Hailey

Plain and simple, I knew we couldn’t end well.

Hollywood endings are bullshit. Love stories are lies.

Cause reality never quite works out the way you want it to. In the world outside of movie scripts, things fall apart. I knew that better than anybody. So, what the hell was I doing?

Holding hands and running through the rain like God and Nicholas Sparks had teamed up to plan the evening?

Nothing about anything I’d done in the last twenty-four hours was sane. Didn’t matter how I looked at it, being near Caleb made me crazy.

Touching him made me crazier, and kissing him was—well, ridiculous ‘cause I shouldn’t have. I shouldn’t have done a lot of things. But I guess that’s what crazy people do.

Everything they shouldn’t. Everything backwards.

The last thing standing between me being me, and me being out of my mind, was a good excuse. And I needed one. Badly.

Or at least an explanation as to why I'd lost eighteen years of common sense in the last three days.

My parents were gonna have a hay-day at the psychiatrist’s office if they got me back in one piece. Dad would call me a psycho, Mom would chalk up my brand new problems to Stockholm, and within a week I'd be drugged up and dragged off to kidnapping therapy.

But the kidnapping wasn't the problem. Or least, it wasn't the whole problem.

Sure, I'd seen things I wish I could've taken back, things I'd probably have nightmares about for the rest of my life. That is, if I even lived through all this. But the real reason the shrinks were going to end up carting me off to the loony bin was Caleb Evans. Caleb—sweaty-palms—Evans, the bad excuse who managed to turn my guts into cotton candy every time he smiled.

The two of us trailed Mrs. Lee through the last half mile of the woods, dragging our feet through the muddy waters of muddy feelings we both knew were nothing but trouble.

Especially me.

I hated this. I hated feeling blind, dumb, and numb to all the warning signs I couldn't afford to miss twice.

'Cause bad things happen when you don’t pay attention, and a couple summers ago, I didn't.

Back then, I thought pretty boys had pretty intentions, and kisses meant playing for keeps. But seeing the world through freshman colored goggles does that to people. I didn't know that getting butterflies around the senior boys were red flags in disguise. So I swan-dived into the deep end of the high school pool without even knowing how to swim.

That one time—on an afternoon when the air was heavy and thick, like slow drying sap on maple trees, I made a mistake.

I probably was the only girl in my grade that summer who hated hot syrupy days, senior parties, and skimpy clothes. I was a stay-in kinda gal who curled up with paperback writers like Lewis Carroll instead of pretty boys like Luke Davenport—a clean cut, green-eyed, senior who used to copy my notes in English.

Like Caleb, Luke had a Kodak smile, and all of his friends hated it because the kid never had braces. Sometimes, I liked to pretend a couple of those Kodak smiles were meant for me. But Luke liked beautiful girls, Ralph Lauren model-types with straightened blonde hair and St. Tropez tan lines—not pale, awkward, bookworms.

His three-year girlfriend kept her skin a perfect bronze.

I couldn’t keep up with her, but neither could Luke.

Luke liked pretending. Most guys do, but Luke especially liked to pretend he didn’t stare at me in the halls or sit next to me at study hour when his girlfriend was at lacrosse practice.

I guess he was pretty good at it, cause she didn’t seem to notice.

Luke wanted everyone to think that he loved all things sports but hated anything and everything school related. He didn’t want anyone knowing that he liked books and skipped crew practice on Saturdays to hang out at the library to talk Salinger and Vonnegut with me.

Luke wanted most people to think that we’d never kissed on a hot sticky day, when boys and girls who don’t pay attention get stuck together. That time, Luke was warm, and real, and smelled like Old Spice instead of old books.

But after a few, less warm, less real times together, the smell of old books never left, but Luke did. 

A semester went by. Luke fooled everybody into thinking that he loved his tangerine girlfriend, never skipped another crew practice, and still hated everything academic.

His smile stayed Kodak perfect and he stopped wasting it on girls who spent Saturday’s in the library.

So, I spent my time pretending that the men from all the books I’d read made better boyfriends than Luke, and that I hated the Old Spice smell that still wouldn’t come out of my clothes.

Things between Luke and I were never warm or real again after that.

Neither was I.

***

“You alright, Hailey?”

Caleb tightened his grip around my fingers ‘till I couldn’t feel the tips anymore. I knew why he did it. He’d get antsy every time I spaced out or stayed quiet for longer than he was used to. But I didn’t want have to worry about everything I said, did, or didn’t say around him 24/7.

I just needed time to figure myself out, without him pressing me for answers.

“Yeah, sorry," I said.

 “Don’t apologize to me. Georgia was the one trying to ask you something.”

 “I’m sorry about that Mrs. Lee, what where you saying?”

An old, ugly fear ran it’s nails down my back and I stiffened up straighter than a sapling. Caleb had his eyes on me, but I hoped he wouldn’t pick up on the change. Not paying attention in my Dad’s house usually meant some kind of forked-tongued insult was headed my way.

I used to daydream a lot, just so I could pretend that I lived somewhere else, that being interrogated at breakfast, lunch, and dinner didn’t scare me half to death, and that my Dad never really meant the things he’d say when he thought I wasn’t listening. 

But Georgia melted all that anxiety away with her weathered smile.

She turned around, put her hand on my shoulder, squeezed away all my tight-jawed tension, and asked me the simplest question in the world.

“All I wanted to know sweetheart was if sleeping in the guest room in my house would be alright with you. It’s not much, but the bed’s big enough for the two of ya’ll if you don’t mind sharing.”

Sharing?

What did she mean, sharing?

I’m an only child, I’ve never really shared things well.  What’s Hailey’s has always been Hailey’s.   Heck, in third grade I got a needs work in sharing. As soon as my Mom saw the report card, she showed up, got parent-teacher-confrontational, and convinced them to let me express my individuality however I wanted.

The next day, I had perfect grades across the board, and nobody ever bothered me about sharing again—until today.

Caleb spoke up before I had a chance to.

“That’s awful nice of you, Mrs. Lee. We would’ve been happy with whatever you could’ve given us.”

“Oh don’t make such a fuss about it, boy. Ya’ll look like ya’ haven’t slept in days, what do you expect me to do? And don’t you think about touchin’ a thing till you’ve washed up. I won’t have the pair of ya’ll turning my house into a mud pit.”

 “Not at all ma’am.”

 “Boy, what did I tell you about callin’ me ma’am?”

 “Sorry, Mrs. Georgia.”

 “Drop the "Mrs." and I’ll take that apology.”

Caleb and Georgia broke out into measured laughs like they’d known each other most of their lives. Neither of them seemed to mind the rain, or the mud, or the idea of sharing a room half as much as I did.

Maybe some things about country folk and city people would never mix. I wanted to be genuinely grateful,I wanted to joke around with Georgia like Caleb could, but all I thought about was how to nicely break it to him that he’d be sleeping on the floor tonight.

 I grabbed him by the corner of his torn up t-shirt and pulled him in close enough to get his attention.

 “You’re cool with me taking the bed, right?”

Caleb stopped dead in the middle of Georgia’s driveway and glared at me like I’d taken food out of his mouth. The “W” shaped furrow branding itself in the space between his eyebrows expressed his thoughts on the matter.

Bombs away.

“You’re screwin’ with me, right?”

“Not really, I’m just kinda weird about beds," I said.

“Well, get un-weird about it. I’m drugged up as it is, the least you could do is let me have a comfortable place to sleep," he said.

 “Well, maybe she has an air mattress or a couch or—“

 “Maybe you’re out of your mind! Are all girls from D.C this selfish or is it just you?”

Georgia turned around as soon as she heard Caleb shouting. If Caleb had known anything about manners, he would’ve quietly dealt with our conversation instead of hollering like a hunting dog.

Trying to figure out how to smile convincingly enough to keep Georgia from worrying about us was hard.

Keeping Caleb from shooting his mouth off was another story altogether.

“Ya’ll alright back there?”

“We’re fine, just happy to get out of the rain is all,” I said.

“The hell I am—“

I clamped my hand over Caleb’s mouth before he made the both of us look crazier than we already did.  Georgia didn’t seem to mind our chaos, just waved the two of us into her front gate with a smile.

But people smile differently when they’re lonely.

Maybe that was part of the reason why she’d let us onto her property without thinking twice about it. We all needed some new company.

I needed someone other then Caleb to talk to, Caleb needed someone else to bother, and Georgia looked happy just to have people around her on a night like this.

Georgia’s house peeped out just behind a shallow grove of pine trees up towards the end of the driveway.

She had the kind of place Tom Sawyer would’ve killed for, a two-story, all-log, southern dream nestled away in the middle of nowhere.

I’d spent most of my life living in “know-where’s”, the clean cut Chevy Chases, or nouveau riche Charlottesville’s of America. But even in the middle of all that stormy dark, Georgia J. Lee’s nowhere felt like home.

A new home, without all the bullshit.

The second our feet hit the porch, Georgia had Caleb and I scrambling out of our muddy shoes before we could get a good look inside. She’d left all the lights on, which was nice ‘cause my Dad always liked turning our house into a bat cave come sunset.

After six, any light that wasn’t in my room, his room, or the bar, was turned off. We weren’t the friendly, welcoming neighbors on our street; we were the ones people talked about.

If Georgia had lived anywhere near civilization, she would’ve been the go to gal for sugar, or neighborly advice, hands down. Even the trees framed the place nicely, and the abundance of pine needles made the front yard smell like Christmas.

I had this theory that maybe Georgia Lee was secretly Santa’s shotgun totin’ wife, and the inside of her house was a warm, life-sized, gingerbread cookie.

Obviously, none of that was true, but it was nice pretending her secrets were happier than ours.

“Listen up, you two. I’ve got rules in this here house and if ya’ll plan on sleeping here tonight, I expect ya’ll to respect em’. “

Georgia wrangled her keys out of her pocket, and fumbled to figure out which one belonged to the front door. She had hands like aged road maps, worn from the road but conscious of the right direction.

Took her a little while, but she finally unearthed what looked like an old skeleton key, and jutted it into the lock.

 “When ya’ll get inside go upstairs directly. Don’t touch, sit on, or do nothin’ but march yourselves straight into the washroom to clean up. Ya’ll can eat when you’re presentable.”

Caleb and I nodded like good little children, and followed her through the front door into Santa’s secret cabin in the woods.

(Continue to Chapter 28 Part 2)