Page 61 of A Fine Line

As soon as Winnie left the room I reached under the bed to grab the pair of socks she threw at me earlier. As I leaned down to grab them, that’s when I saw it—her bundled up charger wedged in the gap between the bed and the wall.

“Gotcha,” I muttered to myself, stretching as far as I could to pull it out. When I straightened up, ready to let her know it was up here the entire town, I heard voices drifting up from downstairs—her and Lottie, laughing and chatting in that easy way they had. I smiled to myself.

I took two steps at a time, rushing down about to make a joke about Winnie losing her things- meanwhile I had lost halfof my very stuffed backpack over this entire trip- when their conversation stopped me dead in my tracks.

“You know, the duplex next to my place is still available,” Lottie was saying. “I was renting it out, but the guy and his wife move out next week.”

“Yeah, I’ll keep that in mind,” Winnie replied, and there was a tone to her voice I didn’t recognize—soft, almost sad.

Maybe she was feeling as weird about leaving as I was. I could tell her now, tell her we could put off the trucks until Monday and just start fresh in our preparation for competition on Saturday.

Lottie asked, “Have you told Crew?”

“What?” Winnie sounded caught off guard.

“That you’re moving back here.”

My chest tighten, like the air had thickened into something too heavy to breathe. Moving back here? Moving away. Fully. Moving away where I wasn’t a twenty minute drive down the road. The words echoed again and again, pounding against my ribs, and suddenly I felt like the room was spinning, closing in. I’d considered it, sure, but she was ready now. Without me involved entirely.

I shook my head, eyebrows furrowing. This wasn’t right. Winnie was the different one. Winnie didn’t leave me out of things. She wasn’t…everyone else. Winnie didn’t forget me. She didn’t just cast me aside. She was the only one that was different. She was mine. And she wouldn’t keep me out of the loop like that…not after everything I shared about how I felt with my siblings. Not after I told her how I was this bonus thing for everyone.

Winnie gave some quiet reply, something about it being “complicated,” between us. I backed up, nearly stumbling as I reached up the stairs back to her childhood bedroom. The high I’d been floating on this entire trip had vanished in an instant.The bubble popped and now everything felt unsteady, unreal. I forced myself to breathe, to focus, throwing the last of my things into my bag, willing the world to make sense again.

I did the square breaths that she taught me, wondering what was left for me at home. If I didn’t have Winnie there with me, did I have anything?

Crew was acting weird ever since we left for the airport.

He still smiled, but it wasn’t his. It was that easy smile he threw on for everyone else when things were loud or chaotic or rushed or crowded. It wasn’t the smile he had been dolling out the entire time at Willow Creek. And it certainly wasn’t the one that I had dedicated as mine.

I first chalked it up to missing his family, maybe. He said that they weren’t far apart from each other for long, that he rarely ever missed a weekly family dinner. But something about that didn’t feel right either, considering he’d just said the night before that he adored his family but he was grateful for the space.

There was an obvious shift that I was missing out on, and my plans of asking Crew for anything more suddenly felt diminished entirely.

We both were sliding into his car in the parking deck outside of the airport, it was reaching half past six and I’d heard his stomach growling for the last hour as he brushed off my every offer of food.

“Do…you want to come over for dinner?” I stared at him, trying to pull any answer out. Anything more than just…this diluted version of my Crew. “I make a good meatloaf.” I nudged his elbow with a forced smile as he reversed the car out of the parking lot. “Or I might burn it entirely. But, we could just order pizza and hang out on my floor mattress?”

I kept my tone light as I waited for his response, and when it came back it was empty. Hollow. Dry.

“Nah, I’m not hungry, Win. Thanks though. Think I need some rest.”

My heart sank. I had done something. I had upset him.

“Crew…did I do something?”

“I- No, Winnie.” His focus remained entirely on the road in front of him, hands tightening around the wheel, knuckles turning white under my gaze.

“I think I did.”

He sighed with his head shaking back and forth. A humorless laugh came out of him, and it hurt worse than the fake smile ever did. “Were you ever going to tell me?”

“Tell you what?”

“That you’re leaving.”

My gut retched. He heard Lottie and me. He had to, it was the only explanation. And now that it was out there, in a way I couldn’t word it for myself, there was no putting it back in.

“I was, I was, Crew.” I heard myself sniffle, felt the tears forming in my eyes but I couldn’t let them fall. Not now. “But we had the competition next weekend and it’s been so nice with us I didn’t want to pop that bubble and…I’m so sorry. I was going to tell you. As soon as the competition-”