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IT WAS CHRISTMAS EVE, AND I’D ALREADY GOTTEN my first present: I could take off my sweatshirt and squint in the sunlight. I was standing at the arrivals loop at Jacksonville International Airport. Any moment now, my dad would be rounding into sight in my mom’s robin’s-egg-blue convertible, and I could feel like I was at home again. I could try to forget everything that had happened at Manderley, and pretend—like I had to—that everything was great.
My bag was weighing on my shoulder, the guy next to me was blowing cigarette smoke so directly in my face that it felt intentional, and it still was a little too cold to be in only jeans and a tank top, but I didn’t care. I didn’t notice any of that. All I could do was snap my gum anxiously, until I finally saw the car.
There was Dad, and there was Jasper.
A grin stretched across my face as I pulled open the door. “Hi!” I waved to my dad. “Oh, Jasper!” He jumped on me, his tail wagging so hard it shook the rest of his body.
I threw my bag and Jasper into the backseat and took a deep breath as I put on my seat belt. I was still smiling like a fool.
“Hey, honey,” my dad said, giving me a hug and a kiss on the cheek.
“Hi! Oh, my God, I’m so happy to be home.”
“How do you like it? You glad you went up there?”
I nodded and considered how I was going to make it seem like I was in any way glad I’d left Florida for New Hampshire. But before I had to decide how to do that, Dad started to drive and then had to slam on the brakes as someone nearly lurched into us.
“Come on!” My dad laid on the horn. “Sorry, honey. Right. Well, I’m glad you like it up there. You wish you’d done all four years there?”
“Nah.”
“And you’re here for what, a week?”
“I have to go back January second.”
“That’s all they give ya? Doesn’t feel like long enough.”
“I know.”
I was soon distracted from the conversation as we drove over the familiar bridge and I could feel the crispy, almost wet breeze on my face. I leaned back and closed my eyes. The sun was hot on my eyelids, but the wind whipping around the convertible was cold. I’d never been more comfortable.
My dad turned up the Eagles on the radio, and Jasper panted in the seat behind me, possibly the only one who understood how incredibly refreshing this car ride was.
An hour later I was sitting at the counter eating my mom’s steaming hot popovers, smeared with butter and raspberry jelly, and sacrificing little bits to Jasper at my feet.
“So tell me all about it,” my mother said as she leaned on the counter across from me, some flour in her hair. She’d been baking all afternoon, which was clear from the dining room filled with every type of Christmas cookie and four loaves of bread.
I shuddered. I couldn’t tell my mom anything.
“What do you want to know?”
“Well, I already know they aren’t feeding you enough.” She looked at my arms and gave them a squeeze. “Look at that, no healthy fat on your little bones. You’re too skinny, mon petite chou!”
“The food is just kind of … prisonlike. It’s not a big deal, I still eat.”
“Uh-huh.” She moved a piece of hair from her eye, putting more flour in it. “I’ll send you care packages. I hadn’t thought of it—I’d assumed the food would be five-star!”
Ha. “Not quite.”
“Okay, so what about your friends? Do you like any boys? You would tell me if you had a boyfriend, no?”
I felt myself blush, and I wished I hadn’t. It wasn’t the normal, coy kind of blushing. My face was hot because I was filled with guilt and resentment. Max and I hadn’t spoken at all since I said … what I said to Dana … and everyone else within earshot.
“Ooh!” she shrilled. “Tell me!”
“I kind of … there’s a guy I’m sort of talking to …”
“What’s his name?”
“Max Holloway.”
“What’s he look like—do you have any pictures?”
I didn’t want to show her his Facebook. It was riddled with pictures of Her. That she’d tagged. In her albums.
“No, I don’t. But he’s really, really cute. You’d like him. He’s the type of guy you always say are a-dor-ah-bleh.” I imitated her accent.
“He is dark-haired? Is he tall?”
I smiled. “Yes, he is. Light blue eyes. His hair comes down about to his eyebrows, and he’s got a really straight nose.” I was caught in a stare and came to, only to find my mother looking smugly at me.
“You like him a lot. I can tell.”
“I mean … it’s complicated.”
“Why isn’t he your boyfriend? He likes you, surely.” She looked as though she was ready to turn on him.
“He has a girlfriend.”
It was the easiest answer that had any truth to it. I didn’t know why, but I didn’t want to tell her about Becca. Maybe the reason was that I would never get sympathy from an outsider for being jealous of a girl who had gone missing. But my mom nodded in understanding and turned around to pull out yet another baking sheet. I slipped another bite to Jasper. A second later, I heard the front door open, and looked up to see my best friend.
“Leah!” I screeched as she walked into the kitchen. I practically leaped on her as if we’d been separated by a century instead of only a few hundred miles.
She squeezed me back. “I’m so happy to see you! Michael came, too, he’s outside talking to his mom.”
Small drop in my stomach.
“Michael?”
“Yeah … we’re back together.”
My jaw dropped. “Are you serious?” My smile ebbed a little. “But you texted me like a week ago and said—”
“We’re working through it. Plus he’s the best kisser ever.”
My little sister screamed with delight.
“Oh, sorry,” Leah said to my mother, and slapped her hand over her mouth.
“That’s fine, that’s fine,” my mom said, and smiled down at the onion she was chopping.
I loved that we were getting ready for dinner and the sun still hadn’t set. It was really, really good to be home. But something was different. It was still my house, but suddenly I felt like a guest. A welcome guest, for sure, but definitely a guest.
The house was the same, something that thrilled me and simultaneously seemed inexplicably strange. I’d only been gone a few months, but it felt weird that everything had just carried on without me. My house was my memory, something I’d always be able to conjure up, even when I was ancient and couldn’t recognize the back of my hand. But when I wasn’t there, it still existed. The doors still slapped and thudded open and shut, flies were still smacked on the outside porch, the fridge still emptied and filled, and my bed was never surprised that I didn’t come back.
All without my mind and me holding it together.
Michael, who had a mop of curly brown hair and teeth that looked almost too straight, walked into my kitchen and greeted my parents, and then smiled at me.
“‘Ey, girl!” He wrapped his arms around me and shook me. “I’ve missed you!”
“Michael!” I feigned excitement. Michael and I had never really gotten along. That’s what happens when you make my best friend cry hundreds of times. It really irritated me that she’d brought him to my house on Christmas Eve. But if she hadn’t, I felt kind of certain she would have just not come. I always tried to rationalize this trait of hers.
Whatever it was that had changed in me lately had no patience for it.
He put his arm around her, and she held his hand. Leah cooed as he kissed her on the tip of the nose.
Yuck.
“Hey, so you’re at Manderley Academy, right?” Michael said, adjusting his attention to me.
“Yeah, it’s in—”
“I know where it is,” he interrupted in that … way of his. “Didn’t some girl go missing from there?”
I felt shaken as my two worlds collided. My mom turned. “Missing? What happened? Did you know her?” She looked at me.
“N-no.”
“Yeah, she was hot in those missing photos, too. If she had a boyfriend, I bet he’s pissed he didn’t hang on to her.”
Leah thudded him in the chest. “Mikey, shut up. She’s missing, it seems wrong to talk about her like that.”
“Hang on to her?” I repeated his words. “She’s missing, she’s not flitting around the world with some other guy.”
I couldn’t believe I was defending her. But somehow, she felt like mine to think bad things about. Certainly not Michael’s.
“Whatever, I’m just saying she’s hot. She’s been missing since the end of last year. I read it online somewhere. She’s probably dead.”
“Oh, my God,” Leah said, ignoring Michael’s more ominous prediction, “that’s just so incredibly General Hospital.”
“She’s got some friend, Diana or something—”
“Dana,” I corrected, automatically.
“Yeah, Dana—she was hot, too—said that she didn’t know where the girl was but she was sure she was still out there. She’s all over interviews online.”
I felt light-headed. It was too strange to hear my best friend’s annoying douche of a boyfriend talking about Becca and Dana.
“That’s so weird. Is everyone freaking out at your school, then?” Leah’s eyes were wide.
I nodded. “Yeah, everyone’s really worried.”
“That’s just awful. That poor girl.” My mom clucked her tongue and started moving the cookies from the tray to a cooling rack. “I hope they find her. Her poor friends, they must be so worried! Oh, and if she did have a boyfriend … that must be just the worst kind of worry—Oh! The corn bread! I’d nearly forgotten it.”
I wanted to press the reset button, and make it so Michael had never come. It would have made things infinitely better for a thousand reasons, but right now his little bit of online stalker info was making me feel nauseous.
“Look!” Lily ran over to me and presented me with the drawing she’d had her nose to for at least ten minutes.
I crouched down to her level, thankful for a change in subject. “What have we got here?”
It was the most tactful way of asking an easily offended child like Lily what on earth she’d been trying to depict with the four free crayons she’d smuggled out of Harry’s Restaurant and Pub.
“Jasper,” she said, pointing to the thickly drawn figure that took up a third of the page. He looked like a horse. “And that’s me.” She pointed to a squat little girl with a crown on her head. “That’s the house, and that’s Mommy and Daddy.”
“Where am I?”
She stretched her mouth out to either side and looked guilty. “Um …” She ran into the other room with a red crayon, and came back a moment later with a stick figure drawn in on the backside of the sheet. “You were just here on the other side. Because you’re not here anymore.”
Ouch.
I smiled, feeling as separated from my old life as the little crayon me, and put an arm around her. “That is an excellent drawing. It should definitely go on the fridge.”
I pinned it up with a magnet and all the other drawings.
An hour and a half later we had finished eating my mom’s best Christmas Eve food (chili, corn bread and—less happily—green beans) and were watching It’s a Wonderful Life. We watched it every year. Even Lily could be heard whispering some of the lines to herself in her small falsetto voice as she played with toys by the Christmas tree.
The sun had finally set, and there was a slight chill wrapping the blanket around my feet. Jasper was curled up next to me, breathing quietly. Michael and Leah were sitting next to me on the sectional sofa, holding hands and whispering things to each other too often and stifling giggles. My parents were in their respective chairs. My dad was falling asleep, as he almost always did during movies, and my mom was sipping on her warm—and spiked—apple cider.
I thought about Michael and Leah. Just about anyone who didn’t know the intricacies of their roller-coaster romance might look at them now and think they were in love. Maybe that’s what it had been for Becca and Max. Maybe they weren’t as in love as everyone thought they were. Maybe they weren’t blissful and bound for a lifetime of happiness. Maybe everyone had been wrong. The thought lifted my heavy heart for a second before it fell again.
Because what if I was wrong? Maybe Michael and Leah were what love was. They always came back to each other, no matter how bad they were for one another. They chose to forget the wrongs of before and stay together. It was their choice. There must be some reason they got back together and stayed with each other through thick and thin.
Was that love, or were they just emotionally destroying each other? My phone buzzed on the cushion under me. It was a text from Max.
Watching It’s a Wonderful Life … you said you watch that every Christmas, too, right?
I clicked off my phone’s screen, feeling an unexpected urge to cry. It was stupid, and I knew it. But suddenly I felt the weight of realizing that no one had ever felt that way about me. No one had ever not been able to stay away from me. Whether Michael and Leah were true love personified or not, they always came back to each other. And even if Max hadn’t loved Becca like everyone said, then it made no difference. Something had kept him magnetized to her. Something, it was to be assumed, other than her beauty and charm.
Michael and Leah whispered things to each other, not meant for anyone else to hear. Suddenly I couldn’t help but imagine Max and Becca sitting next to me instead of them.
Jasper jerked in his sleep, bringing me back into the room and its reality. I looked back at the screen. It was the part where Jimmy Stewart is sitting at the bar, and the weight of his entire life seems to fall on his shoulders.
I texted Max back.
Yeah, I’m watching it now. I miss—
I backspaced over the last two words, shaking my head and feeling embarrassed for myself, and pressed Send.
