Will was Coach Reevey. Calvin had never used his first name around me, but I guess it was silly to think he’d called him Coach Reevey when they’d been alone.
“He said I’d meet a lot of people in my life, but that none would truly understand me the way he did.” Calvin glanced at me, his stare ruthless. “How fucked up is it that he was right?”
All the things I’d thought about saying while I sat in my car after school—all the millions of ways to apologize I’d tried to think up since Vice Principal Grady had pulled Calvin from class—vanished, and I was left speechless. Not because what Cal said had hurt, though it had, but because of the possibility he was right. Maybe I didn’t understand Calvin. Maybe I never would.
I pulled the prom tickets from my pocket and set them on the floor in front of his door before leaving. Just in case.
168,111 KM
I DODGED A PAIR OF flying pliers as I walked into the bookstore stockroom. They hit the wall and skittered across the floor.
Mrs. Petridis swore. She was standing at her worktable over a tiny dead mouse. “Sorry, Ozzie.” She clenched her fists and slumped onto her stool.
“At least you didn’t throw the mouse.” I grabbed an unopened box of books that needed shelving. “Why do you do this, anyway?” I’d never asked before, unsure I wanted to know.
“Because I take these dead things that would repulse most people, and I transform them into something beautiful.”
I wasn’t sure I’d call her dioramas beautiful, but I couldn’t deny they were interesting. The intricate details and the care she put into them astounded me. Her current project was a scene from North by Northwest.
“But they’re still just the hollowed-out husks of things that used to be alive.”
“To you. To me, they’re art.” She motioned at the pliers on the floor. “Kick those on over to me.”
I left Mrs. Petridis to work on her dead animals, and manned the store. Ana showed up later, and I took a break from shelving books to help Mrs. Ross with her essay again, but I had trouble even focusing on that. My mind kept wandering while I read.
“That bad?” she asked. There was something different about Mrs. Ross. She sat with her back a little straighter, and she hadn’t worn her sunglasses into the store. It’d been a couple of weeks since I’d seen her, but that was mostly because Ana had taken a lot of my shifts.
“No,” I said. “Your essay is great; I’m just worried about this guy I’ve been seeing.”
Mrs. Ross chuckled. “Boys are the root of most problems.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Well?” she asked. “What’d he do?”
I shook my head. “It’s not what he did.”
“Then what’d you do?”
I felt weird discussing a guy who wasn’t Tommy with Mrs. Ross, but I needed someone to talk to, and I wasn’t about to return to Dr. Sayegh and have her blab everything I told her to the police.
“He trusted me with a secret and I told someone else and then everyone found out about it.” I raked my hair back with my fingers. “But I’m not sorry, because someone had done something bad to him and it really messed him up.”
Mrs. Ross nodded along as I spoke. When I finished, she said, “You know what faith is?”
“I guess.”
“If you’ve got to guess, you don’t know.” She smiled tentatively. “Faith is believing in something even when every other soul in the world tells you you’re wrong. Even when all the evidence says you’re a fool. No matter what people say or how much they hurt you, faith means you keep believing.”
“How’s that supposed to help me?”
Mrs. Ross shrugged. “You have to believe you did right by this boy, even if you’re the only one. And you never know. Maybe he’ll come around. Sometimes what’s in people’s heads and hearts is too big for words.”
I mumbled at the table. She said, “What?” and I said, “You told me that same thing about Tommy once. After we’d had a fight.”
I waited for Mrs. Ross to gather her things and run off like she had when I’d last mentioned Tommy, but she didn’t. She folded her hands in front of her and stared at me for a long time.
Then she said, “Tell me about him.”
I was so surprised that I looked up at her, and the shock must’ve shone from my eyes, because she said, “Go on, I’m listening.”
“Well,” I began, “Tommy was amazing.” I hadn’t talked about Tommy, really talked about him, in so long that the stories poured out of me. I told Mrs. Ross about the time Tommy and I ran away from home and spent two hours—which had seemed like forever when we were eight—living in a tree. How he could argue with anyone about anything and always win, and how infuriating that was. About the time he stole twenty dollars from our fifth-grade teacher’s desk so he could buy Mrs. Ross new paintbrushes. I wanted to tell her everything I remembered—and I remembered everything—but that would take more time than we had, so I gave her the highlights and left out the sexy bits.
And she listened. She didn’t interrupt. She laughed at some of the stories, looked like she might cry during others, but she never said a word.
“We talked about leaving Cloud Lake after high school,” I said, “but he was worried about you. He was scared of what Mr. Ross would do to you. More than anything, though, he wanted to know you were safe. I think that was the best thing about Tommy. He’d throw himself in front of a train to keep the people he loved from harm.”
Ana was tossing me dirty looks because she wanted to close up, but I didn’t care, because I felt lighter. I hadn’t realized how heavy Tommy’s memories were and how difficult it had been to carry them alone for so long. It’s not like I’d shed them, but now I had Mrs. Ross to help me bear the load.
“I left Carl,” Mrs. Ross said after a moment of quiet.
“You did?”
She nodded. “Got a second job at Target and met a cashier who was looking for a roommate. It isn’t much, but it’s something.”
I couldn’t believe she’d left her husband. Tommy had always hoped she would, but he never thought she’d go through with it. “How’d he react?” I asked.
“Carl?” Mrs. Ross chuckled. “He threw some things around and threatened to kill me, but that man doesn’t scare me anymore. He told me if I walked out the door, I couldn’t ever come back. So I marched outside and slammed the door to that trailer shut for the last time.”
“Good for you,” I said. “Tommy would’ve been proud.”
“I wish I could’ve known him.”
“Me too.”
Maybe some doors that slam shut behind you and can’t ever be opened again aren’t the scariest things in the world after all. Maybe some doors are better off closed. That way we can focus on the ones still open in front of us.
155,081 KM