The Color of a Promise (The Color of Heaven Series Book 11) (3 page)

Her shoulders rose and fell with a frustrated sigh and she looked me straight in the eye, accusingly. “Did you give my letter to your brother?”

Here we go
…

“Yes.”

“Did he read it?”

“I don’t know. I think so.”

She blew out another quick breath, as if she were frustrated with me. “He was supposed to be here tonight. Do you know if he’s coming?”

I shrugged again. “He didn’t mention anything, but we don’t talk much.”

Just then, the sliding glass doors opened and three of Aaron’s friends walked out. Millicent gasped and watched them stroll onto the grass and join the others.

“He’s here,” she whispered, watching the door and waiting for him to step out as well, but he didn’t. Her eyebrows pulled together in a frown. “Where is he?”

She sat down between Gordon and me. “What should I do? He’s probably inside. Should I go in? Should I try and talk to him?”

“Wow, you’ve got it bad,” Gordon said.

“I can’t help it,” she replied, sounding all swoony and in love. “He’s just so cute.”

Cute?
She thought Aaron was
cute
?

She took hold of my arm and shook me. “I need to do something, Jack, or I’ll go crazy. Will you come inside and introduce me to him? Even if he read the letter, I’m not sure he even knows who I am.”

My head drew back in surprise. “You’ve never talked to him before?”

“No, he’s in the ninth grade!” As if that explained everything.

“Did you sign your name to the letter or was it anonymous?” Gordon asked.

“I signed my name,” she replied. “And I caught him looking at me yesterday at recess, but I don’t know how he feels. Could you ask him?”

“
Me
?” Was she nuts?

“You’re his brother.”

“Just because we’re brothers doesn’t mean we like each other.” I paused. “What does Jeannie say? You should ask
her
.”

Millicent huffed. “Jeannie was the one who encouraged me to write the letter in the first place and tell him how I felt, but it’s not working. I wish he would just talk to me. Or
something
.”

“Maybe he’s just not interested,” Gordon said, and I gave him a look, because Millicent didn’t seem in any state to hear something like that. The poor girl was obsessed.

“Please, Jack?” she asked. “Will you come inside and help me talk to him?”

Though it was the last thing on earth I wanted to do, I said yes because Jeannie was in there, and I figured I could use the excuse to ask her to dance with me again. So I got up and went inside with Millicent.

o0o

“Where is he?” Millicent asked, looking around the dark rec room where a few kids were slow dancing to
Against All Odds
.

I led her to the snack table, which had been replenished in the last half hour. “Look, they have Doritos.”

I grabbed a handful and stuffed them into my face, then glanced around for Jeannie, but I didn’t see her either.

“Did he not come?” Millicent asked, growing increasingly frustrated. She boldly walked up to Kimmy, who was waltzing with some guy. Millicent tugged at her arm. “Did you see Aaron come in?”

Kimmy stared at her for a few seconds and glanced around awkwardly. “I don’t know.”

“His friends came in a few minutes ago,” Millicent told her. “Was he with them?”

The guy waltzing with Kimmy leaned closer to speak loudly over the music. “He’s in the closet with Jeannie.”

Millicent and I both responded at the same time. “
What?
”

I felt stunned and paralyzed, while steam came out of Millicent’s ears. She marched straight over to the closet, flicked on the overhead lights, and whipped the door open.

There they were, for all the world to see, lips smacking and hands groping.

They jumped apart at the intrusion, and everyone in the rec room shouted at Millicent to turn off the lights, but she simply stood there, motionless, staring. I did the same from across the room, unable to swallow the Doritos in my mouth.

“You were supposed to be my friend,” she said to Jeannie. “You said we were blood sisters!” Then she turned and ran up the stairs.

Some other kid moved to switch off the lights, while Jeannie reached out to shut the closet door again. She met my gaze for a second, and simply shrugged with what struck me as an apology—as if to say:
What did you expect? It couldn’t be helped
.

My stomach dropped, and I wanted to pound my brother into the ground. But he was bigger than me and I knew I’d end up getting pounded—in front of everyone.

So I went outside to get Gordon and we left in a hurry, up the stairs and out the front door. It wasn’t easy to pass by the closet a second time, knowing the great love of my life was in there necking with the brother I despised. I wanted to cry, but not in front of everyone. Another part of me just wanted to hit something.

Outside, we found Millicent, sitting on the curb in tears.

“Hey Millicent,” I said gently. We sat down on either side of her. “Are you okay?”

She wiped tears from her cheeks with the back of her sleeve. “I can’t believe she did that.”

“Me neither,” I replied.

“She’s the one who kept telling me to go after him. She’d say things like: ‘He’s looking at you. I think he likes you. He’s checking you out.’ But none of it was true, and I don’t know why she did that when she liked him all along.”

“We thought she liked Jack,” Gordon said, and I felt like a fool.

Millicent turned to me. “I know, right? She was walking home with you every day. Did she ever let on that she liked Aaron?”

“Not once,” I replied, thinking back on all our conversations, and fighting to keep the hurt inside.

“Some friend she was,” Millicent said, shaking her head as a car pulled up. “Here come my parents. I gotta go. See you guys.”

We all stood up and backed away from the curb. Millicent got into the car and it drove away, while Gordon and I began to walk home in silence.

After a long while, he said, “You’re better off without her.”

I shoved my hands into my pockets and shivered in the late October chill. “I guess so. I just thought she really liked me—but I won’t be so gullible next time. I think I’ll stay away from girls for a while.”

I didn’t speak to Aaron when he arrived home an hour later, but that was nothing new. When it came to women, I’d learned a long time ago that he would always have the advantage, and he would always win.

What I
didn’t
know was that sometimes in life, second place can turn out to be even better than first, for a variety of reasons.

In any case, the race wasn’t over yet.

Chapter Six

If I thought
I
had it rough on Monday morning—having to face Jeannie with no idea what to say to her—it was ten times worse for Millicent. Not only had she been rejected by the boy she liked, but she had also been betrayed by the girls who had taken her under their wing on her first day at a new school.

At lunch time, Millicent chose not to sit with them, and because she was new in town, she didn’t have any other friends to fall back on. Needless to say, I felt as if we had been shot by the same gun, and I sympathized. At least I had my best friend Gordon at my side.

“Look at her,” I said to him as we sat on our usual bench in the basketball court, unwrapping our sandwiches. “She’s sitting all by herself.”

I glanced across at Jeannie and her sickeningly fashionable entourage. They were watching Millicent and giggling.

“Why do they have to be so mean?” I asked. “They’re the ones who treated her bad. Now they’re making fun of her.”

Suddenly, my devastating heartbreak over Jeannie—which had kept me in my room sulking all weekend—turned to rage, and before I had a chance to think about what I was doing, I set down my sandwich and walked straight over to where Millicent was sitting, eating her lunch alone.

I sat down beside her. “Hey. Do you want to come and eat lunch with me and Gordon?”

She barely looked up. “Sure.”

Gathering up her sandwich, she stood and crossed the basketball court with me. I couldn’t help but glance back at Jeannie and the other girls who were watching us with frowns on their faces.

They turned away after that, left the basketball court, and stopped giggling at Millicent.

o0o

After that day, Gordon and I expanded our twosome to a threesome, and Millicent ate lunch with us every day for the rest of the school year. She also came over to my house or Gordon’s house on weekends to play
Space Invaders
and
Pac-man
and watch movies with us, and she fit in with the two of us as if she weren’t a girl at all. We didn’t think of her that way because she wasn’t beautiful like Jeannie, and she had no interest in either of us, romantically. After the demoralizing debacle at Mark Hennigar’s party, I think we were all a little gun shy.

For a time, we commiserated about Jeannie and Aaron, but soon we began to discover that we had a lot more in common than just that. Eventually, we forgot about our broken hearts and all those stupid, mean, giggling girls. We just hung out together and had fun.

From that moment on, my whole world seemed to expand and become new and interesting, because Millicent was really smart and she talked about interesting things—things Gordon and I had never thought about before. Not just girl stuff, either. She knew things about new technology and medicine because her father was a doctor, and she had a room full of tiny dollhouses she had built. They were detailed and intricate, and she told us she wanted to be an architect when she grew up. She also built model cars and airplanes, and Gordon and I soon started building models, too. Not dollhouses, though. We built space ships.

I felt lucky to have the two best friends anyone could ever ask for. I only wish it could have lasted longer than it did.

o0o

When summer vacation began after seventh grade, the situation improved in the Peterson household. Normally, we all traveled as a family to our summer house on the coast of Maine, but during that particular summer, my mom got a new job with the city and didn’t want to ask for time off. So Dad took Aaron to Maine to go fishing and sailing without us, which was fine by me, since it was never my first choice to be stuck on a sailboat with my brother.

As a result, it came as no surprise that, with Aaron gone and my mother working full time, it was the best summer of my life. I had more freedom to go places and do things, without having to constantly check in at home.

Gordon and I spent a lot of time at Millicent’s house, because both her parents worked as well, and she had a pool and giant backyard with a small forest beyond the fence. If we weren’t swimming in her pool on sunny days, we were biking to the corner store for candy, or venturing into the woods to catch fish with our hands in the river, or making plans to build a fort.

“Why do we have to call it a fort?” Millicent asked. “Let’s call it a clubhouse.”

“That’s such a girlie thing to call it,” Gordon argued. “I suppose you’ll want to hang curtains and have a tea set.”

“Maybe,” she replied, defiantly.

I strode past them to walk ahead, searching for a good spot to build our future clubhouse.

“What about right here? The ground is flat and there are four trees in a square. It would be easy to hammer the planks onto the trunks. See what I mean?” I spread my arms wide between two of the trees.

Gordon strode closer. “Except that on a windy day, if the trees sway, the walls will move and it’ll probably fall apart.”

Millicent came to stand in the center of the square. “The trunks don’t move in the wind, not this close to the ground. It’s only the treetops that blow around. And these are good and solid.” She pounded the edge of her fist on the thick bark. “I think it’s a great spot.”

“Where will we get the wood?” Gordon asked.

“I can talk to my dad tonight,” Millicent replied. “He might agree to buy us some. And he’s got everything in his toolshed—hammers and nails and a saw.”

“You’re going to tell him about this?” Gordon asked, sounding concerned. “What if he says we’re not allowed? Because this isn’t our land. It’s public property. And it’s supposed to be a
secret
hideout. If your dad knows about it, it’s not a secret anymore. And parents… They just don’t get this stuff. They always say no.”

“Maybe your parents do, but mine always say yes to anything that doesn’t involve the TV, and they know I want to be an architect someday and design houses, so they’ll totally let me do this. Besides, do you have any other ideas about how we can get wood?” Millicent asked.

Gordon looked around. “We could chop down some trees like the pioneers did. Build it like a log cabin.”

“Clear-cut this forest?” Millicent replied with horror. “No way! Besides, we’d probably get in trouble for that. There’s gotta be a law that says you can’t do that, and I’m not breaking the law. Rules are in place for a reason.”

I held up a hand. “I vote that we let Millicent ask her dad, because we’re going to need tools. There’s no way we can keep this a secret if we’re going to do it right—and I think we should do it right.”