Accidental Notes: A Novel

Chapter 16

Changing Everything

Not sure what this story is? The synopsis is available here.

Catch up on chapter 15 here.

I don’t remember getting home, but soon Dad and I gather by the fire with ice cream and hot cocoa I’m afraid to touch. I’m still shaking so hard I’m sure I’d spill everything. Dad, however, seems calm. It’s infuriating.

“I probably should have given you a lesson before throwing you out on snowy roads like that.” He’s watching the TV more than looking at me, but I think his attention is on me.

“I get what you were trying to do. It’s fine.”

“When you’re driving on ice and sliding out of control, you don’t slam your brakes. You tap them gently. And when you turn too far one direction, turn the wheel the same way you’re slipping, and you’ll straighten out again.”

“That literally makes no sense.”

“I know. But it’s what fixes things when you lose your grip. Lean into it, and instead of spiraling, you course correct.”

My hands are shaking a little less now, so I take a sip of hot cocoa and let the warmth settle deep inside of me. Between the fire and the cocoa and Dad not being mad at me that I almost wrecked his truck, or got us hurt, or worse, I calm down. My heart rate feels almost normal. Then I remember the stranger.

“Hey, Dad?” I ask as I’m scraping a final bite of ice cream from the remnants that cling to the bowl.

“Yeah?”

“Who was the man who stopped with us?”

His eyes glass over until Dad is stuck inside some distant memory. A smile is pasted across his face, but all the skin around it droops when he looks at me. “It’s been an eventful morning. I need a break.” Then he stands, leaving his empty ice cream bowl on the coffee table. Soon I hear the piano, distant and mournful, and I know I’ve ruined my chance.

Grayson and I are going to need a new plan. I could text him, but I want to do this in person. Instead of pulling out my phone, I head to the family room and settle into an armchair to wait for the end of a movement. When it comes, I clear my throat. “Dad?”

He turns around, annoyed, from the keys. “What?”

“Where do the Wests live exactly? I… uh, I want to visit Harmony.”

“If you miss that dog, I’ll throw on some steak for lunch. I swear she knows.” He’s challenging me, daring me to admit something I’m not going to admit to him. I don’t answer one way or the other, and finally he tells me which way to go through the backyard woods to reach their house. Then he turns back to the keys.

I throw on every bit of outdoor gear Dad’s given me, because even though it’s 11:30, the air is still cool and crisp. The sun peeks through, hints of blue sky piercing the cloud cover that hasn’t fully disappeared since the moment it started snowing. But it’s cold despite the sun, making the snow slippery and the walk difficult.

As soon as I make out a house through the trees, Harmony comes bounding toward me, running off the back porch and across the half-frozen ground with ease before nuzzling her fur against my hand. She hasn’t been by since Monday night, and I’m excited to see her. Or maybe I’m just excited someone is excited to see me.

She seems to realize I’m going toward her house and leads the way, looking back every few steps to make sure I’m following. But I realize both Dad and Harmony led me to the back door of a house I’ve never been to before. Do you knock on a back door? Walk in unannounced?

I don’t need to answer the question, though, because a woman comes to the door in a thick orange sweater, jeans, and unicorn slippers, hair piled in a bun on her head. At first her attention is entirely on Harmony, looking down, but she must notice my boots beside her.

“Hi, uh — ”

“Adaya,” I say. I’m so buried in winter clothes I don’t think anyone could recognize me.

“Adaya Finley, of course. Good to see you. Grayson’s just — uh — come inside, but — ”

I never knew her well, but I don’t remember Grayson’s mom being so unsure of herself. Then I see into the kitchen just behind her, where Grayson’s sitting in flannel pajama bottoms. And nothing else. At nearly noon. He shovels French toast into his mouth and I can’t help but wonder how he isn’t getting his chest covered in syrup.

Then I wonder why I’m thinking about his bare chest.

His mom notices my gaze and chuckles. “So much for that, I guess,” she says. “Grayson! Adaya is here!”

He looks up, catches my eyes, him in next to nothing, considering it’s twenty degrees outside, me a bundle of walking clothing with glasses. A blush spreads from his cheeks along his neck, into a pattern like icicles along his whole stomach.

“Uh, be right back,” he says, and dashes upstairs, leaving a sticky plate of half-eaten French toast behind him.

“Breakfast for lunch?” I ask his mom as I peel off the layers of Dad’s snow gear.

“No, that was breakfast for breakfast,” she says, shaking her head.

I try to discard my judgment with the last of Dad’s clothes, until I’m wearing fleece-lined leggings and a sweater with the neck cut too wide, so the right edge slips off my shoulder. I love the way it looks on me, the wool knit gathering and sliding down my arm like I’m pretty to look at. It feels like a garland on a stair rail, something that makes me worth noticing. I didn’t know I’d be seeing Grayson today when I put it on, but I can’t help but think about how happy it makes me that I am.

He comes back downstairs fully dressed, still wearing the last of the blush that once covered every inch of skin I could see. “You got a chance to talk to your dad?” he asks without any pleasantries first.

I kind of love how I get to avoid small talk with him. How he knows why I’m here. But his mom is at the sink doing dishes, and I can hear a television not far away, not turned up loud enough while Courtney and Taylor talk over it. Too many people are nearby, and while I trust my secret with Grayson, I’m afraid to talk about it in front of anyone else. “Let’s go somewhere,” I say.

His head lifts and a smile tries on the corners of his cheeks, like he’s not sure if it should stay. “So you did?”

“A lot happened while you were still asleep. Most of the world gets up before noon.” The words bite, and the sharp fangs snag against me even as I say them. “Sorry. It’s been a long morning.”

Grayson nods, but any sense of ease has disappeared from his face. My fault, of course, for jabbing at him. I follow him as he leads me toward the back door. I speed up until I can take his wrist, as gently as he had taken mine when we found the sheet music. “Can we stay indoors this time?” Too many of our conversations have been outside in the cold.

“If that’s what you want.” He nods, turns around, and I follow him up the stairs instead. Apparently, somewhere inside is going to be his bedroom. That wasn’t what I meant when I suggested it. But when he opens the door to his room, I’m glad I did.

Grayson has always been someone who inserted himself into my life. At school. Whenever we ran into each other somewhere. At my grandmother’s house. He would show up where I was meant to be, and I’d accept him with an eye roll and some annoyance that would immediately disappear. But I’ve never been to his house before, let alone into his room.

His walls are painted a soft yellow. An electric keyboard sits under the window with a stack of loose paper nearby I assume is lead sheets. A cushioned office chair is in front of it, indented in a way that proves how much time he spends here. His unmade bed features an Iron Man comforter and Batman sheets, a ratty green blanket that might once have been comfortable tangled up between them.

At the edge of his bed sits a stuffed badger, as old and worn as the green blanket. Scattered throughout the room are books. Piles and piles of them. On a nightstand are four textbooks: geometry, American history, biology, and something about coding I can’t quite read from here. Those don’t interest me, not really. I always knew he had the same penchant for school that I did.

What I marvel more at are the novels. Sanderson, some Star Wars spinoffs. But also literary novels, some I’ve heard of, some I only know are literary because of the styles of their covers. Young adult fantasies, including multiple editions of the Witchlands series, and Forest of a Thousand Lanterns, one corner of the cover chewed off. Romances and rom-coms and mysteries and sci-fi, so many he must be drowning in here.

If there’s an organization to his piles, I have no idea what it is.

“Have you read them all?” I ask.

He turns to look at me, like he’s just realizing the implications of bringing me into his bedroom. “Most of them. Sorry for the mess. Didn’t think you’d — well, you’re here now.” Grayson moves to the bed and smooths out a corner of the comforter. “Sit down. Make yourself comfortable. Can I get you a book?”

I sit where he gestured, but his comforter isn’t much comfort beneath me. I don’t want to feel like Grayson’s bed is a place I could belong. “I don’t need a book. We need to talk. We have a lot to catch up on.”

“You said that. Even though I saw you yesterday afternoon.”

“Exactly.”

He’s facing me and he looks ready to listen. So I tell him. How Dad avoided my questions, made me drive, the accident, all of it.

“The too long-didn’t read version is that I won’t be getting a straight answer about the music out of Dad. Especially now,” I conclude.

Grayson takes too long to answer me, fidgeting with his hands. “Okay, so hear me out. What if we change everything?”

I think about the ruined pages of my bullet journal. “Why would we do that?”

“Because your way isn’t working. Your dad won’t give you what you want. So change what you’re looking for.”

“‘You can’t find the answer, so change the question’ is a slippery slope, Grayson.”

He tilts his head back and leans it against the wall with a sigh. “That’s not what I mean. It isn’t proof you want, not really. You want to play it. So spend your time working on it instead of chasing answers to unsolvable problems. Find a new thing to focus on. That’s what I’ve — ” He breaks eye contact. “Never mind. We’re talking about you right now. Point being: Why not work on the music instead of trying to dissect it?”

Maybe he’s got a small point. Maybe. But he’s piqued my curiosity. If I can’t have answers to the questions I was asking this morning, I can at least understand him better. “Tell me what you’ve been struggling with. Maybe it will help me. And even if not, I still want to understand. Honestly.”

“You’re sure?” His shoulders look tense even through his sweater. Now that I’ve seen those muscles, I can picture how his skin tightens and I have to shake the image of him shirtless from my mind. Grayson curls into himself and studies the trees outside his room. I feel farther away from him than I’ve been this whole trip, so I move closer.

“I’m sure.”

When he speaks, he’s still looking away from me, out the window. “There’s this music camp in California this summer. It has a composer track. The piece my mom submitted for the competition? I was working on it for this. But now, with the rejection… It’s the only song I’ve ever finished. I’d been trying for a long time, kept getting stuck. Something finally clicked right before Nancy… and I finished it. I thought maybe this could be my chance. But I’ve never failed a belting test at the ninja gym. I could do that instead, or study psychology, or… something else. I could be anything. I don’t have to be this.”

His comforter feels a little more like home once the warmth from his body reaches me as we don’t quite touch. My pulse quickens, and I don’t like how much I like it. I didn’t come to Bend to get a crush on someone.

But it seems I didn’t come into Grayson West’s room to not get a crush. “You’re going to give up a dream after one try? Someone smart recently reminded me that we’re still pretty young. You’ve got time.”

“Giving out advice you won’t listen to?”

“I mean…” But he’s smiling. And his focus is intent. The darker and lighter blues in his irises mix like a medley. I blink, but breaking eye contact doesn’t break the spell. “If what you were working on yesterday at Grandma’s house was you just messing around, I bet your compositions are amazing.”

We lean toward each other at the same time, and the space between us swirls like the poles within a magnet. I feel the ways we repel and the ways we attract, how we’re trying to fit together and simultaneously pushing one another away. Right now, the pulling is winning. His fingers interlock with mine, his palm on the top of my hand in a way that makes me feel safe, like this doesn’t have to be a real relationship moment.

I’ve never had one of those. I don’t know if I trust one of those.

He looks at our fingers and so do I. We’re both wearing polish, mine black for the funeral, his this shade of dark blue it may as well be black, too. But there’s depth to it, like a night sky, and I find myself looking for stars.

“I had the biggest crush on you in fourth grade,” he says to our hands. I squeeze my fingers around his because I don’t know what to say to that. “It devastated me when you moved away without saying goodbye. I cried for two straight weeks. My mom kept telling me I’d be fine, how I hardly knew you. But it wasn’t true. She didn’t know how much time we spent together at school. I knew you, and I liked you.”

His words puncture holes in my lungs. “Grayson?” I whisper. His door is open and I don’t trust that no one will come up to check on us. We’ve been alone for so long. I notice myself growing up while we sit here. “We left so suddenly. I wish I’d had the chance to say goodbye, too. Our friendship was the hardest thing to leave behind.”

In fourth grade, I didn’t really have crushes. They’ve been new to me in the last year or so and I hate them. Things that were mapped out and simple become more complicated, and I’ve got this feeling deep in my gut that once it gets complicated, you can’t make it simple again. Grayson untangles his hand from mine and slides along his bed, closer to me, rubbing the comforter the wrong way and making it even more messy than when we came in. Our legs touch, and I feel every place of their connection, even through all our clothes. His arm encircles me.

We are an experiment in chemistry without a control and everything could blow up. But we try it anyway. I lean against him, my head against his temple.

“I can’t begin to tell you how happy I am you’re back.”

“You’re the only reason I’m glad I’m here.”

The arm that’s been around me moves across my left shoulder, tickling the skin at the nape of my neck. I’ve never been more aware of my body. Every hair I have, the way they whisper and reach for him, the feeling of elation as his fingers slide from the knit of my sweater to the bare skin just above my collarbone.

“Adaya?” he says, a whisper, a breath. I pause and close my eyes and try to feel the way it moves between us. “Can I — ”

But as much as I savor what’s happening between us, I shake my head. I don’t want my first-ever kiss to be in a boy’s room, on his bed, while his family talks downstairs and I try to figure out who in the world mine is. “Not yet,” I say. “Not here.”

Grayson pulls away slowly, trailing his fingers down my arm until we hold hands again. He squeezes my hand so tight it almost hurts. I never want him to let go. I hope he knows that it isn’t that I don’t want him. He must, because when his head moves, his breath slides from tickling my cheek, to teasing my neck. He looks up at me again, his eyes wide and hopeful behind his glasses. I smile and his lips brush against the very tip of my bare shoulder. It takes half an instant and lasts forever. My eyes shut, then open into a world that’s the same and yet everything is different.

I shift on the bed until I’m facing him, my back to the door, and lean my forehead against his. “You weren’t part of the plan,” I whisper. I’m surprised I even say it out loud.

“None of the best things are.”

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