The Amanda Project: Book One

The Amanda Project: Chapter Twenty-Five

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

In November we had to memorize Juliet's speech in English class. "Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds, toward Phoebus's lodging." It's all about how she just wants night to come because she can't wait to be with Romeo. Lee got his hands on my book and he wrote, "LF and CL = R and J," in the margin and drew a heart around it. That day, waiting impatiently for Friday to come so I could go to the movies with Lee, I'd thought I understood how Juliet felt.

But clearly I hadn't understood anything.

Every second of Tuesday seemed to last an hour. Every hour seemed to last a month. Normally I never have enough time to finish a bio quiz, but today, I swear, I had time to finish it, check it over, and check it over again.

Twelve more hours. Nine more hours. When I saw Nia and Hal in the hallway on the way to gym, I was actually glad that we didn't talk to each other in school, and it wasn't because I was afraid that being seen talking to them would equal social suicide. Trying to pretend I was worried about where Amanda was when I knew where she was (or where she was going to be in just a few short hours) felt almost as impossible as telling them my plans for later that night. Because part of what made tonight so exciting was that I was going to see Amanda. I, not we. She'd left me a message, and even if it was petty and immature, I couldn't help being proud that I was the one she'd singled out. Okay, she'd been friends with Nia and Hal, too, I wasn't trying to deny that. We were all her so-called guides. Maybe she'd cut school to spend the day with Hal in Baltimore or prowl cool shops with Nia for great vintage clothes. But when push came to shove, she and I did have something special, something she didn't have with anyone else.

All day the sun had been playing hide and seek with the clouds, but by dusk the sky was thick with gray, and I was sure I was going to be spending my night sitting on Crab Apple Hill in the pouring rain. I decided I wasn't even going to bother bringing my telescope if that happened-let's face it, I wasn't exactly planning on stargazing anyway. Right around seven it started to drizzle, then pour, and I made a mental note to get my mom's big yellow slicker out of the front hallway. But within half an hour the sky had cleared, and when I poked my head out the back door, the stars were twinkling in the pristine sky over our house, like they had a message for me.

Which, in a way, they did.

I'd heard my dad moving around in his workshop when I got home, but I didn't go down. Before our fight the previous week at Amanda's "not" house, we'd seemed to run into each other around the house a whole lot more than we did now, but whether he'd decided he wanted to avoid me or I'd decided I wanted to avoid him, I couldn't say. The result was the same either way, though: we were staying out of each other's way. The only shocking thing about this night as opposed to all the other nights of our living on opposite sides of a private demilitarized zone was that when I went downstairs to make myself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich at around nine, there was some food on the stove. At first I thought it was just a dirty pot, but I hadn't seen it when I made myself breakfast in the morning, so if it was dirty, it was recently dirty. It was also half-full of macaroni and cheese. I tried to remember the last time we'd had macaroni and cheese in the house-tried to remember the last time we'd had anything that required perishable ingredients like milk and eggs, but I couldn't.

For a while after my mom left, friends and neighbors dropped in with care packages-casseroles, bags of groceries, cakes, and cookies. It was kind of like they'd gotten together and decided the easiest thing to do was to act as if my mom had died rather than taking off. But then this one neighbor, Cara Marks, asked my dad one too many questions when she came to drop off a bean salad, and the next thing I knew, he was throwing Cara and her Pyrex dish out the front door.