Lost in the Sun (21 page)

I went to the store Thursday after school, too, because it wasn't the worst place to be. Mostly I spent the afternoon drawing in my Book of Thoughts, thinking over what Mom had said at dinner, about me listening to the right parts of what Fallon was saying.

I drew a lot of different pictures. I'd always thought Fallon had a good face for drawing, and it turned out I was right. Every picture I drew of her turned out to be better than the last, and it wasn't because of my incredible artistic skills.

The more I drew, the more I figured out.

Fallon leaping up to pause a movie, startling Squillo so badly, he tumbled off the couch.

(Fallon might talk nonstop sometimes, I figured out as I drew, but she kept some words tucked away deep inside.)

Fallon on a roller coaster, hanging upside down, laughing.

(Fallon might seem like she was the bravest person in the world, but she was afraid of some things, too.)

Fallon sitting on the floor of the stockroom, her back against Ray's bookshelves, playing with her hippie leather belt, describing her dreams.

(Fallon might not trust me completely, not yet, but she trusted me enough to tell me something really important.)

Fallon with her mouth open wide, screaming her guts out.

(Fallon had a scream inside her somewhere. I just knew it.)

“How's everything going over here?” Ray asked me, pulling up a stool beside me at the counter.

“Just thinking,” I said, looking up from my sketches.

“A noble pastime.”

I closed my Book of Thoughts. “Hey, Ray?” I said.

“Yeah?”

“Mom told me you used to coach high school baseball.”

He smiled at that. “Years ago,” he said. “Before I moved to Cedar Haven. In my previous life.” But you could tell he had good memories of it.

I sniffed, thinking very carefully about what I wanted to say next. “Mom said . . . I have a question.”

“Shoot.”

“Would you be able to help me sometime?” I asked. “With, like, my hitting and pitching and stuff? I haven't played in a while, and I'm sort of rusty.”

The look on Ray's face, you would've thought I'd asked him to split my winning lotto ticket. “I'd love to, Trent,” he said.

“There's . . . something else, too,” I told him. He waited for me to go on. “Sometimes when I'm playing ball, I get, like . . . my arms, I mean. They get sweaty, sort of? Not normal. And I can't breathe and it's . . .” I shifted my Book of Thoughts this way and that on top of the counter. “I don't know if that's something you could help with.”

Ray rubbed his bald head for a moment, thinking.

“How's this weekend work for you?” he asked.

•   •   •

As soon as I sat down at the lunch table next to Fallon on Friday, I pulled my Book of Thoughts out of my backpack and set it between our two trays. “Here,” I said. “I wanted to show you.” She was squinting at me. “Go ahead. Open it.”

“But you never let me look.”

“This time's different,” I told her.

Fallon opened the book, then immediately sucked in her breath and poked her nose down close to the page. “Is this us?” she asked.

“Mm-hmm.” I took a bite of tuna casserole while she examined the picture.

“This is really good, Trent.”

It was the two of us at her birthday party, that's the picture she was looking at. Fallon and me, sitting in the bumper car, with Fallon pretending to steer. I even remembered to add the foil wrappers tossed near the trash can.

Fallon turned the page.

The next picture was the one of us at Movie Club, where Fallon was jumping up to pause the TV. I was pretty proud of that one, because
I'd captured the way Fallon's face lit up, those big brown eyes on either side of her scar, when she got so excited about a continuity error.

Fallon turned the page again. And again, examining each picture closely. She seemed to like them all. I closed the book before she got to the last one, though, with the scream. I wasn't quite ready to show her that one yet.

“You have to do more,” she told me as I returned the notebook to my backpack. “Those were really awesome.”

“Thanks,” I told her. “Hey, Fallon?” I said, spitting it all out at once so I couldn't chicken out. “Can you ask your parents if you can hang out with me this Sunday? I wanted to show you something. It's a surprise.”

Fallon frowned. “Oh,” she said. “I mean, I don't know if . . .”

“Tell your dad I'm watering plants,” I said.

Fallon looked at me like I was insane. Which I was thinking for a moment I might be.

“He'll know what I mean,” I told her. “I mean, I hope he will.”

Fallon took a deep breath, like she wasn't sure what she wanted to say. But finally what she did say was “Okay. I'll ask.”

“Aaron and I will pick you up at ten sharp. Dress warm.”

•   •   •

Fallon was ready at ten on the dot on Sunday, just like she'd promised.

“Where are we going?” she asked as she piled into the backseat of Aaron's car next to me. Aaron said he felt like a tool driving around with me in the backseat and no one in the front, like he was some sort of chauffeur, but I'd promised to do his chores for two
weeks so he'd have more time to study, and he hadn't mentioned it after that.

“Trent didn't tell you?” Aaron asked as he carefully pulled out of the driveway onto the street.

“He said it was a surprise,” Fallon replied.

“Well, aren't you full of mystery?” Aaron said, glancing at me in his rearview mirror. “He won't tell me much about his master plan either.”

“We're going to Swim Beach,” I told Fallon. “Aaron's work.”

“Aaron's work unless he gets fired for going there during the off-season,” Aaron said, turning right on Woodbine.

“Two weeks of chores,” I reminded him. “Anyway, I thought you said you cleared it with your boss.”

“I did,” Aaron told us. “But she doesn't make good decisions.”

“Aaron's boss, Zoey, is in love with him,” I told Fallon, leaning over so I couldn't see Aaron's eyes in the rearview.

“Oooooh-oooooh!”
Fallon said. I think that was the bit of information she needed to loosen up a little, because suddenly she seemed much more relaxed. Much more like herself. “Is she cute?”

“She's very cute,” I said.

“Hey, back there, settle down now!” Aaron called. “I'll have none of this nonsense.”

“Carry on, driver,” I said, in my best fake snooty British voice. “You do the driving, and we'll do the talking.”

Fallon joined in too. “Oh, Edward,” she said in her own accent. I assumed I was supposed to be Edward. “Isn't there some sort of screen
you can put up so the driver can't
hear
us? I do hate when the help tries to
talk
to you.”

“You two are seriously bizarre,” Aaron told us. But Fallon and I were too busy laughing to care.

•   •   •

It took a while to unlock the rowboat from the boathouse. The whole thing was closed up for the season, the boats all piled up on their metal racks with a giant chain wrapped around them—so some nutter wouldn't break in and steal one to take out on the freezing cold lake, I guess.

All right, so maybe my plan was sort of crazy.

Anyway, with the three of us helping, we managed eventually. The boathouse was dark, and the light was burned out, and I was sort of afraid of spiders (since these were actual creeping, nasty spiders, and not the stupid fake plastic ones Doug had plastered all over my room), but I pretended not to be. When Fallon found a spider crawling all the way up her arm to her shoulder and simply said, “Oh, hello there” in the calmest voice I'd ever heard, and let it walk onto her hand, and then set it carefully on the windowsill, I pretended that's exactly what I would've done too. Not scream like a little girl.

“So what are we doing?” Fallon asked. “We're not actually going to go out on the lake, are we?”

“Apparently,” Aaron said, tossing us each a neon-orange life vest. He grabbed one for himself, too. “We are.”

Fallon looked at me for confirmation, and I nodded. “Why, exactly?” she asked.

“You'll see,” I promised.

Fifteen minutes later we were out in the boat rowing. We'd even managed to get inside and push off from the shore without any of us getting our feet wet. Aaron was in charge of most of the rowing, although Fallon and I helped a little.

“All right, little brother,” Aaron said. “Where to?”

I pointed straight ahead, to the little spit of island with the clump of pine trees.

Sitting there, waiting for us.

Aaron was sitting behind me in the rowboat, so I couldn't see his face. But when he answered, “Sure thing,” he didn't sound a bit surprised. He picked up speed with his oars.

The shore of the island was rockier than I'd expected. Full of tiny round pebbles, all of them smooth, perfect gray ovals. Fallon hopped out of the boat first, since she was in front, and did her best to scramble up the slopey shore. “Careful!” she warned us. “It's slippery!”

I hopped out next.

“Um, actually,” I said to Aaron as he moved to get out too. “Would you, um, mind leaving us here for a little bit? Just, like, an hour maybe?”

At
that
he looked surprised. “Leave you here?”

“Yeah,” I said, shrugging like it was no big deal, even though I'd known all along this was going to be the trickiest part of the plan to get Aaron to agree to. “Just, you know, row back to shore and then stay there a while and then come back to get us?”

“You want me to leave you all alone on a deserted island for an
hour
?” Aaron said. He'd never sounded more like an old man.

“Forty-five minutes, then,” I said.
“Please?”

“What are we going to do on the island?” Fallon said.

Aaron was looking back and forth between us. “You two aren't going to make out or anything, are you?”

Well. I didn't see
that
coming.

“Um,
no,
” I said. Fallon's face had turned bright red.

“Because if I leave you two here, and you start making out and stuff, you are seriously going to be in for it. You guys are
twelve.
”

“Sheesh, Aaron, I know we're twelve,” I told him. He
did
think he was an old man.

“I don't want to make out with Trent,” Fallon said.

“See?” I told Aaron. And I wasn't even offended, either. This wasn't about making out. This was about friends. “It's nothing like that,” I said. “I promise. I just . . . We need some time. And it has to be just us.” I stretched out my navy-blue glove then and reached for Fallon's hand. I wasn't entirely sure she was going to offer it.

But she did.

She looked down at our hands—my navy-blue glove and her red-and-purple knitted mitten—and squeezed just a little tighter. “Please, Aaron?” she said. “We'll be okay.”

Aaron puffed his cheeks and let out a giant breath. I saw it, a cloud of white smoke in the crisp, cold air.

“Thirty minutes?” Fallon bargained.

“I'll give you twenty-five,” he said at last. Fallon let out a tiny squeal and I did a happy dance, but Aaron—old man that he was—just grouched at us. “I'm going to row straight back to shore, then turn
around and immediately come back here. You better be waiting
exactly on this spot
when I get back.”

That was good enough for me. Perfect, even.

“Thank you,” I told him.

We waited there, standing on the rocky shore, Fallon's mittened hand in my gloved one, until Aaron and his boat were hardly the size of a dime.

“So,” Fallon said, turning to me. She had that look she got on her face when she was excited about something, really, truly. The look she got when she found a terrible mistake in a movie. “What are we doing? What's this great plan of yours?”

“We,” I said, raising her hand and squeezing it just a little tighter in mine (this was the moment of truth), “are going to scream.”

Okay, so I thought she was going to be confused. I expected that.

She looked very,
very
confused.

“Scream?” she said.

I nodded. “You said you were worried you couldn't. So”—I shrugged—“we're going to find out.”

“Here?” she asked.

“Why not?” I swept my non-mitten-holding hand across the expanse of the lake. “There's no one around to hear us.”

Fallon bit her lip. She was thinking, I could tell. “We're going to
scream
?” she repeated, thinking it over.

“As loud as we can.”

Fallon stretched her neck out as though she was examining the lake. There were a few stray birds who either hadn't left for warmer
temperatures yet or were never going, sitting on top of the cold water. There was Aaron, a quarter of the way to the shore. There was the wind, with a bit of a howl to it. Other than that, empty. Still. Quiet.

She cleared her throat. “You'll scream too?” she asked, examining the water.

“If you want me to.”

“All right,” she said.

I wasn't sure exactly how I thought it would go, with the screaming. I guess I hadn't thought things through too hard, after convincing everyone it was a good idea and getting to the island. If anything, I thought maybe Fallon would have a little trouble with the screaming at first. Maybe she'd start out quiet, like a whisper of a scream; maybe she wouldn't want to be truly loud at first. Maybe she'd have trouble with it, because it was something she'd been worried about for so long.

But I should've known that whatever I expected was going to be wrong. Fallon never failed to surprise me.