“exemplified leadership potential.” She got a summer job over in Milford, as a checkout clerk for al the overpriced food at the Organic Gourmet market. (Milford doesn’t have things like supermarkets, you see. Just “markets” and “boutiques.” Ugh.)
My parents didn’t understand—didn’t she want to see her friends, didn’t she want to have fun, didn’t she know col ege was taken care of?—but she said she wanted to work. She said she was going to save money for books and other things her scholarship didn’t cover.
To be honest, I think she got a job because Claire lived so close to us and because Claire had stopped hiding in her house. Instead, she was starting to walk around her yard, walk around town, showing off Cole and smiling like she’d glimpsed something amazing no one else ever had. I think that was when Tess realized Claire was never going to issue whatever sort of apology Tess was waiting for.
So Tess went to work, and Jack came into Organic Gourmet on Wednesday, June 30th.
I sometimes wonder if I’l always remember that date, and how I felt when I looked up from the book I was reading on the front porch when I heard Tess turn onto our street and saw him walking behind her, shoulders hunched like he was nervous.
And he was. I could tel as soon as I saw him. Jack was cute; tal with sandy hair and wire-rimmed glasses that he was forever shoving up his nose. He had freckles on his cheeks, a broad, quick scattering, and on that first night, as he stood talking to Tess by the steps, I could see the pale underside of his arms sticking out from the T- shirt he wore.
His arms weren’t stick-thin or anything, just pale, but the sight of that skin … it looked vulnerable, somehow. And that got to me.
He got to me.
He looked nervous. He looked like he needed a hug. And I wanted to be the one to hug him. When I looked at him, he looked like how I felt, unsure but eager, ready to fal in love.
The problem was, of course, that his look was aimed at Tess and not me.
Tess was too nice—and too used to adoration—to blow him off, so she let him fol ow her home. Let him talk to her. And so she—and me, because I would sit on the porch and listen to them talk—learned he was going to col ege to study biology. He wanted to be a doctor, wanted to join a volunteer organization and work overseas. He wanted to help people who wouldn’t be helped otherwise. He wanted to be someone.
He never said that he wanted to matter, of course, but I understood how he felt when he talked to Tess about his plans. I didn’t want to save the world or anything like that, but I wanted to live and work somewhere where people noticed me. Where I wasn’t only “Tess’s sister.” Where I wasn’t a smal er, uglier version of perfection. Where I was just me.
Jack was glad to be done with Saint Andrew’s, because he wanted to go to a school where he didn’t know everyone, and he hadn’t had a girlfriend since the girl he’d been seeing on and off for a few years dumped him right after her school’s final formal (Milford schools never had proms, only formals) and then went off to backpack around Europe until she left for col ege.
Tess never knew any of that stuff. But I did. I asked questions, and he answered them.
That came later, though. First, I had to see him with Tess. I’d wait and watch him walk her home every night, watch him listening to her talk until she’d smile and wave and walk away in this way only she had, a way that left him and everyone smiling and glad to be seen by her. A way that somehow made sure they never noticed that she’d left them.
After about a week of this, though, she’d told him good night and gone inside and he’d stood at the end of our little driveway, shoulders slumped again, like he’d final y understood what her smiles and waves real y meant. That they were nothing.
His shorts were a little too big for him, and hung down a little past his knees. The skin under his arms, from his wrists up to the wide-open sleeves of his T-shirt, glowed pale in the moonlight, and when he turned to walk to the ferry I knew he wasn’t coming back.
I don’t know how I knew—maybe the slump of his shoulders matched how I felt, invisible—but I did. I slipped away from the house and caught up to him.
“I’m Tess’s sister,” I told him. “Abby.”
“I know,” he said. “She’s told me about you. I don’t think you look like an elf, though.”
“An elf?” Tess was always describing me that way, and I think, in her mind, she was being kind. But did I real y look like a magical creature? Of course not. However, since I was short, and had my grandmother’s unusual y colored eyes—wel , describing me as “elf-like,” was, for Tess, pretty nice. She always liked the idea of magical things. Of pretend.
“No, that’s not what she said,” he said. “I mean, she said—”
“It’s okay,” I said. “She thinks she’s being nice when she says it. And I bet she told you that you look like an elf too.”
He grinned at me even as his shoulder slumped a little more. “She doesn’t date elves, right?”
“She doesn’t real y date,” I said. “She’s—I think she has this perfect guy in mind or something, and he’s not— wel , who’s perfect?”
“She’s just so … it’s like there’s something secret about her,” he said. “Something sad, I think.”
Tess was about as sad as any extremely popular and beautiful girl could be, which was, of course, not very, but I didn’t say that. I liked that he thought there was depth to Tess.
I thought if he could imagine it in her, he would see it was truly in me.
“I can help you with her,” I said. “Like I said, I know the kind of guy she’s looking for. Do you like poetry?”
He shook his head.
“Wel ,” I said. “You do now.”
