Part 15 (1/2)
”I don't want the windows open.”
Hannah turns around, entirely caught off guard. ”What?”
Baker strides past the windows, staring determinedly away from her. ”Not tonight. I can't handle it.”
”What do the windows have to do with anything?”
”Just-shut them, please,” Baker huffs. Her voice trembles with barely constrained anger.
Hannah stares at her, waiting for an explanation, but Baker climbs into the bed, rolls onto her side, and says nothing.
”Fine,” Hannah says. She shuts the windows hard-for a half-second she startles, worrying that she might have woken the Landry's-but the room quickly dissolves into silence again.
Chapter Seven: The Only Two Humans on the Earth.
Baker is gone from the bed when Hannah wakes the next day. Hannah finds her in the kitchen, eating a bowl of cereal and talking to Clay's mom.
”Good morning, Miss Hannah!” Clay's mom says, far too loudly and bubbly for Hannah's current state. She clutches a coffee mug and wears a floral-patterned robe. Baker sits next to her at the table, but she doesn't raise her eyes from her cereal.
”'Morning, Mrs. Landry,” Hannah says.
”What would you like to eat?”
”I'm just going to get some Raisin Bran, thanks.”
She pours the cereal into one of the delicate ceramic bowls, then fills a plastic cup with ice water. Clay's mom resumes her conversation with Baker, asking her about how she's going to choose a roommate for LSU. When Hannah sits at the table with them, Mrs. Landry glances away from Baker to give Hannah a welcome smile, but Baker keeps her eyes trained on Mrs. Landry.
Hannah tries hard to make eye contact with Baker, but Baker only looks between her cereal bowl and Mrs. Landry. A cell phone rings, and Mrs. Landry peels herself gracefully off her chair to answer it.
”Oh, hold on, girls, I've got to take this one, it's one of my bible study babes,” she says. ”h.e.l.lo?” she answers. ”Well, good morning to you, too!”
Hannah plays with the raisins in her bowl, burying them underneath the milk, until Mrs. Landry walks out onto the back porch and closes the door.
”Hey,” Hannah says quietly, looking up at Baker. ”You alright?”
Baker meets her eyes for a fraction of a second. ”Fine. Are you?”
”Yeah.” Hannah taps her spoon against her bowl.
They say nothing else to each other.
Baker doesn't speak directly to Hannah after their friends wake up and fill in the s.p.a.ce around them. They all walk down to the beach again, and the sun beats hot on Hannah like it has every other day this week, but Baker doesn't catch her eye or smile at her, and every joke or remark Hannah says to the others seems to materialize from a scared, hollow place inside of her.
The boys spend a long time in the ocean. Hannah hangs out on the sand with Joanie and Baker, pretending to read while the two of them hit a volleyball back and forth. After a while, Joanie plops down onto her towel and puts her headphones into her ears, and Hannah and Baker are left in hot silence.
Baker kneels on her towel to apply sunscreen, and Hannah focuses so hard on the text of her book that the letters blur. She can see Baker out of her peripheral vision, squinting beneath her sungla.s.ses as she lathers her shoulders and arms. Baker reaches behind her to rub in her back, and Hannah watches her struggle for a moment before she can no longer take it. She flops the book down onto her towel and sits up to help her.
”I'm fine,” Baker says.
”Just let me get your back.”
”I am getting it.”
”Not very well. Just-here.” Hannah rubs some lotion in-between Baker's shoulder blades, and Baker leans forward, her shoulders tense. Hannah pours more sunscreen onto Baker's back and lathers it down her spine, all the way down to her hips.
”Okay?” Hannah asks.
”Yep,” Baker says, with an edge to her voice, and then she wrenches out of Hannah's grasp and walks purposefully down to the water, and Hannah is left kneeling on her towel.
There's pizza for dinner that night. Mrs. Landry apologizes to the group for not having the energy to cook something, and Dr. Landry waves off the apology and says, ”This is fine, honey, we can eat pizza one night this week.”
Hannah sits on the back porch after dinner and plays Apples to Apples with Wally, Luke, and Joanie. She tries not to think about how Baker is still sitting at the kitchen table with Clay and his parents.
”Clay's probably so uncomfortable,” Joanie laughs. ”You know he hates his mom getting too involved in anything.”
”Yeah, but she wouldn't be Clay's mom if she didn't interview the prom date,” Luke says. ”Or girlfriend. Or whatever.”
”I think she's been interviewing her here-and-there all week,” says Joanie, choosing one of her cards and tossing it down to match the category. ”Yesterday I heard her asking about Baker's brother and how he likes New Orleans and all that.”
”Scopin' out the family,” Luke says. ”Mama Landry's got long-term plans.”
”Could you imagine them married, though?” Joanie laughs. ”Clay would be like, 'Honey, I'm home from coaching little league and junior football and all these other manly sports, is dinner on the table?' and Baker would be like, 'Hold on, Clay-Clay, I'm finis.h.i.+ng up these city council papers and all of my other overachieving activities!' It'd be a nightmare.”
Hannah's stomach clenches and the thing inside her chest hurts more than ever. Please make it go away. Please just let me be normal. Please just let me find this funny, like they do.
”Okay, really?” Wally says, holding up the selection of cards for the category he's judging. ”'The dump,' 'Your grandma,' and 'Herpes'? For the Delicious card?”
”Guess we're all on the same wavelength here,” says Luke.
”These are absolute s.h.i.+t.”
”Oh, Walton, we always forget that you like to play this game literally,” says Joanie.
”Aren't you the one who taught me that you're supposed to play to the judge? Alright, I'm gonna go with...'Your grandma.'”
”Yes!” says Luke. ”That one was mine.”
There's more drinking that night. Clay produces a bottle of Wild Turkey American Honey, which Hannah has never tried, and they all take turns swigging from it while they sit around the pool and talk. Wally makes everyone laugh by describing his series of Yu-Gi-Oh Halloween costumes from elementary school, and Joanie entertains the group with stories about growing up with Hannah.
”And we played doll house until we were, like, 12 and 13, didn't we, Han? We were way past the age where we should have been playing that. But we had a whole collection of families that lived together in this house, and we used to spend hours setting up the furniture and the decorations.”
”And we had that butler,” Hannah says. ”That really ugly figurine that we took from some other play set, and you drew angry eyebrows on its face and we named it 'Hector.'”
”Yeah, and we used to laugh so hard because we would have the eight year-old daughter boss Hector around, but like only when the doll house parents weren't looking, so it became this whole subseries within our doll house universe.”
”And we had the babies, too. The triplets.”