“Yeah, I guess. But it doesn’t matter, does it?”
“No,” Leni said quietly. She knew that she was making a decision she might regret, but it felt inevitable. “Nothing matters except us.”
* * *
COME AWAY TO COLLEGE WITH ME, Len. Please …
U of A is beautiful … you could still get in for fall. We could go together.
Together …
At home, she put her bicycle away and fed the animals, but she was so distracted she dropped an entire bucket of grain. Then she hauled water from the spring at the top of the hill. An hour later, when she’d finished her chores, she saw her parents go down to the beach and stand by the boat. They were going fishing.
They’d be gone for hours.
She could ride her bike to Matthew’s house, let him kiss her again. Her parents wouldn’t even know she’d been gone.
Stupid plan. She would see Matthew tomorrow.
Tomorrow felt like a lifetime away.
She yanked up her bicycle and jumped aboard and pedaled away, past the canoe Dad had dragged home from the dump last week and the rotting husk of a dirt bike he’d been unable to get running again. The shadows of the driveway plunged down around her, chilled her.
She pedaled out onto the main road, back into the sunshine, and rode the quarter mile to the gated driveway. Wheeling around the open gate, she passed beneath the painted arch, with its tanned silver salmon carved into the wood, and kept going.
This is dangerous, she thought, but she couldn’t make herself care. All she could think about now was Matthew, and how it had felt when he kissed her, and how much she wanted to kiss him again.
Here, the road was not so muddy. Someone had obviously taken the time to regrade the earth and put down gravel. It was the kind of thing her father would never do: smooth out a road to make life easier.
She came to a bumpy, breathless stop in front of the Walker house.
Matthew was carrying a huge bale of hay over to the cattle pen. He saw her and dropped the bale and came toward her. He wore an oversized hockey sweater and shorts and rubber boots. “Len?” She loved how he had renamed her, made her into someone else, someone only he knew. “Are you okay?”
“I missed you,” she said. Stupid. They had barely been apart. “I wish … we need time together.”
“I’ll come over to see you tomorrow night,” he said, taking her in his arms. It was where she wanted to be.
“Wh-what do you mean?”
“I’ll sneak over to see you.” He said it with such conviction that she didn’t know what to say. “Tomorrow night.”
“You can’t.”
“At midnight. Sneak out to meet me.”
“It’s too dangerous.”
“You guys have an outhouse, right? So it’s no big deal to go out. And do they ever look up in the loft for you in the middle of the night?”
She could dress warmly and go out and just not come back for a while. They could steal an hour together, maybe more. Alone.
If she said no right now, it would prove that Leni could live a sensible life, with the kind of love that no one would ever compare to heroin and she would never cry herself to sleep.
“Please? I need to see you.”
“Leni!”
She heard her father’s voice yelling at her. She pushed Matthew away, but too late. Her father had seen them together and now he was striding toward them, while Mama ran along behind him.