Between the lines

Delilah

WE ARE SO CLOSE-THERE IN FRONT OF ME in the quiet corner of my old tree fort, I can see Oliver’s face appearing. But before he is more than just a misty hallucination, he’s gone.

While I’m still trying to figure out what happened-and what didn’t-I hear my mother call my name.

“Now?” I mutter. “Really?”

“Delilah?” Her voice is getting closer. She’s standing at the base of the tree fort. “What are you doing up there?”

I quickly close the book and shove it between the old newspapers. My mother’s head bobs at the top of the ladder. “I’m cleaning it out,” I announce. “Turning over a new leaf. No more fairy tales, no more tree forts.” She looks at me dubiously. “Dr. Ducharme thought it would be a good idea for me to have some more age-appropriate things to do.”

The words have the intended effect. “Well, then,” my mom says, surprised. “Good!” She shakes her head, as if she cannot quite believe me, and why should she? “Jules is here. She’s upstairs in your bedroom.”

“Jules?”

The last thing I want to do is hang out with Jules when what I really need is to speak to Oliver. I’ve realized something: he’s not the one who can rewrite the ending. I have a new plan, and I am desperate to share it with him.

I take the fairy tale and tuck it under my arm, heading back to the house. When I get to my room, Jules is lying on my bed, listening to my iPod. I slip the book quickly between others on a shelf so that Jules doesn’t start asking questions about why I’m still reading a kids’ fairy tale. Then I sit down and pull the headphones out of her ears. “I wasn’t expecting you,” I tell her.

“Since when do I have to make an appointment to be with my own best friend?” Jules asks. “And since when do you listen to Justin Bieber?” She shakes her head. “Maybe you do need psychiatric counseling. I don’t have any problem with you breaking Allie’s nose, but if you keep downloading songs like this, I may have to kill you.” She flops over onto her belly and looks up at me. “So how did it go?”

“How did what go?”

“Your shrink appointment?”

It seems like that happened a thousand years ago, not three hours. “It was a nonevent,” I say.

“Good, because I need you to have all your brains in place to help me get out of the worst situation ever.” She sits up, crossing her legs. “Remember my aunt Agnes?”

“The one who smells like beets?”

Jules winces. “Oh, God, why did you remind me of that? My parents said they’re sending me to her place for the summer to get a taste of the country. Can you imagine me in East Nowhere, Iowa, milking cows?”

“They have cows?”

“No, but they might as well. That’s not the point. The point is that I’m being shipped off like a FedEx box to the loneliest town on Earth.” She hesitates. “They still have dial- up, for God’s sake.”

I want to feel bad for Jules, seriously. But my head is filled with thoughts of Oliver and what we are going to do next.

“Maybe it won’t be that bad,” I say. “Summer’s over before you know it.”

She stares at me. “Wow. Zero sympathy whatsoever.”

“I don’t mean it like that-of course I feel bad for you-but I mean, it’s not the end of the world, Jules.”

“Can you tell me something? Where’s Delilah? Because the friend I used to know would actually care.”

“That’s a little dramatic,” I say, forcing a laugh.

“Is it? I came over here because I wanted someone to commiserate with me. To tell me that my summer’s going to suck and that you’re sorry. To take my side. I’ll probably still have to go to Iowa and it’s going to be hell, but it sure would be nice to go knowing that there’s someone here who doesn’t want me to leave.”

I can feel my cheeks heating up. I’ve been so obsessed with Oliver, I haven’t had time to spend with Jules. And the fact that she can’t hear him only makes her seem even more distant from me right now.

It will be different, I tell myself, when we get Oliver here. Then Jules can meet him, and get to know him, and be happy for me because I’ve finally got a boyfriend. These arguments we keep having are little roadblocks; eventually we’ll find a way around them. “I’ve just got a lot on my plate right now.”

Jules stands up. “I used to be on that plate,” she says. “I used to matter.”

“Jules, don’t say that. You’re still my best friend-”

“You know what? You don’t get to decide that. It takes two people to make a friendship work, and these days, I’ve been doing more than my fair share.”

“Jules,” I say. “Come on.” I reach toward her, but she steps away.

She looks at me. “Just remember-I had your back when the whole world hated you. I thought that counted for something.”

She walks out of my bedroom and slams the door behind her. I let out a defeated sigh. I’ll make this right again, I swear I will, but first I have to finish what Oliver and I have started.

My mother sticks her head inside the door. “Is everything all right with Jules?”

“Fine…”

“Funny, she didn’t look fine when she ran out the front door.”

My eyes fill with tears. “I don’t want to talk about it,” I tell her. I’ve lost two friends in one day.

My mother sits down beside me on the bed. “Well, if it’s not fine, it will be,” she says. “And when you’re ready to talk about it, I’m here.”

It feels good to have her arms around me, to pretend, for a little while, that what she’s saying is true. To believe that in the end, everything works out. She drops a kiss on the crown of my head. “I have an idea,” she says. “Why don’t we watch a movie?”

I look up at her. “Like old times?”

“I’ll make the popcorn,” my mother says. “You get The Little Mermaid.”

If I have any thoughts about why my mother would have a philosophical problem with me reading a fairy tale but be perfectly fine with me watching a Disney cartoon, they vanish in the anticipation of an evening spent believing that dreams can come true. “Okay,” I whisper, and she hugs me a little tighter.

When she leaves, I go to the bookshelf to retrieve the story. I plan to just quickly pop to page 43 so that I can tell Oliver my brilliant idea. But then I think of my mother, downstairs, of how hard she’s trying to make me happy. For right now, anyway, Oliver can wait.

I keep the Disney movies in a cardboard box in my closet, on the upper shelf. I can’t quite reach it, so I drag my laundry basket closer, overturn it, and use it as a foot-stool. Reaching up, I grab the edge of the box. But suddenly everything around me grows brighter and silvery, the way the world looks when it snows overnight. I find myself squinting against all this light, and then suddenly I am falling, tumbling head over heels through a big, wide wasteland of nothing.

I start to scream. I’m falling so fast that I can hear the wind in my ears, and my eyes are watering. It’s as if I’ve been pushed out of a speeding plane. I can dimly make out black shapes as I streak by them. Then I am abruptly yanked to a halt. My T-shirt has caught on a hook, and I find myself bobbing, the wool bunched up around my shoulders.

Except it’s not a hook. When I look around, I realize that I am hanging from a gigantic letter J.

Until the curl of the J snaps beneath my weight and sends me free-falling once again.

As I tumble, color begins to bleed into the space around me-faint at first, and then growing darker and more full of pigment, until I am sure I’m going to smack against the ground at any moment. I cover my face with my