“No, it’s fine,” he says. “That’s the most you’ve ever said to me, so I was gonna let you keep going.” He smiles over at me. “I was just trying to figure out where you want me to take you. It’s still seventh period, so . . .” He looks me over, and I feel his eyes on every mud-covered inch of me. “You probably wanna go home though, right? To shower?”
“Yeah, that’d be good.” I pinch my crusty shirt away from my chest and a few flecks of mud fall off onto my legs. I see Trevor see them. “Oh, crap, I’m sorry. I’m totally getting your car dirty.”
He smirks, but doesn’t say anything.
“What?” I fight the urge to check the mirror. Do I still have dirt in my teeth? Mud stuck in my nose?
“Nothing, don’t worry about it.” His eyes slide over to me for a second before they bounce back to the road and he shakes his head. “I wasn’t looking at the mud, Frost.”
11.
“On Looking Up by Chance at the Constellations”
—1928
By the time my mom walks through the door, I’ve showered, erased the message from the school about my unexcused absences for periods two through seven, and am still giddy at the fact that I somehow got away with my little foray out onto the edge today. And it was fun. And Trevor Collins was checking me out in his car.
I’ve even got a pot of spaghetti boiling on the stove, but it’s more a gesture than anything else, because my mom probably won’t eat any. Instead, she’ll pour a glass of wine and sit down at her computer to check her e-mail even though she just came from work. There’s an ebb and flow to her store, which caters to the high-end tourist ladies who want to shop while everyone else skis. The store lives and dies by November through January. Spring, summer, and fall are the slow times, which means she’ll stress out at the end of every month until things pick back up next ski season.
“Hey, Mom,” I say as she sighs her way into the kitchen. “Long day?”
“You have no idea.” She stands on tiptoe, reaching in the cabinet for a wine glass. “Sales for spring break were not what I was hoping for. Not even close. At this rate I may actually have to cut down hours come September.”
“You say that every May, and by every September, it’s fine. You always make it.” I heft the pot over to the sink and stand back from the billow of steam when I dump the noodles in the strainer. “You want some spaghetti?”
She shakes her head. “Not now. I may have some later.” It’s quiet a moment as I scoop some into a bowl for myself, add a ladle of sauce, and grab the parmesan cheese. “So,” she says, making a point to look at me. “How was your day?”
A little tremor of nervousness zips through my stomach, but I shake the parmesan can over my bowl and play it cool. “Fine.”
She nods. “Good.” Then she pours her wine and sits down at the table with her laptop. When she doesn’t ask about anything else, not even my speech, it surprises me. Normally she doesn’t let it go at just that, which means things at the shop must be really bad.
Partly because I don’t want to spend my dinner in silence, and partly because I’m nervous, I elaborate. “I’ve been helping Mr. Kinney with these senior journals he sends out every year, so that’s pretty cool.” She nods absently, alternately scrolling and tapping. “They’re from ten years ago, and now we’re mailing them out to the people who wrote them. It’s sort of like a personal time capsule of who they were when they were seniors.” I twirl my fork until it’s full and take a bite of spaghetti.
She looks up for a second. “Hm. I wouldn’t want to read anything I wrote about when I was seventeen.”
“Why?”
“Oh, it’d just be embarrassing to read all the things I thought were so important back then. Life is different once you grow up. Not so dramatic. By the time you’re my age you’ll get it.” She pauses, and swirls the wine in her glass, thinking. “I would just hate to look back and see how naive I’d been about a lot of things. Life works out a lot differently than you can ever imagine at seventeen.”
She stops herself and I shovel another tightly wrapped bundle of spaghetti into my mouth. The only sound is the clink of my empty fork when I rest it on the bowl. We both know what she just said without actually saying it. When I was old enough to do the math I figured out why my parents had gotten married. When I got brave enough to ask her about it, she sat me down and told me all the things a parent is supposed to say: that yes, I was a surprise to her and my dad, and so they did what they thought was best back then and got married, and even though they weren’t the right people for each other, I was the best surprise either one of them had ever gotten.
That was years ago, and for the most part she’s always been good at maintaining that glass-half-full version. But sometimes, in little moments like this, she slips. And this slip makes me wonder what it was she would’ve dreamed of doing at seventeen. It probably wasn’t running a boutique that somehow squeaks by every year in a town she never really wanted to live in to begin with, while raising a daughter mostly by herself.
“I didn’t mean anything by that, Parker. I just . . . I’m a little stressed about the store right now.” She takes a deep breath and recomposes her smile. “Anyway, I’m sure Mr. Kinney appreciates your help with those. It must be quite a production to find all of the addresses and get them sent out.”