Maybe that’s why his mom had gone to a new town, leaving Shawn and his father and their whole life behind. Maybe no one here would have understood why she’d leave someone like Gabe. Maybe leaving them both was the only way she wouldn’t feel crazy.
There were some days when Shawn thought he understood what it must have been like for her. When there was nothing he wouldn’t do to get away.
Noah shrugged. “Everyone’s kind of messed up. But that’s what friends are for, right? To be there through the mess? Honestly, if you want to talk, we can talk.”
Shawn sighed. He spotted another good skipping stone on the bank, flat and smooth. He picked it up, hefting its weight in his hand. “Not yet,” he decided. “But thanks. Seriously.”
“Well, the offer stands.”
“Same for you.” Shawn turned the rock over and over in his hands. It really was perfect.
He tossed it out into the water and turned away before he could see it start to skip, walking up the bank toward Noah’s mom’s car. “C’mon. Let’s go home.”
Chapter Forty-Four
JUSTIN
A couple of hours after I leave Rose’s house and she obediently returns to her “grounding,” Noah’s car pulls into Mrs. Hanley’s driveway, with Rose in the passenger seat. It’s still weird to me how people will just disappear for hours in 1985, and you’ll have no idea what they’re doing until they resurface. Rose told me she’d talk to Noah when he got home, and now here they are. No text to say they’re on their way, no social media check-in with their location. Just there, then nothing, then here.
When they arrive, driving a station wagon with a bike rack strapped to the back as promised, Noah seems less than thrilled to see me standing in the driveway. He climbs out of the driver’s side and looks at me. “So I hear you stole Karl Derrin’s bike.”
Rose rolls her eyes, but I can’t help but notice how she seems happier in his presence. More relaxed. Like the sun coming out from behind a cloud. My stomach does a strange little flip. “Not exactly,” I say. “You okay taking it back?”
“Of course.”
As Noah loads the bike up onto the rack, he grins at Rose and says in a weirdly high-pitched voice, “I don’t wanna go that fast!”
Rose dissolves into giggles, then pitches her voice up several octaves, too. “Like a snake?”
I look from one to the other, totally lost as Rose doubles over in laughter, and Noah’s shoulders shake as he secures the bike to the rack with bright-orange straps. Briefly, he wraps the end of a strap around his own waist and makes a comically horrified expression, stretching his eyes and mouth wide, making them both laugh even harder.
Rose catches me staring at them in confusion, and manages to gasp out, “Noah’s sister, when his mom first got this rack—”
“She was eight,” Noah jumps in, lifting his glasses to wipe away tears.
“She asked what it was for, and Noah told her—”
“I said it was for bikes.”
“But she thought that meant while people were riding the bikes—”
“And that one person got tied to the rack, and then the rest would get tied on behind them—”
“And they’d all get pulled by the car like a train. She called it a bike snake.”
“And she got so scared that we were going to make her ride the bike snake—”
“Which you totally let her believe—”
“I mean, I was not going to be the one to kill the dream of the bike snake!”
By now they are laughing so hard it’s all I can do to follow their tag-team story. I wonder if they realize that they talk like two people sharing one voice. Like when one of them breathes in, it’s the other who breathes out.
Is she different, with him? Brighter, sharper, more vibrant?
Or is this who she is all the time when she’s not with me? Is relying on her to help me fix all my absurd problems . . . dimming her somehow?
I’m still stuck in my own head, wondering if I somehow make the people around me worse, when I hear Rose say something about me riding with the two of them, which I find moderately alarming, considering I am nowhere near fluent in this language of shared inside jokes that they speak.
Noah looks at me, his keys dangling from one finger as the laughter fades from his eyes. He’s still smiling, but the truth couldn’t be plainer if it were tattooed across his face: I’m a third wheel, and he planned for only two. “Actually,” he says, “since you know the way there, Rose, why don’t you two just go and I’ll head home? My mom won’t mind if you drive her car.”
“Are you sure?” Rose asks, and there it is. The dimming.
“Yeah. I told Steph I’d call her when I was done over here anyway,” Noah says, hands in his pockets. He doesn’t meet her eyes.
“Oh,” Rose says, her expression flickering for just a second before she gives him a tight smile. “Sure, yeah, of course.”
She’s quiet during the drive over. I feel like there’s obviously something going on with her and Noah, but I don’t know the right way to ask about it, or if it’s even any of my business. So I don’t say anything either.
When we pull into the Derrins’ driveway, I get the weirdest sense of déjà vu. The house looks largely the same as it did when I was here last weekend, thirty-eight years in the future. The landscaping is different, of course, and I think some of the trim may be a different color, but otherwise it looks just like it did the last time I watched it shrink in my rearview mirror as I drove away with Alyssa screaming at me to stop.
A few seconds after Rose parks in the wide driveway, the front door opens and a girl emerges from the house. She’s pretty and petite, about our age, with a round face that looks like it should be selling bubble gum, and green eyes frosted in a shocking smear of bright-blue eye shadow. Her peach-colored shirt is about eight sizes too big, with the face of some dude who looks like he just escaped from Jumanji printed across the chest and something unintelligible scrawled in purple script down the sleeve, and her blonde hair is tightly curled into a frizzy halo that makes her look like she shoved her finger in an electric socket.
I have been stuck in 1985 for more than four days now, but I don’t feel any closer to understanding any of its bizarre fashion choices.
“Hey,” she says, looking at both of us and trying to hide her confusion at my presence. Her eyes settle on Rose. “I’m sorry, did we have plans or something?”
“No, Justin just noticed that Karl left his bike by the school, so we came here to drop it off,” Rose says. She gestures toward me as I lift the bike off the rack. “Charlene, this is my friend Justin. My pen pal that I told you about. Justin, this is Charlene, Karl’s sister.”
Charlene sticks out her hand to shake, which seems a little formal, but I go with it. I expect her hand to be soft, given the swankiness of her house and the gentleness of her features, but her fingers are calloused and her grip is firm. Looking at her up close, it finally comes to me where I’ve seen her before: the family portrait, when I went inside to use the bathroom during the bonfire. She was in the one with Dave’s grandparents. Which would make her Dave’s aunt.