He’s there, messing around with stuff in his dresser. He stops and glares at me.
I sigh. “You know, it might be easier for both of us right now if you would stop hating me for like ten minutes.”
“That’s your sisterly advice?”
“Yeah. I’m older and wiser too. So you should listen.”
And Mom wanted us to be there for each other, I don’t quite dare to say out loud.
He snorts and goes back to counting out pairs of socks.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“Packing my gym bag for this week.”
“Oh.”
“I’m busy, okay?”
“Jeffrey . . .” I move a pile of dirty clothes from his desk chair and sit on it. “What’d I do to make you hate me so much?”
He pauses. “You know what you did.”
“No. I mean, yes, I guess I was pretty selfish last year, about my purpose and stuff. I wasn’t thinking about you.”
“Oh really,” he says.
“I’m sorry. If I ignored you, or took the attention away from you because I was so focused on my purpose. I didn’t know about yours, I swear. But don’t you kind of owe me an apology too?”
He turns to me incredulously.
“What for?” he demands.
“You know . . .”
“No. You tell me.” Suddenly he tugs off his tie and flings it on the bed.
“You started the fire!”
“Yeah, I’ll probably go to juvie. Is there even a juvie in Wyoming?”
“Jeffrey . . .”
But now that he’s talking, he doesn’t plan to stop. “This is pretty convenient for you, right?
Because now you get to blame me. If I hadn’t started the other fire, Tucker would have been safe and your thing with Christian would have gone off without a hitch, and you’d be a good little angel-blood who fulfilled her purpose. Is that right?”
“Are you sure it was your purpose?”
“Are you sure about yours?” he counters.
“Okay, true enough. But seriously, I don’t get it. It doesn’t make sense. But if you say you had the visions about it, and that’s what you were supposed to do, I believe you.”
“Do you have any idea how hard it was?” He’s almost shouting now. “The crazy stuff that went through my head, like I could have been murdering people, starting that fire. All those animals and all that land, and the firefighters and people who risked their lives to put it out. But I still did it.” His lip curls in disgust. “I did my part. Then you had to go and bail on yours.” I lower my eyes, look at my hands. “If I hadn’t, Tucker would have died.”
“You’re so wrong it’s pathetic,” Jeffrey says more calmly. “As usual.”
“What?” I glance up, startled. “Jeffrey, I was there. I saved him. If I hadn’t shown up when I did, he would have . . .”
“No. He wouldn’t have.” Jeffrey looks out the window like he can see it happening all over again. “He wouldn’t have died. Because I would have saved him.” He starts packing his bag again, underwear this time. He laughs, a mean, humorless sound, shakes his head. “God. I was frantic that night, looking for him. He didn’t show up where he was supposed to, where he always did, in the visions. I thought I’d messed up somehow. I thought he was toast for sure.
Finally I gave up and came home. I saw you on the porch with Christian and I was like, well, at least she did it. At least she fulfilled her purpose. Then I spent all night agonizing over how your face would look when you found out Tucker was dead.”
“Oh, Jeffrey.”
“So you see,” he continues after a minute. He grabs a stick of deodorant and tucks it into his duffel bag. “You thought I screwed up your purpose, right? But the truth is, if you’d followed your vision, if you’d just trusted the plan, then you and Christian would have done your thing in the forest, and Tucker would have been perfectly safe, and everything would have worked out fine. But instead you had to go and screw it up for the both of us.” I don’t say anything. I just slink out of his room and shut the door. In my own room I lie down on the bed and stare up at the empty ceiling wide-eyed, dry-eyed, and it feels like the ache opens a huge gaping hole in my chest.
“I’m sorry,” I gasp, although I have no idea who I’m apologizing to, Jeffrey or my mom, who believed in me so much, or even God. I just know that it’s my fault, and I’m sorry.
Don’t beat yourself up, Christian says in my head. I sit up and glance at the window, and of course he’s there, sitting in his normal spot.
I messed things up for you too, I remind him.
He shakes his head. No, you didn’t. You just changed things.
I go to the window and open it, step outside into the cool night air. It feels like summer now, a kind of shift in the way the night feels, the way it smells.
“You’ve got to stay out of my head,” I say as I hunker down awkwardly next to Christian.
I’m still in my mom’s nice black pumps. My toes hurt. “It can’t be very fun for you, always finding out my deep dark secrets.”
He shrugs. “They’re not so dark.”
I give him a hard look. “My life is a soap opera.”
“A really, really addictive soap opera,” he says. Then he puts his arm around my shoulders and draws me into him. And I let him. I close my eyes.
“Why do you want me, Christian? I’m hopelessly screwed up.”
“We’re all screwed up. And you look so cute while you’re doing it.”
“Stop.”
The back of my neck feels hot where his breath is touching me, stirring the wisps of my hair that managed to escape my braid. “Thank you,” I say. We sit there for a while, not talking.
An owl hoots in the distance. And suddenly, miraculously, there are tears in my eyes.
“I miss my mom,” I choke out.
Christian’s arms tighten around me. I lean my head onto his shoulder and cry and cry, my body shuddering with sobs. It’s one of those loud, probably unattractive kind of sobfests, the kind where your nose runs and your eyes get all huge and swollen and your whole face becomes this messy pink swampland, but I don’t care. Christian holds me, and I cry. The ache empties itself out on his T-shirt, leaving me lighter, a good emptiness this time, like if I tried I might be light enough to fly.
Chapter 21
High Countries
At graduation all the girls have to wear white robes and the boys wear black. When the band plays “Pomp and Circumstance” we file two by two into the gym at Jackson Hole High School, which is filled with chattering, cheering, frantic-picture-taking friends and relatives. But it’s hard to look up into the bleachers and not see Mom. Or Jeffrey, even. The police showed up at our house the next day to question him. This time they even brought a warrant. But he wasn’t there. All we found in his room were a bunch of clothes and toiletries missing—and here I’d believed that lie he’d fed me as I watched him pack it up that night—and a single yellow Post-it stuck to his window.