Things I Can't Forget (Hundred Oaks #3)

Things I Can't Forget (Hundred Oaks #3) Page 3

And now he’s a literature major with a mess of dirty blond hair who could be a bicep model.

I say quietly, “I’d love to run again.”

“Again?”

“I used to play soccer. I fell and tore my ACL last fall.”

Matt winces and checks out my knee. I want to cover the long, thin scar.

“So you didn’t play again after that?”

“No. I did a lot of physical therapy this spring. Maybe I’ll be able to play intramural in college.” It’s a total long shot.

He asks, “Were you a good runner before?”

“Pretty good. I played center midfield.”

He looks impressed. “I’m sorry you got hurt.”

I clutch my sketchbook closer to my chest, trying to forget how much my injury had hurt. Physically and in my mind. I haven’t gone running since it happened, because I’m scared I might tear something again. I stick to the exercise bike now.

But I miss feeling my long black hair flopping against my back in the wind. My heart pounding and blood rushing through me as I sprint faster than anybody. I miss being part of a team where we spoke a common language: soccer.

Looking down at my scar, I say, “It happens, I guess.” But God didn’t have it happen to anyone else on my team.

I point at the restroom pavilion, indicating I need to use it. We walk over there to find that Parker and Will have snuck into the darkness behind the bathroom pavilion and he’s got her pressed up against the wooden wall. They are kissing fast and furiously and their hands are everywhere. I’m a little curious, because no boy has ever kissed me passionately like that, and I spend way too much time imagining what it would be like. Tingles rush up my spine and my face goes rosy, for spying, for being jealous.

“Geez,” I mutter.

Matt and I stare at Parker and Will, then move inside the pavilion filled with picnic tables.

“Guess they couldn’t hold out.” Matt chuckles softly. He’s okay with this? With Parker and Will getting all handsy at church camp? It reminds me of how uncomfortable I was in my high school cafeteria, where the football players made out with girls all the time, slipping their hands under shirts and skirts.

“Sometimes you just can’t wait,” Matt says.

“Oh?” I say with a tiny voice, wondering what kind of guy he is now.

“Yeah, like, a couple weeks ago? My mom sent me to pick my little sisters up from ballet, and on the way home, I saw this new restaurant called Just Tacos.”

“Just Tacos.”

He nods. “But it was weird. They had a lot more than just tacos there. They had fajitas and quesadillas and enchiladas. I told the waitress that a burrito isn’t a taco and she said, ‘It’s a big taco.’ I cried bollocks on that one.”

All this laughing feels good. “So what does Just Tacos have to do with kissing?”

“Besides the fact I absolutely love both?” he asks.

I nod. How many girls has he kissed since he pecked my lips that time? He was thirteen then, so probably a bunch.

“So I was driving home and I got really hungry for a taco. I took my little sisters inside and we totally pigged out, and when I got home, my mom was pissed because she had cooked a roast.”

“Because you just couldn’t help getting the taco?”

“Exactly.” He puts his hands in his shorts pockets and glances from the ground up to my face. The lantern light filling the pavilion really brings out the green flecks in his blue eyes. “It’s good to see you again, King Crab Kate.”

“It’s good to see you too, Miniature Poodle Matt.” We smile at each other some more. “You’ve changed a lot. You’re more confident.”

He blushes. “You’ve changed a lot too.”

I raise my eyebrows.

He looks me up and down, at my khaki shorts, tank top, and the cross charm hanging from my neck. His eyes move from my long black ponytail hanging over my shoulder to the freckles dotting my nose. My breath hitches in my throat.

He adds, “You’re a lot taller. I bet you can ride the big kid rides at the fair now.”

I playfully nudge his shoulder and take in his eyes again. I don’t want to look away.

He coughs lightly into a fist and points over his shoulder at the bathroom—I need to go too. I push open the screen door to find Andrea and Carlie chatting next to the sink. I decide to listen—subtly, I hope—before walking inside.

Carlie is drying her hands on a paper towel. “Matt seems happier this summer.”

Andrea fluffs her short blond hair. “He’s still not over it…”

Carlie throws the paper towel away, then uncaps her lip gloss. “I could’ve sworn he was checking you out when you first got here.”

“He told me he’s not interested in dating at all right now.”

“Ian asked me to share a bed in Dogwood. Thank God, it’s been months since I’ve gotten any.”

Andrea laughs, and my heart speeds up. It’s nothing new, but it always upsets me when I hear about other Christians doing it. Don’t they hear the same lessons as I do in Sunday School?

“I sooo want Matt,” Andrea says. “I haven’t fooled around in like, a year.”

I can’t listen anymore. I let the screen door slam behind me and walk into the bathroom. Andrea and Carlie shoot me looks before I push the stall door open and sit down. A beetle is crawling on the floor, so I edge my sneaker away from it.

What hasn’t Matt gotten over?

“I can’t believe that new girl was eavesdropping,” I hear Andrea say as the door slams shut.

When I come out of the bathroom, Andrea’s sitting on a picnic table, talking with Matt.

I bite down on both of my lips. I loved our conversation, and now he’s off talking to Andrea already. I tell myself he’s not the same boy I knew when I was eleven anymore. He’s twenty, a grown-up. A bicep model.

He’s not interested in dating anybody…?

He looks over at me and waves. I wave back and inch away toward Great Oak, passing by Parker and Will again. Now they are holding hands and talking quietly. If I’d gotten the chance to date Will Whitfield, would he have tried to put his hands all over me? I’m not that kind of girl.

But I didn’t think Emily was that kind of girl, either.

sketch #332

what happened on april 17

I sketch an outline of Emily’s figure, thin and hunched over.

That day, she had sat on her porch steps and buried her face in her palms.

“I have to do it,” she cried.

“You don’t,” I said. “I’m sure there are options.”

“I’m not giving up my scholarship.”

She’d gotten an offer to attend Belmont University’s prestigious music school in Nashville, where she would study violin. Her grandfather played violin too, and the first time he heard her play, he knew she’d go a lot further in life than he did. His claim to fame was playing the fiddle in front of crowds of three hundred at the Rutherford County Fair. Emily wanted more, and between junior and senior years, she’d played for the National Youth Philharmonic in Washington, D.C.

I fan my colored pencils out on Great Oak’s cedar deck. As I draw the scene, I add heavy mascara to Emily’s eyes, something she never wore before D.C. I smudge her cheeks, to show her tears and the stress she was under that day in April. I make her lip gloss glisten and make her tight yellow skirt cling to her legs. I draw myself looking confused. Eyebrows tilted down. Hands stuffed in my armpits.

Neither of us admitted it, but that summer had changed her. She had started using words we’d only heard in movies. She showed off more cleavage and went quiet during Sunday school. She didn’t participate anymore. With a voice full of wonder, she would say things like, “Do you think God really exists?” I told her, of course there is a God.

But I couldn’t understand why she was questioning that, and that made me think about my own beliefs. Church was all I had ever known, and Emily had come back from D.C., telling me most kids there didn’t believe or they belonged to some other religion that I knew nothing about, like Judaism and Islam. Why didn’t we learn anything about those religions in Sunday School? Why didn’t we have more than a few temples and mosques in Tennessee? The only thing I knew about either religion was what I had learned in history class: the Holocaust, 9/11.

I knew what I was supposed to believe: God is great. God loves me. I don’t want to go to Hell. I know some people wonder whether Heaven and Hell truly exist, but do those people question whether gravity exists? Or oxygen? You can’t see those with your naked eye, either. I can’t see cologne on a guy’s body, but I can smell it. I may not be able to see Heaven, but deep inside, I can feel it.

Anyway, Emily’s boyfriend of three years liked her physical changes a lot, and when the three of us would hang out together, Jacob and Emily disappeared upstairs into her bedroom more frequently. I figured they wanted to kiss in private.

Before she went to D.C., she’d once told me about how Jacob had gone up her shirt and unsnapped her bra.

“Emily, that’s wrong,” I had said.

“Prude,” she’d replied with a laugh.

Maybe I was a prude, but that’s how I wanted to be. We had been told to save ourselves for marriage. After that, she tried to talk to me about physical stuff she did with Jacob, but it always made me uncomfortable.

A small part of me was jealous. I wanted a guy to kiss me. To touch me.

But Mom sent me to Sunday School every week and she taught me to follow the Bible’s instructions (thou shall not steal, thou shall not lie), to do what our pastors say. And for good reason.

Like, my pastor told us not to drink. That made a lot of sense after James Macanley drove his truck into a backhoe and slashed his forehead open on the windshield. He had to get seventeen stitches. Sex before marriage isn’t smart because you can get pregnant or contract some nasty disease. Taking drugs is stupid. Why mess up your brain like that?

God’s laws just make sense. And like I said, before Emily went to D.C., I honestly never knew there were other options, other beliefs. It was like a part of my brain opened up to this whole new world. A world I didn’t understand.

Using my pink coloring pencil, I shade in Emily’s Converse, which she was staring down at.

That day on her porch in April, Emily wiped her eyes and said, “I want to play for the National Symphony. I can’t have a baby.”

In elementary school, my Barbies married Emily’s Ken dolls. In middle school, we shared deodorant after gym class. Freshman year, when Kristen Markum called me a Jesus Freak, Emily got in her face and told her to shut up. I loved Emily more than anything.

“Have you prayed about it?” I asked her.

“I need to do what’s best for me. I think God would want that.”

“I don’t know what He wants,” I replied, and bit my lip.

“I want to get an abortion,” she said so quietly I could barely hear her.

I dug the heels of my hands into my eyes to stanch my tears. If I were her, I would’ve married the father and had the baby.