That first night we talked for an hour, until the last cal for the ferry came, the lone whistle from the dock echoing into the night.
Granted, al we’d talked about was Tess, but I’d talked to him, and I floated home, happier than I’d ever been.
I had no luck with guys. Not that there were any in Ferrisvil e to even want luck with. Oh, there were a few who were cute, but I knew al their fathers and brothers and cousins, and I knew what happened to guys in Ferrisvil e. They grew up and got a job in the plant. They grew up and grew bel ies and lost their hair and sat around scratching their stomachs on the beach in the summer, slowly turning red in the sun.
I wanted more than that.
As for friends, back then I had those. Everyone in school said hel o and invited me to their parties and al that stuff. But I had nothing in common with them, and most of my “friends” just wanted to be near Tess, wanted her to notice them and invite them into her world. There were a few that maybe did like me, but they weren’t like me.
I wanted to get out of Ferrisvil e, and they didn’t. They might go off to the community col ege, or even the state col ege an hour away, but they would come back. No one in their families had ever left town for good, so why would they? People came to Ferrisvil e and stayed. It might be smal , and life might be slow-paced and smal too, but nobody but me seemed to mind that.
“Stuck-up,” my so-cal ed “friends” said about me when I stopped talking to them that summer. I guess they thought I believed I was too good to talk to them, that I thought I was going to somehow become Tess.
I didn’t think I was too good for them, and I knew I wasn’t going to be Tess. I didn’t want to be. I just wanted a world that was me and Jack and nothing more. I wanted him to be mine and, for a while, I thought he could.
And then, after it was over, I didn’t want to go crawling back to my “friends.” I didn’t want to ask for forgiveness, didn’t want to beg to be let back into something I didn’t real y want any part of. I didn’t want to live in Milford, but I didn’t want to live in Ferrisvil e either. I didn’t want to hear about boys or clothes or parties or anything. I just wanted to be left alone. And so I was.
And so I am.
But that’s now, and I stil had to get to that point.
I stil had to break my own heart.
In the end, it was easy. Jack kept talking to Tess, kept walking her home. He was volunteering to col ect water samples from the Ferrisvil e side of the river as part of some project the state was doing to see if the water was less ful of chemicals than it had been. And I kept talking to him.
He tried to talk to Tess about poetry, and I talked to him about biology, about the latest medical trends, about countries that needed doctors. He asked Tess out to dinner, and when she said no I made him sandwiches that we’d split as we sat in the dark on the beach, talking.
We talked about Tess less after a while, and talked more about him. About me. He was—and wil always be— the only guy I ever told the truth about how I sometimes felt when Tess was with me. About how I hated being her shadow.
“You shouldn’t think like that,” he said to me one night. We were down on the beach, like always, and he pushed his glasses up his nose and turned to look at me, moonlight gilding his hair to a shade that was a richer blond than Tess’s could ever be.
“You’re not like Tess at al , so why compare yourself? She’s beautiful on the outside, but you—you have the …” He cleared his throat. “You have the most beautiful soul. I know that sounds stupid, but it’s true. Any guy would be lucky to be with you.”
How could I not kiss him after he said that?
So I did, and he kissed me back. He dropped the rest of his sandwich, and when we separated he stared at me like he’d never seen me before.
“Abby,” he said, and the ferry whistle blew.
“I see what Tess doesn’t,” I said. “I see you, Jack. And I think you’re amazing. Meet me here tomorrow night. Just—just you and me.”
“Amazing?” he said. “Me?” He sounded so surprised I had to kiss him again.
And the next night, he took the ferry over earlier, and I slipped out of the house after dinner and met him down on the beach.
My parents didn’t ask where I was going or what I was doing. They never worried about me. Tess was the one who got phone cal s al the time, who had guys get into fights over her—including a memorable one during my parents’ company picnic—and who used to come home way past her curfew, mutely shaking her head when my parents demanded to know where she’d been.
The parties had stopped when she’d quit hanging out with Claire, replaced with her tel ing us over and over that she had to get into a good school and always fol owed by long, frequent bouts of sitting in silence in her room. But the guys stil cal ed, and people stil wanted to see her. My father would sometimes joke that it felt like we were al part of “Tess’s Messenger Service.”
So, no, Mom and Dad didn’t worry about me. I was free, free in a way I took for granted. I was free to do what I wanted, to fol ow my heart.
Free to be an idiot.
And I was one.
The worst part is that I can’t blame Jack. He never lied to me. When he showed up that first night to see me and not Tess, he told me he liked me, but that he stil had feelings for Tess.
“I just—I think that if she got to know me, she’d like me,” he said. “I know that probably sounds dumb, and obviously I like you too since I’m here, but I’m—argh! This al sounded much less stupid in my head.”
“But she doesn’t want—” I said, and then bit my lip when I saw his shoulders slump. “She doesn’t get you. I do.
