Across the car, Clark looked at me for a moment. “You did?” he asked, sounding baffled.
Oh god. I could feel myself getting frustrated. That was just something you said, not something you actually meant. Most people understood that. I didn’t like going to Tom’s sketch comedy shows or my dad’s fund-raisers. But that didn’t mean I told either of them that. “Sure,” I said, keeping my smile in place.
Clark looked at me for a second longer, and by the dashboard light, I could see confusion knitting his brow. “I just . . . ,” he said slowly, then shook his head. “I mean, it was like you didn’t want to talk to me.”
I drew back slightly in my seat. Why were we recapping this? We’d clearly both had a bad time, so why weren’t we moving on? I had tried to talk to him, all night. He was the one who hadn’t wanted to talk about any of the subjects I brought up.
“We talked,” I said. I was fine with having a bad date. I was less fine with discussing it forever, not to mention incorrectly.
“No,” he said simply, shaking his head. “Not about anything real.”
I had opened my mouth to reply to this, but stopped with my argument half-formed. Because it was true. I hadn’t asked him anything real, because I hadn’t really wanted to know anything real. I wanted the date I always had—fun and easy and simple. I had no idea how to explain this. But I knew I needed to get out of his car. The way he was looking at me—the way he was talking about this—was making me feel retroactively embarrassed, like I’d spent the whole night doing and saying the wrong things, even though I’d been doing what I always did.
“See you around,” I muttered as I opened the door and stepped down to the ground. I was trying not to think about the fact I was supposed to see him tomorrow to walk the dog. But he might be calling Maya as soon as he drove away, requesting a different dog walker.
I shut his door, maybe a little harder than I needed to, and walked toward my house even though I had no intention of going inside. I was going to get in my car, find my friends, and start the process of telling them about this, so it could turn into something we could all laugh about. I walked toward my front door, pulling out my phone and waiting for Clark to drive off. I watched as his car pulled into our turnaround, backed out, and turned around so he was now facing the end of the driveway. But the car just sat there, idling, not going anywhere.
I realized after a moment that he was waiting to make sure I got inside okay. There was a piece of me that would have appreciated this under different circumstances. But not tonight. Tonight it was just annoying. I walked up to the side entrance and pulled open the screen door, then took out my keys and pretended to unlock it. I glanced toward the driveway, but his car was still there waiting. Rolling my eyes, I unlocked the door and stepped inside, and only then did Clark drive away.
? ? ?
I pressed on the brakes even though there were no cars behind me and none in front of me, but I had a habit of missing the turn to get into the Orchard and not realizing it until I’d gone about a mile too far down the road, driving along with the sinking feeling that I should have been there by now. And I didn’t want to waste that time tonight. I wanted to vent to my friends. And then, once that was done, I wanted to move on. I’d spent the drive over working out my plan. I needed someone to replace who I had hoped Clark would be—someone to help me forget about everything that had happened in the last two weeks, someone to help me turn my summer around. And Clark clearly was not going to be that person, so I would have to find someone else.
As I was about to speed up, thinking I’d slowed too early, there was the old Orchard sign, with its two cherries, letting me know I was in the right place. I swung in, starting to relax the closer I got. At some point, the Orchard had been a functional orchard, but ever since I’d first heard about it—when Palmer’s oldest sibling, Fitz, was in high school and we were still in elementary—it had been the town party spot. Not so much in the winter, but in the summers it was filled with people from the three neighboring high schools and the occasional bored-looking Stanwich College student. And tonight it was just the place I wanted to be.