“Did you tell your therapist?” I asked. “Could she help?”
“Maybe. But, you know, I don’t know her, either. She’s a stranger.”
“And I’m not?”
He looked up and smiled at me as we passed each other again. “Apparently not,” he said, making us both laugh. “I wish I remembered more about you.”
“Me too,” I murmured. “I wanted you to come home so bad that I never thought about what would happen after. I just wanted my friend back.”
Oliver beckoned his fingers toward me and I reached out, clasping on to his chain. He wrapped his hand around mine, his fingers cold, and I realized he had been outside for a long time. “I guess we both have a new friend now,” he said. “I didn’t really have a lot of those growing up.”
“Because you moved a lot?”
“Well, yeah, kind of,” Oliver said, then gestured to me. “My dad homeschooled me, too. It’s just disappointing because I thought maybe I would finally get to do that, y’know? Just be normal, with friends.”
“Well, you’re friends with me, right?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said, then was silent for a few extra seconds. “Caro and Drew, though. We were friends, too, before I . . . left. Are they . . . are they, like, mad at me or something?”
“Mad at you?” I repeated before I could stop myself.
“Yeah. They don’t really talk to me or that day when you came over to say hi at lunch, Drew didn’t say anything and then he came over and sort of pulled you away.”
“Oh, Oliver,” I sighed. I felt so horrible. Picturing Oliver alone was one thing. Picturing him lonely was another issue entirely. “When you first came back, everyone said that you needed some space. They told us to let you ease in on your own, so Caro and Drew gave you space. That’s all it is, I swear. No one’s mad at you. Why would they be? What’d you do?”
Oliver swung a little more, his feet making an empty pit in the sand. “I don’t know. Nothing. Maybe that’s part of the problem.”
I dropped my head into my hands. “Ugh, this is the last time I listen to my parents,” I muttered, then sat back up. “Look, no one’s mad. We were just trying to give you space to adjust to a new school, a new neighborhood”—I thought of his earlier confession—“a new life. That’s all. But we totally want to hang out with you.”
“You do?” Oliver looked at me and even in the darkness, I could tell that the question wasn’t casual.
“I do,” I said, then corrected myself. “We do. We’re still friends. That hasn’t changed. It never did.”
Oliver laughed through his nose. “Weirdest friendship ever,” he said.
“Definitely,” I agreed. “But it’s ours.” I retwined our grasp so that my hand was on top of his. “Hey.”
“Yeah?”
“Thanks for the exclusive.”
He just nodded, resting his forehead against my knuckles, and we hung there together, not moving, suspended in midair, as if we were waiting to fall.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
We finally got up when it was too cold to stay still anymore and the shirt and sweater Oliver and I were wearing, respectively, did nothing to block out the coastal fog that always rolled down the street after dark. “See you tomorrow?” he said, just before opening the sliding-glass door. I could see the TV on in the den, one of the twins’ Barbies lying sprawled on the floor, hair hacked off and her pink party dress gathered around her waist.
“Yeah, of course,” I said, and then Rick was standing in the doorway. “Oh, there you are,” he said. “Emmy, your parents are worried about you.”
They were?
“I’m right here?” I said, looking at Oliver as if to say, Isn’t that right? “We were just sitting back here.”
“Your mom sounded a little frazzled on the phone,” Rick said. It was always so odd to hear him speak; his voice was so different from Maureen’s. She had always been fond of the verbal italics, especially during a crisis. I guess living in a nonstop nightmare for ten years could do that to a person. Rick, though, was always cool under pressure. Maybe that’s why Maureen had married him, an anchor for her lost ship. “She said she tried calling your phone,” Rick said, “but it just kept going to voice mail.”
I pulled it out of my pocket and looked at the screen. Dead.
Wonderful.
“Better go,” I said. It was so quiet out that I could hear the wet grass crunching under my shoes, the kind of quiet that made your head hurt because you knew it was about to shatter into the loudest sounds.
I was right.
“Where have you been?!” My mom was standing in the kitchen and I saw her standing there, phone in hand, her eyes frantic. “We’ve been calling and calling you! We even called Caro!”
“I was next door!” I cried, gesturing to Oliver’s house. “I just came home and I heard him in the yard and we started talking! I’m sorry, I just forgot.”
“And you couldn’t answer your phone?” my dad asked, but he didn’t seem that worried. I wondered if he was keeping up the pretense for my mom, if it was easier to keep up with her than let her lead the charge alone.
“It died,” I said, holding it up to prove my point. “I’m sorry, Oliver and I just started talking. My car was in the driveway the whole time,” I added.