Chapter 2
Itried to breathe normally, but that was not going to happen. Was this even real? I stared at the screen, unsure.
“Hi, this is Everett.”
I closed the app and then opened it again. The message was still there. I reread it, the four words from an unknown number with an out-of-town area code. “Hi, this is Everett,” the bubble on my phone said. I didn’t know any Everetts except the man who had puked on me. So Everett Ford had sent this. Right? Unless it was some kind of joke. Who would play a joke like this?
“Zoey?”
I finally looked up and saw my cooperating teacher staring at me. How many times had he said my name? We didn’t get along as well as I had with Sarah Paulker last semester, when I’d been the student teacher in her first-grade class. Now I had moved to a different school into a fourth-grade room, with a new mentor. Right away, things had been a little strained. Phil had wanted us to have meetings outside of school, and since I worked, wentto class, and took care of things at my house, I wasn’t free and I had to keep saying no. Anyway, as a divorced guy with kids older than I was, he wouldn’t have been interested in the fact that I had just gotten a text message from a man. A real one—I was assuming.
I said sorry, and that my mind had been elsewhere. I put the phone away and paid attention to the fact that the fourth graders were just about done with gym class, I needed to have their math quiz grades entered, and there was mysterious liquid pooled around Antoine’s backpack on the floor next to his desk. What was it? I investigated. I thought about that message a lot but I didn’t answer it until I left the school and got into my car. Then I looked at it again.
“Hi, this is Everett.”
I thought about asking Willow for help with my response but then decided not to. She would have known what to say, the things that would interest him and keep him writing, maybe even things that would make him want to see me in person. But she had been quiet and withdrawn lately, and I thought I knew why: the football game. That was where she’d seen Boyd and the woman who did appear to be his girlfriend—I’d done a little looking on my own and I knew that my sister was tracking them both, too. So many years had gone by but she still loved him, no matter what she kept telling me about how she paid attention only because she was curious, and that everyone was interested in what their exes were up to. Maybe the fact that Everett Ford (maybe Everett Ford?) had written to me would have made her feel worse.
Without her help, I was on my own and I didn’t have much time to figure out what to do, because there was a lot of other stuff that I needed to take care of. I had to pick up my sister’s prescription and also go to the water department, because we were having an issue with our bill. My mom was in charge of our utilities but she must have forgotten to pay it…anyway, it was a thing and now I would have to straighten it out, because she wasn’t responding to my questions about it. I also needed to eat, to go to class, and then to my job.
Four words in a text shouldn’t have meant so much, anyway. I sat in my car in the school parking lot, engine off so I wouldn’t waste gas, and looked at them.
“Hi, this is Everett.”
“Hi.” I typed the two letters and sent them, and then I dropped the phone like it burned my fingers. I knew what my sister would have said about how I was acting (no wonder you’re still alone, why are you like this, et cetera) and she would have been right. I drove out of the lot, which still had kids and parents milling around so I went carefully, but I only went a block or two before I felt the need to stop again and check for a response. There wasn’t any answer to my “hi,” but just in case there might have been one in the future, I turned the volume all the way up. That was necessary in case I encountered a loud environment, like a wind tunnel where they were testing home building products for their hurricane strength. We had just watched a video about that in fourth-grade science and I wasn’t likely to drive into one now, but still…
I didn’t get a response to my text until that night, when I was at Jannie’s bar. She was there, too, sitting at a table with a beer, her laptop, and a pile of the notebooks into which she jotted down her financial records. Well, she jotted most of them, but she kept some in her head (under the fez that she was now wearing), and that was a problem because she often had trouble remembering them. A larger problem was that other records weren’t stored anywhere and were a total mystery. She also wasn’t great with numbers, so when she tried to put them into spreadsheets and accounting software, things got a little tense.
She jumped and her fez fell off when my phone whistled very, very loudly. “What in God’s name was that?” she asked. “Did anyone else hear that noise?” She put her finger in her ear and wiggled it, then wiped it on her overalls.
The other people in the bar, all three of them, nodded and agreed that they had heard it, too. “It’s just me getting a text,” I announced. “Nobody needs to worry.” Instead of checking my phone where they could watch me, I went into the cramped back room. I had been hoping to hear from my mom, because I’d sent her more questions, but this was something different.
Something good.
“Do you still work at that bar on Hazel?” Everett asked me.
“Yes,” I said aloud as I typed back. “I’m at the bar on Hazel Street right at this moment.” He really had remembered me!
“I’ll stop by. On my way.”
I stared, and then I ran to the bathroom. “What’s happening now?” Jannie yelped as I went by, moving so fast that Iruffled the pages of her notebook. I looked in the mirror at my reflection, which was obscured by soap residue and water stains. What could I accomplish with myself before Everett Ford showed up? Since I didn’t know his starting point, it was hard to determine how much time I had to prepare. And how was I going to prepare?
I studied my brown hair, which was basically straight and was back in a ponytail because it was way too much to deal with every day. Next, I reviewed my features, which were just normal. There had never been anything about my appearance to make me upset but there had also never been anything to delight me. Unlike my sister, I didn’t carry around makeup or other tools that could help with it now, like perfume or a sexy tank top. I didn’t own those things at all, actually.
I blew into my hand to try to smell my breath and then shrugged at the spotty reflection. What else?
“Zoey?” Jannie yelled through the door. “Is everything all right? Did you get sick or something?”
Yes, she was bad at bookkeeping, cheap, and sometimes unhygienic, but she was also a nice person. “No, I’m fine,” I told her as I came out. “I was checking my looks.”
She stared at me, confused. “You’re the same as always,” she said, which was correct and a little unfortunate. But my face had never been my fortune—I planned to make that as a teacher. I said that to Jannie, who only continued to stare for a moment before she said, “They don’t earn much money.”
“It was a joke. I was saying that I would have to earn my fortune as a teacher, since I won’t be able to depend on my beauty,” I explained.
“You’re a pretty girl, but they don’t earn much money,” she repeated, and I nodded and said she was correct. I wouldn’t depend on a career in stand-up, either.
Everett came in only a few minutes later, so even if I’d been prepared with styling stuff, I wouldn’t have had time to fix very much. And it was weird—I’d gotten so worked up about his texts, but seeing him in person? He just seemed normal, the same guy who had thrown up on me after he’d been dumped, and not anyone to be nervous about. He was definitely still good-looking, definitely tall, definitely strong and muscular. Anyone could have spotted all that, although unlike the last time he’d come here, today he was wearing a coat which covered him up a lot more.
“Hey,” he said to me, and he took a seat at the bar. Another difference from the last time he’d been at Jannie’s was that no one even bothered to look at him now. Back then, he had been a Woodsmen player—not a starter and not the first in line after those guys, but a Woodsmen. Not anymore.
