Page 16 of Sunsets & Slow Dances

My phone buzzed, and I pulled it out from my back pocket. It was a text from Amos.

Amos:A little birdie named Lewis said someone is getting a new student today. How are we feeling about that?

I instantly replied.

Me:Can’t breathe. Might throw up.

Amos:Brown paper bags in the supply closet. In through the nose, out through the mouth. Aim for the trash bin.

Me:Good advice.

That took care of hyperventilating and barfing. Now all I had to worry about was crying or having an existential crisis or a nervous breakdown. Probably just the crying.

He’s just a kid, I told myself. He didn’t represent everything I ever wanted in my life.

It was fine. I was fine. Everything was fine.

6

CALLUM

“You can drop me off here.”Chloe started reaching for the handle of the passenger door while I was pulling up to the stop sign a few blocks away from the high school. She had the door open before I even came to a full and complete stop.

“I’ll pick you up at—” My words were cut off when she slammed the door. “—three,” I finished.

As I watched her disappear in the sea of other teens on the sidewalk, I wondered how today was going to go. This was her first day back since she’d lost her mom. Would she be okay? Were all of her teachers aware of what she’d been through? Did she have a close group of friends to support her?

Since she got home Friday morning after going MIA on NYE, I broached the subject several times. I asked her about school and her social life, but she’d given me short, one-word answers. I couldn’t blame her for not opening up to me. I was a complete stranger to her.

Over the weekend, she’d spent a lot of time out in the barn with Lady. I’d seen her have long conversations with Buzz. She’d played video games with Matty. This morning, she seemed happy to see my mom. But it was very clear she was not mybiggest fan. I wasn’t sure how I was going to bridge the gap and form any sort of relationship with her. All of my attempts so far had ended in a crash and burn. The harder I tried, the more she pulled away.

I pulled up to the stop sign and signaled to make a left toward the elementary school when a car passed in front of me with a blonde in the driver’s seat. For a split second, I thought it was Nadia behind the wheel. The driver glanced to her left and I discovered it wasn’t. My entire body exhaled, and my heart started beating once again. It wasn’t her—this time. But the reality was, sooner or later, Iwasgoing to see her. We would be face-to-face. This town was too small to avoid her.

At some point, our paths would cross. In the years we’d been apart, I’d run through what that scenario would look like hundreds, maybe thousands of times. Would I catch a fleeting glimpse of her driving by in a car? Would I walk into a shop, she’d have her back to me, then she’d turn around in slow motion like in the movies? Would I walk around a street corner and bump into her, she’d look up at me, and our eyes would meet? In each one of these cinematic vignettes, time stood still, and romantic music swelled.

But those were just fantasies. Now that I was here, in town, and confronted with the inevitability of our reunion, I knew it was going to be anticlimactic at best, awkward at least, and agonizing at worst.

The truth was, I hadn’t kept tabs on Nadia during our time apart. I hadn’t even uttered her name since I left town a decade earlier. I had no idea who she was now.

I didn’t know what she looked like. If she had a boyfriend. If she had ahusband.Or if she even lived here. I assumed she was still in town, but I could be wrong.

Over the years, a few of my friends had come to my fights and we’d hung out afterward. But none of my boys brought up my ex,and I hadn’t asked about her. It didn’t surprise me they didn’t mention her after the way we ended. Even though I never told a soul. I was sure everyone in town knew she hooked up with Jerry Clemons the day after my dad’s funeral. We weren’ttechnicallytogether at the time, but that was just semantics. We’d broken up plenty of times and never been with anyone else.

Part of me wanted to rip off the Band-Aid and see her, but another part of me was scared of what would happen when/if I did. I wish I could say that I got over her—that the past was the past—and I moved on. But that wasn’t the case.

The last time we broke up—and I say last time because we broke up so much—was traumatic. It destroyed me. I never properly dealt with it. I just forced myself to stop feeling my emotions because they were too much. I numbed myself. I became a shell of what I used to be so that I could function. That was, I discovered, easier to do when everywhere I turned, everywhere I looked, there weren’t memories of her.

I pulled into the parking lot of the elementary school and once again pushed Nadia Carson from my mind. I’d had ten years of practice doing it, so I was pretty good at it. Thankfully, the elementary school was the one place that was safe. Nadia was a year younger than me, so we weren’t in any classes together in elementary. Plus, she was absent a lot because of her home life, before she was old enough to walk to school. So she wasn’t on my radar until she was twelve and I was thirteen. Firefly Elementary held zero memories of Nadia Carson.

As I reversed into a parking space and looked up at the steps leading up to the office of the two-story brick building with an arch and white columns at the entrance, I was struck by how different the building appeared. It looked so much smaller than I remembered. It used to seem so large and imposing; now it seemed quaint.

I glanced up in the rearview mirror. “Alright, little man. Are you ready for your first day at your new school?”

Matty nodded as he put on a brave face. Beneath his smile, I could see he was nervous. As shitty as I felt that I’d had to pull him out of his school back home, where he had a solid group of friends, I just didn’t think it was right to pull Chloe out of school halfway through her freshman year, not after losing her mom.

I got out and opened the back door. Matty climbed down from his booster seat, and we headed up the front steps to the office. He held my hand, and I squeezed his.

“I went to this school when I was your age.”

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