room.
Scarlet bailed me out. “It’s going to look cooler,” she said. “A big girl’s room. I think we should put your name up on the wall. Or maybe on a sign on the door.”
When I turned to look at Lucy, she was chewing her lip. “I like that. Mandy’s door has a sign that says ‘no muggles beyond this point.’”
“Good one,” Scarlet agreed.
“We should get some dinner,” I said, looking at my watch. “The dining halls are about to close.”
“I’ve got a better idea,” Scarlet said.
“What’s that?”
“How do women recover from stress, Bridge?”
So she’d noticed how twitchy Lucy was, too. “I dunno. Spa treatments?”
“Close,” she said. “Shopping.”
“Where?” I asked.
“Ikea, of course.”
First, we ate meatballs. And then we turned Lucy loose in the kids’ department. “I like that pink lamp,” she said. “And, look!” She pointed to a kind of filmy fabric thing that hung from the ceiling, draping around the head of a bed. “That’s like the bed curtains in Harry Potter!”
“We’re not get anything yet,” I cautioned. Lucy was going to want everything in the store.
“Oh, I am so buying that,” Scarlet murmured. “It’s cool, and it’s thirty bucks.”
“Christmas,” I hissed.
“Deal,” she whispered, tucking a lock of hair behind her ear and smiling at me. She drew a little notepad out of her purse and began writing.
“What’s that for?”
“It’s a list of things you need. So far I’ve added a desk for Lucy. A couple of lamps for reading. We’ll get to the kitchen stuff in the next room.”
“This is going to give my credit card a workout.”
“Nope.” Scarlet smiled. “Your Coach’s wife asked Hartley for a list. And Hartley asked me to make it.”
“Because that’s not a job for anyone who has a dick?”
She rolled her eyes at me. “Hartley put it more delicately than that.”
“Scarlet, I can’t let the hockey team furnish my apartment.”
“Why? Because you’ll end up with a TV, a video game console, and nothing else?”
“No. Because I don’t want them paying for things.”
She stuck the notebook in her back pocket. “I’m thinking you don’t really have a choice. But look on the bright side. Stores will be visited, but not by you.”
I grabbed her waist and kissed her. “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“Everything.” I kissed her again. I ought to feel wrecked right now. Everything I’d dreaded about this year had actually happened. And we were going to be okay. Even though I had a boatload of problems to manage, debris to clean up and a gale force of uncertainty in my life. Scarlet. Hartley. Theresa. Amy and Rich. The dean. The coach. Andy. The number of people who had my back was astonishing. Leaning on them made me feel weirdly strong, when I’d always assumed that the opposite would hold true.
“Ew. No kissing,” Lucy complained. “That’s gross.”
Scarlet giggled. “Let’s look at tableware instead. That’s almost as fun.”
We got back to Beaumont after Lucy’s bedtime. But Hartley and Corey were waiting with champagne and ginger ale to welcome Lucy back.
“Thanks,” Lucy said, accepting a glass from Corey.
“You’re welcome. But I have something else, too. The dean asked me to give it to you.” She took a Harkness ID out of her purse, on a pink lanyard. When she turned it over we could all see that it read LUCY MCCAULLEY on the front, with her school picture.
“It’s just like Bridger’s!” Lucy yelped, putting it over her head.
“That’s what you use to check in to the dining hall.”
“Can we eat there tomorrow?” Lucy asked.
“Hell yes,” I said. “We’ll have to be ready for school a little early. But they have five kinds of cereal, and there’s always bacon.” Christ, I missed the dining hall. It made life effortless.
Hartley popped the cork on a bottle of bubbly and began pouring into my collection of stolen dining hall glasses. “Maybe Andy wants one?” Hartley asked.
“He’s out on a date tonight,” Scarlet said.
Corey looked toward the fire door. “I’m positive I just heard him over there.”
Scarlet frowned, probably hoping that the set-up with Katie hadn’t been a disaster.
Corey raised a hand to knock on the fire door, but something held her back. She turned, with an amused expression on her face. “You know, I don’t think he’s going to want one.”
From the other side of the fire door came the distinct sound of a moan.
“Is he okay?” Lucy asked.
“He’s fine,” Corey said quickly. “He’s, uh…”
“He’s watching the basketball game,” I said, just as another moan could be heard. “And his team isn’t doing that well.” (Big lie there! It sounded as if his team was doing very well.)
“Dance party!” Scarlet announced, leaping over to my computer. She tapped the touch pad, and a second later Macklemore began to rap. Scarlet cranked up the volume and began to boogie. “Come on, Lucy! Shake it.”
My girlfriend was brilliant.
But my sister just stood there for a second, looking confused. So Corey got into the swing of things, circling her hips. She swatted Hartley on the arm, too. Watching the three of them, Lucy began to move, shaking her skinny body and bouncing her arms.
Then we were all dancing, drinks in hand, on a Wednesday night in December. Macklemore segued into Skrillex and then into Avicii. I watched Scarlet shake out her silky hair. She caught me ogling her and winked. Hartley took his girlfriend’s hand while they danced, to help her balance. Lucy climbed up on the window seat to better see the action. It was silly and glorious. The last few months had made me feel old and defeated. But just then, I felt young again.
Young, and surprisingly happy.
