Part 36 (1/2)
”I owe you some, too,” Luke says.
”My sister loves you. Really loves you.”
Luke smiles. Smiles in a way he rarely does-not like the world is bursting with hilarity, but rather like the world has given him something he never thought he deserved.
”I love her, too,” he says.
They eat their oranges in silence, sitting side by side on the porch, until Luke turns to Hannah and says, ”I wish I had been there for you.”
”I wish I had told you what was going on,” Hannah says. ”I think I knew, deep down, that you would understand. That you would be able to talk to me in a way Wally and Clay couldn't. But I was afraid.”
Luke nods. He picks up another orange and tosses it up and down in his palm. Then a slow grin spreads across his face.
”Well,” he says, looking her in the eye, that old familiar hitch in his smile, ”Orange you glad you told me now?”
She talks to Clay next. She walks up to his front door on Tuesday afternoon, her heart beating anxiously as it remembers this place.
”He's grounded,” Mrs. Landry says when she answers the door. Her voice has lost its normal warmth. ”Pete and I are only letting him out to do community service.”
”I have some things I want to apologize for,” Hannah says, begging Mrs. Landry with her eyes.
Mrs. Landry scrutinizes her with an uncomfortable expression on her face, and Hannah realizes that Mrs. Landry must now see her as someone foreign, someone unfathomable, someone unknown. But Hannah stands upright, feeling her breath in her lungs and her pulse in her chest.
”He's out back,” Mrs. Landry says finally. ”You can talk to him for a few minutes.”
”Thank you,” Hannah says, and then she turns away from the door and walks around the side of the house instead.
She finds Clay at the back of the yard, one knee in the dirt, his quarterback's hands hammering nails into the wooden fence.
”Need some help?” Hannah calls.
Clay startles. ”Oh,” he says, his tone uncertain. ”No, I'm alright.”
”Can we talk?”
Clay looks at her for an extended second. Then he drops his hammer into the dirt and walks over to her.
They sit on the swings and sc.r.a.pe their heels against the ground. Clay bounces a tennis ball up and down off the dirt, his tree-dark hair reflecting sunlight.
”I'm not sure how to start,” Hannah mutters.
Clay clutches the tennis ball in his hand. ”Yeah.”
”And it's weird,” Hannah continues, ”because I've always known how to talk to you. I've always felt like I could tell you anything.”
Clay's eyebrows draw together. He bounces the tennis ball into the dirt.
”I saw y'all kissing,” he says.
”What?”
”At the beach. At Tyler's party. I went looking for Baker. I opened the garage door, and I saw y'all kissing.”
”That was you?”
”It freaked me out,” Clay says, his eyebrows still drawn close together. ”Not because I thought it was bad, or wrong, or any of that s.h.i.+t, but because it made sense. It made so much sense. And I didn't want it to. I didn't want her to be with you. And I didn't want to hate you.”
A long beat of silence. Hannah winds her arms around her swing. She digs her sandals into the dirt and waits.
”I was an a.s.s,” Clay says finally. ”Wally was right. I was so blinded by wanting to be with her, and wanting everyone to love the two of us, and trying so hard not to resent you...that I messed everything up. I ruined us. I ruined our friends.”
”No,” Hannah says. ”It's not your fault. All this stuff that happened-it's too big to be anyone's fault. Maybe there's no fault at all. Maybe it's just stuff that had to happen.”
”No. I shouldn't have abandoned you. I shouldn't have said all those ugly things I said and I shouldn't have started that fight.” He pauses. ”I shouldn't have waited to see what Michele would do.”
”There's a lot of things I shouldn't have done, either,” Hannah says.
”You know the worst part? I knew she didn't want to be with me. I knew it deep down. She never seemed to want to talk to me on the phone. One time she started crying when I was driving us home from the movies-she said she was just stressed about college stuff, but I knew that wasn't it. Even when we-even when we, you know, had s.e.x, she was really distant afterwards. She wouldn't let me hold her or anything, and then we both just kinda lay there for a few minutes until she started to cry.”
Hannah's chest aches. Clay raises his head to look at her.
”And the way she looked whenever someone said your name,” he says. ”I knew, somehow, that she wanted to be with you. That she had always wanted to be with you.”
Hannah's throat thickens. She swallows and shakes the hair out of her eyes.
”She,” Clay says, stopping himself when his voice shakes. He clears his throat and stares down at the tennis ball in his palm. ”She was telling the truth about the e-mail. When she said she wrote it. Right?”
He's looking hard at Hannah, begging her for the truth. Hannah pulls her lips into her mouth and stares back at him, unsure of what to say.
But Clay nods, and then he pa.s.ses the tennis ball into Hannah's hand. ”You're brave, Han,” he says, looking meekly at her. ”You're braver and stronger than I've ever been.”
”No,” Hannah says, turning the tennis ball over in her hand.
”I really missed you when all of this was going down. Even though I didn't want to, I did. I really missed our whole group. Even now, after all the s.h.i.+t that's happened, all I want is for all of us to hang out again.”
Hannah tosses the tennis ball to him. ”I want that, too.”
”You gonna talk to Wally?”
”I'm going to try.”
”He'll listen,” Clay says, tossing the ball back her way.
”Are you going to talk to him?”
Clay hangs his head. ”I need to,” he says. ”I need to talk to him and Luke and Joanie.”
They fall back into silence, each of them bouncing the tennis ball a few times before tossing it back to the other, until Clay stands and tells her that he needs to finish repairing the fence.
”Can we hang out when you're no longer grounded?” Hannah asks.