It was amazing how quickly they hushed things up, how Scott was shuttled to one room and Charles to another. He could hear their father shouting and Scott shouting back, but he couldn’t make out the words. Charles’s mother ran into the house, crying, “What happened? What happened?”
Bronwyn volunteered to take him away for a while. She helped Charles into her car and they snaked down the driveway. Charles crumpled against the seat, repentant. He didn’t dare ask Bronwyn if she’d heard what he’d said. The answer, he knew, was yes—she’d been right there.
They drove to the bottom of the hill and parked at the edge of the cornfield. Bronwyn gripped the steering wheel hard. “There’s something I have to tell you,” she whispered.
Charles kept his chin wedged to his chest. His stomach felt slashed open.
It took Bronwyn a long time to speak. “I think it would be best if we spent some time apart.”
“Okay,” he answered stonily. He wasn’t about to ask why. He didn’t need to hear how disgusted she was that he had the capacity to say such things. He didn’t want to hear her say, You deserved it. “I’m sorry,” he mumbled.
There were tears in her eyes. “I’m sorry.” Which made him feel even worse: What the hell did she have to be sorry for?
She offered to drive him back up the hill to the party, but he said that wouldn’t be necessary—he could walk. She took off fast. He never saw her again.
Did Charles really need to revisit that? Did he really need to face someone who obviously detested him enough to not just cut all ties with him but with every single one of his friends, too?
And yet, it was tempting. There would be something both edifying and purifying about seeing Bronwyn now. Having Bronwyn say her piece, once and for all. It could be good to know who Charles had been before in order to know who he had become. It could be good to know the damage he might have done.
It was tempting to see her and know she was real, that it had really happened. Because if it truly was her, what she’d done was the same thing Scott had done—take everything she had been given and cast it aside. Maybe there was something to doing that, something Charles didn’t yet understand. Maybe her decision had been the right one.
Chapter Nine
Sylvie didn’t even notice the rain until it turned to hail. It pelted on the roof, making harsh, ugly smacks so forceful she thought it might be taking off whole shingles and layers of paint. Just minutes had passed and there was already a small stream in the front yard. Hail bounced off the roof of Scott’s car in crazy angles, ricocheting off the metal pole of the basketball hoop Scott still used. She ran around shutting all the windows.
She went to the living room and nestled under a blanket. It was almost midnight, but she was too wide-eyed to sleep. Once again, she went over the day.
It astonished her that Christian’s father had been … a person—human, capable of complex and contradictory feelings. She often felt this way about people she didn’t know. That it was incredible that their inner lives were as complicated as hers was. It reminded her of when Scott was very young and used to play with Legos, dumping the garbage can of blocks on the living room floor and creating entire towns—houses, doctor’s offices, gas stations, grocery stores, airports. He would leave the backs of the buildings exposed so he could reach inside and move the people around. Once Sylvie noticed him leaning over the blocks, frantically moving a bunch of the tiny Lego people at once—making a woman get into her car, guiding a spaceman from a gas-station parking lot to the mini-mart, then quickly moving a black-haired man in a fireman suit from the upstairs part of the house to the downstairs to turn on the giant, battery-run windmill. “Why are you moving them all so fast?” Sylvie asked.
“This is how life works,” Scott told her matter-of-factly. That was when he still talked to her. When he still answered her questions. “It all happens at once. But I don’t have enough hands for all of it. I never know what they want to do next.”
Sylvie didn’t have enough hands for all of it either. She hadn’t expected Christian’s father to have another emotion besides anger. She hadn’t expected him to look at her, recognize her, and not immediately fly into a rage.
There was pounding on the side door. She stood up, shuffled through the kitchen, and squinted. With all the lights on in here, she could only see her reflection in the side door’s window. Her straight, bluntly cut hair was mussed and the corners of her mouth turned down. She looked tired and puffy, a hundred years old.
Scott was on the porch. He was hugging himself tightly, and there was water dripping from the ends of his hair and the tip of his nose. “Oh.” Sylvie whipped open the door. There was something embarrassing, or maybe vulnerable, about seeing him so late at night, in her robe and slippers, her makeup washed off.
“I’ve been knocking for ten minutes,” he yelled over the sound of the rain.