The Rom-Commers(12)

I stared down at the phone screen with dread, afraid to know for sure. What video?

From the format, I could guess that it wasn’t the YouTube video of the writing talk I’d given for the library that now had almost three hundred views. Nor, clearly, was it the sample freshman English class that lived on our community college’s home page.

No, this video was vertical.

This video was personal.

This video had come from Logan’s phone.

And here I faced a choice that was really no choice at all. I wanted to stay and continue eavesdropping—since I no longer trusted Logan’s relationship with the truth. But I needed to know which video Logan had sent.

Please, please, please don’t let it be the bikini video, I begged silently as I snuck with my bags away from the door, out into the yard, creating enough distance to watch it without being heard.

The bikini video—that I’d regretted a thousand times. The bikini video from ten years ago that Logan had sworn he’d erased—but I never 100 percent believed him. The bikini video I’d recorded for him when he’d asked me to send him “something sexy” and so I’d gotten Sylvie to record me crawling through the surf and growling like a panther at the beach in my first—and last—bikini.

The bikini video that topped my list of Most Embarrassing Things I’d Ever Done on Purpose.

He wouldn’t have. Right?

He couldn’t have.

But now I knew something new. I really had no idea what Logan would or wouldn’t do. If he’d trick me into flying out here for a job that didn’t exist, he was capable of anything.

There was a bench in the yard, and without really noticing, I backed up and parked myself on it. Next, the fight inside the house now out of earshot, I slid the video into frame on Logan’s phone and tapped PLAY.

It wasn’t the bikini video.

It was a video I didn’t even remember. Had possibly never seen before.

It was me. In high school. Laughing and walking away from Logan, saying, “Do it right this time!” I watched myself moving—walking the way girls walk when they know they’re being watched. I wore cutoffs and a striped T-shirt. My red curls were longer and wilder then, draping down my neck like mermaid fire. I paused to tie them into a bun.

I’d forgotten that. My hair was so long in high school I could tie it in a knot.

Wow. That girl was like a stranger. Like some kid I’d walk past on the street.

She lifted her arms, stepped forward, and then kicked up into a handstand. And then she started reciting a passage from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night while upside down.

Oh, god. I’d forgotten all about this.

“O Mistress mine, where are you roaming?” the young me bellowed, walking on her hands. “O stay and hear, your true love’s coming, that can sing both high and low. Trip no further pretty sweeting. Journeys end in lovers’ meeting—”

As I watched, the poem was coming back to me, and I was just anticipating the next line when my dad—looking younger than I ever remembered him, with dark brown hair and broad shoulders—stepped barefoot into the frame and flipped up on his hands, too, and finished the line. “Every wise man’s son doth know.”

“Dad!” the other me complained. “This is for school.”

It was this ordinary moment, but it was mesmerizing. There it all was: The backyard I grew up playing in. My mother’s herb garden on the flagstone patio. The overgrown crepe myrtle tree we used to climb.

It wasn’t a video on a phone. It was a time capsule.

A time capsule of everything I’d lost.

That’s when I heard something in the video that stopped my heart.

Her voice.

My mom’s voice.

She must’ve been standing right next to Logan as he filmed, because her volume was so loud—so much louder than everything else in the video, ten feet away—that for just half a second, it didn’t seem like the sound was coming from the phone in my hand.

“Emma! Your shirt’s coming off!” my mom called.

And it felt so much like my beautiful, long-lost mother wasn’t there, but here, right here, in the present moment, beside me in Charlie Yates’s yard, that I glanced down at my shirt to check it. For one heartbreaking instant, my brain thought she was with me here and now—and sent a spark of joy so bright it almost hurt.

But of course she wasn’t here.

We scattered her ashes in the ocean nine years ago—as soon as my dad was healed enough to make the drive.

The spark faded. I came to my senses. The video kept playing.

“My shirt’s not ‘coming off,’” the other me corrected my mom. “It’s just falling down.”

“Either way, we can see your bra.”

“It’s not a bra,” I said. “It’s a bikini top.”

“Well, it looks like a bra. Tuck your shirt in.”

“I can’t. I don’t have any arms.”

“You do have arms,” my still-upside-down dad pointed out. “You’re just using them as legs.”

Just as Logan, still focused on the bra issue, offered helpfully, “It’s nothing I haven’t seen before, Mrs. Wheeler.”

“That’s not comforting,” my mom said as she stepped into the frame. And then there she was—not just a voice, but a vision. My beautiful, ethereal, ordinary mother, striding across the lawn in a jean skirt and sandals toward her goofball daughter. She grabbed my shirt while I was still upside down and tucked it in while my legs went all cattywampus.