The clouds that lingered low in the sky were gunmetal gray as I pushed open the library door, feeling the bitter chill of the late January air against my face and exposed arms, prickling my skin, as I quickly ambled down the concrete steps that led down to the sidewalk. My backpack was swung over my shoulder, laying heavily against my back, and my peacoat was draped over my arm because I was so frantic to get out of the library before I heard any more of what that detective on the computer screen had to say about Emily and Griffin and what about she had done that night or Aniston babbling out apologies while mentally making a note to remember to bring headphones next time she watches a news report about a local murder in the library. My backpack was unzipped, my notebooks were beginning to slip out, and I kept hearing the clanking of items-pencils, pens, tubes of Baby Lips-falling out of my opened backpack and colliding against the pavement of the sidewalk as I walked, briskly, home. I didn't care if I was basically leaving a trail of stationary and cosmetic items like breadcrumbs for someone to follow me. I felt tired of constantly picking up pieces, stuffing them into places they didn't belong, and pretending as if it wasn't getting harder and harder to keep going.
I felt my eyes beginning to burn as I continued to walk, feeling as the items in my backpack shifted around and began to slowly dangle over the edge of the opened zipper, and I felt another lump growing achingly in my throat as I swallowed. I was just so angry with her-angry that she had texted him that night and lured him with sexual advances, angry that she had stabbed him down there, angry that she held the door open for his elderly grandmother with a cane, angry that she had murdered him, angry that she had left me, angry that she decided one moment of revenge was greater than a lifetime with me.
And I was angry with myself-so angry-because I gave her a reason.
Crash. I felt it as all of my notebooks, my textbooks, my calculator, my phone, everything, just slumped to the side and rolled out of my backpack, colliding against the cracked sidewalk with a series of clanks and thuds, and my backpack, now finally free of everything weighing it down, slid off of my shoulder and dangled off of my elbow as if it were an oversized bracelet. One of my notebooks, with the purple cover, landed in a snowbank, the remainder of my pencils rolled off of the sidewalk and onto the side of the road, one falling eraser first into a drain, and my biology textbook was lying, open, face down on the pavement, over one of the elongated cracks that sort of looked like a snake if you squinted. I groaned, letting my backpack drop down from my elbow and onto my foot as I stared up at the gunmetal gray sky, lingering close and threatening with another snowfall. A burning tear glided down the side of my cheek, and I kicked my backpack off of my foot as I felt its warmth, its humiliation scalding my skin.
My sister was a murderer and here I was, crying, because my backpack spilled on the sidewalk in front of the library.
When I tilted my head away from the darkening sky, my eyes squeezed so tightly shut that I felt them boiling underneath my eyelids with pathetic, unshed tears, and a chilled breeze fluttered against my cheeks, rustling my strawberry blond hair that I shared with her, with a murderer, and I exhaled, my lips parting as I heard it. The sound of old shoes-Timberlands, actually-softly pounding against the concrete of the sidewalk in front of me, slowing once they noticed me, standing there, eyes closed and mouth faintly agape, with a backpack lying against a dirtied snowbank and stationary supplies scattered around me, as if my backpack had suddenly combusted all around me. I opened my eyes as I heard the muffled sound of him, clearing his throat, and I felt like I just knew it was him. Of course it was him. He was there the night of the Super Bowl after-party, standing on the porch without a coat on, shifting his weight from socked foot to socked foot, unsure of what to do, as I asked him to please not say anything, and he just nodded. He started to ask me if I was okay, if I wanted him to go get him, but I interrupted him before he could finish. So, of course after seeing me sobbing in front of the mailbox, my skirt wrinkled and my wrists raw, that he would see me now, crying because of my backpack spilling my notebooks everywhere.
"Clara," he said, the tone in his voice somewhat final but soft, and I heard the sound of his Timberlands ambling towards me as I slowly opened my eyes, embarrassed by how watery everything was to me, the lines of definition obscured and blurred, and there he was, Kolby Rutledge, again, in his black puffer jacket, a blue long-sleeved shirt underneath, and a pair of dark jeans, and his brunette hair was tousled, slightly, and he smelled like soap in the cold air. I could still see the comb tracks dividing his strands of hair. He bent down, a few feet away from me, and grabbed an eraser in the shape of a cartoon hedgehog. He glanced at it. "Did the zipper on your backpack break?" he asked, leaning down and grabbing a pencil whittled down to about three inches.
I shook my head, biting down on the inside of my lower lip as I looked down at the erasers, pencils, and books littered around my feet, and I shivered as another small gust of a breeze brushed against my bare arms, my coat still draped against my arm, the hem just barely touching the concrete ground. "No," I murmured, softly, as he bent down to grab a pencil, the corner of my government textbook, and another eraser, this one in the shape of a cartoon fox with a stupid smile. One of his ears was worn away after months of erasing mistakes. "I just . . . Aniston was in the library-" I watched as his eyebrows rose as he looked up from the cartoon fox eraser, his thumb touching the word-away ear-"she's writing an article for the paper . . . about Emily and him and. . . . you know. She was watching this video and this guy, the detective, I don't know, he was saying that she . . ." I stopped. He looked at me, head tilted, my school supplies in his hands, and I knew I didn't want him to know. I didn't want him to know about Griffin's last moments. "He was just saying things that I didn't already know so I left and I was hurrying and now my things are . . . a mess." I laughed, bitterly and quietly, giving a kick to the snowbank beside me. "Kind of like my life, huh?"
He used his pinkie finger to reach down and grab my backpack from the snowbank beside us, laying it against his shins, and slowly depositing my stationary supplies inside, wiping off a bit of murky, brownish sludge off of the corner of my government textbook, and said, placing my fox eraser at the bottom, "Messes can be picked up."
.
Kolby had swung my backpack-now refilled with my pencils, cartoon animal-themed erasers and textbooks, and he even managed to locate my yellow Baby Lips lying, vertically, in the snow near the steps of the library, and zipped-over his shoulder, grasping onto the sleek material of the strap with his fingers, and followed me home, pressing the buttons for crosswalks and giving the obligatory wave to drivers in rusted, old cars who let us pass. He didn't say anything to say, about my flushed cheeks or watering eyes, about Aniston and her stupid article about Emily and Griffin, about how this seemed to mimic exactly what happened nearly a year ago that morning after the Super Bowl. He just held onto my backpack, brought his hand up in short, polite waves, and pressed his thumb into cold, red buttons.
"Did you have anywhere you needed to be?" I asked after a moment of us just walking, together, with my backpack leaning against his back, fingers curled around the dark strap, and he had just lifted his hand in lieu of a thank you to a driver who stopped and let us amble across the street in front of a STOP sign. He glanced at me as he brought his hand down, stuffing it into the pocket of his puffer jacket, and he shook his head, a strand of dark brown hair falling over the top of his forehead. "You don't have to walk me home if you do. Or if you don't. I mean, if there's something else that you wanted to do, you don't have to stop to carry the sister of a murderer's backpack home."
He smiled, faintly, and I noticed how he glanced down at the concrete sidewalk, pale gray and dry, and it looked almost bashful. "I'm good," he told me, his voice quiet but final in the sort of way that made me bite down on my tongue and excuses to him leave. I watched, for a minute, as he looked down at the ground again, his Timberlands taking short steps as they hit the pavement, and I noticed that his fingers squeezed slightly around the strap of my backpack. "You get it."
"What?"
"You get it," he repeated, and he stopped, momentarily and abruptly, and then he shifted to face me, and there was this confidence lingering in the features of his countenance. Not the kind of confidence that used to linger on Griffin's or the kind of confidence that twinkled in Emily's green eyes when she first saw Wilson Westbrooke, playing basketball with our neighbors as she licked strawberry ice cream. But the kind of confidence that was soft and gentle and sure. "No one around here gets it. All my mom wants to do is talk about it and him and all my dad wants to do is take me out to hockey games and hope I forget all about it. But you," he said, his voice softening as he said it, pointing the index finger curled around my backpack strap at me, "you get it."
And then, for maybe the first time since Emily was arrested, for the first time since Griffin was murdered, for the first time since that night at that party after the Super Bowl, I felt myself actually smiling, and at Kolby Rutledge of all people. Because he got it. Because I got it. "My mom wants to forget all about it and my dad wants everyone to drop everything until we fix it. Like we possibly stand a chance."
His faint little smile grew just a little less faint. "See," he told me, tilting his head slightly, "you get it."
.
The Tomlins' home smelled of greasy pizza that stained the cardboard boxed that were stacked on the island in the center of the kitchen, Mrs. Tomlin's fruit bowl and ceramic jar of large spoons, ladles, and mashers were now on the counter, shoved the corner, with opened bags of potato chips, Doritos, and corn chips with little tubs of various flavors of Helluva dip, the lids tucked underneath the perspiring tubs. Somewhere, probably in the living room, I heard the distant sound of crowds cheering, loudly, and whistles being blown and announcers announcing numerous facts about football and players that I didn't really understand. Some of my neighbors were in the kitchen, lazily picking up slices of pizza and dropping it onto their Super Bowl-themed paper plates, a cartoon football obscured by strings of cheese, and a few kids that I'd occasionally see in their snowy yards, bubbled up and about two sizes larger than normal, building snowmen and singing Let it Go and throwing snowflakes around with their mitten-clad hands, were huddled around a shelf with a bunch of Blu-Ray DVDs stacked vertically. I heard one of the little girls, with an Olaf the snowman stuffed toy, asking Mrs. Tomlin if they had Frozen.
My father had already shed his coat and shoes, clapped one of my neighbors on the back, who was grabbing himself another slice of pizza and licking the grease from his thumb as my father passed, and then his socked feet thudded across the tiled kitchen floor, onto the carpeted floor of the hallway, and into the living room where the Super Bowl was starting. My mother had a veggie platter in her hands, sliced carrots and celery mostly, and she was moving aside some of the opened bags of chips to place it on the granite countertops. A potato chip spilled out from the bag and landed onto the floor. Behind her, the neighbor with another slice of pizza and a greasy thumb, began joking complaining about the vegetables, and Mom was laughing along, grabbing a baby carrot and tossing it onto his plate. Emily just waved to Mrs. Tomlin, who was trying to explain to the little girl that Frozen wasn't on DVD yet, and then headed downstairs to the basement where I assumed her friends were, painting their nails or playing Twister or something.
Emily had broken up with Wilson Westbrooke just before Christmas after a month and a half of trying to convince herself-and me-that Wilson was really just having a bad day, that Wilson would never hurt her again, that Wilson was so sorry about what had happened. But then, nine days before Emily was going to give him a basketball-a symbol of their love, she said, since she had caught the basketball that rolled along the road and handed it back to him, and an unhealthy relationship was born-Wilson grabbed her wrist really tightly. He didn't hit her and she insisted that he wasn't even really angry when he grabbed it, but he did and she broke up with him. My father pretended not to be thrilled that she was no longer dating the guy who wore oversized polo shorts and had way too long blond hair and wore sunglasses inside, and my mother was just so ready to talk about everything. Emily had never been upset over a break-up before, and Nora shielded her romances from my mother at all costs, so now it was finally her chance and she bought chocolate, chick flicks, and tissues the day after Emily announced, tearfully, that she and Wilson Westbrooke were done.
But she never told either one of them why they were.
They just thought that a combination of Wilson Westbrooke's greasy hair, slow speech, dirty fingernails, and the fact that he used to throw crushed beer cans at headstones in the cemetery ("I mean, it wasn't like it was just me. You know that girl who killed herself two years ago? Yeah, well, someone wrote, like, Annie's fine or something on the grave. If you ask me, that's disrespectful.") made her decide to break up with him.
I stood there for a moment as my mother chatted with Mrs. Tomlin and a few other neighbors, who I guess weren't really that interested in the Super Bowl, as they munched on potato chips and said, after almost every chip, that they should stop before they ballooned up and then laughed every time someone said a variation of "Who cares?!" I grabbed a paper plate a middle slice from the sheet pizza on the counter of the island, and as I reached for a red plastic cup for my soda, I quietly scanned the neighboring rooms for Griffin but I couldn't locate that head of curly black hair or broad shoulders edging out of a doorframe. I hadn't really seen or heard from Griffin since that day in October when he scribbled down half of his phone number onto my hand before I noticed Emily, in a black hoodie, standing outside the parlor. I had seen him at school and I had occasionally looked out the windows if I heard the sound of the wheels of their garbage cans rolling up the driveway or car doors slamming. I'd see him outside, shoveling the snow on the weekends or climbing into the backseat of his parents' car as they went out to a local Chinese restaurant called the Red Panda (which, inserted in with their menus, was a petition to save the red pandas) for their family dinners on Friday nights, the glue gleam of his phone against his features as his father pulled out of the driveway, off to eat eggrolls and save endangered pandas.
My fingers grasped around the squared bottom of one of the red plastic cups that were stacked, upside down, next to the small pile of greasy, crumpled, and empty pizza boxes that were gathering on the corner of the granite countertop of the island, and as I set it down, a hallow thunk emanating from it, I reached for one of the bottles of soda aligned together in front of the stovetop that was connected to the island-something my mom was secretly jealous of and would mention, spontaneously, whenever she was stirring pasta or frying eggs on our stovetop which was, unfortunately, attached to our oven rather than our counter-and my fingers curled around the white bottle cap when a tanned pair of hands, with uneven fingernails and a bruise blackening the nail on his pinkie finger, grabbed the center of the soda bottle, his large hand obscuring the Coca Cola logo, and that's when I smelled the scent of soap mixed with spearmint gum.
Griffin.
"Whoa there," he said, and I glanced up from the tanned hands with a bruised pinkie nail, holding the bottle of soda I was about to pour into my lonely plastic cup, and I saw him, standing in front of me, wearing a T-shirt with a football team logo I didn't recognize stamped over the chest and a pair of jeans with fraying holes in the pockets. He was grinning at me as he took the soda from me and curled one of his fingers, his index, around the rim of my cup and dragged it closer to him. His hair was faintly wet, as if he just had showered, and I noticed a faint cut on his cheek from shaving, and, as he uncapped the bottle of soda and started to pour it into my cup, the liquid frizzing and bubbling in between us, he said, "I haven't seen you in forever. You avoiding me?" There was a joking edge to his voice as he said this and placed down the bottle of soda and then grabbed my cup before I could and handed it to me, but it bothered me slightly that he would think that, especially since the only way I ever saw him now was by peering through the blinds in my window.
I shook my head, and extended my hand out for my cup of soda, and the tips of our fingers brushed together as I grasped onto the plastic. "No," I told him. I watched, quietly, as he reached forward to grab one of the plastic cups beside me, and I could feel the heat emanating from his body against my shoulder as his arm brushed against it and the scent of his shampoo grew stronger. "I've just been busy . . . you know, with musical stuff. Spring musicals and everything." I was lying, but I didn't want the first thing that I said to Griffin Tomlin in almost four months to be a complaint that he was the one who seemed to be avoiding me.
He smiled at this, glancing away from me for a moment to look down at his red plastic cup aa few inches away from the edge of the granite countertop of the island, and I heard the bubbles from the soda fizzling as he poured the brown beverage, a layer of tannish bubbles surfacing as he paused, waiting for them to settle, and then continued pouring a moment later. He placed the bottle of soda, now almost empty, back onto the countertop with the other bottles of soft drinks and a few Juicy Juice mixed berry juice boxes for the neighborhood kids, and I noticed that he left the white bottle cap off of the bottle as he grabbed his cup and took a slow slip. "Your hair is a little longer," he commented, lifting his index finger off of the surface of the cup to point to me, to my now little longer hair, and he smiled again, tilting his head. "I like it."
He liked it. I resisted the urge to touch the tips of my now proclaimed longer hair, strawberry blond-darker now than it was in October, when we last spoke and his phone remained, unfinished, on my palm, because the summer lightness had faded by now-and he liked it. And if he liked my hair, which only had a faint layer of hairspray holding it into place because I had sort of convinced myself that Griffin was probably going to be at a friend's house for the game tonight, then maybe that meant he liked me too. Maybe after almost six months of Cinderella whispers, backyard kisses, and unfinished phone numbers, that everything would fall into place. Phone numbers would be finished, second kisses would be had, and Griffin Tomlin would be with me.
So when he leaned in close, the corner of the island pressing into his waist as his breath emanated warm on the lobe of my ear, and whispered to me that fateful question, that question that turned my life into a series of befores and afters, that question that would cause his death in six months, I smiled and murmured the seal to everything, locking it all into place.
Yes.