“Are you just saying this because of Chloe?” I asked.
It worked. Stuart’s head snapped back a little. He clicked his jaw back and forth a few times, then steadied himself.
“Let me guess,” he said. “My mom told you all about it.”
“She didn’t tell me all about it.”
“This has nothing to do with Chloe,” he said.
“Oh no?” I replied. I had no idea what happened between Stuart and Chloe, but I’d gotten the reaction I wanted.
He stood up, and looked very tall from where I was.
“Chloe has nothing to do with it,” he said again. “Do you want to know how I know what’s going to happen?”
No, actually. I didn’t. But Stuart was going to tell me anyway.
“First, he’s avoiding you on Christmas. Want to know who does that? People who are about to break up with someone. You know why? Because big days make them panic. Holidays, birthdays, anniversaries . . . they feel guilty, and they can’t get into it with you.”
“He’s just busy,” I said weakly. “He has a lot to do.”
“Yeah, well, if I had a girlfriend, and her parents had been arrested on Christmas Eve, and she had to take a long train ride through a storm . . . I’d have my phone in my hand all night. And I would answer it. On the first ring. Every time. I’d be calling her to check on her.”
I was stunned silent. He was right. That’s exactly what Noah should have done.
“Plus, you just told him you fell into a frozen creek and you were trapped in a strange town. And he hung up? I’d do something. I’d get down here, snow or no snow. Maybe that sounds stupid, but I would. And if you want my advice? If he isn’t breaking up with you, you should dump his ass.”
Stuart said all of this in a big rush, as if the words were blown up by some emotional windstorm deep inside. But there was a gravity to it, and it was . . . touching. Because he clearly meant it. He said everything that I had wished Noah would say. I think he felt bad, because he shifted back and forth silently after that, waiting to see what damage he had caused. It was a minute or two before I could speak.
“I need a minute,” I finally said. “Is there somewhere . . . I can go?”
“My room,” he offered. “Second on the left. It’s kind of a mess, but . . . ”
I got up and left the table.
Chapter Eleven
Stuart’s room was messy. He wasn’t kidding. This was the opposite of Noah’s room. The only thing that was completely upright was a framed copy of the picture I had seen in his wallet sitting on his bureau. I went over and had a look at it. Chloe was a stunner, no kidding. Long, deep brown hair. Eyelashes you could clean a floor with. A big, bright smile, a natural tan, a splash of freckles. She had pretty right down to the bone.
I sat on his unmade bed and tried to think, but there was just a low hum in my head. From downstairs, I heard the sound of a piano being played, really well. Stuart was running through Christmas songs. He had real style—not just like one of those people who play by rote. He could have been playing in a restaurant or a hotel lobby. Probably somewhere better than that, even, but those were the only places I’d seen piano players, really. Outside the window, two little birds huddled together on a branch, shaking snow off themselves.
There was a phone on Stuart’s floor. I picked it up and dialed. Noah sounded just the tiniest bit annoyed when he answered.
“Hey,” he said. “What’s up? We’re about to go, and—”
“In the last twenty-four hours,” I said, cutting him off, “my parents have been arrested. I got put on a train, which got stuck in a blizzard. I’ve walked miles in deep snow with bags on my head. I fell into a stream, and I’m stuck in a strange town with people I don’t know. And your excuse for not being able to talk is . . . what, exactly? That it’s Christmas?”
That shut him up. Which wasn’t really what I was aiming for, but I was glad to see he had some sense of shame.
“Do you still want to go out with me?” I asked. “Be honest with me, Noah.”
The other end of the line went silent for a long time. Too long for the answer to be “Yes. You are the love of my life.”
“Lee,” Noah said, his voice sounding low and strained. “We shouldn’t talk about this now.”
“Why?” I asked.
“It’s Christmas.”
“Isn’t that really more reason to talk?”
“You know how it is here.”
“Well,” I said, hearing anger spring into my voice. “You have to talk to me, because I am breaking up with you.”
I could barely believe what was coming out of my mouth. The words seemed to come from a place deep inside me, far beyond the place where I stored them, past the ideas . . . from some room in the back that I didn’t even know was there.
There was a long silence.
“Okay,” he said. It was impossible to tell what tone was in his voice. It may have been sadness. It may have been relief. He didn’t beg me to take it back. He didn’t cry. He just did nothing.
“Well?” I asked.
“Well, what?”
“Aren’t you even going to say anything?”
“I’ve kind of known for a while,” he said. “I was thinking about it, too. And if this is what you want, you know, I guess it’s for the best, and . . . ”
“Merry Christmas,” I said. I hung up. My hand was shaking. My whole body was, practically. I sat on Stuart’s bed and wrapped my arms around myself. Downstairs, the music stopped, and the house filled up with a drowning kind of quiet.
Stuart appeared at the door, pushing it open cautiously. “Just checking to make sure you were okay,” he said.
“I did it,” I replied. “I just picked up the phone and did it.”
Stuart came and sat down. He didn’t put his arm around me, just sat next to me, kind of close, but with a little space between us.
“He didn’t seem surprised,” I said.
“Assholes never are. What did he say?”
“Something about how he’s known it for a while, how it’s probably for the best.”
For some reason, this made me hiccup. We sat in silence for a while. My head was spinning.
“Chloe was like Noah,” he finally said. “Really . . . perfect. Beautiful. Good grades. She sang, she did charity work, and she was a . . . you’ll like this . . . a cheerleader.”
“She sounds like a prize,” I said grimly.
“I never knew why she went out with me. I was just some guy, and she was Chloe Newland. We dated for fourteen months. We were really happy, as far as I knew. At least, I was. The only problem was that she was always busy, and then she got busier and busier. Too busy to stop by my locker or the house, to call, to e-mail. So I would stop by her house. And call her. And e-mail her.”
It was all so horribly familiar.
“One night,” he went on, “we were supposed to study together, and she just didn’t show up. I drove over to her house, but her mom said she wasn’t there. And then I started to get kinda worried, because usually she would at least text me if she needed to cancel. So I started driving around, looking for her car—I mean, there are only so many places you can go in Gracetown. I found it in front of Starbucks, which made sense. We study there a lot because . . . what other option does society give us, right? It’s Starbucks or death, sometimes.”
He was wringing his hands furiously now, pulling on his fingers.
“What I figured,” he said pointedly, “is that I just made a mistake and that I was supposed to be studying with her at Starbucks all along, and I’d just forgotten. Chloe didn’t really like coming here to the house very much. Sometimes she got a little freaked out by my mom, if you can believe that.”
He looked up, as if waiting for a laugh from me. I managed a little smile.
“I was so relieved when I saw her car there. I’d been getting more and more upset driving around. I felt like a moron. Of course she was waiting for me at Starbucks. I went inside, but she wasn’t at any of the tables. One of my friends, Addie, works the counter. I asked her if she’d seen Chloe, since her car was there.”
Stuart ran his hands through his hair until it got kind of huge. I resisted the urge to pat it down. I kind of liked it that way, anyway. Something about his really big hair made me feel better—took away some of the burn I felt in my chest.
“Addie, she just got this very sad look on her face and she said, ‘I think she’s in the bathroom.’ I couldn’t figure out what was so incredibly sad about being in the bathroom. So I bought myself a drink, and I got one for Chloe, and I sat down and waited. There’s only one bathroom in our Starbucks, so she had to come out eventually. I didn’t have my computer or any books with me, so I was just generally staring at the wall mural where the bathroom door is. I was thinking about how stupid I was to get upset with her and how I’d kept her waiting, and then I realized that she’d been in the bathroom for a really long time and that Addie was still looking at me, really sadly. Addie went over and knocked on the door, and Chloe came out. So did Todd, the Cougar.”
“Todd, the Cougar?”
“It’s not a nickname. He’s literally the Cougar. He’s our mascot. He wears the cougar costume and does the cougar dances and everything. For a minute, my brain was trying to put it all together . . . trying to figure out why Chloe and Todd the Cougar were in a Starbucks bathroom. I guess my first hope was that it couldn’t be anything bad because everyone seemed to know they were in there. But from the look on Addie’s face, and the look on Chloe’s face—I didn’t look at Todd—it finally clicked. I still don’t know if they went in there because they saw me coming, or if they’d been in there for a while. If you’re hiding from your boyfriend in the bathroom with the Cougar . . . the details kind of don’t matter.”
I momentarily forgot all about my phone call. I was in that Starbucks with Stuart, seeing a cheerleader I didn’t know emerge from a bathroom with Todd the Cougar. Except in my vision, he was wearing the cougar outfit, which probably wasn’t how it really went down.
“What did you do?” I asked.
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing. I just stood there, thinking I was going to be sick on the spot. But Chloe got furious. With me.”
“How does that work?” I said, furious on his behalf.
“I think she was freaked out by the fact that she’d been caught, and it was the only way she could think to react. She accused me of spying on her. She called me possessive. She said I put too much pressure on her. I think she meant emotionally—I guess—but it came out sounding so bad. So on top of it all, she made me sound like a letch in front of everyone in Starbucks, which might as well be everyone in town because nothing stays quiet here. I wanted to say, ‘You’re making out with the Cougar in the Starbucks bathroom. I am not the villain of this story.’ Only I didn’t say that because I literally couldn’t talk. So it must have looked like I agreed with her. Like I was admitting that I was a possessive, grabby, sex-freak stalker . . . and not the guy who was in love with her, who had been in love with her for more than a year, who would have done anything she asked. . . . ”
There probably was a point after the breakup when Stuart told this story all the time, but he clearly hadn’t done it in a while. He was out of practice. His expression didn’t change a lot—all of his emotion seemed to come out of his hands. He had stopped wringing them, and now they shook, just ever so slightly.
“Addie finally walked her outside to talk her down,” he said. “That’s how it all ended. And I got a latte, on the house. So it wasn’t a total loss. I became the guy who was famously dumped in public when his girlfriend cheated with the Cougar. Anyway . . . I had a point in saying all of that. My point is, that guy . . . ”
He pointed accusingly at the phone.
“ . . . is a dick. Although that probably doesn’t mean much to you right now.”
My memories of the last year were playing back through my mind at super-speed, but I was looking at them all from a different camera angle. There I was, Noah holding my hand, one step ahead of me, pulling me through the hall, talking to everyone else but me along the way. I sat with him in the front row at school basketball games, even though he knew that ever since I’d gotten hit in the face with a wayward ball I was scared of those seats. But still, we sat there, me frozen in terror, watching a game that never interested me to begin with. Yes, I sat with the upper-echelon seniors at lunch, but the conversations were repetitive. All they ever talked about was how busy they all were, how they were building their résumés for their college applications. How they were meeting with recruiters. How they were organizing their calendars online. Who was recommending them.
God . . . I’d been bored for a year. I hadn’t talked about myself in ages. Stuart was talking about me. He was paying attention. It felt foreign, a little embarrassingly intimate, but kind of great. My eyes filled up.
Seeing this, Stuart braced himself and opened his arms a little, as if inviting me to give up my efforts to contain myself. We had inched marginally closer together at some point, and there was an expectant energy. Something was about to give. I felt myself gearing up to start bawling. This made me angry. Noah didn’t deserve it. I was not going to start crying.
So I kissed him.
I mean, really kissed him. I knocked him backward. He kissed me back. A good kiss, too. Not too dry, not too wet. It was a bit on the frantic side, maybe because neither one of us had done the mental preparation, so we were both thinking, Oh, right! Kissing! Quickly! Quickly! More movement! Deploy tongue!
