I had been lying to myself the night before, thinking I was free, thinking I had let him go. He still took my breath away, just being near him. First love kept making me come back to this, to him. I kept getting caught in this current-first love, I mean. The old pull, the tide drawing me back in. I felt like I was intruding on a private moment, one he'd never let me see if he weren't grieving. I would take care of him, just like Susannah wanted. I felt that old lurch, that gravitational pull, that desire to inhabit him-like wherever he was in this world, I would know where to find him, and I would do it. The boy I thought I knew so well was gone. His eyes were these bleak and empty abysses, like sockets. He didn't look at me when I sat down next to him. He was sitting, his knees close to his chest. It was so misty out that it took me a minute to find him. The sky was gray, and there was a chill in the air. "You're the luckiest girl in the world to have her for a mother. She's not like that." Susannah reached across the table and grabbed my hand. I hadn't even considered the possibility that it had been my mother who'd bought it for me. "Your mother must have gone back and bought it for you." Laurel would've had a fit." Then her face cleared, and she smiled. "The one from that mall, the purple one that you and Mom fought over that time. I'll wear that dress you bought me last summer." The one person I wanted to go with didn't go to my school. No one had asked me, and I hadn't really felt like it. I hadn't gone to any of my school's homecomings or proms yet. She said, "Make sure you send me pictures of you at your first big dance." My mother certainly wouldn't, and neither would Conrad and Jeremiah. Susannah loved to talk about anything girly she said I was the only person she could talk to about those kinds of things. Somehow we got around to talking about proms and dances.
0 kommentar(er)
