“We’re just some boys who like fresh air and company,” one of them said, the one with the wispy, pitiful mustache. “You like to read, we like fresh air and company.”
Shelby looked at the one who said he was a redneck and he was champing at the bit. She wished he would jump at her or raise his voice. She wanted to see her father beat the hell out of one of these kids. This was what she was stuck with. Citrus County. These were her people now. No one in Iceland was hers. Her mother and her sister were not hers. Toby — who knew? The whole county was full of these kids, these punks, full of their parents.
Shelby looked toward the car and her father was indeed peering rigidly in her direction, the look on his face all business. He was trying to figure out if these boys were her friends or what. Shelby looked individually at as many of them as she could, into their hollow eyes. The boys didn’t move. There wasn’t a peep to be heard. They were of one mind, done in. They were survivors, these boys. They couldn’t afford to have fight in them like Shelby did. They knew when they were beat.
After the final bell sounded and Mr. Hibma’s last class of the day spilled out into the hall and blended with the rest of the freed students, Mr. Hibma shut off the lights in his room and sat at his desk. All the clubs had wrapped up. Most of the sports were over. This was the time of year when even the teachers bolted right after the final bell. It was the beginning of summer, a time to be happy. Mr. Hibma clacked the heel of his shoe down on the linoleum and listened to the echo, and for once it wasn’t a dispiriting sound. The clack of Mr. Hibma’s heel was not in a minor key; it was the first note of a crescendo.
He spun his chair around so that he was facing his computer, blew on the keyboard, then backed his head away as a plume of dust rose. He turned the computer on and listened to it come to life, waving dust away with his hand. He watched the green light flicker and then steady, made sure there was paper in the printer. Mr. Hibma got into the word processing program and typed the following:
The moon is more serious each night and the sun sillier each day. I could do without anything. I could do with nothing. The Publix. 1315 Cooper Road. Clermont, Florida. 5 in the afternoon. June 1.
Mr. Hibma walked to the end of the hall and looked out over the parking lot. He saw the buses pulling away, saw the grassy plot where the flag corps practiced. He saw Pete and the Spanish expert walk out together and slip into the same car. He saw Vince drifting from crowd to crowd, offering his gum. Mr. Hibma had no idea if Dale was going to show up. He knew he’d corresponded himself into a corner, and he was glad for that, but whether Dale would physically appear was of little consequence now. Mr. Hibma didn’t need Dale anymore, didn’t care to impress her. He understood that she didn’t take him seriously. She wanted to be disappointed. That was how she lived — in search of disappointment. Had she taken Mr. Hibma seriously, even a little bit, she never would’ve responded. Mr. Hibma was trying to change his life and she thought he couldn’t. Mr. Hibma was going to shock her; he was going to stick her with a heavy secret, a problem, and she was going to have to carry it.
He would go to the FedEx in Clermont this afternoon — no messing around with the post office — and tell them to deliver the letter on the morning of the 29th. He didn’t want Dale to have time to think anything over. If she did come, he wanted her rushing to get to him, wanted her to arrive bedraggled, beginning to lose her doubt in Mr. Hibma — her doubt, all she had. He wanted to see her screech into the Publix parking lot in her rental car, panicked, hoping she wasn’t late, hoping Mr. Hibma was bluffing, hoping not to have to talk him out of anything. And what would Mr. Hibma do? He couldn’t meet her there. He’d wander the parking lot and watch for her, and he’d know her when he saw her, and he’d pass close enough to smell the airplane and the foreign air on her, and he wouldn’t say a word. Afterward, if she wanted to reveal what had passed between them, wanted to turn Mr. Hibma in, so be it. That would be her business.
Mr. Hibma was bursting with a foreign feeling. Or perhaps the absence of a familiar feeling. He didn’t feel defensive. He did not feel put-upon, attacked. He was on the move. No other way to move forward had presented itself, and he wasn’t running from the way he had.
Shelby decided to follow Toby on Friday afternoon. A week left in the school year. She couldn’t think of a thing to hope for, and that was good. What she was going to do was hunker down in Citrus County. If she had to be here, she was going to be here. Her passport had arrived in the mail and she had promptly carried it out to the backyard and burned it in a coffee can, the white smoke trailing with the breeze into the treetops. Shelby hadn’t had to coax the fire. The passport went up like kindling, like it knew it was meant to be burned. Shelby had also removed the photograph of Aunt Dale from the hallway. It wasn’t hers to burn, but she’d stashed it out in the utility room. She wasn’t about to pass by the lady every time she went to the bathroom. Her father would ask where the picture went, and Shelby would have to come up with something.
Shelby knew the general direction through the woods Toby started in on the way to his house, but she didn’t want to miss him somehow, didn’t want him to evade her by taking an alternate route, so she blended into a crowd at the end of the science wing and tracked Toby straight from his marine biology class. He nudged past a gaggle of short blondes, crammed his whole bag in his locker, then proceeded at a mourner’s pace out the lunchroom exit. He didn’t stop to talk to anybody. He broke from the parking lot into the woods at a spot that didn’t seem to have a trail. Shelby followed. There was a trail all right, winding and shadowy. Shelby felt exposed in the woods. She wasn’t sure how far behind to stay. Toby kept his eyes on the forest ground, never turning around to check what was behind him. He’d worn a bright red T-shirt that day, so whenever Shelby let him get a few steps too far ahead, she had only to rush forward until the shirt called out through the underbrush. Shelby fell into a rhythm. She kept at least one tree directly between her and Toby. The multitude of bugs in the woods were providing their standard crackling hum, drowning out any noise Shelby made by snapping twigs. She felt dishonest but full of purpose.
They came to an open area, what would have been a meadow if there were such a thing as a meadow in Citrus County, and Shelby let Toby get ahead. She watched him drag through the sandy clearing and into the woods on the other side. Shelby wasn’t a spy, she was a girl in love. There was something delicious about watching Toby with him not knowing she was there. She could see a lot of the tired sky, could see the spot where the sun, in a few hours, intended to set.
She came out into the brightness and hurried across, peering ahead for the red T-shirt, and in a moment there it was, bobbing in the foliage. Toby had sped up. They pushed past bunches of cross-trails, tracks in them from dirt bikes and dogs and raccoons, and they shuffled past countless rabbit holes, countless isolated bogs that hid countless snakes. They passed a shopping cart full of beer cans. They’d been walking for close to an hour. Sweat was dripping off Shelby’s nose. She could taste it. The sun was a bald eye. It was clearing away the clouds, making preparations.
The best odds were on Uncle Neal being exactly how Toby had described him, bewildered but volatile. Probably the house would look normal, and Toby would take a shower and play solitaire or something, and Uncle Neal would be down for his pre-dinner nap. Probably Shelby would find nothing damning about the household, but she had to check. She had to see where Toby lived. She was doing this partly for herself, she knew, following Toby for her own reasons. At night, when he was at his house and she at hers, she would be able to picture Toby safe in his bed. She would be able to see him drift off to sleep as she drifted off to sleep. He was her only friend, and at night she knew that more than ever.