Cross Country Hearts by Suzanne August

Twelve

“Jasper is the compassionate one.”

In the morning, I sit on an unfamiliar bed and stare down at my phone. The bold, white blocks tell me that it’s eight in the morning. I’ve slept at least seven hours, but I feel as if I haven’t gotten any. The walls are thin enough that I hear at least two voices drifting in from the hallway. I wonder if one of them is Jasper, but the tones are too low for me to discern any familiar sounds.

I’m too anxious to leave the room and figure out for myself if Jasper is awake. At the very least, behind the wall of twisted knots below my chest, it’s amusing how I didn’t want to be anywhere near him only a few days ago when we left Boston.

Despite having woken up so early today, I’m generally not a morning person. Yet, I woke up at dawn, and now I’m sitting on the bed and staring at my phone.

I don’t know how long it’s been since I’ve typed Melanie’s number in. All I have to do is press send, but I’m hesitant. Intending to give her some space, I’ve only called her twice since leaving Boston, and I’ve sent no text messages. She didn’t answer either call. Somewhere, in the back of my mind, I hear her grumbling about how I haven’t tried harder to get in touch. Georgia would still suggest giving her space.

“By the time you get back,” Georgia would say, “she’ll have forgotten the whole thing.”

I know she probably won’t answer. I know that despite the fact she’d grumble about me not trying harder, she does need some space. And despite her need for space, I hear her breezy, careless voice saying, “You could’ve tried harder, you know.” I press dial.

It rings. And continues to ring. It rings until Melanie’s voice message answers, and she tells me she’s not at the phone, though I know that’s a lie. I’ve been standing right next to her plenty of times to see her swipe to ignore the calls of people she wants to make feel guilty. I know the game. I know she saw the call.

Despite knowing her game, I still feel guilty. It’s a horrible manipulation she plays and one I should’ve learned by now not to fall for. It’s enough for me to know that yes, I did say some mean things to her, but it gets to me that she always thinks she’s completely innocent when she’s not.

My mother, even though she doesn’t understand our fights well, says it’s what friends do to each other. Georgia says I can live without Melanie’s friendship for a while. Honestly, I’m starting to lean towards Georgia’s argument.

A knock on my door jolts me from my stupor. I turn my phone’s screen off and throw it across the bed, suddenly disgusted with myself for letting one of my closest friends get to me so much. “Yeah?”

The door opens, the person behind it not asking for permission to come in. Apparently, my “yeah” was good enough. I recognize Lila immediately, her blonde, blue, and pink hair poking in.

When she sees me sitting in bed, already dressed, she perks up. “Oh, you’re awake!”

I wince at her loud voice. “Yeah.”

She opens the door and leans against the frame, jutting out one hip and placing her hand on it. “Well, get out here then. Thomas is almost done making breakfast.”

“Thomas?”

“Thought Jasper told you about us. He’s the cook.”

“The cook?” I repeat, dumbfounded.

“Not a morning person, huh?” But Lila smiles at me, and it’s a smile that tells me she finds my parroting her words back at her amusing. “Thomas is the cook, Ren is the photographer, and I’m the intelligent one.”

“Oh.” When Jasper talked to me about his friends yesterday, I didn’t get any impression that they were anything but scheming and crazy people. I imagined them lumped together, sharing between them one spontaneous personality.

But of course, they’re their own three personal selves.

“Yeah,” Lila nods. “You’re going to love Thomas’s pancakes.” In one instant, she goes from leaning against the door frame to pushing off it, gliding to my side at a speed that even I’m impressed by, and I’m one of the fastest runners on my soccer team. She tugs on my arm. “Get out of here and into the kitchen already!”

Lila’s familiarity and easiness around me—someone she didn’t even know until eight hours ago and then only for ten minutes—makes me flustered. I don’t want to object and say I would rather seclude myself in an unfamiliar room all day. I almost do say it. But instead, I do as she says. I rise from the bed and start for the hallway, and then a thought occurs to me.

Lila now behind me, I look over my shoulder. “If you’re the intelligent one and Ren’s the photographer, and Thomas is the cook, then who’s Jasper?”

Lila’s reaching over the bed to pick up my phone, which I realize I’ve almost forgotten. She straightens, phone in hand, and walks over to me. As she pushes the phone into my palm, I imagine she’ll say he’s the artist, obviously. She doesn’t, though. Instead, as I curl my fingers around my phone, her gleaming, mischievous gaze locks onto mine, and she says, “Jasper is the compassionate one.”

~.*.~

“You must be the bridesmaid. June.”

The guy standing at the stove doesn’t glance up when I walk out from the hallway, though somehow, he knows I’m the stranger and not Lila. I’m too tongue-tied to say anything—mostly because I can’t figure out why someone would want to be up and making breakfast so early in the morning, but also because Thomas looks so at home in an apartment I know isn’t. I’m also wondering where Ren’s parents are.

“Thomas.” The guy finally looks up from the pan he’s had his attention on and reaches out a hand to me, even though I’m on the other side of the large room. Which isn’t saying much. The apartment, which, although has an open concept in which the kitchen and living room are one, is still on the smaller side, albeit it has all modern amenities. Thomas cooks on a stove that has to be almost new, and the wooden floors are shining and polished. Still, there’s not a lot of counter space, the living room is a bit cramped, and the table for eating is big enough for three—four if you squeeze in a chair.

Thomas is still watching me, eyes lit, and hand outstretched. I don’t want to be more self-conscious than I already have been, which is that I’ve been staring at him for too long to be polite. Awkwardly, almost tripping over my feet, I stride over and pull his hand into my own, shaking once before letting go. “Nice to meet you.”

Thomas raises his chin and returns his attention to the pancakes, flipping one over. He says, “Don’t call me Tom. I hate the nickname just so you’re warned. My full name Thomas represents me a lot better.

He’s a bit on the short side, this Thomas-not-Tom, and his hair is bleached in the way Jasper’s is. The two even look similar, though I figure Jasper would have mentioned any relation.

Slowly, to make careful conversation, I say, “I like nicknames.”

Behind me, somewhere in the hallway, I hear pounding on a door and Lila yelling, “Get up, you idiots! It’s time for breakfast!”

“Yeah?” Thomas says, and he doesn’t look phased by Lila’s crazed yelling. He doesn’t even acknowledge it. Instead, he only addresses me. “You got a nickname?”

Huh. Maybe Lila goes around screaming at people all the time? “June is it.”

“Really. What’s your given name?”

I glance over my shoulder when I hear a door open and slam shut. When I return my attention to Thomas, he still doesn’t seem to be paying attention to anyone but me. So, I ignore the commotion too and answer. “I don’t usually tell people.”

He raises his eyebrows. “Hate your name that much?”

“I like June.”

He shrugs. “As you like.” He flips a pancake again, then scoops up another one and places it on a plate to the side of the stove. Several pancakes are already stacked on it.

I hear a scream that sounds suspiciously like Jasper.

I frown. “Is… are they okay?”

Thomas laughs. “They’re fine. Lila usually elicits a negative response from the people she wakes up.”

I think that I’m glad I was already awake before Lila came to my door.

“So, June,” Thomas says now, tone light, “have you ever been zip-lining?”

My eyebrows knit together, but I’m unable to reply. Lila has emerged from the hallway, and she’s not alone. She has Jasper and Ren by the ear and is dragging them into the kitchen. I pull back and watch, alarmed, as Jasper tries to draw away from her.

“Let go of my damn ear, Lila!”

“I don’t know. I kind of like the feeling of being motherly.”

He snorts. “You have no motherly bone in your body.”

Ren swats Lila’s hand away from his ear. “I’ll cry for the kid the day you have one.”

“Not planning on having one.” Lila shoots a grin at me, and I stare at her back, eyes wide. “I got the morning birds up.”

And she sounds so happy about it, like a job done well.

“Rude awakenings are cruel,” Ren grumbles. He massages the ear Lila had been gripping.

Jasper stares at Lila, eyes dark. “Especially at eight in the morning.”

“It’s nine,” Thomas corrects.

“I don’t care what time it is. It’s too early!” Ren drags a chair out from the kitchen table and slumps into it. “The only perk from waking up this early will be these pancakes.”

Thomas places one more pancake onto the stack before turning off the stove. “You’re welcome.”

Jasper drags out the table’s other chair and sits across from Ren. He lets his forehead drop to the table and groans.

Lila swats the back of his head. “You’re not sleeping!”

He jerks up. “I wasn’t going to!”

“Drag over a chair,” Thomas tells me. He gestures to a couple of folded-up chairs leaning against the wall before turning back to his pancakes. Lila pulls a fourth chair to the table as Thomas passes by me, placing the plate of breakfast in the center of the small and cramped table, which is already set with plates, glasses, juice, and syrup.

I study the table, frowning. I see a fourth person squeezing in, but five? It’d be impossible to eat.

“Don’t worry,” Ren says, probably seeing my discomfort. “It’ll work.”

Not knowing what else to do, I take a chair and place it between Lila and Thomas and have just enough space to squeeze between them.

“Now eat,” Lila demands. Ren shoves a plate into my hand.

I take a glass, fork, and two pancakes from the plate centered on the table. It’s definitely cramped. I elbow Lila and almost stab Thomas with my fork. I’m terrified that the orange juice Ren is pouring into my glass will knock over.

And yet, no one seems to mind how cramped it is. They don’t even seem to notice the severe lack of personal space. Ren is still grumbling about waking up so early. Meanwhile, Jasper is readily responding to Lila’s rapid-fire questions about how his last year in Boston has passed, which—listening to him answer—was more eventful than I would’ve thought for the high school loner and recluse. Thomas is in his own world, creating an American flag with blueberries, strawberries, and butter on his pancakes.

“It’s what he does,” Ren mutters to me, and he’s still nursing his ear. Lila breaks off from drilling Jasper and flashes an upturned mouth my way, the corners of her eyes crinkling. Her expression says, See? Thomas is the cook. And then she goes back to questioning Jasper.

I dig into my pancakes and say not one word, but I don’t mind. There’s an air around the four that is, put simply, enjoyable. I’ve heard Jasper laugh before this morning, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard him laugh so much before. The corners of his mouth turn up so far that two dimples appear. He cackles while he dumps loads of syrup on Ren’s pancakes when he isn’t looking, and there’s a mischievous grin while he’s trying to discreetly tell Thomas about a girl he met in Boston.

But Jasper is terrible at whispering, and Lila has the ears of a bat. “Why haven’t I heard of her?” she demands.

“Didn’t work out.” But the way Jasper’s smile turns lopsided, a knowing glint in his eyes—you know there’s more to the story.

Lila rolls her eyes, but she turns to look at me. “It never works out for him.”

I open my mouth to ask why, but Ren is already saying, “He says the girls are never real.”

“Real?” I say.

Lila rolls her eyes again, and then just as quickly as the topic changed to Jasper’s relationship with a girl that didn’t work out, it’s changing again to Lila telling the story about how she got locked out of her apartment last week. Which, by the sounds of it, happens a lot.

The carefree air that cloaks this table of childhood friends is so different from how my own friends and I are with each other. It’s more than eating a homemade breakfast together. Jasper and his friends openly tell everything to each other. There are no secrets between them. The only friend I have that can compare is the one to Georgia. Though, at times, Melanie is my closest confidant, and no matter what she is, she’ll keep your confidence and tell no one else. You can trust her. That much is true.

But this is also yet another side of Jasper I’ve never seen before. It’s Jasper with dimples and wrinkles around the eyes, whose carefree laughter is contagious. Better yet, there are no pauses in the conversation while he thinks about what to say. Every word flows out of him like a painting once inspired needs to be immediately let out, and there’s no thought needed on how to do it.

It’s almost shocking how many sides to Jasper I’m discovering, and all it does is unease and confuse me. This Jasper King is a different Jasper King I’ve known for the past three years of high school.

Despite the unease, I like the atmosphere he and his friends generate between them. Despite my discomfort of being with people I’ve just met, their comfortableness with each other rubs off on me bit by bit, with every bite of the pancakes that Thomas made.

“So,” Jasper says when he clears his plate and has drained his orange juice. “What’s in store for me and June today?”

Lila and Thomas share a slow-growing grin. It’s so full of mischievous promises that I set down my fork and stare at them, unsure of whether I should be excited or alarmed.

“You haven’t decided without me, have you?” Ren cries.

Thomas points his fork at him. “That’s what you get for sleeping in.”

“It’s only nine o’clock!”

They ignore him.

“So, June,” Lila begins, casual and light. She pops another bite of pancakes in her mouth. “Have you ever gone zip-lining?”