Page 55 of The Cadence
“Yeah.” By that point, I wasn’t crying anymore, and I was starting to feel stupid instead. I hadn’t meant to divulge that stuff to anyone and especially not to Will, who was the pinnacle of perfection no matter what I’d heard whispered about his weird family.
“Jesus Christ.” He had shaken his head and we’d sat for another moment. Then he’d said, “Come on. The least I can do is give you a ride home.”
Of course, we hadn’t made it to my grandma’s house before he’d started getting a bunch of calls from his mother, and that had all been a mess. At least I’d been there to help him.
I stepped out of those memories and back into the present when my own phone sounded a little reminder that I needed to leave for the grocery store. I did have to work and I couldn’t sit here staring at the wall, lost in thoughts of Will. I’d already wasted a large part of my life doing that, and now I had the real thing! I didn’t have to pine and yearn anymore, like I was a forlorn and forgotten girl in one of the books I checked out of the library. Although, I had just finished most of their selection. I was going to either find a new branch or find a good used bookstore.
But there was no more pining, because now I had the real deal: William Franklin Bodine, in the flesh. Of course, I didn’t have him at the moment, because he was off in Alabama where his beautiful former girlfriend lived. And of course, I didn’t reallyhave him at all, not in the way that I’d dreamed about when I’d proclaimed my love for him in the parking lot of our high school.
I sighed. I was seven years past the day when I’d humiliated myself with my ridiculous declaration but just like I’d once told him, I was still the same Calla at heart. Things hadn’t changed much for me.
I headed out to the car and looked at myself in the rearview mirror. Why was I worrying about Will and some woman he used to love, why was I torturing myself with the idea of the two of them and what they would do together? It was enough to be his friend and to help him just like he helped me. Yeah, that was enough. I nodded at my reflection and drove myself to work, going a little faster than I should have. I was a fortunate girl and this was enough.
“It’s not enough.”
I jerked back to the present once again and refocused my attention on my current location: the grocery store. “What?” I asked.
My manager shook her head as she looked at the display of bakery items that Cully had set up. “Why did he leave this half-finished? It’s…what’s that word I’m looking for? It starts with an S.”
“Sloppy?” I suggested.“Scarce?Stupid?”
“It’s all three and it looks like crap. Where is he?”
I shrugged, although I’d seen him grinning like a monkey at his phone and heading into the back. He’d let me know that he andKirsten had patched things up. Apparently, there was an area next to the loading dock where the cameras didn’t reach, and she had been meeting him there for—at that point he’d gotten a self-satisfied smile that told me exactly what was happening next to the loading dock, an area that smelled like stale beer and garbage, and where I’d once seen a rat.
“That’s romantic,” I’d said.
“Who needs romance when a girl is so happy to share her kitty?” he had responded, but he’d used another word that also referred to cats. I couldn’t say it because I remembered my grandma’s face when she’d heard it yelled by some rude kid in another aisle at the thrift store.
Cully had also told me that I was being dumb if romance was what I was waiting for. “Kirsten said that either you’re lying about Bodine and how you’re just friends, or you’re withholding sex for some reason. She thinks you may be a religious freak, but they don’t have those in The City so she’s not sure. Either way, go ahead and fuck him! You’ll feel better.”
That had made me extremely mad and since the dinner party, the two of us hadn’t been on the best of terms anyway. But out of solidarity, I still wouldn’t give up his location, so now I told the manager that I wasn’t sure where he’d gotten to but he was probably rounding up the buggies in the front parking lot. She went off to find him and I hurried back to the registers to open mine. With the Woodsmen game tomorrow, we were busy and the store was full of customers. There was no time for doing anything with anybody’s kitty at the moment.
The manager must have found Cully eventually. He joined me at the front looking hot and messy. He also looked annoyed that he had to work and I got annoyed as well, because he kept checking his phone and smiling at it. Groceries were piling up at the end of my conveyer belt.
“Pay attention,” I hissed at him. “You’re not hiding next to the loading dock anymore.”
“You’re just jealous.”
I almost dropped the big bag of flour that I was passing over the scanner, and that would have been a huge mess if it had broken open. “Who do you think I’m jealous of? Kirsten, because she has you?”
He slammed the flour into the paper grocery bag and a dusty cloud flew up.
“Hey!” the customer said. “Did that just break?”
Cully’s voice went up in volume. “You’re jealous ofmebecause I have a real relationship and you’re playing house with the Woodsmen—”
“Be quiet!” I barked. What about the fans who had takenpictures and videos of me? All the people who had criticized me? What if they heard?
“I want different flour,” the shopper announced, her voice just as loud. “And a different bagger.”
“I’m sorry about that. He’ll get more for you, in a nice way,” I promised her, and I glared at Cully. My ex-friend grabbed the flour and made another cloud puff up as he stalked back towardthe aisle with the baking supplies. I glanced at the long line of customers and wondered if any of them had their phones out and had recorded that interaction. For the rest of the shift, until the last Woodsmen fan had gone home, Cully and I ignored each other and I watched people and hoped that at least my hair looked ok.
“You’re a beautiful girl,” my grandma had told me when I’d first moved into her house. “But it doesn’t matter if I say so. The important thing is that you think it about yourself, Bug.” She had brushed my crazy hair and shown me pictures of women with hollowed-out cheeks and giant eyes that were too big for their faces, like I had looked back then. “So beautiful!” she’d repeated, nodding seriously. “Someday, you’ll see it, too!”
But I had been more interested in getting other people to see it, like the girls at my high school who already had beautiful hair and bigger breasts and the boys…the boys like Will. As years had passed, I’d accepted myself a whole lot more, but the idea that people were watching me just to criticize was enough to throw any woman off her game. I definitely felt like I’d been thrown off mine as I drove back home, and when I got there and checked Will’s location? I didn’t feel any better.
He wasn’t at the hotel where I knew that the team was staying. The night before the game, he was in what looked like a residential neighborhood that didn’t have anything to do with football, except it might have had something to do with his ex-girlfriend Nicia. I stared at my phone and thought about texting him or even calling, but that was just pathetic. I didn’t havemuch experience with men but I knew enough not to chase them when they were running away.
