“It will make your days feel normal, and you’re so good at it. I mean, not as good as me, but . . .” I let the quiet slip in, sensing that she doesn’t want any jokes. She wants the truth.
“It’s what Addy wants,” I say, getting to the only thing that matters. It’s been three weeks, a timeline that feels too short to do something other than sit and hope and pray.
“You mean would want,” she answers in a quiet voice that works hard not to break. Her eyes flit to mine then back to the sky behind me.
“No, I meant what I said. No matter what, that’s what Addy wants.” My words are heavy with meaning, and they earn me a long stare into Eleanor’s eyes as she turns to understand me better. I swallow and shake my head, never once letting my eyes shift from hers. “You can’t think that way. Addy is. No matter what. And always.”
I’m trying to both encourage hope but also edge it with hard truths, that this story—her family’s tragedy—might get worse before it gets better. Morgan wasn’t wrong last night. It’s been three weeks. Their one solid lead disappeared with few clues. The odds of finding Addy are growing grimmer by the hour. And finding her alive may no longer be the only mission. It doesn’t change the way Addy lives inside her sister’s heart, though; I’m learning that slowly. My dad is more alive inside my chest now than he was the year before he passed. It’s about knowing someone.
“Will you come to the games? There are only two left, and then competition. So I have someone there for me, to see me? My family…they just can’t yet.” Her plea breaks my heart and I can’t help the way it pulls my eyes down with a tender sorrow.
“It would be an honor.” A strange electricity builds between us during the silence this time, and I’m not sure whether it’s because of a real connection or because I want there to be one. Eleanor is the first to look away with a glance to the side, the sky’s colors reflecting in her golden lashes and off her soft skin. She’s orange and pink, like a work of art—God’s colors brushed on her face.
“Oh, it’s show time,” she says, and I think partly to change the subject and break up the intensity blanketing us.
I lean back on my elbows and turn my face to the sun just as it dives behind the rooftops and trees in the distance. Eleanor moves closer, her shoulder leaning against mine, but her body is turned to face behind me. I shake with a quiet laugh, assuming she’s joking, but the longer she sits backward, the more I realize she’s watching an entirely different wonder happen behind me.
“You waiting on the moon or somethin’?” I joke.
“I always watch the sunset from the other side. Sky looks like candy this way.” She grins and goes back to watching the magic happen as pinks dip into purple and oranges become red. I watch it all happen in her expression—in her eyes and in the way the light hits her face. I stare at her more than I look at the sun dropping before me, because of all the things she could have said, she found a very intimate line of poetry to reference.
I hear you, Dad. And you are right. The sky does look like candy, and this girl is incredibly special.
Sixteen
I wasn’t sure she would actually go through with it. Sunday, when we hung out in the garage with Jake and Gemma, I got the sense that Eleanor was waffling on her decision to come back to school. Her car was still parked in front of her house when Jake picked me up Monday morning, and we were running late. Jake is always running late, which makes me always running late by default.
But then it was our lunch hour, and I was getting ready to hide in my favorite window seat with my final reading for the semester—King Lear. Gemma approached me, her arm looped through Eleanor’s as if it were just another Monday and nothing had ever changed at all.
I gave in and joined them for off-campus lunch. Like I told Eleanor, even things I hate doing I will do when there is some reason for me to want to. Monday’s car ride of death was a must for me because Eleanor was going. Not only did I want to protect her from Jake’s crash-and-burn style on the road, but I didn’t want anyone else letting her sit on their lap.
I took the same seat as last time, and instead of Gemma on my thighs, it was Eleanor. It was the first time I’ve held her like that without it being to console her. It was greedy, but I have thought about that five-minute ride for the entire week. It might have been the only time I’ve been in a car with Jake driving when his lack of attention to the road was the last thing on my mind.
My Tuesday lunch was taken up with a dental appointment (thanks, Mom) and I decided to let Eleanor have her time with Gemma the rest of the week. Things almost felt normal, as if she never left the hallways of Oak Forest High at all. Only, in this version of my senior year, Eleanor talks to me in the hallways and I don’t run and hide.
Tonight, though, will be a different test.
For us.
For her.
As shitty as our high school football team is, there is still a strange hierarchy that accompanies the Friday night games. There’s an unspoken structure to where people
