Between Here and Forever

Or happy.

“I wasn’t sure—I thought maybe you wouldn’t come,” he says, and how can someone who looks like him sound unsure? How?

“I’m here,” I say, trying—and failing—not to stare.

I can’t help it, though. Eli looks like an idealized private-school guy, like a model dressed up in clothes for a brochure, a vision of what guys are supposed to look like but never do.

Standing there looking at him, the sunlight shining onto him and highlighting his hair, his eyes, his face, al of him—I have no idea why he wants me here. I know what the sunlight shows as it shines on me. I am too short, I am scrawny, I am as far from perfect as you can get.

“You ready to go?” he says, and I notice his hands are clenching and unclenching by his sides, fingers flexing like butterfly wings.

He isn’t perfect either, and I understand that. I know how it feels.

I put one hand on his arm. “Are you al right?”

It’s the first time I’ve asked anyone other than Tess or my parents or Claire if they’re okay in forever, and it staggers me.

But I have to ask. I want to make sure Eli is okay. I … I care about him.

“Just the usual,” he says. “I’m glad—I’m real y glad you came.”

My heart kick-thuds in my chest again and I know al the feelings I had on the way here weren’t nerves. It was never nerves. It was excitement.

Hope.

It’s him.

I let my hand linger on his arm, feel the warmth of his skin through his shirt, and say, “Me too.”

We walk toward what he tel s me is the cafeteria. It looks just like al the other fancy, old brick buildings, except there are slightly more windows, as wel as tables and chairs outside, and as we head in, I glance at him.

Now that I’ve gone and done it—touched him (even if it was only on his sleeve) and admitted to myself that I’m glad to be here, that I want to be here—I can admit something else too.

The “deal” I struck with him, the one that was about Tess—it hasn’t been about her for a while. I stil want her to wake up, but I don’t want her to fal for him. I don’t want him to fal for her.

I want him to fal for me.

It’s weird, but after being so careful for so long, after forcing myself to remember the pain of final y seeing that Jack didn’t love me and wasn’t ever going to, I’m not scared of how I feel.

I thought I would be, but the truth is I feel like—I feel like I did during those few heady weeks with Jack, when the world seemed like it had a place for me, not as Tess’s sister, but as just me, in it.

I’m not saying I want to run around hugging everyone or skipping through fields of flowers, but the hard knot of anger—the one that’s lived and breathed across and around my heart—has loosened.

And so my first glimpse of Eli’s classmates doesn’t make me want to find large rocks and hurl them at their heads, even though I see them eyeing me and writing me off, able to spot my cheap jeans and not-faded-on- purpose shirt for what they are, where they show I’m from.

Eli hasn’t written me off. Eli wants me here.

Although, once we’re in the cafeteria, he doesn’t real y look like he wants to be here. He doesn’t look upset, exactly, and his fingers aren’t twitching, but he looks—he looks like he’s holding everything inside himself very stil . Like he’s wil ing himself to be calm.

The problem is, it shows. I can see it, in how the fluid grace of his walk is slowed down, stiffened, and in how he keeps looking around. Like he can stop his fingers, but he keeps expecting people to see him doing something they don’t want to see anyway.

And then I notice something else. No one talks to him. We’ve passed by at least twenty guys in their white shirts and khaki pants and acne constel ations ranging from a few stars to entire galaxies, and no one has said anything.

Even I get “Hey,” at school from people I see in my classes, girls who used to cal me “friend” and hang around the house, hoping to talk to Tess until before she went off to col ege and I drew into myself.

Eli gets nothing, and as we wait in line for food that looks better than anything I’ve ever seen in Ferrisvil e High’s cafeteria or, frankly, anywhere, I notice that everyone acts as if he isn’t even there.

We get our food—and we don’t even have to pay, I guess it’s part of the tuition—and walk back into the main part of the cafeteria.

It’s gorgeous, al windows and light and I think there’s even soothing music piped in. It’s like a museum or something—at least until you see that everyone is eating normal y, the guys furiously shoveling in food just like they do in my school.

It’s not that I was feeling like I didn’t belong, exactly, but a reminder that guys are guys, even if you give them tablecloths, is a pretty welcome one.

I wait for Eli to make a move to sit down somewhere, but he’s just standing there, holding his plate so tightly his fingertips are white with strain, the tips tapping against the bottom over and over.

“Excuse me,” a guy says, al sneer, and shoves past me, heading toward a table.

“You might as wel leave,” he says to Eli as he passes him. “Last thing anyone wants to see is you doing your