Page 64 of The Getaway List
Mariella slaps an enthusiastic palm on the table. “Wait, what other thing?”
I’m not sure what makes me say it. Maybe it’s just the comfort of seeing everyone else look settled in this moment, or at least on the verge of it. Jesse’s planning on telling Dai how he feels tonight. Mariella and Luca are clearly about to peel out of here and un-crush their mutual crushes on each other. They’ve got closure, and really, so do I—Tom’s leaving. We know the exact measure of what we are and what we could be, know exactly what’s going to happen next.
But this summer still has one loose end, and suddenly I can’t resist the urge to tug it. As if unraveling it could stop the summer from ending, even if it’s just a few seconds more.
“Someone sent me a notebook.”
I look at all three of them in turn as if one of them will give themselves away, only their expressions are unchanged—Jesse’s curious, Luca’s confused, and Mariella’s oddly determined.
“What kind of notebook?” she asks.
“Just—a blank one is all,” I say, feeling the heat creep into my face. “It’s nothing.”
Mariella’s eyes fixate on me slyly. “Your face looks like it’s something.”
“My face is the same face it’s always been.”
“Goopy recognizes goopy,” she says, which makes Luca’s head tilt in further confusion, and prompts Mariella to pull out her phone. “And enough is enough.”
I blink. “Wait—what are you doing?”
“Abusing my power,” she says.
I cross the room to her fast. “Are you going into the backend of the ‘Dear, Love’ Dispatch again?”
“Only because at this point it feels like my civic responsibility,” she says into her phone screen. “I think I can speak for everyone in this room when I say your whole ‘will they, won’t they’ thing with Tom has gone past the legal limit. We need clarity.”
“Actually we don’t,” I say quickly, but I’m swallowed up by Luca saying, “Wait, are we sure we want to do this?” And Jesse unsubtly chanting, “Do it, do it, do it.”
It takes Mariella all of five seconds to pull it up, and the thing is, I don’t stop her. I don’t pull the phone out of her hands or kick up a fuss or think about any of the consequences. I let it happen so easily that I might as well be pressing the buttons myself.
“Wait—are you the one who’s been sending Tom things?” Mariella asks.
I feel a louder version of the quick, defensive twinge of jealousy I’ve been trying to push down all summer. “No,” I say.
“But there are all these outgoing deliveries to Tom’s number, and they have the same area code as his. The Virginia one.”
I glance over her shoulder, recognizing the number immediately. Tom insisted we memorize all our collective emergency numbers by the time we were eight.
“No, that’s Tom’s mom,” I say, too bewildered to think the better of it.
“Wait, what?”
We all startle like cartoon characters at Tom, whose entire six-foot-something self walked right through the door without any of us noticing. He looks upset but not in the startled, accusatory way he probably should. He looks drained. Dull. Strangely resigned.
“What’s wrong?” I ask. “Who was that?”
“Um,” he manages. Whatever it was cracking in his expression, he seams it up fast when he feels the weight of all our eyes on him. “It was my mom. I guess she’s not coming in tonight after all. Says it’s looking more like next week.”
Shit.
I step forward on instinct even knowing full well I can’t pull him into my arms like I want to right now—if Tom is determined to pretend everything’s fine, the last thing I want to do is call more attention to the fact that it’s not. Tom finds my eyes just the same, and the hurt in them is so raw that it’s like I’m seeing all of it at once—every moment in the past few years he’s hoped for something from Vanessa and she’s let him down.
“Why would your mom send you stuff through the dispatch?” Mariella asks. “I thought she didn’t know you were running it.”
“I don’t know,” says Tom, who is staring at her phone now, too, his voice flat. “I don’t know.”
There’s a beat none of us are sure whether to fill, waiting to see if Tom’s going to say something else.
