The Good Father. Diane Chamberlain
and middle class and his sounded sort of thrown together in an emergency.
“At least you have friends here,” he said, “I’m starting all over.”
“I used to have friends,” I said. “Not so much anymore.” Wow, was that true? I felt like I was finally admitting it to myself. When was the last time Sherry called me instead of me calling her? When was the last time she texted me? My friends were moving on. Leaving me behind.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“They’re … I don’t know. They’re changing in a way I’m not. They don’t talk about anything important anymore.” I made it sound like I was leaving them. Not the other way around.
“Most girls are like that,” he said. “Airheads.”
“Major generalization.”
“Maybe.”
He told me about his old friends in Hampstead and how cool they were. I told him who was okay at my school and who he should watch out for and then we started talking about music we liked and before I knew it, it was ten o’clock and Daddy was knocking on my door telling me to go to bed.
“Is that your father?” Travis asked.
“Yeah. He wants me to get off and go to bed.”
“It’s only ten.”
“I know.” I looked over at my bed, remembering how I’d stayed awake most of the night before, trying to keep my heart going. “I’m afraid to go to bed.” I bit my lip, wishing I could take back the words. I couldn’t believe I’d said that to someone I hardly knew.
“Why?”
“It’s just … It’s stupid,” I said. I didn’t talk much about my heart. I didn’t like people to think I was weak. The scrawny, girly image of him suddenly popped into my mind. Why was I talking to him at all? But the words wanted to come out in the worst way. “I have this … I have the same heart problem my mother had,” I said. “And yesterday I found out it’s even worse than my mother’s was, so last night I kept feeling it beating when I was in bed and it freaked me out and now I don’t want to go to bed.”
“Wow.” He was quiet for a few seconds. “You could call me,” he said finally.
“What do you mean?”
“Call me from your bed and we’ll talk about other stuff. It’ll keep your mind off your heart. And keep my mind off my father,” he added.
“That’s crazy.”
“You could,” he said.
“No, thanks,” I said. “And I have to get off. I still have to read a chapter for history and you have all those assignments to check out.”
“Like I’m really going to do that,” he said with a laugh. “See you tomorrow.”
I hung up the phone and got ready for bed, thinking about what a total dork I was for spending an hour on the phone with him. But once I was lying in bed, my heart started hammering against my rib cage and I felt like I couldn’t pull a full breath into my lungs and before I knew what I was doing, I reached for the phone and hit Redial.
He answered so fast, I knew he’d been waiting.
He became the person I looked forward to seeing at school. Not Sherry or my other long-time friends. As I was losing them, I was gaining Travis. He didn’t fit in well with the other boys. It wasn’t only his looks, although honestly, I was starting to think he was cute. He had really nice gray eyes beneath those insanely long eyelashes and although he didn’t smile often, when he did, he kind of tipped his head to the side in a way that made me smile back. He was too down over his father’s death to make much of an effort to fit in. He talked to me a lot about him, and I felt jealous that he’d gotten to know his father so well when I’d been cheated out of knowing my mother. His father sounded amazing. I loved my own father and I would have said we were close, but Travis’s father was almost like a best friend to him. A really, really good father.
We talked on the phone more than we emailed and it took me a while to realize the old computer he shared with his mother was always breaking down and they didn’t have the money to get it fixed. I didn’t know what it was like not to have enough money for something as necessary as a computer. We had three in our condo for just Daddy and me. Travis had to use the one at the library sometimes to get his work done—and he did get it done even though he always acted like he didn’t care about school. My father drove me to his house every once in a while so we could study together and afterward Travis and I would slowly walk the two blocks to the beach and he’d talk on and on about the tides and the surf and the marine life—all the things he’d learned from his father. My own father seemed to like Travis and called him “that nice little boy at the beach.” He was happy I was no longer hanging around my old friends, who were getting wilder by the minute. The nice little boy at the beach struck him as much safer.
By the time summer rolled around, I was hardly speaking to Sherry and everybody, and that was okay. We had nothing in common anymore and they always wanted to put distance between themselves and Travis, who seemed like such a loser to them. That summer, Travis and his mother spent the entire two months with his aunt in Maryland, and when he came back he looked completely different. It was such a shock. When I saw him the first day of school, I honestly didn’t recognize him. He’d had a growth spurt so huge it must have hurt. He was taller than me and he had muscles where he used to be all skin and knobby bones. He actually needed to shave! No one would ever think of him as girlish again. Especially not the girls, Sherry and my former friends included. They practically threw themselves at him, but he hadn’t forgotten how they treated him. And he hadn’t forgotten the one girl who treated him like he mattered: me.
I’d changed, too, over the summer. I suddenly understood my old friends’ fascination with guys and I saw Travis in a whole new way. We settled back into our friendship pretty easily, but there was something new and exciting cooking beneath the surface and we both knew it. We still spoke on the phone nearly every night, but our conversations were different, full of unexpected twists and turns.
“I met a girl in Maryland,” he told me one night, soon after school started.
I tried to act cool, though I felt ridiculously jealous. “What was she like?” I asked.
“Nice. Pretty. Sexy.”
I didn’t think I’d ever heard him use the word sexy before and it set all my nerve endings on fire. I was dying at the thought of him kissing her. Touching her body.
“Did you do it?”
He laughed, sounding a little embarrassed. “Almost, but no.”
I felt relieved. “Are you still … I mean, do you want …”
He laughed again, and this time I knew he was laughing at me. “Spit it out,” he said.
I shut my eyes. My heart was beating so hard I could feel it pounding through my back into my mattress. “Are you going to see her again?” I asked. “It’s not like Maryland’s on the other side of the country.”
“No, I’m not. It wouldn’t be fair to her.”
“Why not?”
“Because the whole time I was hanging with her I wanted to be with you.”
Yes. I couldn’t believe how much I’d wanted to hear him say that! “I love you,” I said. I blinked my eyes open and stared at my dark ceiling, biting my lip. Waiting.
“Since when?” he asked. Not exactly the response I’d wanted. But I thought back.
“Since that first night we talked on the phone. Remember? How you said talking would keep me from thinking about my heart and you from thinking about—”
“I love you, too,” he interrupted, and suddenly everything