4
TEDDY
FALL OF SENIOR YEAR
There’s a big smile on Ellie’s face when she climbs into the passenger seat beside me.
“Here ya go!” She leans across the center console to swing a small paper bag in my face, yanking her plaid scarf off with her other hand. Immediately, the scent of cinnamon and sugar fills the confines of the car. “Fresh out of the oven.”
The rear door opens with a creak.
“Thanks.” I smile at Ellie. Force my eyes tostayon my girlfriend, not the girl climbing into the backseat of my old Toyota.
They live together now, Ellie and Sutton, on the dairy farm Joe Everett has lived on for decades, long before I moved in next door. His property butts up against Grams’s on one side, overlooking the body of water Brookfield’s residents claim as a lake but is really more of a glorified pond.
For the first few months after Sutton and her father, David, moved to Brookfield, I’d run into her.
Randomly at first. On purpose later.
By the mailbox when I went for a run after school.
In the mornings when I was helping out with the milking and the upkeep.
At night on a big rock by the lake.
And each and every time, we’d linger. Talk. About music and school and our messed-up families and nothing and everything.
I knew she had a boyfriend because it came up the first time we spoke. The second time we talked, I told Sutton I had a girlfriend. Since Brookfield is the size of a postage stamp, I’m sure she put together who that was as soon as school started in August.
Freshman year, I was the new guy in a close-knit town with a murky backstory. Ellie was the perky class president who kept walking with me between classes and sitting with me at lunch. I thought I loved her—or was getting there—right up until a leggy blonde walked into Dave’s Grocery, wearing a faded Folsom Prison T-shirt and a pissed-off expression.
Sutton’s father, David, was barely in town for a week before he started hanging around the bakery Ellie’s mother, Lily, owned. Fast-forward a few months, and David proposed. Ellie and Lily moved into the farmhouse next door.
Ellie was thrilled.
I pretended to be. I think Sutton pretended too.
I’d spent the past few weeks—months—realizing I wanted to break up with Ellie. Then, all of a sudden, the girl Ellie smiled at in the halls—the girl who I couldn’t get out of my head, no matter what I did or how hard I tried—was about to become her stepsister.
So, I kept my mouth shut. Watched Ellie’s mom marry Sutton’s dad with a stupid sinking sensation in my stomach.
Ellie and I have been together for almost three years. Breaking up with her is the furthest thing from an easy fling to end. She thinks we’re going to college together. Going to get married and have kids. I wasn’t sure if I was ready for any of that before I met Sutton. But it was nice, heading in the direction where that was an option. Seeing the stable, normal steps I never had in my life before Brookfield laid them out as possibilities.
I might have had some shitty role models in my life when it comes to love, but I know this much—you shouldn’t make promises to one girl while you have to physically restrain yourself from looking at another.
Complications aren’t only on my end. Sutton has a boyfriend.
I don’t think this…connection between us is one-sided. There are too many lingering stares. Too many innocent touches that feel more intimate than sex. Too many times she knows what I’m thinking without me having to say a single word.
We have chemistry. The tangible sort that tiptoes across skin and swirls in your stomach. The undeniable kind.
But we’ve never discussed it, never addressed it.
Ellie is stubborn. A little bossy. She likes things done one way—hers. I’ve gotten glimpses of the softness beneath the perfectionist, but not many people do. Despite her excessive involvement in school activities—or maybe because of it actually, since she tries to foist it on others as well, with limited success—Ellie isn’t the most popular girl at Brookfield High.
That would probably be Sutton.
I know that bothers Ellie even though she pretends it doesn’t. Just like I want to punch every guy I see so much as talk to Sutton and pretend I don’t.