I had run the several blocks home. I had packed a duffel bag with the essentials, and what I had saved from my allowance. I ran to the nearest taxi point, and the driver drove to the train station in Columbia. I bought the first ticket out of town. The train left ten minutes later and took me to Charleston, West Virginia. From there, I took another train to Cleveland, Ohio.
“And that’s how you ended up in Cleveland.” It wasn’t a question.
“Yup.”
“By the time I got to my grandma’s house, my mother had already called her in a panic, saying I was missing. She had been expecting me. During the first month, she tried talking to me about forgiving my father, or at least talking to him, about going home to my family. When I threatened to leave and disappear from her life too, she stopped. She accepted me and my conditions: I wouldn’t talk about my family; I wouldn’t talk to my family.”
“Shit, this is … I’m sorry, Jess. Now I know why you haven’t gone back to Lexington in four years. Gosh. How are you holding up?”
I let out a half-chuckle, half-snort. “I’ve been better.”
“I bet. Hm, you mentioned running into Caryn. That probably didn’t help.”
“No, it didn’t. It was this afternoon.” I retold her the events of the entire afternoon, including Noah’s unwelcomed flirting, Caryn’s encounter, and then Ryan escorting me away from her.
“Well, I guess you knew you would run into your past.”
“I honestly thought I could hide from it.” I let out a deep breath. “Apparently, Ryan went through something after I left. I asked my brother about it, but he says I should ask Ryan.”
“Like finding some closure.”
A sarcastic chuckle escaped my lips. “That’s what my friends here say.”
“See? All of us can’t be wrong.” She paused. “You need to talk to him.”
“As if that was easy.”
“Nobody said it would be easy. It won’t. But if you want peace, while you’re there and while you’re here, you need closure. He probably needs it too.”
I snorted. “Right.”
“Why not?”
“I told you everything that happened, Kristin. You know he was playing with me. I was just another notch on his bedpost.”
“Maybe, maybe not. You’ll only know after you talk to him.”
Could it be? No, no. I didn’t want to go down that path again. My heart was shielded from him, and it would remain that way. If I were going to talk to him, it wouldn’t be to find out if I had meant something or not. It would be to get closure, to put some dots on the Is and move on.
But could I do it? Could I go after him and talk to him? My initiative? I seriously doubted it.
“You need to talk to him, Jess, and hopefully then you’ll have less weight on your shoulders.”
I was about to answer her with something like ‘I’ll think about it,’ even though I didn’t really mean it, but then I looked down at the sketchpad in my lap and gasped. Without realizing it, I had drawn the Main Square. More specifically, the exact spot where Ryan and I first kissed. The exact spot where I had last seen him before I left.
Chapter Twelve
Jessica
“She never changed,” Sophie said, picking up the pillows from my bed.
Rachel tsked. “Oh, she did. She changed for the worse.”
After hearing about my encounter with Caryn, the girls decided it was time for the tree house slumber party. We arranged everything for Thursday night.
In my PJs, I felt like a kid ready to sneak cookies from the hidden cookie jar in the middle of the night.
“I would love if we changed subjects,” I said.
“Oh, come on!” Rachel made a puppy face. “It’s good to talk about bitches. It makes us feel better, in spirit and as a person.”
We laughed.
I grabbed the quilts from my bed. “Okay, but then let’s talk about another bitch.”
“Not fun,” Sophie said, following Rachel and me downstairs. “She’s a good bitch to rant about.”
“Oh, you don’t know,” Rachel said. “We aren’t sure if it’s true, but we heard Caryn is a call girl around the Columbia and Charlotte area.”
I almost tripped on the stairs and fell. “What?”
Rachel grabbed my arm to steady me. “Yeah, we first heard about that a year ago.”
“See, she’s a good bitch to talk shit about,” Sophie said.
“Seriously, girls, I’m done with her.” I hoped they actually changed subjects, because I wasn’t talking about Caryn anymore.
“You girls ready?” Mama asked from the kitchen. She propped the back door open for us. “I’ll bring some ice cream in a minute.”
Rachel paused beside her and kissed her cheek. “You’re the best, Mrs. Hayes.”
Mama chuckled as we passed her and walked out into the balmy night.
I stared at the tree. I had cleaned it, sort of, the previous weekend, but still wasn’t happy about the prospect of sleeping there. What if the wood was rotten on the inside and didn’t support our weight?
Sophie was the first to climb up the wood planks nailed to the tree trunk. I handed her the lamp, the quilts, and the pillows, then climbed up next. Rachel was about to come up when Mama appeared with a tray and three bowls spilling with so much ice cream and hot fudge.
She took the tray and kissed Mama again. “I mean it. The best.”
“Thanks, Mama,” I whispered, peering down.
“Thanks, Mrs. Hayes,” Sophie said from somewhere inside the tree house.
With a smile, Mama nodded and walked back inside the house.
Rachel extended the tray to me and, reaching down, I grabbed it, then she climbed up.
“Got it,” Sophie squealed as the first lamp began shinning.
She turned to the other as Rachel set the tray on the floor, and I examined the place.
It was tiny, too tiny with the three of us. I could barely stand without hitting my head on the ceiling, and the floor creaked whenever one of us moved. The furniture and the drapes that covered the two windows were gone. Sophie spread the quilts on the floor, and I realized we would fit there if we all slept closed together, probably touching. This wouldn’t be a good night for sleep.
Well, if I left it to the girls, we wouldn’t be sleeping, only talking the entire night.
We sat down on the floor, the tray among us, and dug into the ice cream. It was homemade, of course, and delicious.
“Can I borrow your mother?” Rachel asked. “I need her cooking at all times.”
“Nu-uh.” Sophie shook her spoon. “Can you imagine how many pounds you would put on if you only ate Mrs. Hayes’s food? It would be terrible.”
“True.” Rachel nodded, and then glanced at me. “I don’t know how you’re still so skinny.”
“Rachel!” Sophie hissed.
“What?” Rachel looked shocked. “What did I do?”
“It’s okay,” I said. “What Sophie means is that I wasn’t here for almost four years. Maybe that’s why.”
Rachel gasped. “Oh crap. I keep forgetting and saying the wrong shit.”
“Since we touched that topic,” Sophie started. She licked her spoon, eyeing me, probably gauging my reaction. “You’ve been putting off talking to us about your life in Cleveland, and about how you really are, Jess.”
I spooned my ice cream, suddenly unsure I wanted to eat more. “Honestly, I don’t know how I am. It’s hard to talk about it when even I’m not sure about anything.”
Rachel patted my knee. “I’m sorry. And I’m sorry you had to face Caryn this week. I wish I were there though. I would have jumped on her and clawed that fake hair out of her head.”