Chapter Three
A lanky 12-year-old boy sat on the edge of a bridge, his arms folded on the bottom rung of the railing and his bare feet dangling over the quietly rushing water. He looked far more sober than most boys his age and was obviously deep in thought as he silently kicked his feet.
The silence was broken by the sound of someone approaching the bridge at a run. Justin still didn’t look up as a thin redhead stopped and dropped her backpack on the bridge.
“Hi, Rach,” he greeted her, his gaze remaining fixed on the river.
“Hello!” she replied brightly, removing her shoes and socks and placing them next to where his already sat. She sat down next to him, sliding her legs over the side of the bridge, resting her folded arms on the railing and placing her chin on her arms. Immediately deserting this position, she pulled two strawberry snack cakes out of her bag and handed one to him before she started talking. “I just gave Trace a bloody nose, you missed it,” she told him with a grin and returned her arms and chin to their place on the railing.
“You punched him again?” Justin questioned disapprovingly.
“Um…no?” she tried to backtrack, taking a bite out of her cake, but the look on her friend’s face told her it wasn’t working. “Only a little. He was teasing me about my hair again, so I feel no remorse. Gaby felt bad about it, though and had to ask if he was all right. I think she has a secret crush on him or something. She tries to hide it, but I know all. It disappoints me, since she is otherwise awesome, but I suppose no one’s perfect.”
“Trace likes her.”
“I know. That’s why I was hoping she wouldn’t return the feelings, but no such luck.”
Justin laughed and shook his head. “I really wish you two would just get along.”
“So do I, but he keeps calling me ‘Carrot Top,’ so I fear we are doomed to be sworn enemies for the rest of our lives.”
“I told him to stop teasing you about your hair, too.”
“I know. And I think it’s getting darker now, don’t you?” she asked hopefully, holding out a few strands of her bright red hair.
“Yeah, definitely,” Justin replied with a nod.
Rachael frowned. “You lie. It’s still exactly the same color it’s always been. I’m doomed,” she stated glumly.
He shrugged. “It might still get darker. And even if it doesn’t, I like your hair. It’s pretty and eunuch.”
She rolled her eyes. “You’re a bad liar, Justin. And the word is unique, not eunuch.”
“Whatever. And I’m not lot lying, I do like your hair. It’s better than mine anyway,” he grumbled.
“Oh! I just remembered!” She turned and started rummaging through her backpack.
“You’re really bad at changing the subject without being obvious about it.”
Rachael ignored him. “About fifteen girls from school gave me notes to pass along to you. Love notes,” she added with a grin.
Justin pulled a face. “Love notes?”
“Yep. The entire female population of Mrs. MacArthur’s sixth grade class, excluding me, seems to think you are the greatest thing since…I don’t know, Joey McIntyre. There’s even one from Hollie, which is too bad, but since she is also otherwise awesome, I’ll let it pass.” She pulled a stack of envelopes and folded pieces of paper out of her bag and set them down between herself and Justin. “They also seem to think I’m your secretary.”
Her friend just stared. “These are all for me?”
Rachael nodded. “Scary, isn’t it?”
***
Rachael slid into a chair across from where Brian was seated at the Cup of Blues, the coffee house where she and Laura both worked.
“Hey, can you go get me another one of those Chai things? Those are hella good,” Brian requested, not looking up from the ‘Anatomy for the Dancer’ book he was immersed in.
“Nope. No can do, Brino. My shift just ended, so you will have to find someone else to run your caffeine related errands.”
“Brino?” he replied distractedly as he scanned notes from the same class.
She nodded and set her head down on the table. “I think it suits you.”
“Mmm. What’s the most common cause of injury among dancers?”
“Stupidity.”
Brian finally raised his head to look at her. “Somehow I don’t think that’s the answer they’re looking for.”
“Ah, but ethically speaking, don’t you think it would be better to give them the right answer rather than the answer they’re looking for?”
“Perhaps, but selfishly speaking, I would rather give them the answer that will get me the best grade so I can pass this class and actually graduate from college one day.”
“You bring up a good point.”
“Speaking of which, don’t you think you should be studying as well?” Since they were both dance majors, the two were in many of the same classes and Anatomy for the Dancer was one of them.
Rachael did her best to shrug her shoulders in the position she was in. “The exam is tomorrow morning. If I don’t know it by now, I’m not going to remember it, so I don’t see the point. I’d rather just relax.”
“Well I need to study,” Brian replied, immersing himself in his notes once more. Rachael sat silently at the other end of the table, drumming her fingernails on the wood surface. It had been a few days since she’d seen Justin and she hadn’t talked to him since. Normally he’d call her a day or two after they saw each other, but this time she hadn’t heard from him at all. His weirdness was worrying her. She just kept wondering what she’d done to make him act like avoiding her was the number one thing on his to do list.
Lance had been in town the day before, and as such had of course dropped by to see her. Hanging out with him had made her feel much better and helped keep her mind off of Justin. However, the fact that Laura had been sitting at the kitchen table shooting her “why are you not dating this man?” looks all day had put a bit of a damper on this situation. Why could no one understand that she didn’t want a boyfriend? After everything that had happened with Wade and Justin in the past year, all she wanted was a break from all that dating stuff. What was so unbelievable about that?
“Would you stop tapping your fingernails please?” Brian asked in annoyance.
“Sorry.” A few minutes of silence passed. “Brian?”
“Hmm?”
“What do you think of my relationship with Lance?”
“I don’t.”
“You don’t what?”
“I don’t think about it. I’m still trying to get over the weirdness of the fact that my dance partner was involved in a whole love triangle thing with Justin Timberlake and Wade Robson.”
“That was pretty weird of me, wasn’t it?”
“Extremely. Weirdo. Which one’s the tibia and which one is the fibula?” he asked, returning to his notes.
“The tibia is that one bone in your leg, and the fibula is another bone in your leg.”
“That’s helpful, thanks.”
“You’re welcome.” A few more moments of silence passed as Rachael tried desperately not to annoy her counterpart. “Speaking of Justin,” she began cautiously.
Brian covered his face with his hands. “Oh, God…”
***
“Gaby and I broke up again.”
Justin rolled his eyes despite the fact that Trace could not see him from the other end of the phone. “What’d you do this time?”
“And why do you assume it’s my fault?”
“Because it always is. You do or say something stupid, then you two break up for a couple of months until you finally go begging her to take you back. You have been repeating this pattern since the 10th grade. Honestly, Trace, I don’t know why the girl doesn’t just dump your ass for good.”
“Not really feelin’ the love right now, bro.”
Justin sighed. “I’m sorry.”
“Is something wrong, J?” Trace questioned.
“No, nothing’s wrong. I’m just really tired from rehearsals and stuff. You know…” his voice trailed off as he let out another heavy sigh.
“What’s wrong?” his friend pressed. Could Justin have honestly thought he’d believe that whole “I’m just tired” story? Please. He knew him far too well to buy that.
“Nothing!” Justin insisted. “I’m fine, really.”
“You’re not fine, so just shut up and tell me.”
“If I shut up-“
“Yes, I know I just contradicted myself,” Trace cut him off. “You’re going to end up telling me what’s wrong anyway, so why not just tell me now and save us both a lot of trouble, okay?”
Justin sighed for what had to be the fiftieth time since the beginning of their conversation. “It’s Rachael,” he admitted.
“Oh. I thought you were past the whole Rachael thing.”
“I am! Or I was. Or I thought I was. I don’t know,” Justin groaned. “Things have been weird between us lately. I mean, it’s great that we finally started talking again after the accident, but I hate the fact that we pretend that everything before that never happened.”
“You mean the smooching?”
“Yeah. And the fact that if I hadn’t screwed everything up by lying to her about Kim we would probably would have ended up together. And the fact that she hated my guts for five months. I mean, I know that’s the way Rachael deals with things. If something bothers her, she just pretends it didn’t happen and to her that solves the problem. But I just…I can’t do that.”
***
“Okay, so speaking of Justin,” Rachael repeated now that she had Brian’s attention once more.
“Yes, what drama is Wonderboy causing now?” her friend replied with a nod, glancing at his book and notes as though worried they would lose all their useful information if he left them unattended for too long.
“He’s been acting weirder than usual. And you being a guy and all, I was hoping you could interpret his behavior for me.”
“I thought you two could read each others’ minds? Or was Laura exaggerating when she told me that?”
“No, we pretty much can, but…I don’t know. Things are different lately. He’s harder to read than he used to be. One minute things will be totally normal, we’ll be laughing and talking just like we always have, and then all of a sudden he’ll start acting really weird and looking at me like I’m…I don’t know, what’s something really weird and nasty?”
“Cher?”
“That’s a really bad analogy.”
Brian shrugged. “Not really. Have you seen Cher lately?”
“We’re getting off track.”
“Sorry. Go ahead. One minute things are normal, then he looks at you like you’re Cher…”
Rachael rolled her eyes, still a little put off by the analogy, but she continued anyway. “And every time I touch him, he’ll flee the room or move so he doesn’t have to look at me. It’s just a weird feeling, like he doesn’t want to be around me.”
Brian nodded thoughtfully. “Okay, well this obvious. He still likes you. Can I go back to studying now? Please?”
“Well, I should hope he still likes me. We’ve been friends forever.”
“No, he still likes you. You know, the kind of liking you that he was doing during the weird love triangle. He still likes you like that.”
Rachael frowned. “Nuh uh.”
“Yes he does.”
“No he doesn’t. He would have told me.”
“Yeah, because you haven’t rejected him enough times and you know how we men just love rejection.” Brian rolled his eyes to accentuate his point.
“He would have told me,” she repeated stubbornly.
Brian shrugged. “Believe what you want, but I’m telling you, the boy still has the hots for you. Why else would he be weirded out by you touching him? Unless you have some contagious disease you never told me about.”
Rachael bit her lip. She didn’t want to admit it, but Brian did kind of have a good point. She and Justin had never really talked about the “friends with benefits era,” as she liked to call it. They’d just sort of pretended it never happened. But still, Justin would have brought it up if it were something he still wanted, right? He hadn’t said a word about the whole thing, which was part of why she’d never brought it up either. After everything that had happened last time, she didn’t want to risk losing their friendship again. She shook her head again. “You’re wrong.”
***
“So what are you saying, J? You still want to be ‘more than friends’ with Rachael?” Trace asked.
“I don’t know what I want,” Justin replied glumly. “Like I said, I thought I was over the whole thing, but then there are times when I look at her and I realize that I’m anything but over it. Like this weekend, everything was normal, we were sitting around playing Candyland and then all of a sudden I just started thinking about how beautiful she was and that I wanted to kiss her. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
“Okay, first of all, I’m going to try to ignore the fact that you just used the words ‘Candyland’ and ‘normal’ in the same sentence. Secondly, nothing is wrong with you. I mean really, Rachael did turn out to be one sexy woman if I do say so myself.”
“Trace, you’re supposed to be helping me get past these feelings, not encouraging them.”
“Right. Sorry. Maybe you should just talk to her about it, Justin. What’s the worst that can happen?”
“The worst that can happen is the same thing that happened last time, she rejects me and our friendship falls apart. I don’t want to be the one to bring it up. If she wants something more than friendship with me, then she’s going to have to make the first move this time. I don’t want to make things worse by pushing her.”
“So what’s the problem? Just be her friend, and wait and see if she shows any interest in moving farther than that.”
“I just don’t know what to do when I’m around her, you know? If I don’t stop having these feelings, I’m going to destroy our friendship and that’s the last thing I want.”
“Just try to think of her as the mischievous little redhead from Millington, Tennessee who gave me at least five black eyes and a bloody nose in the course of our childhood,” Trace advised, a hint of bitterness in his voice. “Think of her as your buddy Rachael, not as the girl you fell madly in love with last year.”
“Okay, you were doing good until the ‘madly in love’ part.”
“Yeah, I wasn’t sure about that. Sorry.”
***
“Justin, look at me for a minute,” Rachael ordered. Her friend obeyed and she stared intently at his eyes for a few minutes, then shook her head. “I don’t see it,” she stated, turning her attention back to the letter in her hands.
“Don’t see what?” he questioned.
“Well, according to this letter from Brianna Hart, your eyes are like sparkling pools of water. I think she’s been reading her mother’s romance novels again.” She folded the letter back up and placed it in the pile of those that she and Justin had already read. “If I ever write anything like these letters to anyone, especially you, please kill me,” she added.
Justin shook his head. “You and I would never write things like this to each other. We’re buds.”
“It’s a good thing too. Wouldn’t it be creepy if I told you your eyes were like sparkling pools of water?” Rachael asked with a giggle.
“Or if I told you that you were the most beautiful creature ever to grace the planet of Earth?” he replied, laughing. “That would definitely be weird.” They were both silent for a minute, staring out at the water that traveled beneath them.
“So what’s wrong, anyway?” Rachael finally broke the silence.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, whenever I’m upset about something and I want to be alone, I go to the hill above the graveyard and whenever you’re upset about something, you come here. So what’s wrong?”
Justin sighed and bit his lip slightly. “Today was the last day of school,” he stated.
“And that’s…bad?” his counterpart replied, throwing him a confused glance.
“Well, you know…it means I’m leaving soon. For Florida.”
She nodded. “I know.”
Justin shrugged. “I guess I’m just kind of scared about going. I don’t really want to leave my friends.”
Young as she was, Rachael understood that what he really meant was he didn’t want to leave her. “We’ll still see each other, Justin. My daddy lives down in Orlando and I’ll be coming to visit him a lot. And my mom said I can still call you even though it’s long distance.”
“It won’t be the same.”
“I know,” was all she could think to say. There was silence again and this time a sort of sadness lingered in the air between the two.
“Rach?”
“Yeah?”
“Are you mad that I’m going when you didn’t get on the show?”
She rolled her eyes. “Don’t be thick, Justin, of course I’m not mad. I’m happy for you, I really am.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, really.” There were a few more minutes of silence before Justin spoke again.
“Rach?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m scared that you’ll make new friends while I’m gone and you won’t want to be friends with me anymore.” He let this all out in a rush of breath, afraid that speaking his fears would make them come true.
“That would never happen.”
“It might.”
“No it wouldn’t. If anything, you’ll make new friends and won’t want to hang around me anymore.”
He shook his head. “I would never do that.”
“You might,” she replied softly.
Justin sighed. “Okay. Swear to me that no matter what happens, you and I will be friends forever,” he said, holding his pinky out to her.
Rachael laughed and shook her head. They had ditched their ritual of pinky swearing a year ago, because the other kids had told them it was stupid.
“Come on, Rach, swear it. Friends forever.”
She linked her pinky with his. “Forever,” she agreed.
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