—
I zip the bag back up and place it carefully inside the box, folding it in half, covering the polos. I look away as I close the lid. My blue dress from last year still hangs in my closet, in the plastic dry-cleaning bag, untouched. I missed Homecoming this year. It was last month, on a clear and crisp Saturday night. The dress I bought for it at the end of the summer (Hailey, pulling it off the rack, holding it up to me, her eyes shining. You have to get this, Jessa. It’s perfect. It’s perfectly you.) still has the tags.
I bought the dress because it was on sale, and because I was an optimist.
But even then, it felt like a lie. Like I was trying to recapture something between us that was already gone.
I’m pulling down the rest of Caleb’s clothes from the closet when I feel something bump against the back wall—a faint hum, a flat twang. I push the hangers aside, and in the middle of the space is his guitar, leaning against the wall. It’s propped up precariously between a deflated football and a spare blanket, folded up and gathering dust. I grab the neck of the guitar, and my fingers brush the strings—letting loose a tense, sharp cry in the empty room. The moment like muscle memory, as I run my fingers against the untuned strings.
—
It was November, and we’d just finished morning finals. Everyone was heading to the school library if they had an afternoon final, or to lunch and study groups if they didn’t. We opted for studying at Caleb’s house. “Everyone should be out,” he said. Mia was in third grade, Eve worked pretty regular hours at a real estate office, and Sean’s job alternated between days and nights, depending on the project.
Music was playing from Caleb’s computer speakers, which seemed to be focusing him, but it had the opposite effect on me. I sat at his desk with my math notes out on my lap, swiveling back and forth in his chair. I was mostly watching his reflection in the computer screen as he was reading over the physics notes to himself on the bed, when his body suddenly stiffened. He leaned from his bed to his desk, reaching beyond me. He turned down the volume on the speakers, and frowned.
“What?” I asked, but by then I heard it, too. Slow footsteps on the stairs. Caleb’s eyes went wide, and he took me by the shoulders, gently pushing me toward the closet.
“Shh,” he said as the darkness engulfed me, his shirts closing in around me, his face a pale sliver in the gap of light before he slid the door shut entirely.
I tried to slow my breathing, to mask the sound of my existence.
“Caleb?” The door to his room creaked open and someone stepped into the room. “I thought I heard someone up here.” Sean’s voice, low and gravelly. I imagined a lifetime of smoking cigarettes, though I never smelled any smoke in the house.
“Yep. It’s just me.”
“Thought you were supposed to be at school.” An accusatory edge.
“It’s finals week. I’m studying,” Caleb said. His voice had risen to the same level, matching Sean’s. “What are you doing home?”
I heard something move—an object picked up and placed back down. “We finished up early. Physics, huh?” Sean said. He must’ve picked up Caleb’s textbook. I heard a slight jangle as he stepped closer, the chain of his pocket watch, always connected from his pocket to a belt loop whenever I saw him. “You sticking around? I could use your help carting some junk from the garage to the recycling center.”
The silence lingered, the tension radiating all around the room. I held my breath, so sure he could sense me, in the silence. The way you can feel the presence of another, without seeing them. I was a rustling in the walls, a shadow in the closet. I wondered if Sean was staring at the gap under the closet door right now.
Finally, Caleb spoke. “On second thought, think I’ll head to the library.”
Sean made a noise that could’ve been a laugh. Hard to tell, behind the door, without perspective, with no body language or facial expression to accompany the moment.
Something pressed against my back, and I jumped, thinking it was an arm, or a hand, until I reached behind me to grab it. The strings brushed against my fingers, but my hand held them silent and still, the shape of the neck gaining context in the dark. I had no idea Caleb could play an instrument.
I stayed where I was, holding the guitar, listening to Sean’s steps descend. Caleb didn’t move until he heard a door close somewhere below us. Then he opened the closet door, and I pushed him with my free arm, annoyed. He laughed, fake-rubbing the shoulder I’d just shoved.
“I didn’t know I needed to be hidden,” I said.
“Trust me, it was the quickest way to deal with him.”
I rolled my eyes. “So many secrets, Caleb. You play the guitar?”
He saw what I had in my hand and laughed. “Hardly. It was a gift from my grandparents when I was younger. I don’t know how to play.”
“At all?”
“Nope.”
The guitar, I then saw, had a fine layer of dust covering the sides. Remnants of a spider web clung to one of the tuning keys at the top. I brushed away the dust and debris, swung it in front of my body, looping the strap onto my shoulder. I placed my fingers in the position of the single chord I knew the best, which my father had taught me years earlier.
“Wait, you can play the guitar?” His face contorted, stuck somewhere between confusion and delight.
“I wouldn’t say I can play exactly, but apparently I can play better than you.” I strummed another chord, smiled, tried to remember the few basic bars from the handful of lessons I took back in middle school. The guitar was out of tune, but the notes still sounded familiar.
“What else don’t I know about you, Jessa Whitworth?” he whispered, leaning closer. We were at that stage where we thought we already knew all the important things, but then something like this would come along, and we’d realize how much more there was still left to discover.
“Well, for one,” I said, placing my hand over the strings, to still them. The room fell silent. “I don’t like being hidden in closets.”
He tipped his head back, laughed—laughed louder than he expected. He cut himself off, cut his eyes to the stairway. “Point taken,” he said. “But we should go before Sean comes back inside, unless you want to end up back in there.”
I slid the guitar strap off my shoulder, handed it to him, and watched as he restored it to its original position, in the back of the closet.
“Who owns a guitar and doesn’t know how to play?” I mumbled.
“I’ll let you teach me if you want,” he said. He threw me a look over his shoulder, then motioned for me to follow him silently. We snuck down the steps, peering around corners, until we were down the front porch steps, in the open air, then in his car, driving to a place I can no longer remember.