Page 7 of Choosing Her
“Call me Rebecca again and you’ll learn what it’s like to live without knee caps,Caleb.”
Being called by my first name didn’t bother me as much as it bothered her, mostly because it was what almost everyone outside of Hartwell called me. Even Naomi had always called me Caleb. Crossy was just a name I’d gotten from the hockey team, since we all went by nicknames from our last names. Levi Barrett became Bear. Michael Valentine was Tino. Jace McIntyre was Mako. And Caleb Cross became Crossy. When I’d met Saylor at the party, the nickname had just slipped off my tongue without me thinking. It was like my mouth had decided for me that this girl was important enough to call me Crossy, before we even knew each other.
Behind me, Tino and Mako switched from singing Piano Man to singing O’Canada at the top of their lungs. It was so loud that I honestly expected someone to stick their head out of the dorm windows and yell at them to shut up. I glanced at them over my shoulder and noticed that Bear was now standing between the other two, looking like he was trying to extricate himself without getting kicked by their bizarre walking. When I turned back to Saylor, she was watching them too, with a grin on her face.
It was so unusual for her to smile in my presence that I knew I had to jump on this opportunity.
“Want to join us?” I asked. “Still over an hour until curfew.”
It was remarkable, really, how someone could go from smiling to scowling so quickly. Part of me wondered if I’d actually imagined the smile altogether. Maybe I’d taken a memory from ten months ago and placed it on her now, wanting to let myself believe the girl who liked me was still in there somewhere. Not that I thought there was any chance of her liking me romantically again. I was pretty sure dating her sister ruined that possibility. But I hoped that there was some piece of her willing to move past my actions following the early hours of New Year’s Day. I hoped that she might be able to forgive and forget, if only so I could let myself move on from the guilt.
“In your dreams, Crossy,” she said.
Even though I knew I wasn’t supposed to be flirting with her, the words came out before I could stop them: “Trust me, Saylor, you’re always in my dreams.”
I regretted saying it pretty much as soon as the words were out of my mouth. The way to get onto friendly terms with Saylor was definitely not by flirting with her. But after being set up on so many dates in the past two weeks, I felt like my brain’s default setting was flirting and it was incredibly difficult to turn it off.
“Shall I tell my sister about that?” Saylor asked.
The jab landed exactly as it was intended, stabbing me in the gut. It was funny how much had changed in the months since I’d lost contact with her. There was time, back before I met Naomi, that I’d wanted to find Saylor and see if we could rekindle what we’d had at that party. It was the wondering about it that was the worst, the question of if we could get it back. My mom didn’t think it was possible to go back. When I’d told her that I met a new girl and thought I might be giving up on finding Saylor, she said it was for the best. Her motto was that the only good parts of a relationship were the magical early days, when everything they did was perfect and you felt like they could do no wrong. But it disappeared quickly as you realized the person in front of you was nothing compared to the imaginary version of them you made up in your mind.
My dad was the opposite. When I told him that I was looking for Saylor, he thought it was a good idea because sometimes, you have a gut feeling about a person. He said that my mom was obsessed with the honeymoon phase of dating, but a long-lasting love was so much deeper and a different form of magic. I guess that was why the two of them couldn’t make it work. They’d broken up before I was even born and now, I couldn’t even remember a time he hadn’t been married to my step-mom, Stacey.
The two of them acted like the angel and devil on my shoulders when it came to Saylor. There was my mom, telling me not to chase after her, because once I finally caught her again, I would realize none of it had been worth it after all. But then there was my dad on the other side, telling me that maybe she was actually the love of my life, and I couldn’t know until I found her again.
When I did find her, I decided I had to listen to my mom, because I was not the kind of boy to go after my girlfriend’s little sister—even if she was the one I’d wanted first.
“Saylor!” Tino called as they came up to us. I cringed, not sure whether having him here would help or hurt my case. “What are you doing out here this fine evening?”
“Well, actually…” Saylor said.
She bent over to pick something up from the ground and I realized she’d been holding a bag that she must have dropped when I ran into her. She held the canvas bag out to me and I just stared at it, not sure what she was expecting me to do with it. The side of the bag had line art of flowers printed on it, with the wordslife is goodwritten in cursive beneath it. I couldn’t think of a single reason why she would be handing that off to me.
“It’s yours,” she said when I didn’t budge. I looked at the bag again, even though I was already sure there was no way it was mine. The more I looked at it, the less familiar it seemed. I was sure I’d never seen it before in my life.
“No, it’s not.”
“Yes, it is,” she insisted. Then she shoved the bag into my arms, not giving me a chance to refuse it. “It’s from Naomi.”
Somehow, her saying Naomi’s name in my presence was the most surprising thing that had happened this evening. She and I didn’t speak of her sister, especially not since we got back to school. I thought we had an unspoken agreement not to mention the past at all, since it obviously wasn’t anything either of uswanted to remember. But if she was acting like all of this was normal, then I guess I would too.
“Naomi’s giving me a gift? How unusual. Most ex-girlfriends prefer to never speak to me again.”
“This isn’t a gift either,” Saylor said in that same flat tone. I opened the bag to peek inside. “It’s a bomb.”
My head jerked up in surprise, not at the words, but at the fact that Saylor had made a joke. Tome. Since the first time we saw each other after New Year’s Eve, she’d been dry, sarcastic, cold… but she had never, not once, made a joke.
Progress.
I looked in the bag again to see what it actually was and saw some things I’d thought I’d lost—my favorite t-shirt, my old iPod touch I’d dug out over the summer, the book I’d been reading the week that Naomi and I broke up… It all had one thing in common.
“She sent you to give me back the stuff I left at your house?” I asked.
Saylor shrugged. “She didn’t want to talk to you, none of her friends know you, and she figured we see each other regularly enough that I could give it to you without it being…” Her lip curled and she ducked her chin. “Weird.”
I’d wondered a few times whether Saylor had told Naomi anything post-break-up, but this was enough to tell me that she didn’t. Not that I was all that surprised—telling her after the break-up wouldn’t have been much better than telling her during the relationship. If anything, it made it all less necessary because we were no longer in the uncomfortable position of having to hide it every day.
“That’s just cold, Saylor,” Tino said, peering over my shoulder into the bag. I had to agree with him, although I couldn’t say that I expected anything different from either of the Saylor sisters.
