I dig my phone out from under a pile of dirty, sweaty, dusty clothes. The battery is dead. (Of course.) I find the charger deep inside my duffle and plug it into one of the sockets on the wall. After a few minutes the screen comes to life, but it’s still not charged enough to use, so I sit on my bed and wait.
I start pacing the room. I bite my nails and change my clothes, like I’m worried about looking nice when I call Nolan. Super-dork. I pick my favorite T-shirt, the one I stole from Mom with the Mustang on the front. I go into the bathroom and play with my ragged hair. Maybe when I get back to Ridgemont, Mom and I can go to a salon and see if a stylist can make sense out of it. Maybe it will look like a dramatic and edgy fashion statement.
Next I start pacing the hall. But after a few laps, it feels so small and narrow that I start opening doors and pacing the other rooms on the floor one at a time.
I open the door to the nursery last. It’s dark but cool, and instead of pacing, I move slowly across the room, running my fingers along the edges of the dust-covered crib and changing table. I open a cabinet and smell the talcum powder and baby wipes, long since dried out.
I lift a tiny white onesie from a drawer and bring it to my face. It takes me a second to recognize the scent: lavender and spices—the perfume from the master bedroom. I rifle through the drawer until I find a sachet filled with herbs, tied shut with a tiny pink satin bow.
I fold the outfit as well as I can in the darkness and put it back where I found it. I leave the room, shutting the door tightly behind me. I check on my phone: 20 percent charged. That’s plenty—I’m in no condition to wait for it to be fully charged. I run down the stairs and out the door, holding my phone out in front of me like a lantern as I trudge through the garden and up the hill behind the house.
Finally bars appear at the top right-hand corner of the phone’s screen. I start to dial Nolan’s number—I actually know it by heart, even though it’s stored in my contacts—but I can’t seem to make myself press Send.
He didn’t pick up the last time I called. He didn’t respond to the message I left. Maybe he never listened to it at all.
I sit cross-legged on the ground and lean against a tree trunk. Mud sticks to my bare legs. This entire place feels dirty—not just the dusty house and the dilapidated buildings, but the air itself feels thick, almost sticky.
I take a deep breath and clear my phone’s screen. I check for text messages. One from Mom, just saying hi and I love you, and several from Ashley, checking in to see how I’m doing and telling me that Cory Cooper won’t stop calling her, that he wants to get back together . . . what should she do? I smile. I’m literally the last person Ashley should be turning to for relationship advice.
No texts from Nolan. No voicemails either. I bite my lip. What are the odds that he emailed me instead?
When I see his name at the top of my inbox, I’m so happy that tears actually spring to my eyes.
Sunshine, I don’t really know how to tell you this, but I’ve been doing some research, and I think Aidan is up to something.
Up to what? I keep reading, and my tears of joy quickly shift into tears of anger.
My mentor/father—blah, who cares about the stupid slash anymore!—has the power to keep me from Nolan, from any and every person I might have wanted to touch and kiss and love. Memories of every awkward almost-kiss and slow dance and crowded party from middle school onward flood my brain.
My hand shaking, I lower the phone even though I haven’t read all of Nolan’s e-mail.
Ashley always teased me. We thought I was the only sixteen-year-old in the world with virgin lips. Just another thing to make me different from most of the kids at school, another thing to make me a weirdo.
And apparently it was all Aidan’s fault.
I stand and start running, clutching my phone to my chest like a Teddy bear. My hands are shaking so hard that I’m scared I might drop it. I hug it tighter. Even from far away, even after the way I rejected him, Nolan is still protecting me: conducting research, getting me new information. I never could have let him go, never had a chance to set him free to find a normal girl. He was never going anywhere.
Now I’m crying because I miss him so much.