Where We Used to Roam Jenn Bishop (red white royal blue TXT) 📖

“It’s not, though,” Tyler says. “You were just being nice. I wish I could come out and visit. I want to go. You know they have an annual Stars Hollow convention in Connecticut, right?”

“Maybe you can. Look, your Grams is right: a lot has happened this year. Maybe she’s afraid of you being far away. Maybe she’s worried she’s going to lose you, too.” As I’m saying that, it hits me. Maybe that’s how Mom and Dad feel right now about Austin. No one wants to send their kid away. They knew they’d have to for college, sure. Earlier this year, before everything went wrong, sometimes I’d catch them getting all wistful about it. They were so certain he’d want to go far.

And now, ahead of schedule, he is away. Just for a month, and just to Cape Cod, but still.

“I can try to warm her up to the idea,” Tyler says.

Now that things seem okay with us, I pull the letter from Austin out of my back pocket. “I got this in the mail yesterday,” I say, handing it to him.

“You sure you want me to read it?”

“No, I handed it to you because I don’t want you to read it,” I deadpan. “Yes, silly.”

We pull off to the side, where there’s a picnic table under a tree, and sit down next to each other. The whole time he’s reading it, I keep shifting my new Becca box, creating little rainbows from the refracting light. As much as I don’t want my time here in Wyoming with Tyler to end, in this moment I want to fast-forward to the end of the summer. Becca’s box will be beautiful by then. No, perfect. And Austin will be home and healthy again. And we’ll start the new school year and everything can just go back to the way it used to be.

Tyler hands the letter back to me. “That’s… great, Em.” I can’t help noticing how his voice doesn’t match the words.

“It sounds like he’s doing so much better, right? I mean, he’s joking in the first part. And he says how much he’s learned now and how he’s never going to get into that stuff again. He sounds like how he used to. I mean, not that you would know. But he does. He seems happy and hopeful. They caught it in time, you know?”

“Yeah…” There’s that hesitation again.

“What?” I say.

“It’s just—this stuff is so hard. That’s what I saw with my mom. She was in and out of rehab so many times. And every time, she’d say it was the last time, but it wasn’t. And so eventually I just stopped believing her. It was easier that way. Then she couldn’t let me down.”

“I’m sorry,” I say, surprised by how easy it is to reach out and hug him.

I wish I could make his mom as strong as Austin. Wish that there were some way to give their story a happy ending. But all these unhappy families, they’re different, like Tolstoy said. Some of them stay unhappy forever. And others get a second chance.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Back home I used to be the kind of person who always slept through the night, but now that I’m in Wyoming, that’s no longer true.

I wake up with a start, never remembering my dream, and every time it takes me a second to figure out where I am. The streetlight outside my window back home would shine into my bedroom no matter how many times Mom or I played around with the shade. Plus it never got that dark, with the city so close by. It was comforting, that light. I know it doesn’t make any sense, but as I fell asleep, it felt like someone was watching over me.

In the darkness now, as my brain remembers why I’m here, there’s that little moment of panic. Austin and my parents, they’re so far away. What if something happened to them? And I don’t even know it yet?

My brain starts whirring with all the things that could go wrong, until I lay my eyes on the one thing that settles all the worries. My Becca box. Even though I’ve been working on it in the den during the day, at night I always bring it back to my room. I don’t trust that Dumbledore for a second. The box sits on the desk across from my bed, and in the dark I can just barely make out the shape. A fuzzy black rectangle, but that’s enough somehow. Maybe it’s better that I can’t see more than that, because in my head I can see the finished product.

As I close my eyes and try to fall back asleep, I imagine walking over to Becca’s house. Knocking on her door. Becca opening the door and the look on her face when she sees it. Surprise and relief and something else.

She takes it in her hands and turns it over, seeing all the details I put into it. Two months’ worth. I know I can’t see her remembering, but I’ll know she is. I’ll know because she’ll do that lip-biting thing she does when she reads. Except she won’t be lost in some book she’s imagining in her head; this time it’ll be us she’s imagining. Us she’s remembering.

And she’ll forgive me.

She can forgive me, and Austin can get better. We can all go back. I can’t explain how the two are related, only that I feel it in my body, the way you know your heart is beating, your lungs are working.

This trip is like my reset button. When I finally go home at the end of the summer, everything can go back to normal.

My legs look pink, so I smear a dab of sunscreen on them. Tyler’s got his face in a library book, like he always does when we’re at the town pool, but when I glance up, I