I smiled to myself and waited a few minutes before I came back in the room so they wouldn’t know I heard, though I suspected Ty wouldn’t care if I did. He would really hate having me in his room if he knew I’d dug all through it, looking at his old stuff from when he was a kid. He’d probably want to help me pack and walk me out himself. But I was the one who’d been around all summer keeping his mother company, and it was the first I’d seen of him. His brother and sister both lived out of town, so they had excuses not to come around. But he didn’t.
The whole time he was there, he watched me like I was going to make off with the family silver or some of Zell’s jewelry. It wasn’t hard for me to figure out he didn’t like me very much. But to be honest, it seemed like he didn’t like Zell or Mr. John very much, either. He complained that Zell made chicken instead of steak, and pouted that she made roasted instead of mashed potatoes. I thought about the lame diary I’d found under his bed, covered in dust and forgotten. He’d kept a log of what he ate for dinner every night. Boring. I looked at his belly, hanging over his waistband. If you asked me, he was a little too concerned with food. And he didn’t need potatoes at all. He needed one of those low-carb diets Zell was always talking about.
Mr. John and him hardly spoke, and Zell just chattered about mindless stuff: the weather, our wildlife habitat, the new way she made the broccoli. “It’s roasted instead of steamed,” she said. “Isn’t it so much better?”
Ty just shrugged and kept shoveling food into his big open hole of a mouth. So I said I agreed it was much better roasted, which was a mistake, because then I had to listen to her explanation of how she made it, which went on way too long. Mr. John and Ty didn’t seem to hear her at all.
Ty didn’t stay very long, though of course I wasn’t sorry to see him go. Zell made me walk him out with her, and I did, but I lagged behind. I was happy to see that Lilah, Alec, Pilar, and Zara were outside, too, and waved at them as soon as I saw them. Pilar and Zara were over at Alec and Lilah’s all the time. I was a little jealous and wished my mom would date someone with kids my age, someone Cutter and I could hang out with all the time. I wondered if Ambulance Guy had kids. I doubted it.
“Can I go over and say hi?” I asked.
Zell said yes, and I started to run off, but then Zell hollered, “You forgot to tell Ty goodbye, Cailey.”
I stopped and turned around, giving him my most sincere smile, which wasn’t sincere at all. “Goodbye, Ty. It was nice to meet you,” I said.
“You, too,” he said, but his voice told me he didn’t mean it any more than I did.
I skipped across the Brysons’ yard toward the kids, who were swinging each other on the tire swing Mr. Lance had hung there a few weeks before. Pilar was pushing Alec, and Lilah and Zara were doing “Poof with the Attitude,” a clapping game they did all the time. Mr. Lance and Miss Jencey were sitting on the picnic table, hardly paying attention to the kids. If they were, they would’ve told Pilar not to push Alec so high, and Alec to hang on tighter. And they would’ve told Lilah and Zara to find a new game to play, one that didn’t get on all our last nerves because we’d heard it so much.
“Hi, Cailey,” Miss Jencey called out as I walked by them, surprising me that they even saw me. She pointed out Ty’s car, finally backing out of Zell’s drive. “Did you guys have company for dinner tonight?” She was smiling. She was always smiling when she and Mr. Lance were together. She didn’t smile much when I first met her, always wearing sunglasses and looking like she just came from a funeral.
I stopped in front of the picnic table and eyed the graham crackers, Hershey’s bars, and marshmallows stacked there. If I played my cards right, I might get a s’more. “Yes, ma’am,” I said, using the same voice I used with Ty. It was the voice I used with most adults I didn’t know all that well. I used it with Zell at first, but now I mostly forgot and just talked to her in my regular voice. “Zell’s son was here. Ty.”
“Oh, Ty!” Jencey said. “I knew Ty way back when.”
Then I remembered. “Oh, yeah!” I said. “You did know him.” I raised my eyebrows and gave her a look. “You knew him pretty well.” I looked over at Lance, who’d stopped holding Jencey’s hand with me around, but they didn’t fool me. “Don’t get jealous, Mr. Lance,” I said. “It was a long time ago.” I froze, realizing what I’d done. In teasing them, I’d told on myself. But it was too late now. I could tell by the looks on their faces I was going to have to explain.
I’d found a whole box of stuff in Ty’s closet that had to do with Jencey. Little cut-out hearts with her name on them, and poems he’d written about her (which were so lame I laughed when I read them), and a lot of pictures of her, some with the heads of other people cut out in them. You could tell that, at least back then, she was the only girl for him. Which kind of didn’t make any sense because she seemed way too pretty for him. But who was I to know? Maybe back in high school he was a stud. He had the photo of her when she was homecoming queen, standing on a stage with a crown on her head, looking surprised and really, really happy.
I started to walk over to the kids to see if I could get a turn on the tire swing when Jencey stopped me. “What was a long time ago, Cailey?” she asked.
“Oh, well, um, when you guys were boyfriend and girlfriend,” I said, wishing I’d never said anything. I didn’t want to stand there and discuss an adult’s old boyfriend with her, especially when I’d just gotten away from his gross self. I waved my hand in the air like it didn’t matter a hill of beans, as Zell would say, and started to walk away again. But Jencey stopped me again.
“Cailey, we were never boyfriend and girlfriend. I barely knew him,” she said. “Where would you get an idea like that?”
I looked at her, feeling a little sick inside for bringing it up. I didn’t want to talk about it—whatever it was—anymore. But the way she was looking at me, I could tell I didn’t have much choice. “Um, well, um, I found the box of stuff. In his, um, closet,” I tried to explain. “I’m staying in his old bedroom?” I added, as if that explained my snooping around in Ty’s private stuff. The last thing I wanted was for her to tell Zell on me. I had no business rummaging through Ty’s closet. I just got bored sometimes. And I was curious. I heard my mother’s voice in my head: I told you not to snoop in other people’s things.
Jencey leaned forward, looking at me intently. “What box of stuff?” She looked as confused and sick as I felt.
“There’s an old shoe box in the back of his closet. I, um, sort of opened it and looked through it one night when I couldn’t sleep. And it has pictures of you and, um, poems he wrote about you, and a lot of cut-out hearts with your name on them and stuff?” I looked at Lance, who’d put his hand on her back and looked concerned. “I thought you’d know about it. Like it was something he kept from when y’all went out? Like maybe he just couldn’t bear to part with it, or . . . something.” I looked down and drew a line in the grass with the toe of my tennis shoe, wishing I’d never walked over, wishing Zell had never made me come outside with her in the first place.
Jencey hopped down from the picnic table. “Can you show it to me?” she asked, her voice sounding like it did when Pilar and Zara were bugging her at the pool, like she was working hard to keep from screaming.
I shrugged. “Sure,” I said. I motioned for her to follow me and headed back to Zell’s, thinking as we walked how in the world I was going to explain this one to her.
ZELL