They walked back down the hallway, through the front entrance way and past the massive grande staircase, and back into the library where Michael was still plugging away at his sketch book. He glanced up as they came back in and set his sketching pencil down as Jessica walked over to him with a glass of water and held it out for him to take.
“Thanks,” he said as he took the glass from her, and watched as she set the bags of chips and the jar of salsa on the table in front of them. He took a sip of water and set his glass down on the table, before pushing the chair back from the studio table and standing up. “So, what’s the deal with the library? You never did explain that before you ran out of here to get the drinks.”
“Well,” Jessica said as she set her glass down on the table as well. “My Aunt Sarah collects books, and both of us have always loved to read. Half of my major is English as well, which would explain the book shelf full of ‘classics’, dictionaries, and grammar books over there.”
Both Jake and Michael turned their heads to see the book shelf she was gesturing too, which was against the wall the doors were on, just to the right of where they had walked in.
“Have you read everything in here?” Michael asked, genuinely curious.
“No way,” Jessica said, laughing. “I’ve only lived here for about six years, and there are literally thousands and thousands and thousands of books in here. I would venture a guess that Sarah hasn’t read all of them either, and she’s lived in this house her whole life. She grew up here, and half of the books in here belonged to her parents before they moved out.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Jake said as he gazed around the library. There was no doubt the place was impressive. It could rival the libraries of most of the top ten universities in the country, including most of the Ivy League universities as well. “Walk me through this place. What all do you guys have here?”
“If you want me to, I guess we can do that. I mean, it’s a library. They’re books. There’s not much more too it than that,” Jessica said, making it sound like this was the most boring thing they could be doing right now. “But okay. Well, like I said that book shelf over there is where I keep most of my English text books and things like that. That whole wall is actually textbooks and reference books for school. A lot of them are Sarah’s, but I’m catching up to her pretty quickly in terms of the number of text books we’ve acquired over the years. My parents sent up all of my text books from junior high and my freshman year of high school for some reason, so they are all down there as well, all the way in the corner.”
“Are they all English text books?” Michael asked as they walked past rows and rows of books with cracked spines, torn covers, and brightly colored stickers with the word USED stamped across them.
“No, just the first two book shelves on the wall are all English and grammar related. The next two sets of shelves are a combination of math and science text books, work books, and answer books. Sarah used to be a substitute math teacher, and she’ll probably never get rid of any of them. The last three sets of shelves are a weird combination of history, government, and geography. They’re not in any order, and any time I try to do anything with them I just get frustrated and give up on it, so we let it be just a random conglomeration of history and government text books on the first two book shelves, and the last one is mostly general geography stuff. The one book shelf on the left side of the window is packed with maps and atlases, and books detailing the National Parks in all 50 states. Sarah is really big on the idea of traveling, but we hardly go anywhere. Still, don’t ask about any of it. I usually don’t. Kind of continuing with the history theme, that section over there is biographies and auto-biographies of a bunch of important historical figures. One of Sarah’s more recent ridiculous online book shopping sessions gifted us with a complete collection of auto-biographies and biographies of the first forty one presidents and vice presidents, so if you ever need information on one of them let me know and you’re more than welcome to find what you need over there.”
“Who’s Chris Baty?” Jake called from across the room behind Jessica and Michael, who hadn’t noticed that Jake had stopped. They turned around to see him standing in front one of the middle sets of book shelves with a Chemistry book open in his hands.
“What are you talking about?” Jessica asked as she walked over to him. “And what do you mean ‘who’s Chris Baty?’ I’ve never heard of him before.”
“Chris Baty. Right here, look,” Jake said, jabbing his finger at the inside of the front cover. There was a scrawled inscription on the inside cover above the box where a list of names of students who had previously owned the book was printed. The name Chris Baty was the last name on the list, and was printed in the same messy scrawl as the inscription that was in the top corner of the page which Jake read out loud, “This book is the property of the Half-Blood Prince.”
“What? Let me see that,” Jessica said, grabbing the book out of his hands. Sure enough, wedged in the top corner in a barely legible scrawl were the words Jake had just read out loud to them. Her jaw dropped slightly at the visual confirmation of what she had just read, and she looked back up at Jake who had a huge grin on his face. “I wonder if he had greasy black hair and spent too much time by himself.”
“I don’t know who he is or what he did, but Chris Baty is my new hero,” Jake said. Jessica snapped the book shut and set it down on the table that was in front of the large window.
“We’ll definitely have to come back to that. I didn’t know that was there, and I want to know what else he wrote in that book,” she said, looking at Jake who still had a goofy grin on his face.
“I’m intrigued. But continue with the tour. You were saying you have a collection of presidential and vice-presidential auto-biographies?”
“Um. Yeah. Over there,” she said, pointing to the corner where Michael was still standing, scanning the shelves of biographies. She was thoroughly impressed with the fact that Jake not only knew what the message in the book was a reference to, but that he understood it and was just as excited about it as she was. “Yeah. Biographies. Like I said, Sarah collects pretty much any book she finds even remotely interesting or the slightest bit entertaining.”
“I can see that,” Jake said, gesturing to the entire library. “That’s cool though. I really wish I had something like this at my disposal whenever I wanted it.”
You could if you wanted to. No, Jess what the hell are you thinking? Don’t start that. Jessica jerked her head slightly to try to clear out her thoughts. Right now was not a good time for her inner monologue to kick in, especially when she was playing host to two people she had barely just met and didn’t know about some of her quirky habits just yet.
“What’s next?” Michael chimed in, suddenly seeming really eager to see the rest of the library. “Not that I mind it in small doses, but if the rest of the library consists of text books and historical documentation I might be afraid for your sanity.”
“Don’t worry, I’d be afraid for my sanity if we had more historical documentation than we already do,” Jessica said. She had begun to notice that Michael’s moods were strange and hard to read. He had gone from seemingly really polite and genuinely nice at Rob’s place to nothing short of annoying and a bit of a jerk in the car, and now he was back to making sarcastic comments that matched Jessica’s sense of humor. She wasn’t sure what to think about that, but she brushed it off for now and continued playing tour guide to the boys. “Anyway. On the other side of the book shelf with the last of the biographies and auto-biographies we have copies of nearly every single historical document that is relevant to the foundation and structure of this country, as well as most of the major word-wide historical documents. I had to memorize the Declaration of Independence for the government class I took in my junior year of high school, and some how we ended up with pretty much every document penned by our founding fathers. They come in handy every now and then, so I guess it worked out eventually. That’s pretty much it for the ‘educational’ section of this place. Although, this part is pretty self-explanatory.”
“Do you really have ...” Jake trailed off as he did a quick scan of the shelves in front of him. “Do you really have twenty two sets of encyclopedias?”
“We sure do. I’ll take the blame for five of them, the other seventeen are Sarah’s. I’m not even going to get into why we have so many, it’s really not worth it. Although it makes for a good story sometimes.”
“I want to hear this,” Jake said, leaning against the end of one of the shelves. “I mean, it’s not like we don’t have time for it.”
“Well. Okay, I guess. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of anyone who has ever been that interested in encyclopedias,” Jessica said. “When I moved up here, I brought the two sets I had back at home with me. For some reason my parents didn’t think I had done that, but it never occurred to them to ask me what I had done with them since they couldn’t find them in their house. So they bought two new sets and sent them up here about five months after I moved here. Amazingly enough they were two completely different sets from the ones I already had, so after that I owned four different sets of encyclopedias. The last set is one that Sarah got for me as part of my ‘Welcome to Vermont’ gift, which I’m sure makes absolutely no sense at all to either of you since you don’t know my family at all.”
“I’m still confused as to why you needed two sets of encyclopedias in the first place. Especially when you were ...” Jake trailed off again for some quick mental math. “You were sixteen when you moved here, right?”
“Yeah, I was. Don’t question it. I like my books, and I like being able to find information on anything I need when I want it. Anyway. Sarah had about eleven sets already when I moved in, some of them dating back something like a hundred and fifty years. She was using one of the older sets to look something up a while back, and she was getting frustrated when she couldn’t find whatever it was that she was looking for until I pointed out that the particular set of encyclopedias that she was using were published in eighteen ninety two, so therefore it might be a bit more helpful to use a more recent set of encyclopedias to find the information she wanted. If it had been me, I would think the logical thing to do would have been to put back the books I had been using, and move over a shelf to a more recent set of books. But no. Sarah felt it was necessary to go out and buy a whole brand new set that had just been published the previous year. And while she was at it, she went ahead and pre-ordered a whole new set that was in the process of being published and was set to be released about six months ago. They’re right there, and so far the only time they have been touched was when I unpackaged them and put them in order on the shelves after moving some things around,” Jessica said as she pointed to a set of thirty three books bound in dark brown leather with gold writing on the spines. “Somewhere between then and now, she has also bought a full set of Italian, French, and Russian encyclopedias, and managed to acquire a set that had been published in sixteen thirty four in London. That brings our current count up to twenty two sets, and I’m sure we’re not stopping there.”
“That’s a bit crazy, but kind of cool.” Jake had turned around and was running his hand across the spines of one of the older sets on the shelf behind him.
“Yeah, I like it, honestly. Although I never have an excuse for not being able to find information for research papers and presentations, which is slightly obnoxious some times but I’ll deal with it,” Jessica said as she watched both Michael and Jake look around at the multiple sets of encyclopedias that surrounded them. Their library was set up much like a normal library was, with shelves not only lining the walls but also jutting out of the walls in various spots which created smaller sections of the room and allowed for more shelf space and therefore more room to house books.
“Remind me the next time I need to write a paper to just come invade your library. Screw going to an actual library, you guys have more than most colleges would, ” Michael said with a grin as he put a brightly colored volume of the World Book Encyclopedia back on the shelf. “What’s next?”
“The fire place, actually,” Jessica said with a hint of sarcasm in her voice. Sure enough, they emerged from the encyclopedia section and came around the end of the last shelf to be greeted by the sight of the very large brick fire place that ran from floor to ceiling on the first level of the library. The fire place took up about a third of the wall it was on and consisted of dark red and dark brown bricks. There was a dark mahogany mantle piece that matched the rest of the wood in the room, and a variety of different sized picture frames containing pictures of various family members as well as all four of their dogs. Above the mantle and the picture frames (which were all the same vintage looking antiqued gold finish as the rest of the hard ware in the room) was a massive mirror that covered most of the top half of the fire place and was edged in a vintage looking antiqued gold finished frame that matched not only the smaller picture frames below it but the rest of the hard ware in the library as well. The hearth that stuck out at the bottom of the fire place was the same dark red and dark brown bricks and had what Michael and Jake assumed was a dog bed sitting on the end closest to where they were standing. On the floor in front of them was a large area rug that looked more like a tapestry wall hanging than an area rug that covered a part of the cream colored wall to wall carpeting. The rug in turn was in front of an over sized leather sofa and two matching over sized arm chairs on either end of the sofa. Both chairs and the sofa had matching throw pillows tucked in to their corners, and the couch had three blankets of varying patterns draped over it. One was plain and a slightly lighter brown than the sofa, and it was neatly folded and draped evenly over the back of the sofa. The second one looked like it had been folded in a hurry and dropped on the right arm of the couch in a hap hazard manner, and it looked to be a swirled pattern of blues and whites that matched the colors of the paint job on the walls of the entire library. What Jessica, Jake, and Michael had originally thought was a big furry blanket at first glance wasn’t actually a blanket at all but the third (and largest) of the four dogs: Charlie, a Bernese Mountain dog who was curled up in the left corner of the couch, looking very much like a large brown, black and white furry blanket. He opened his eyes lazily at their approach and lifted his head up at the sight of two strange people on either side of Jessica.
“Hey Charlie,” Jessica said, walking over to the very adorable mass of canine fur on the couch. He was only ten months old, but he was already the biggest of the four dogs and he was only going to get bigger. Charlie closed his eyes and stretched slightly as Jessica petted his head. “I was wondering where you were. Michael, when did he come in here?”
“Uh. I wasn’t aware he had,” Michael said, scratching his head as he tried to remember seeing the dog wander in. “Maybe while you guys were getting the drinks and stuff, and I just didn’t notice? Sorry, I don’t know.”
“No, it’s fine. I just don’t remember seeing him come in here at all while I was here, so I was just curious,” Jessica said as Charlie picked his head up at the sound of Michael’s voice. He gave a slight growl and looked up at Jessica, trying to determine if it was safe to have these strange boys in the house with them. “It’s okay, Charlie. They’re fine.”
Jake cautiously walked up next to Jessica and stood by her side, and held his hand out for Charlie to smell. The dog lifted his enormous head and stretched his neck out a few inches to reach Jake’s hand, and gave it a few quick sniffs. Charlie apparently approved of Jake’s presence, because he gave Jake’s hand a quick lick and started to wag his huge fluffy tail. Michael followed Jake’s lead and stepped up to Jessica’s other side, and hesitated for a second before extending his hand out in front of Charlie’s face just as Jake had done. Charlie gave Michael the same reaction he had to Jake, and licked his hand in a welcoming fashion. Jessica was about to ask Jake and Michael if they had dogs of their own, but she was interrupted by a burst of music coming from her cell phone that was tucked away in her back pack.
“Hey green eyes
You wanna go lose some time with me?
Oh my my,
I’ve gotta know
What is this feeling?
I think I’m f f f falling
For lovely Lily
You can’t deny we belong together
It’s crystal clear to see
You belong with me
Lily”
Jessica sighed and walked over to her back pack, which was at the table they had put all of their stuff at when they had first come into the library. She knew it was Sarah calling, but that didn’t make her try to find the phone in her bag any faster.
“Hey green eyes
You wanna go lose some time with me?
Oh my my,
I’ve gotta know
What is this feeling?
I think I’m f f f falling
For lovely Lily
You can’t deny we belong together
It’s crystal clear to see
You belong with me
Lily”
Her phone kept ringing as she un-zipped the front pocket of her bag where she normally kept her phone, but was a bit surprised to not find it where it usually belonged. Another burst of music came from some where a bit deeper in the bag, and she kept digging for the missing phone.
“Hey green eyes
You wanna go lose some time with me?
Oh my my,
I’ve gotta know
What is this feeling?
I think I’m f f f falling
For lovely Lily
You can’t deny we belong together
It’s crystal clear to see
You belong with me
Lily”
She pulled up the front flap of her bag to reveal the main compartment of her bag and heard the music coming from her phone get a little louder, so she knew she was in the right place to find it now. She stuck her hand in between a few books and started to feel around for her phone, and she felt her fingers brush across the familiar feeling of her phone’s key pad. She shoved her hand a bit farther into the bag and wrapped her fingers around the phone before extracting her arm from the bag, phone in hand and still emitting the chorus from one of her favorite songs.
“Hey green eyes
You wanna go lose some time with me?
Oh my my,
I’ve gotta know
What is this feeling?
I think I’m f f f falling
For lovely Lily
You can’t deny we belong together
It’s crystal clear to see
You belong with me
Lily”
The phone fell silent before she had a chance to answer it, but wasn’t worried because Sarah always left her a voice mail when she called. As she un-locked the key pad, the phone beeped with the tone of her voice mail notification just as she had expected it to.
“Sorry, guys. I’m pretty sure that was Sarah. Give me just a minute to call her back,” Jessica said as she punched the button programmed for her voice mail on speed dial. For some reason, the automated voice mail operator’s voice for her phone service had an British accent and it always threw her off for a second when she first connected to her voice mail. Jessica had to switch service providers when she had moved, because the one she had in L.A. didn’t have decent coverage and signal in this part of Vermont. She quickly navigated through the main menu to her messages, and listened as Sarah’s voice came from the ear piece of her phone.
“Hey Jess. I was just trying to make sure you had gotten home alright. I hadn’t heard from you, so I just wanted to touch base and make sure you were all right. I’m staying at the shelter tonight, it’s going to be way too hard for me to get home in this weather. You won’t be able to call me back at the shelter because their phones are acting up because of the storm, and my phone is going in and out of service depending on where I’m standing. If I’m outside I have decent reception, but the ridiculous amount of wind and snow isn’t helping anything. I’ll try calling you back again in a bit, so don’t worry about trying to get ahold of me. I’ll take care of that. Hope you’re all right. Love you.”
Jessica pulled the phone away from her ear and punched the button to delete the message before dis-connecting the call and setting the phone on the table for safe keeping so she could easily find it when Sarah called back. She walked back over to Jake and Michael, who were being licked and loved on by Charlie on the floor in front of the fire place.
“You would think he never gets any attention,” Jessica said as she sank to the ground next to Michael and reached her hand out to rub Charlie’s stomach. He was sprawled on his back on the rug in front of the fire place with his tongue hanging out of his mouth, and looking quite like he was having the time of his life.
“Do you guys want to -” she stared to ask them if they wanted to continue their tour of the library, but was interrupted by her phone ringing again.
“Hey green eyes
You wanna go lose some time with me?
Oh my my,
I’ve gotta know
What is this feeling?
I think I’m f f f falling
For lovely Lily
You can’t deny we belong together
It’s crystal clear to see
You belong with me
Lily”
“Hey green eyes
You wanna go lose some time with me?
Oh my my,
I’ve gotta know
What is this feeling?
I think I’m f f f falling -”
She reached the table and picked up the phone half-way through it’s second round of the chorus. She glanced at the caller ID and didn’t recognize the number, but picked it up anyway just incase it was Sarah who was calling back.
“Hello?” she answered.
“Hey sweetie, it’s Sarah,” came her aunt’s familiar voice crackling from the other end. Jessica could tell Sarah was having a hard time with the reception on her end at the shelter and that she was going to try to make it as quick of a phone call as possible. “Did you get my voice mail?”
“Yeah, I did. You’re staying at the shelter tonight, and have really bad reception. Any thing else?” Jessica asked. She knew her aunt well enough that they could easily have every thing necessary covered in a thirty second conversation.
“Not really, that’s it. You got home okay, I take it?”
“Yeah, no problems at all. The dogs have been fed and we still have power. I’m going to check on the generator as soon as we’re done and then get started on my portfolio and homework.”
“Good girl. I think they have the phone problem solved out here, so if you need me try that number first and then my cell phone, okay?”
“Got it. See you tomorrow, then?”
“Yep. Bye Jess, love you.”
“Love you too,” Jessica said as she hung up the phone and set it back down on the table. She looked back over at Michael, Jake, and Charlie who were all still on the floor in front of the fire place. “Do you guys want to keep the tour going, or are you content to entertain my dog for the rest of the night?”
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
Chapter 6
CHAPTER 6
“H-hey,” Jessica said, her voice shaking with the cold, as she extended her hand out and grasped his to shake it. His hands were warm which she throughly appreciated right now as she was already freezing in the time it took her to walk the short distance from the front door to the driveway. She shivered slightly at a small gust of wind, and without saying anything Jake slipped off his jacket and draped it over her shoulders in one swift motion.
“Th-thanks,” she stuttered again, reaching out to pull the jacket closer around her. “Come on in, it’s a heck of a lot warmer inside.”
They walked into the garage just as she and Michael had done a bit earlier and up the small set of steps to the mud room. She hoped the dogs were still distracted eating dinner as she pushed open the door and stepped inside. She had purposely fed them right as she brought them in to keep them entertained for a bit while they settled down around the house. She kicked off her boots and slipped off his coat and draped it over her arm while Jake pulled his shoes off and re-adjusted his backpack over his shoulder. He went to set them on the ground just as Michael had done earlier, but she stopped him mid motion.
“Don’t leave them here, they’ll be fair game for the dogs. All of Michael’s stuff is upstairs in my room, you can put yours there as well if you want. It’ll be safer there, trust me,” she said as they started to walk out from the mud room into the kitchen. Jessica rounded the corner into the kitchen first, and was greeted by the smallest canine member of their family who jumped up and propped her tiny front legs on Jessica’s thigh. She reached down and scooped the corgi up with one arm and turned to Jake. “This is Sandy, she’s pretty much our baby. She’s the youngest and the smallest of everyone we have.”
“Hey there pretty girl,” Jake crooned at the dog, holding out his hand for her to sniff and decide if she liked him or not. Apparently he seemed to pass Sandy’s approval because she licked his hand and started squirming in Jessica’s arms, which made her laugh a bit.
“Looks like you pass the test for this one,” Jessica said, still laughing. “We’ll see how it goes with the other three, wherever they are.”
They walked down the hallway that lead to the entrance hall, taking the same path she and Michael had taken earlier. Jessica set Sandy down in front of the staircase, who wandered away into the living room while Jessica put her boots back down by the front door before leading Jake upstairs to her room. She could tell Jake was just as distracted as Michael was by the sheer size of the house, and her Aunt Sarah’s strange choice in decor. They made the trek up the stairs and took a right at the top to work their way down to Jessica’s room. Her door was propped open when they reached it, even though she knew she had closed it before she and Michael had gone back down stairs. She wasn’t worried because two of their four dogs were able to open doors on their own, so she figured one of them had let themselves into her room to make themselves comfortable on either her bed or in one of the chairs she had in her room. Sure enough, as she pushed open the door she was greeted by the sight of Roxy the chow sitting up on her bed wagging her tail in excitement. Jessica walked over to the bed and reached out to ruffle the fur on Roxy’s head, who responded with a bark of excitement and standing up.
“Go ahead and put your shoes on the floor somewhere. They won’t touch anything while it’s in here so it’ll be fine.” Roxy jumped off the bed as Jessica turned around to hang Jake’s coat on one of the hooks by her door, and Jake bent down to pet her as she stood in front of him, her entire body wagging with excitement. Roxy was the most excitable of all of the dogs, and usually made sure she was the first one to greet any newcomers to the house. Sandy barked from somewhere downstairs, which sent Roxy running out the door of Jessica’s room and down the stairs to see what was going on down on the first floor.
“I don’t know if you have homework or anything to do, but Michael’s stationed in the library working on his portfolio and I was going to head down there as well to get my own portfolio done. You’re more than welcome to join us down there, there’s more than enough room,” Jessica said.
“I’m actually not in school right now, so I don’t have anything necessarily to do, but I’m sure I can amuse myself somehow,” Jake said with a smile. When he smiled, his whole face lit up and it made Jessica a little weak in the knees. What is going on today? Seriously. I can’t get a break with anything. It had been a very long time since she had felt like she did today, but Jessica refused to believe it was anything except the memory of today already haunting her along with a streak of bad luck.
“I’m sure you can. Our library is enormous, and if that fails you I’m sure we can find some way to annoy Michael,” she said with a small smirk as she tried to shake the fluttering sensation in her stomach. Jake laughed at her suggestion, a deep laugh that if projected the right way could probably shake walls.
“I take it he’s already found a way to get on your nerves? That’s almost a record. You’ve been with him for, what, three hours?” Jake asked, cocking his head to the side.
“Yeah, something like that. I take it this is a normal occurrence, then? I’m not the only one who gets annoyed by the argumentative whining?”
“Not at all. In fact, I’m pretty impressed you let him in the house if he’s already annoying you. Most people would have made him walk home, and locked their doors.” Now it was Jessica’s turn to laugh at Jake’s statement.
“Well, I thought about it for a split second. But I’d rather not see tomorrow’s paper have the front page headline of ‘Scrawny Art Student Found Frozen to Death in Woods’ and have that on my conscience for the rest of my life. I’ve got enough of that, thanks.”
“So you’ve thrown someone out of your car before and let them freeze to death in the woods? That’s impressive. I don’t know many people who can do that and still be living in their own house without a tether,” Jake said, and Jessica laughed again. He’s got a sense of humor. That’s good. Much better than Michael. Maybe today won’t be too bad. Remembering Michael downstairs in the library by himself and the fact that all four dogs were currently unaccounted for and roaming the house somewhere, she figured it was probably a good idea to head downstairs and start working on her portfolio.
“Not quite. I’ve never actually thrown someone out of my car. I’ve threatened too quite a few times, even stopped once. But I don’t let people freeze to death in the woods. I’m not that cruel,” she said. “Alright. I kind of forgot Michael was downstairs by himself. If he’s not already getting licked to death by the dogs, he’s probably wondering where I am with the water I said I was getting. I’m going to grab a hoodie out of the closet and then we’ll head back down, if that’s okay.”
“Do I have an option? I mean, it’s your house. Or your mansion, if we want to get technical about things.”
“Ha ha ha. Good to know the smart ass gene carried through the family,” she said over her shoulder as she walked toward her closet. Like everything else in the house, her closet was over sized and slightly cluttered. She opened the door and disappeared into the rather large walk-in closet which probably could have doubled as another spare bedroom. Jake took a look around her room as he waited for her to emerge again. Her bed was the first thing he had seen when they walked into the room, not that he had actually been looking for it though. It was directly in his line of sight as he stood in the door way, and it carried on the theme of the rest of the house being large and extravagant. It was a King sized mattress (but looked pretty big even for that) perched on a slightly elevated four poster frame, complete with a gauze veil canopy draped across the top. The bedding was quite a bit more modern than the rest of the bed looked, but it seemed to match and fit the fairy tale look that the canopy gave to the bed. The veils draped over the top of the four posts were layers of cream and navy that stretched across all four posts and down to the floor on the shorter sides of the bed. The rest of the bedding was a cream base with a layered geometric pattern of navy and teal squares and a grey border, and Jake noticed that the bed was a bit of a mess. Jessica seemed like the kind of person who would make her bed every morning, so he chalked it up to the fact that the bed had just been recently vacated by the dog. A quick tally of the pillows let Jake realize that if he ever needed to borrow a pillow from anyone for some strange reason, Jessica would be the one to go to. He could see two large body pillows (one grey and one navy), about four throw pillows that matched the comforter, and about seven regular pillows of various sizes (that he could see). Just past the end of the bed was a short, but rather wide, bookshelf that was filled to max capacity with books of every shape and size. He recognized a few just from a glance at the covers, and was happy to see that they shared the same taste in books. The top of the bookshelf housed a variety of odds and ends, including picture frames of various sizes and a few small stuffed animals. The wall shelf about the book case had a few more picture frames and stuffed animals, but also a handful of small trophies. To go along with the trophies, there was a row of award ribbons above the shelf ranging in sizes and colors from the standard yellow, red, and blue to various combinations of yellow, white, green, purple, and pink. He mad a mental note to ask about those later, as he felt weird walking around her room and examining things without her there. Just past the book case was an over sized arm chair that didn’t seem to match the rest of the room at all, but looked well loved. It looked like the original upholstery had been either off white or cream and was covered with small dark pink flowers, and it had faded to a soft cream and light pink flower combination. There was a hard cover book placed over the arm of the chair, which was being used to mark her place in the book instead of a bookmark. The dust jacket had been removed from the book, but combination of the black spine and purple cover was a familiar sight to Jake’s eyes and he knew exactly what it was without even taking a second glance at it. His eyes continued to wander from the chair, across the window clad with navy drapes, and stopped on the desk that was on the wall opposite of the door. There was a large dark mahogany writer’s desk with even more piles of books stacked around its edges, and a black rolling desk chair pushed off to the side in front of it. There was a black cordless phone set on the back right corner, and right in the middle sat a shiny iMac with a matching keyboard and mouse situated in front of it. Jake was a technology nerd, so naturally anything shiny excited him and if it had an Apple logo on it, even better. He was about to break his own rule of not exploring to go investigate Jessica’s iMac when she finally walked back out of the closet with a hoodie hanging over her arm and she had changed into a new pair of jeans as well. She saw Jake staring lovingly at her computer, and it made her smile.
“If you’re done drooling over my iMac, are you ready to head back downstairs?” she asked as she shrugged the hoodie on over her head and pulled it down over the rest of her torso. Jake tore his eyes away from the desk to crack another witty comment at Jessica’s remark.
“Yeah, now that you’ve returned from Narnia, we can go see what Michael’s up to,” he said with his trademark smile, sending a fresh wave of butterflies through Jessica’s body. Okay really. Stop that, Jess. You’re fine, cut out all this emotional stuff. She gave him a weak smile in return, and took a second to collect her thoughts.
“If Narnia was really back there, I would have disappeared into the wardrobe a long time ago,” she shot back, quickly matching his wit. “Come on. I need to figure out what all the dogs are up to as well.”
Jake led the way out of the room and Jessica closed the door behind them for safe keeping, even though two of the dogs could let them selves in if they wanted to. They walked down the hallway and the stairs in silence with Jake still taking in his surroundings. He had a feeling he could spend a few weeks in this house and still not see everything it had to offer. Just like Michael had done earlier, Jake had failed to notice the massive double doors that lead in to the library as they had headed upstairs the first time. He let out a low whistle of approval as he continued to walk down the stairs, and saw a bit more into the library with each step he took. They took a left off of the bottom of the stair case when they hit the main floor again and Jake slowed his pace a bit before they reached the doors to the library. Jessica had made it half way into the library before she realized that Jake was still standing just inside the doors with the same awe struck look that had adorned Michael’s face when he first stepped inside the library as well.
“Come on in, nothing here is going to bite you. Unless you’re afraid of books. Then we might have a problem,” Jessica said, taunting him.
“Hey Jake,” came Michael’s voice from the table closest to the front window. He had found the studio table Jessica had been talking about tucked behind one of the book shelves by the window and had stationed himself in front of the window.
“Hey Michael. Good to see you,” Jake said, raising his arm in greeting in a typical boy fashion. He walked over to the large meeting table next to the studio table Michael had set up and set his bag down on top of it before turning around to take in the sight of the library. Jessica had followed him over to the table and followed his lead, setting her bag and a small stack of work books on the other end of the table that both boys were at.
“Alright sorry Michael, I’m actually going to the kitchen this time. Do you still just want water?” Jessica asked him as she walked around the end of the table and started to make her way toward the doors.
“Yeah, that’s fine, thanks,” he said, looking up from his sketch book for a split second before burying his nose back into his work.
“Okay. Jake, do you want anything?”
“Uh, sure. What all do you have?”
“Honestly, I’m not entirely sure. My aunt was supposed to go grocery shopping on her way home tonight, but obviously that didn’t happen so I don’t really know what all there is other than water.”
“Totally fine. I’ll come with you and see what you have,” Jake said as he followed Jessica to the doors. The pair walked out of the library and walked past the stairs, and turned right down the hallway the had taken earlier to make their way back to the kitchen. Just as with the rest of the house, Jake hadn’t really noticed how big the kitchen was either. He figured he should have expected it considering the size and stature of everything else they had encountered so far, but it still took him by surprise when they hit the end of the hallway and stepped into the glittering mass of chrome and marble.
“Woah,” Jake said, slightly under his breath. The kitchen didn’t quite meet the library’s standards in terms of contents and extravagance, but it was still quite impressive compared to most other kitchens.
“Sorry, what was that?” Jessica asked. She wasn’t sure if she had heard him say something, or if she was just hearing things. Considering the way today had been going, anything was possible.
“Nothing, sorry. Just ...” he didn’t finish his sentence, just kept looking around at everything that was in the kitchen.
“Just what? You can’t just say that and not finish your sentence,” she said, half serious and half joking about wanting him to finish what he was about to say.
“Well, just that if you can compare culinary technology to books, this kitchen could almost rival the library.”
“Oh come on. It’s not that bad, is it?” Jessica asked as she looked around, following his gaze around the kitchen as she walked into the middle of the kitchen and pulled a couple of glasses out of a rack that hung over the square island in the middle of the kitchen. They clinked slightly as she set them down on the white marble counter and reached up to get a third glass, setting it down with another clink next to the other two.
“Well, probably not if I knew anything about cooking and kitchen appliances. But it looks pretty impressive,” he said with a small laugh. Jessica smiled at him, and decided she liked the way he laughed. He didn’t force it, and when he laughed he had dimples that made him look like an adorable five year old. His laugh was also contagious, she noticed, as she gave in to a small giggle as well.
“I really don’t know what half of the stuff in here does, to be honest with you. My Aunt Sarah is the cook in the family, and she always wants the newest and best electronics and appliances. I stick to books and computers, she sticks to food. We’re pretty okay with that agreement,” Jessica explained.
“Wait, how does that even out? She makes all the food and you get to read and be on the computer. Somehow that doesn’t seem quite like an even trade,” Jake said as he crossed his arms over his chest with a playful smirk. It was quite obvious that he was clearly teasing Jessica in hopes of getting an argument out of her, which she immediately caught on to.
“If you knew my aunt you wouldn’t even question that arrangement. I’m an alright cook when I’m left on my own, but she can barely start a car without blowing it up. She is quite possibly the worst person I’ve ever met when it comes to technology. I’m not even joking a little bit when I say she managed to completely fry the hard drive on a brand new iMac within ten minutes of bringing it home, it’s that bad. On top of that she’s always buying books and letting them just pile up everywhere, both new and used, whether it’s off the shelf at Borders, scouring the basement of a used book store, or bidding a ridiculous amount of money on the hand written first copy of the Macbeth script at an auction. And yes, before you ask, she did spend far too much money on it and it’s upstairs in the library if you want to see it,” she said, answering the question Jake was undoubtedly about to ask her seconds later.
“You’ve got to be kidding me. You have an original Macbeth script? As in written by William Shakespeare. As in ...” he trailed off, his words failing him.
“As in original ink and paper from the 1500’s, as in touched by the man that wrote some of the world’s most famous plays. No, I’m not kidding.” “Not that I’m not impressed with that, because I clearly am, but why on earth would she want that?” “Because Sarah is a bit ... well ... strange about things like that, I guess. And it’s not like it’s something we’re going to own but never do anything with it, or have it just for the sake of being able to say ‘I own an original Shakespeare script’. I love absolutely everything to do with English, whether it’s writing or reading or whatever else, so it’s basically like a dream come true for me. We don’t actually do much with it because it would probably literally fall apart if we tried to read the whole thing cover to cover, but I’ve looked through a few pages a few times, and Sarah’s going to have a historical document expert look at it soon, and we’re going to get a proper display case for it at some point.”
“That’s ... that’s amazing,” Jake said, still a bit in shock. He wasn’t entirely sure how to take this bit of information, and he was starting to realize just how much money Jessica’s family had at their disposal.
“Yeah. Anyway, let’s see what we have to drink.” She walked across the kitchen to a set of large wooden pantry doors and opened them to reveal rows and rows and rows of stacked boxes of everything from cereal and oatmeal to flour and sugar to cans of soup. There was a dull thud that came from somewhere over head and she glanced up at the ceiling when she heard it.
“Three ... two ... one ... Sandy,” she counted down and said the dog’s name as the little blur of tan and white fur sprinted into the kitchen and skidded to a stop at Jessica’s feet. Seeing the amused look that Jake was giving her, she just smiled and bent down to pet the dog. “I don’t know what you think you’re getting, baby. You just ate dinner. Go find Roxie or Bruno.”
The little tan dog just started up at her with a wistful look in her eyes, still waiting for something. Jake spotted a box of dog treats on the top shelf of the pantry Jessica had just opened and now understood why the dog had come running quickly at the sound of the doors opening.
“No, Sandy.” Jessica repeated to the little dog, who gave a rather uptight huff (or at least the dog equivalent of such a noise) at Jessica before turning around and waddling out of the kitchen down the frequently used hallway they kept using. “She’s such a mooch sometimes. I swear, that dog is more spoiled than Vanessa is.”
“Vanessa? As in Fordson?” Jake asked as Jessica turned to rummage through one of the shelves for any sign of a stray can or bottle of soda.
“The very same,” came Jessica’s muffled voice from inside the pantry. “Sorry, I know she’s apparently dating your brother. I’m not too fond of her, and it’s pretty obvious on her part that the feeling is mutual.”
“No, don’t worry about it. I can’t stand her either,” Jake said with his trademark soft laugh. “She’s way too spoiled for her own good. It drives me insane when people with that kind of money fill the Waldorf stereotype and prove a point like that.”
“Please tell me you didn’t just make a pop culture reference that most guys of any age wouldn’t actually understand.” “Nah, don’t think too much into it. My ex is absolutely obsessed with that show, and I used to have to watch it with her. I know a hell of a lot more than I would ever like to about the lives of Blair and Serena.”
“Uh huh. Right,” she said mocking him just a bit as she emerged from the bottom shelf of the pantry with a few bottles of soda in her hands. “Well, this is what we have other than water. I’m almost ninety seven percent sure there’s a jug or two of apple juice in the fridge, and that’s the extent of our beverage selection I’m afraid. Sarah was supposed to hit up the grocery store on her way home tonight, but she’s not coming home because of the storm so this is what we have.”
Jake glanced at the bottles of soda she had set down on the center island next to the three glasses she had pulled down earlier. He wasn’t a very big fan of soda, he liked his caffeine in the form of energy drinks and coffee, but if he had a choice he would take either Coke or Dr. Pepper straight out of the plastic bottle. Seeing that none of the options were his preferred choices, he figured it would be safe to just stick with water for now.
“I think I’ll just go with water for now. Sorry. I’m kinda picky about my soda,” he said as he reached for one of the glasses that was upturned on the counter top.
“Hey, no worries so am I. Sarah’s the caffeine freak in the house. I usually stick with water and Rockstar energy drinks. If I have to have soda, it’s either Coke or Dr. Pepper,” she said as she reached across the island for the other two glasses and turned them over as she picked them up. Jake raised an eye brow at her statement; it was as if she had read his mind when she said that. He knew it was entirely possible for someone he just met to have the same taste in beverages, but it was still a strange coincidence. He didn’t say anything about it though, just picked up the glass he was reaching for and followed Jessica around the island in the middle of the room to the sink that was on the other side of the kitchen. “If you want ice, there is a dispenser on the front of the fridge. Be careful, though. It tends to be really temperamental sometimes. Last week we ended up with a miniature ice skating rink in here because of it.”
“Like that old school Tom and Jerry cartoon episode?” He asked as his eyes scanned the room and settled on the dispenser on the front of the bright chrome fridge on the opposite wall.
“Almost exactly like that. It was really weird, but pretty funny when you take into consideration that the dogs had a really hard time walking or doing anything really when they tried to come in here. Especially Sandy, because she hardly ever actually walks; she’s always running everywhere,” Jessica said, laughing to herself at the memory of it.
“That’s awesome. I always wanted to try that, the whole ice skating rink in the house thing. Mom never went for it though. I almost convinced Michael to try it with me once, though.”
“I can’t really see him doing something like that, strangely enough,” she said a bit sarcastically as she lined up her glass underneath the faucet and turned on the stream of cold water.
“Yeah, that’s why it didn’t work too well. I didn’t tell him what we were going to do until we had barricaded the kitchen, and then he told me that it was a dumb idea and he left me to clean up on my own,” Jake said as he handed off one of the glasses to Jessica and took the full one from her and set it on the counter next to him.
“That sounds more like it. You’re the older one out of the two of you though, aren’t you?”
“Believe it or not, yes,” Jake said as he laughed, and Jessica felt the familiar tingling sensation in her stomach. “Most people don’t believe things like that are my idea, but Mr. I’m an Art Student So Therefore I’m Mature and Well Rounded is usually pretty quick to prove them wrong.”
“Wow. I’d almost say that’s a bit harsh, but I’m not entirely thrilled with Michael’s behavior enough to defend him. So I’ll just agree with you.”
“Yeah, well he has that effect on a lot of people,” Jake said as they switched glasses again, and watched as Jessica let it fill to just below the rim before using her free hand to turn the handle on the counter and turn off the flow of water.
“Unfortunately, I’ve noticed that. Would you mind picking up the other two glasses? I’m going to grab a couple bags of chips and bring them with us,” Jessica said as she walked toward the pantry again. She had left the doors open after looking through it for soda earlier, so there was no need to worry about Sandy running in again.
“Yeah, no problem.” He picked up the now full glasses and waited for Jessica to grab the bags of chips. As she reached up to the top shelf her hoodie rose up from the waistband of her jeans as she stretched up to reach the into the pantry, and a small spot of black on the lower part of her back caught Jake’s eye. He caught a short glimpse of what he thought looked like either a tattoo consisting of some kind words or maybe a butterfly, but Jessica grabbed the chips and brought her arm back down before he could see what it was. She turned around to show Jake that had grabbed two bags of chips, one bag was barbeque flavored potato chips and the other bag was unsalted tortilla chips, and to ask him if he wanted anything else.
“Nice choices,” he said, giving a verbal affirmation of his approval before she could ask him about it.
“I thought so. Do you want me to grab some kind of salsa or dip for the tortilla chips?” She asked, nodding toward the fridge.
“Salsa, if you have it. Michael won’t use it but I sure will,” he said with a small smile. She returned his smile, and made her way to the fridge. He was about to offer to open it for her, even though his hands were full just like hers were, but she had somehow used her foot to pop open the door before he could even open his mouth. “That was slightly impressive.”
“I do what I can,” she said with her head in the fridge. She emerged a few seconds later with a large jar of colorful salsa in the same hand as the chips, and stepped back from the fridge. As she used her hip to swing the door shut, she turned back around to Jake and asked “Would you mind closing the pantry? I don’t want the dogs getting in there, I should have closed it after I got the chips.”
“I’m on it,” he said as he worked his way around the island in the middle of the kitchen and used his elbow to close first the door on the right and then the one on the left before following Jessica out of the kitchen.
“H-hey,” Jessica said, her voice shaking with the cold, as she extended her hand out and grasped his to shake it. His hands were warm which she throughly appreciated right now as she was already freezing in the time it took her to walk the short distance from the front door to the driveway. She shivered slightly at a small gust of wind, and without saying anything Jake slipped off his jacket and draped it over her shoulders in one swift motion.
“Th-thanks,” she stuttered again, reaching out to pull the jacket closer around her. “Come on in, it’s a heck of a lot warmer inside.”
They walked into the garage just as she and Michael had done a bit earlier and up the small set of steps to the mud room. She hoped the dogs were still distracted eating dinner as she pushed open the door and stepped inside. She had purposely fed them right as she brought them in to keep them entertained for a bit while they settled down around the house. She kicked off her boots and slipped off his coat and draped it over her arm while Jake pulled his shoes off and re-adjusted his backpack over his shoulder. He went to set them on the ground just as Michael had done earlier, but she stopped him mid motion.
“Don’t leave them here, they’ll be fair game for the dogs. All of Michael’s stuff is upstairs in my room, you can put yours there as well if you want. It’ll be safer there, trust me,” she said as they started to walk out from the mud room into the kitchen. Jessica rounded the corner into the kitchen first, and was greeted by the smallest canine member of their family who jumped up and propped her tiny front legs on Jessica’s thigh. She reached down and scooped the corgi up with one arm and turned to Jake. “This is Sandy, she’s pretty much our baby. She’s the youngest and the smallest of everyone we have.”
“Hey there pretty girl,” Jake crooned at the dog, holding out his hand for her to sniff and decide if she liked him or not. Apparently he seemed to pass Sandy’s approval because she licked his hand and started squirming in Jessica’s arms, which made her laugh a bit.
“Looks like you pass the test for this one,” Jessica said, still laughing. “We’ll see how it goes with the other three, wherever they are.”
They walked down the hallway that lead to the entrance hall, taking the same path she and Michael had taken earlier. Jessica set Sandy down in front of the staircase, who wandered away into the living room while Jessica put her boots back down by the front door before leading Jake upstairs to her room. She could tell Jake was just as distracted as Michael was by the sheer size of the house, and her Aunt Sarah’s strange choice in decor. They made the trek up the stairs and took a right at the top to work their way down to Jessica’s room. Her door was propped open when they reached it, even though she knew she had closed it before she and Michael had gone back down stairs. She wasn’t worried because two of their four dogs were able to open doors on their own, so she figured one of them had let themselves into her room to make themselves comfortable on either her bed or in one of the chairs she had in her room. Sure enough, as she pushed open the door she was greeted by the sight of Roxy the chow sitting up on her bed wagging her tail in excitement. Jessica walked over to the bed and reached out to ruffle the fur on Roxy’s head, who responded with a bark of excitement and standing up.
“Go ahead and put your shoes on the floor somewhere. They won’t touch anything while it’s in here so it’ll be fine.” Roxy jumped off the bed as Jessica turned around to hang Jake’s coat on one of the hooks by her door, and Jake bent down to pet her as she stood in front of him, her entire body wagging with excitement. Roxy was the most excitable of all of the dogs, and usually made sure she was the first one to greet any newcomers to the house. Sandy barked from somewhere downstairs, which sent Roxy running out the door of Jessica’s room and down the stairs to see what was going on down on the first floor.
“I don’t know if you have homework or anything to do, but Michael’s stationed in the library working on his portfolio and I was going to head down there as well to get my own portfolio done. You’re more than welcome to join us down there, there’s more than enough room,” Jessica said.
“I’m actually not in school right now, so I don’t have anything necessarily to do, but I’m sure I can amuse myself somehow,” Jake said with a smile. When he smiled, his whole face lit up and it made Jessica a little weak in the knees. What is going on today? Seriously. I can’t get a break with anything. It had been a very long time since she had felt like she did today, but Jessica refused to believe it was anything except the memory of today already haunting her along with a streak of bad luck.
“I’m sure you can. Our library is enormous, and if that fails you I’m sure we can find some way to annoy Michael,” she said with a small smirk as she tried to shake the fluttering sensation in her stomach. Jake laughed at her suggestion, a deep laugh that if projected the right way could probably shake walls.
“I take it he’s already found a way to get on your nerves? That’s almost a record. You’ve been with him for, what, three hours?” Jake asked, cocking his head to the side.
“Yeah, something like that. I take it this is a normal occurrence, then? I’m not the only one who gets annoyed by the argumentative whining?”
“Not at all. In fact, I’m pretty impressed you let him in the house if he’s already annoying you. Most people would have made him walk home, and locked their doors.” Now it was Jessica’s turn to laugh at Jake’s statement.
“Well, I thought about it for a split second. But I’d rather not see tomorrow’s paper have the front page headline of ‘Scrawny Art Student Found Frozen to Death in Woods’ and have that on my conscience for the rest of my life. I’ve got enough of that, thanks.”
“So you’ve thrown someone out of your car before and let them freeze to death in the woods? That’s impressive. I don’t know many people who can do that and still be living in their own house without a tether,” Jake said, and Jessica laughed again. He’s got a sense of humor. That’s good. Much better than Michael. Maybe today won’t be too bad. Remembering Michael downstairs in the library by himself and the fact that all four dogs were currently unaccounted for and roaming the house somewhere, she figured it was probably a good idea to head downstairs and start working on her portfolio.
“Not quite. I’ve never actually thrown someone out of my car. I’ve threatened too quite a few times, even stopped once. But I don’t let people freeze to death in the woods. I’m not that cruel,” she said. “Alright. I kind of forgot Michael was downstairs by himself. If he’s not already getting licked to death by the dogs, he’s probably wondering where I am with the water I said I was getting. I’m going to grab a hoodie out of the closet and then we’ll head back down, if that’s okay.”
“Do I have an option? I mean, it’s your house. Or your mansion, if we want to get technical about things.”
“Ha ha ha. Good to know the smart ass gene carried through the family,” she said over her shoulder as she walked toward her closet. Like everything else in the house, her closet was over sized and slightly cluttered. She opened the door and disappeared into the rather large walk-in closet which probably could have doubled as another spare bedroom. Jake took a look around her room as he waited for her to emerge again. Her bed was the first thing he had seen when they walked into the room, not that he had actually been looking for it though. It was directly in his line of sight as he stood in the door way, and it carried on the theme of the rest of the house being large and extravagant. It was a King sized mattress (but looked pretty big even for that) perched on a slightly elevated four poster frame, complete with a gauze veil canopy draped across the top. The bedding was quite a bit more modern than the rest of the bed looked, but it seemed to match and fit the fairy tale look that the canopy gave to the bed. The veils draped over the top of the four posts were layers of cream and navy that stretched across all four posts and down to the floor on the shorter sides of the bed. The rest of the bedding was a cream base with a layered geometric pattern of navy and teal squares and a grey border, and Jake noticed that the bed was a bit of a mess. Jessica seemed like the kind of person who would make her bed every morning, so he chalked it up to the fact that the bed had just been recently vacated by the dog. A quick tally of the pillows let Jake realize that if he ever needed to borrow a pillow from anyone for some strange reason, Jessica would be the one to go to. He could see two large body pillows (one grey and one navy), about four throw pillows that matched the comforter, and about seven regular pillows of various sizes (that he could see). Just past the end of the bed was a short, but rather wide, bookshelf that was filled to max capacity with books of every shape and size. He recognized a few just from a glance at the covers, and was happy to see that they shared the same taste in books. The top of the bookshelf housed a variety of odds and ends, including picture frames of various sizes and a few small stuffed animals. The wall shelf about the book case had a few more picture frames and stuffed animals, but also a handful of small trophies. To go along with the trophies, there was a row of award ribbons above the shelf ranging in sizes and colors from the standard yellow, red, and blue to various combinations of yellow, white, green, purple, and pink. He mad a mental note to ask about those later, as he felt weird walking around her room and examining things without her there. Just past the book case was an over sized arm chair that didn’t seem to match the rest of the room at all, but looked well loved. It looked like the original upholstery had been either off white or cream and was covered with small dark pink flowers, and it had faded to a soft cream and light pink flower combination. There was a hard cover book placed over the arm of the chair, which was being used to mark her place in the book instead of a bookmark. The dust jacket had been removed from the book, but combination of the black spine and purple cover was a familiar sight to Jake’s eyes and he knew exactly what it was without even taking a second glance at it. His eyes continued to wander from the chair, across the window clad with navy drapes, and stopped on the desk that was on the wall opposite of the door. There was a large dark mahogany writer’s desk with even more piles of books stacked around its edges, and a black rolling desk chair pushed off to the side in front of it. There was a black cordless phone set on the back right corner, and right in the middle sat a shiny iMac with a matching keyboard and mouse situated in front of it. Jake was a technology nerd, so naturally anything shiny excited him and if it had an Apple logo on it, even better. He was about to break his own rule of not exploring to go investigate Jessica’s iMac when she finally walked back out of the closet with a hoodie hanging over her arm and she had changed into a new pair of jeans as well. She saw Jake staring lovingly at her computer, and it made her smile.
“If you’re done drooling over my iMac, are you ready to head back downstairs?” she asked as she shrugged the hoodie on over her head and pulled it down over the rest of her torso. Jake tore his eyes away from the desk to crack another witty comment at Jessica’s remark.
“Yeah, now that you’ve returned from Narnia, we can go see what Michael’s up to,” he said with his trademark smile, sending a fresh wave of butterflies through Jessica’s body. Okay really. Stop that, Jess. You’re fine, cut out all this emotional stuff. She gave him a weak smile in return, and took a second to collect her thoughts.
“If Narnia was really back there, I would have disappeared into the wardrobe a long time ago,” she shot back, quickly matching his wit. “Come on. I need to figure out what all the dogs are up to as well.”
Jake led the way out of the room and Jessica closed the door behind them for safe keeping, even though two of the dogs could let them selves in if they wanted to. They walked down the hallway and the stairs in silence with Jake still taking in his surroundings. He had a feeling he could spend a few weeks in this house and still not see everything it had to offer. Just like Michael had done earlier, Jake had failed to notice the massive double doors that lead in to the library as they had headed upstairs the first time. He let out a low whistle of approval as he continued to walk down the stairs, and saw a bit more into the library with each step he took. They took a left off of the bottom of the stair case when they hit the main floor again and Jake slowed his pace a bit before they reached the doors to the library. Jessica had made it half way into the library before she realized that Jake was still standing just inside the doors with the same awe struck look that had adorned Michael’s face when he first stepped inside the library as well.
“Come on in, nothing here is going to bite you. Unless you’re afraid of books. Then we might have a problem,” Jessica said, taunting him.
“Hey Jake,” came Michael’s voice from the table closest to the front window. He had found the studio table Jessica had been talking about tucked behind one of the book shelves by the window and had stationed himself in front of the window.
“Hey Michael. Good to see you,” Jake said, raising his arm in greeting in a typical boy fashion. He walked over to the large meeting table next to the studio table Michael had set up and set his bag down on top of it before turning around to take in the sight of the library. Jessica had followed him over to the table and followed his lead, setting her bag and a small stack of work books on the other end of the table that both boys were at.
“Alright sorry Michael, I’m actually going to the kitchen this time. Do you still just want water?” Jessica asked him as she walked around the end of the table and started to make her way toward the doors.
“Yeah, that’s fine, thanks,” he said, looking up from his sketch book for a split second before burying his nose back into his work.
“Okay. Jake, do you want anything?”
“Uh, sure. What all do you have?”
“Honestly, I’m not entirely sure. My aunt was supposed to go grocery shopping on her way home tonight, but obviously that didn’t happen so I don’t really know what all there is other than water.”
“Totally fine. I’ll come with you and see what you have,” Jake said as he followed Jessica to the doors. The pair walked out of the library and walked past the stairs, and turned right down the hallway the had taken earlier to make their way back to the kitchen. Just as with the rest of the house, Jake hadn’t really noticed how big the kitchen was either. He figured he should have expected it considering the size and stature of everything else they had encountered so far, but it still took him by surprise when they hit the end of the hallway and stepped into the glittering mass of chrome and marble.
“Woah,” Jake said, slightly under his breath. The kitchen didn’t quite meet the library’s standards in terms of contents and extravagance, but it was still quite impressive compared to most other kitchens.
“Sorry, what was that?” Jessica asked. She wasn’t sure if she had heard him say something, or if she was just hearing things. Considering the way today had been going, anything was possible.
“Nothing, sorry. Just ...” he didn’t finish his sentence, just kept looking around at everything that was in the kitchen.
“Just what? You can’t just say that and not finish your sentence,” she said, half serious and half joking about wanting him to finish what he was about to say.
“Well, just that if you can compare culinary technology to books, this kitchen could almost rival the library.”
“Oh come on. It’s not that bad, is it?” Jessica asked as she looked around, following his gaze around the kitchen as she walked into the middle of the kitchen and pulled a couple of glasses out of a rack that hung over the square island in the middle of the kitchen. They clinked slightly as she set them down on the white marble counter and reached up to get a third glass, setting it down with another clink next to the other two.
“Well, probably not if I knew anything about cooking and kitchen appliances. But it looks pretty impressive,” he said with a small laugh. Jessica smiled at him, and decided she liked the way he laughed. He didn’t force it, and when he laughed he had dimples that made him look like an adorable five year old. His laugh was also contagious, she noticed, as she gave in to a small giggle as well.
“I really don’t know what half of the stuff in here does, to be honest with you. My Aunt Sarah is the cook in the family, and she always wants the newest and best electronics and appliances. I stick to books and computers, she sticks to food. We’re pretty okay with that agreement,” Jessica explained.
“Wait, how does that even out? She makes all the food and you get to read and be on the computer. Somehow that doesn’t seem quite like an even trade,” Jake said as he crossed his arms over his chest with a playful smirk. It was quite obvious that he was clearly teasing Jessica in hopes of getting an argument out of her, which she immediately caught on to.
“If you knew my aunt you wouldn’t even question that arrangement. I’m an alright cook when I’m left on my own, but she can barely start a car without blowing it up. She is quite possibly the worst person I’ve ever met when it comes to technology. I’m not even joking a little bit when I say she managed to completely fry the hard drive on a brand new iMac within ten minutes of bringing it home, it’s that bad. On top of that she’s always buying books and letting them just pile up everywhere, both new and used, whether it’s off the shelf at Borders, scouring the basement of a used book store, or bidding a ridiculous amount of money on the hand written first copy of the Macbeth script at an auction. And yes, before you ask, she did spend far too much money on it and it’s upstairs in the library if you want to see it,” she said, answering the question Jake was undoubtedly about to ask her seconds later.
“You’ve got to be kidding me. You have an original Macbeth script? As in written by William Shakespeare. As in ...” he trailed off, his words failing him.
“As in original ink and paper from the 1500’s, as in touched by the man that wrote some of the world’s most famous plays. No, I’m not kidding.” “Not that I’m not impressed with that, because I clearly am, but why on earth would she want that?” “Because Sarah is a bit ... well ... strange about things like that, I guess. And it’s not like it’s something we’re going to own but never do anything with it, or have it just for the sake of being able to say ‘I own an original Shakespeare script’. I love absolutely everything to do with English, whether it’s writing or reading or whatever else, so it’s basically like a dream come true for me. We don’t actually do much with it because it would probably literally fall apart if we tried to read the whole thing cover to cover, but I’ve looked through a few pages a few times, and Sarah’s going to have a historical document expert look at it soon, and we’re going to get a proper display case for it at some point.”
“That’s ... that’s amazing,” Jake said, still a bit in shock. He wasn’t entirely sure how to take this bit of information, and he was starting to realize just how much money Jessica’s family had at their disposal.
“Yeah. Anyway, let’s see what we have to drink.” She walked across the kitchen to a set of large wooden pantry doors and opened them to reveal rows and rows and rows of stacked boxes of everything from cereal and oatmeal to flour and sugar to cans of soup. There was a dull thud that came from somewhere over head and she glanced up at the ceiling when she heard it.
“Three ... two ... one ... Sandy,” she counted down and said the dog’s name as the little blur of tan and white fur sprinted into the kitchen and skidded to a stop at Jessica’s feet. Seeing the amused look that Jake was giving her, she just smiled and bent down to pet the dog. “I don’t know what you think you’re getting, baby. You just ate dinner. Go find Roxie or Bruno.”
The little tan dog just started up at her with a wistful look in her eyes, still waiting for something. Jake spotted a box of dog treats on the top shelf of the pantry Jessica had just opened and now understood why the dog had come running quickly at the sound of the doors opening.
“No, Sandy.” Jessica repeated to the little dog, who gave a rather uptight huff (or at least the dog equivalent of such a noise) at Jessica before turning around and waddling out of the kitchen down the frequently used hallway they kept using. “She’s such a mooch sometimes. I swear, that dog is more spoiled than Vanessa is.”
“Vanessa? As in Fordson?” Jake asked as Jessica turned to rummage through one of the shelves for any sign of a stray can or bottle of soda.
“The very same,” came Jessica’s muffled voice from inside the pantry. “Sorry, I know she’s apparently dating your brother. I’m not too fond of her, and it’s pretty obvious on her part that the feeling is mutual.”
“No, don’t worry about it. I can’t stand her either,” Jake said with his trademark soft laugh. “She’s way too spoiled for her own good. It drives me insane when people with that kind of money fill the Waldorf stereotype and prove a point like that.”
“Please tell me you didn’t just make a pop culture reference that most guys of any age wouldn’t actually understand.” “Nah, don’t think too much into it. My ex is absolutely obsessed with that show, and I used to have to watch it with her. I know a hell of a lot more than I would ever like to about the lives of Blair and Serena.”
“Uh huh. Right,” she said mocking him just a bit as she emerged from the bottom shelf of the pantry with a few bottles of soda in her hands. “Well, this is what we have other than water. I’m almost ninety seven percent sure there’s a jug or two of apple juice in the fridge, and that’s the extent of our beverage selection I’m afraid. Sarah was supposed to hit up the grocery store on her way home tonight, but she’s not coming home because of the storm so this is what we have.”
Jake glanced at the bottles of soda she had set down on the center island next to the three glasses she had pulled down earlier. He wasn’t a very big fan of soda, he liked his caffeine in the form of energy drinks and coffee, but if he had a choice he would take either Coke or Dr. Pepper straight out of the plastic bottle. Seeing that none of the options were his preferred choices, he figured it would be safe to just stick with water for now.
“I think I’ll just go with water for now. Sorry. I’m kinda picky about my soda,” he said as he reached for one of the glasses that was upturned on the counter top.
“Hey, no worries so am I. Sarah’s the caffeine freak in the house. I usually stick with water and Rockstar energy drinks. If I have to have soda, it’s either Coke or Dr. Pepper,” she said as she reached across the island for the other two glasses and turned them over as she picked them up. Jake raised an eye brow at her statement; it was as if she had read his mind when she said that. He knew it was entirely possible for someone he just met to have the same taste in beverages, but it was still a strange coincidence. He didn’t say anything about it though, just picked up the glass he was reaching for and followed Jessica around the island in the middle of the room to the sink that was on the other side of the kitchen. “If you want ice, there is a dispenser on the front of the fridge. Be careful, though. It tends to be really temperamental sometimes. Last week we ended up with a miniature ice skating rink in here because of it.”
“Like that old school Tom and Jerry cartoon episode?” He asked as his eyes scanned the room and settled on the dispenser on the front of the bright chrome fridge on the opposite wall.
“Almost exactly like that. It was really weird, but pretty funny when you take into consideration that the dogs had a really hard time walking or doing anything really when they tried to come in here. Especially Sandy, because she hardly ever actually walks; she’s always running everywhere,” Jessica said, laughing to herself at the memory of it.
“That’s awesome. I always wanted to try that, the whole ice skating rink in the house thing. Mom never went for it though. I almost convinced Michael to try it with me once, though.”
“I can’t really see him doing something like that, strangely enough,” she said a bit sarcastically as she lined up her glass underneath the faucet and turned on the stream of cold water.
“Yeah, that’s why it didn’t work too well. I didn’t tell him what we were going to do until we had barricaded the kitchen, and then he told me that it was a dumb idea and he left me to clean up on my own,” Jake said as he handed off one of the glasses to Jessica and took the full one from her and set it on the counter next to him.
“That sounds more like it. You’re the older one out of the two of you though, aren’t you?”
“Believe it or not, yes,” Jake said as he laughed, and Jessica felt the familiar tingling sensation in her stomach. “Most people don’t believe things like that are my idea, but Mr. I’m an Art Student So Therefore I’m Mature and Well Rounded is usually pretty quick to prove them wrong.”
“Wow. I’d almost say that’s a bit harsh, but I’m not entirely thrilled with Michael’s behavior enough to defend him. So I’ll just agree with you.”
“Yeah, well he has that effect on a lot of people,” Jake said as they switched glasses again, and watched as Jessica let it fill to just below the rim before using her free hand to turn the handle on the counter and turn off the flow of water.
“Unfortunately, I’ve noticed that. Would you mind picking up the other two glasses? I’m going to grab a couple bags of chips and bring them with us,” Jessica said as she walked toward the pantry again. She had left the doors open after looking through it for soda earlier, so there was no need to worry about Sandy running in again.
“Yeah, no problem.” He picked up the now full glasses and waited for Jessica to grab the bags of chips. As she reached up to the top shelf her hoodie rose up from the waistband of her jeans as she stretched up to reach the into the pantry, and a small spot of black on the lower part of her back caught Jake’s eye. He caught a short glimpse of what he thought looked like either a tattoo consisting of some kind words or maybe a butterfly, but Jessica grabbed the chips and brought her arm back down before he could see what it was. She turned around to show Jake that had grabbed two bags of chips, one bag was barbeque flavored potato chips and the other bag was unsalted tortilla chips, and to ask him if he wanted anything else.
“Nice choices,” he said, giving a verbal affirmation of his approval before she could ask him about it.
“I thought so. Do you want me to grab some kind of salsa or dip for the tortilla chips?” She asked, nodding toward the fridge.
“Salsa, if you have it. Michael won’t use it but I sure will,” he said with a small smile. She returned his smile, and made her way to the fridge. He was about to offer to open it for her, even though his hands were full just like hers were, but she had somehow used her foot to pop open the door before he could even open his mouth. “That was slightly impressive.”
“I do what I can,” she said with her head in the fridge. She emerged a few seconds later with a large jar of colorful salsa in the same hand as the chips, and stepped back from the fridge. As she used her hip to swing the door shut, she turned back around to Jake and asked “Would you mind closing the pantry? I don’t want the dogs getting in there, I should have closed it after I got the chips.”
“I’m on it,” he said as he worked his way around the island in the middle of the kitchen and used his elbow to close first the door on the right and then the one on the left before following Jessica out of the kitchen.
Friday, November 20, 2009
Chapter 5
Author's Note: I've changed up some character names. Joseph is now Michael. The more I wrote and the more I thought about it, the more I realized his name didn't quite fit his personality. Also, if you have any feedback or criticism, please leave a comment and let me know. Grammar and spelling aren't at the top of my list right now, but plot lines and character analysis are. If you have an suggestions or just want to let me know what you like and don't like, feel free to comment. Thanks! Enjoy.
CHAPTER 5
Michael watched from the backseat in a mixture of shock and awe as a herd of deer leapt across the road in front of the Jeep. He couldn’t believe Jessica had managed to miss all of them. The Jeep’s speed had slowed to a crawl now, and he could see that Jessica was visibly shaking.
“Oh this is INSANE. Why can’t I get a break today?” Jessica shouted. She took a few deep breaths and each time she let them out she forced herself to calm down a bit. She refused to let her nerves show much longer. Today’s emotional assault was quickly draining her already limited patience with the world, and she wasn’t about to let it totally break her down.
“Are you okay?” Michael spat out quickly, running his words together. He was more frazzled by the deer than Jessica had been.
“For the last time, I am FINE. Please stop asking me that,” Jessica snapped back through gritted teeth. She was tired of reassuring him that she was fine, and she sighed for what seemed like the thousandth time today. A nagging thought in the back of her mind told her that she should apologize for snapping at him again, but she ignored it. She started to ask him to either come back into the front seat or at least buckle up if he was going to stay in the back because he was making her a bit nervous, especially after almost sending him through the windshield a few minutes earlier but she was cut off by a rather loud chorus of some overplayed mainstream song that she wished she had never heard of emanating from Michael’s cell phone. He either didn’t hear her or chose to ignore her as he glance at the caller ID and then flipped the phone open to answer it.
“Hey Jake, what’s up?......No, we’re not at the coffee shop anymore, why?......Oh, seriously man? Why would you do that? I got a ride somewhere, you should have called me before you left.”
Jessica could only imagine what the other end of the conversation was like. Judging by what Michael was saying she guessed that Jake, who she vaguely remembered was his brother, had showed up at Rob’s place to pick Michael up only to find the place shut down for the day and the parking lot probably empty. She hated eavesdropping on phone conversations, but there was really no way around it since she was the only other person in the car.
“Well, just hold on a second. Let me figure something out.” He pulled the phone away from his ear, and pressed his thumb over the mouth piece.
“Let me guess,” Jessica started in before he could explain anything. “Jake showed up at Rob’s place expecting you to still be there waiting for a ride, and now you want to know if I’ll drive you back there so you can go home.”
“One out of two isn’t bad, I guess. Almost. He showed up at the coffee shop, but I’m not going to ask you to take me back there.”
“Good, because we’ll be at my house in approximately seven minutes and I’m not turning around now.”
“Would you stop being so snippy and just listen to me for a second? I know it’s already an awkward situation and a lot to ask of you, but would it be okay if Jake came over too? He was staying at our grandparent’s house and they lost power so they packed up and they’re driving upstate to our aunt and uncle’s house tonight. And our parents are out of town, and he doesn’t have a spare key so he can’t really go home.”
Jessica thought about it for a few seconds. She had never met Jake, and before today didn’t know Michael existed. It’s not really going to hurt anything if he does. You’ve pretty much skipped over most of the awkward first date scenarios in the last few hours with Michael so there isn’t much left to make things really uncomfortable. And you could use the company, and maybe the extra help, if the power goes out. Plus it’ll keep the dogs occupied for a while, anyway.
“Um, yeah. I guess that’s fine.”
“Great,” he said and put the phone back up to his ear. “Jake?...Yeah, that’ll be fine. Start heading east on Main Street toward the park. Take a left -”
“Wait. What kind of car does he drive?” Jessica broke in, and Michael over looked at her.
“A truck that’s about the size of your tank here. Why?”
“Never mind. If it was something small I would have told him to take another route because this road hasn’t been driven on except for us, but he’ll be fine.”
“Right. Jake? Yeah. Sorry. So take a left when you get to the end of Main Street and follow the road through the park.”
“Tell him to watch out for deer,” Jessica interjected again.
“Oh. Yeah. Make sure you keep an eye out for deer, I guess. Call me when you’re almost through the park, okay? See ya then.” He hung up the phone as they pulled up to the stop light at the end of the park road and Jessica eased down on the brake as they got closer to the intersection’s red light. They stopped at the red light and Jessica turned around to Michael in the back seat again, who had discovered the bag of books Jessica had bought earlier today during the break between her morning classes.
“Can you do me a favor? I don’t care if you stay in the back seat, but either way I want you to put your seat belt on. If we have another deer incident and you end up through the windshield, that’s your fault and not mine.”
“Technically, I don’t have to. There’s no law that says back seat passengers have to have a seat belt on.” Michael said, contradicting his statement as he latched the seatbelt around his waist.
“I don’t care what the law is, you’re in my car so you abide by my rules. I say I want your seat belt on, so put it on unless you want to walk the rest of the way.” She twisted back around to the front and waited rather impatiently for the light to turn green. She was starting to regret offering to let Michael come with her, but wasn’t about to leave him stranded anywhere. I hope Jake is more manageable than he is. I don’t think I can take two of them. Realizing that they had never successfully hooked up her iPod, she yanked the auxiliary cable out of its port on the dashboard and punched the CD button with her index finger. It was pointless to try to mess with the iPod now, as they’d be home in a few minutes. She relaxed a bit when the familiar, soothing strains of music started to fill the empty silence in the car.
“On an ocean full of gravel,
In the middle of the night.
We were all there together,
All dressed up in the headlights
Of the little blue pick up with the stereo loud
We danced to the music of the band from the bar
And we knew, we knew.
We knew this was the start
This was the start of the fall.”
“This guy is really into the depressing kind of stuff, isn’t he?” Michael observed rather unnecessarily from the back seat. Jessica glanced up to look in her rearview mirror at him, only to see that he was absently flipping through one of the books she had bought earlier that day.
“So what if it is? We just went over this. My car, my rules, my music,” she retorted. She was starting to get sick of his downer attitude and criticism. There wasn’t any reason for it, and she was starting to wish she had taken him back to the coffee shop with his brother.
“I’m just saying. He has a pretty bleak outlook on things, and everything has been about love. There’s more to the world than that,” he said.
“Look, does it really matter? We’ll be in my driveway in roughly 30 seconds and then you won’t have to listen to it anymore. While we’re being blunt, if you’re going to be like this all night we’re going to have problems. I don’t take well to annoying people,” she said as she slowed down to turn into the winding driveway. Her response seemed to work to shut him up, as he didn’t spit back an attempt at a witty remark, but instead continued to lazily flip through another book. She was quickly becoming unimpressed with Michael. He had come across as pretty reasonable earlier today and the jab at Twilight when she was clearing off the car had eased her mind a bit more, but it seemed that the more they drove the worse he got. He’s starting to prove that he’s a decent match for Vanessa. Apparently I was wrong about that. She had momentarily forgotten about the small dip at the end of the driveway and had to jab at the gas pedal to get through it, but thankfully that was the only problem she encountered as she made her way up to the house. The driveway was nearly a quarter of a mile long, which in the city seemed like an unnecessary length but out on the edges of town was a fairly common occurrence. Jessica, for one, was extremely happy to live this far out in the country, and by the park. When she had lived in LA they lived on the outer edges of the center of the city, which meant that while they weren’t crammed into a tiny apartment or studio loft they still didn’t have a ton of room outside. Sure, their property had been one of the biggest lots in their area, but compared to her aunt’s house that she lived in now it was quite small. One day a few years ago while she was incredibly bored, she had done the math to figure out that approximately twelve and a half of her old property would fit on her aunt’s lot.
She hit the large button on the garage door opener attached to her visor with her thumb as they pulled up to the edge of the house. Normally she would park in the garage, but with the possibility of losing power later due to the continuous storm she would rather dig the car out of the snow instead of getting it stuck in the garage and having to deal with the fiasco that would entail manually detaching the opening contraption from the door in order to accomplish anything. Pulling up so there was about four feet between her front bumper and where the door would be when it closed she put the car in park and turned the engine off. The last few bars of the song that Michael had labeled as ‘hopelessly depressing’ a few moments ago faded out as she opened the door, unbuckled her seat belt, and slid out into the ever falling snow.
“Woah.” She had to grab the still open door to steady herself as to not fall face first into the drift that had gathered at the edge of the garage. Apparently the snow had accumulated a lot more out here because she drift she was now standing in was up to her knees, as opposed to the ones back at Rob’s place that were between ankle and mid-calf height. That’s going to be fun later, she thought as she eyed the gigantic snow plow attached to their lawn mower that was parked in the corner of the garage, even though she would probably wait until morning to even start to make an attempt at clearing off the driveway. Struggling a bit with walking she worked her way to the back door to collect her stuff when she heard a soft thud and some muffled cursing coming from the opposite side of the car.
“By the way,” she called over the car, “the snow is a lot deeper out here.”
“Thanks. I actually managed to figure that one out for myself, strangely enough.” Michael appeared in front of her as he opened the door on his side of the car. She just shrugged as he gave her a slightly dirty look. That’s what you get for being an insufferable jerk, I suppose. She was a big believer in karma, and she just hoped something didn’t come back to haunt her from her mental commentary today. She reached in and pulled her bag toward her before picking it up and hitching it over her shoulder. It felt a lot heavier than it had when they had left Rob’s place, but she decided to chalk that up to the fact that all of its weight was on the shoulder she had used to bust open the doors earlier. She hadn’t realized how sore her shoulder actually was until just now. Still clutching her keys in her hand, she made her way around the front of the car and into the garage. Michael followed behind her to the small set of steps that lead up from the garage into the house. Even though the heat had been on the entire way home, her hands were still freezing and she kept up today’s theme of fumbling with the keys as she tried to find the right one to open the door that lead into the house.
“What’s the point of locking the door if the garage is closed?” he interjected from behind her.
“Because the back door to the garage doesn’t lock most of the time,” she said as she rolled her eyes for what seemed like the hundredth time that day and jerked her head toward the back corner of the garage where the aforementioned door was. She finally found the right key and shoved it into the lock with a bit more force than was really required and twisted it. She was relieved when it turned without sticking, and before she pushed it open she turned around to issue a quick warning to Michael.
“Just so you know, the dogs are probably going to bust out of the door as soon as I open, so you might want to stand to the side unless you want to get knocked over,” she said and barely gave him a second to get out of the way before she easily popped the door open with her hip. Just as she had warned would happen, all four of her dogs burst through the doorway before she even had the door half open. Three of the four completely skipped the stairs as they leapt down to get out of the house. The fourth, who was also the smallest being a corgi with short little legs, had to hit a few of the steps as she bounded after the rest. “Come on. If you get inside before they realize you’re here you’ll probably be safer. They tend to be a bit calmer about new people once they’re actually in the house.”
Michael scaled the set of four steps in two strides and squeezed past Jessica into the house. She shut the door behind them and flicked one of the light switches that was on the wall next to the door revealing the slightly cluttered mud room they were now standing in. She pulled off her shoes so she didn’t track snow and mud through the rest of the house, and Michael followed suit. He started to set them on the ground by the door but Jessica stopped him before he even got close to the ground.
“I wouldn’t do that. I can bet at least one of the dogs will make off with one, or both, of your shoes if you leave them there and you’ll never get them back. You can put them and the rest of your stuff in my room if you want, it’ll be safer there.”
“Okay,” he said elongating the word, and sounding as if he didn’t believe what she was saying.
“Just trust me,” she said over her shoulder as she walked past the open linen cabinet and disappeared around the corner into the kitchen which lead to the main part of the house. Michael followed her lead again, but was a bit too slow and rounded the corner too late to see where she had gone next. “Jessica?” he called through the silent house. Instead of a verbal response he heard a thud from some where over his head, and he realized that he hadn’t noticed until now that the house had multiple stories. He had been too wrapped up in flipping through the bag of books that had been in Jessica’s back seat when they pulled up to the house to notice anything about the house itself. While he had been pondering the idea of where she had wandered off to, Jessica had silently re-appeared behind him and didn’t bother to make her presence known. She took the opportunity to let him stand there, still confused as she walked back around through the kitchen so she could properly re-appear in front of him. She might have been slightly annoyed with him, but that didn’t mean she was going to purposely, or even unintentionally, scare him. She had a habit of moving silently even when she didn’t try to, especially when she didn’t have shoes on. Her aunt Sarah claimed she was part ninja, but didn’t know where she got it from because both of her parents were the loudest people she knew when it came to walking.
“Hey,” she said as she came around a corner at the front of the house. “Come with me, you can put your stuff upstairs. I have to call Rob and Sarah to let them know we got home fine, but go ahead and make yourself comfortable in the living room or library if you want.”
Michael followed her through the hallway that connected the kitchen to the front foyer, taking a second to observe his surroundings. The house was huge, there was no doubt about that. It probably could easily rival some of the houses on the North end of town where some of the more wealthy families lived, like Vanessa’s family. There was a massive staircase at the back of the fairly large entrance hall that they started to climb, and Michael continued to take in his surroundings. Jessica’s family definitely had a lot of money, that was quite obvious from the sheer size of the house and property, and it was only emphasized by the elaborate, and slightly eccentric, decor that adorned nearly every spare square inch of wall and table space. The more he looked around as the neared the second floor, the more amazed he was that Jessica was as down-to-earth as she was. He had spent his fair share of time with Vanessa’s family and friends of Vanessa’s that probably had underground dragon guarded vaults filled with money, and they were absolutely clueless about the world around them and people who didn’t have as much money as they did.
“Here we go,” Jessica said, bringing him back to reality. “Go ahead and put whatever you don’t want the dogs to get ahold of in here. They won’t bother your books or anything but your shoes, coat, and keys are fair game if they find them.” She opened the door in front of her to reveal a bedroom that rivaled the front entrance hall in both size and decor. At a quick glance, Michael guessed her room was roughly the size of the entire coffee shop they had been at earlier. There was a king-sized four poster canopy bed centered on the wall to his right flanked by two enormous bookshelves that were packed to capacity with everything from used textbooks to hard cover copies of new release books. He set his shoes down on the ground just inside the door and discovered that what looked like wall-to-wall carpeting at first glance was actually an area rug that covered most of the floor on the front half of the room, leaving about 8 inches between the edge of the rug and the wall. He balled up his coat and dropped it down next to his shoes before bending down to set his bag down with his growing pile of stuff. Jessica had crossed the room and was perched on the edge of a desk that had a few more piles of well-worn books spaced around the edges with the phone base cradled in her lap, receiver in hand as she quickly punched in the number.
“Hey Rob, it’s Jessica.” Her voice carried across the room in a soft whisper. He couldn’t tell if she was just speaking quietly or if the acoustics in the room were just really bad. “Yeah, we’re fine. No problems here just yet......Yeah, the power is still on......No, I haven’t checked that yet......Well, I’m going to call Sarah first, and then double check the generator just to be safe......Yeah. It should be fine...” Michael let her voice fade out as he continued to dig through his bag for various supplies. He stood up as she hung up the phone and hopped off the desk.
“Alright. Ready?” she asked as she crossed the room, stopping just short of the door.
“Yeah. You said my bag and books will be okay with the dogs if I take it back downstairs, right?”
“Absolutely. They know not to touch books of any kind, and they’ve never given us any issues with backpacks or anything like that.”
“Okay good. I’m just gonna take the whole bag back downstairs then. I’ve got a lot of stuff to work on in my portfolio, and it’d just be easier to have everything down there and not have to run back and forth up the stairs every time I need something.”
“Sounds good. There’s a couple of pretty big tables in the library, you can take over one of those if you want. I think we still have the studio table Sarah used to use set up in there too, if you want that instead,” she said as she walked out of the room ahead of him. She waited just outside for him to follow her out before she reached back and closed the door behind them. As they walked back down the hallway toward the staircase Michael did a quick mental tally of the doors in front of them and came up with a total of 7, not counting the ones behind them down the other end of the hallway. He still couldn’t get over how much the house reminded him of the obscenely large houses in Vanessa’s neighborhood but at the same time felt like it was a cozy townhouse nestled on one of the side streets in the center of town. Half-way down the staircase Michael’s phone started to ring again.
“It’s Jake,” he said to Jessica, who was quite aware of who it was even without looking at the phone. “Hey Jake. Where you at?”
It took a lot of self control for Jessica to not visibly cringe at that last statement. Doesn’t anyone speak in complete sentences anymore? For the love of -
“Alright, he’s through the park. What now?” Michael asked with the phone still pressed to his ear.
“Here, let me talk to him,” she said as she stopped on the stairs and turned around to reach for the phone. Michael handed it to her, and she brought it up to her ear.
“Hey Jake, this is Jessica. Are you still at the first intersection at the edge of the park?”
“Yeah, I’m sitting at the light still. What next?” came the unfamiliar voice through the receiver. It caught her a bit off guard. Since they were brothers, she expected Jake to sound a lot like Michael: a bit whiney and argumentative.
“O - okay,” she stuttered, trying to regain a bit of composure. “I would almost bet there haven’t been any other cars on the road leading out here, so you can probably just follow the tire tracks all the way here. Go straight through the light you’re at now, and then turn right at the next intersection, which is Sarasota and Prince Street. You’ll be turning on to Prince.”
“Straight, then right on Prince. Okay,” he repeated the directions back to her.
“Once you turn right, my street is about a mile from the light. You wont hit any more lights after you turn, so keep an eye out for it. It’s Carson Lane that you’re looking for, it will be on the left side of the road.”
“Left onto Carson Lane. Got it.”
“After that, just follow the road. I’m almost ninety eight percent sure that no one else on my street has left or come home since we got here, so just follow the tire tracks. If you need it, the house number is 693. There’s a giant navy blue Jeep in the driveway, you’ll see it from the road. It should only take you about 5 or 6 minutes to get here from the intersection you’re at now.”
“693, follow the tracks. Anything else?”
“No, I think that’s it. I don’t know if Michael told you but we do have four dogs. If I can’t get them inside before you get here, don’t worry about them when you pull in. They won’t get in your way, and they’re really friendly.”
“No problem, I love dogs. Alright then. See you guys in a few minutes.”
“See you!” She hung up the phone and handed it back to Michael. “Alright, he’ll be here soon. I’m going to go try to get those idiots inside before he gets here. The library is through those doors right there, make yourself at home.” She pointed to a set of ornate wooden doors to the left of the staircase as they reached the main floor again. Michael looked over to where she pointed and his jaw nearly dropped. Completely baffled at the sight before him, and entirely perplexed as to how he didn’t see the doors when they had passed through the foyer the first time. He stood there, just staring at the massive doors in front of him.
The library itself was a separate wing of the house, taking up the entire side that it was on for all three stories. The doors that flanked the entrance were a dark mahogany color with antiqued gold hardware, including everything from the hinges and the door handles to the studs that highlighted the intricate carvings that ran the entire length of the door. Inside, the first floor was more of a typical study or den than it was a library. There were two giant meeting tables, one on either end of the room, both complete with a set of ten chairs around the perimeter. All of the wood work and furnishings were the same dark mahogany with gold hardware that the doors were, even down to the bookcases and stairway banisters. Both the front and back walls had mirror image floor to ceiling windows on the first two floors, and a wide window on the third floor that stretched the entire width of the wing instead of running floor to ceiling. Jessica’s Aunt Sarah had wanted the windows on the third floor to be floor to ceiling as well, but no matter what she did she couldn’t get the contractors who built the house to budge because of safety restrictions. So instead she settled on windows that were two and a half feet from both the floor and ceiling but ran the entire length of the wall instead, allowing for wonderful seating areas on both ends. There were two over sized arm chairs that were on either side of a matching over sized couch, all of which were facing the window. The remaining two walls on the top floor of the library had a few scattered bookshelves lined with small leather bound books. Jessica’s Aunt Sarah collected journals, and this is where she kept them. Some of them were her own, and a good portion of them were from members of her family. Sarah had gotten Jessica to start journaling when she had moved to this side of the country and it was a task that quickly became more of a necessity than anything else for her. Jessica had her own bookshelf situated in the corner, right next to the window, of which the top two and a half shelves were completely full of journals of hers that she had accumulated and filled over the past six years. They ranged from the cute, spiral bound notebooks that were always the constant craze of teenage girls to thickly bound leather editions that rivaled the multiple sets of encyclopedias that were housed down on the first floor. The bottom shelf was filled as well, but instead of journals it was packed with Jessica’s writing. She had volumes of short stories and poetry, and her parents had insisted on getting bound copies of her novels made, even though they weren’t technically published anywhere, so she not only had her finished drafts collected in three ring binders, but a plain hard cover copy of each as well. The second floor of the library was where they kept all of what Jessica’s Aunt Sarah referred to as ‘recreational books’. The walls were lined with with rows and rows and rows of books ranging from the latest installment by James Patterson to cracked and yellowed copies of Chaucer. There was no real rhyme or reason to the way Sarah kept things organized on this floor. Some shelves were kept in alphabetical order, some were sorted by series and some were sorted by collections. For the most part she kept books by the one author in the same general area, although there were always exceptions to the rule. The main floor was where they kept what Jessica considered research books. They had at least four full sets of encyclopedias, a complete set of both biographies and autobiographies of the first 42 presidents and vice presidents, biographies and autobiographies of all of their favorite authors, records and maps of all of the National parks across the country, and atlases detailing every square foot of countries from Italy to Japan to Peru and everything in between. On the wall opposite from the doors leading into the library from the entrance hall was a gigantic wood burning brick fireplace that stretched from floor to ceiling on the first level with an oversized leather sofa and tapestry like floor rug in front of it.
“Hold on, before you go in there let me disable the alarm,” Jessica said as Michael started to move toward the massive doors. She pulled open a small hidden door to the right of the library entrance and tapped in the code she had memorized. She closed the small door and it virtually disappeared into the wall again. There was a loud click that sounded like it came from inside the doors themselves, followed by a series of three short beeps and two longer ones which let her know that the alarm was finally disabled. “Okay, go ahead. Sorry, I almost forgot about that.”
“You guys are pretty serious about your books, aren’t you?” Michael remarked. “I mean, you don’t have an alarm system on the rest of the house but you do for the library?”
“Wait until you see the inside. You’ll understand why,” she said, and moved in front of him to open the doors. Jessica was insanely proud of their library, and she usually made a point to make sure that everyone that came over saw it at least once. Taking advantage of the fact that Michael was quite obviously impressed with the house so far she turned both door handles and pushed both of the doors open at the same time, allowing for an overly dramatic reveal of the contents inside. She stepped over the threshold and turned around to face him. “Here it is. Take your pick of tables. The front one usually gets more light, and I think the studio table is tucked behind the bookshelf to the right of the front window. Make yourself comfortable, I have to get the dogs in before Jake gets here.”
“O...okay...” Michael said, letting his words trail off. He was literally speechless and awe struck at the sight before him. He took a few steps inside and just stood there, taking in everything around him. He was so enthralled with the library that he didn’t notice Jessica walk up beside him and stand with him.
“Pretty impressive, isn’t it?” She said softly which cause Michael to jump as she startled him. She laughed a bit at that. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to scare you. I’m going to go get something to drink before I get started on my portfolio, do you want anything?”
“Uh, water. Water would be good for now, thanks,” he said as he turned to his left to look at her as he said that.
“Okay,” she said, and before she could continue she was interrupted by the dogs barking and running through the house to the front window in the living room which was across the entrance hall from the library.
“I’ll take that as a sign that Jake is here,” she said and turned around and quickly walked to the front door. She cracked it open to see what the commotion outside was, and watched as an enormous black pick up truck turning into the driveway. She shoved her feet into a pair of boots that were sitting by the front door and stepped outside to greet the new comer as he pulled up behind her Jeep. Making sure to close the door behind her so the dogs didn’t follow her outside, she carefully walked down the steps that lead to the sidewalk and made her way toward the driveway. She hadn’t bothered to put a coat on this time since she figured she would only be outside for a minute or so, but she was regretting it already because the wind had picked up a bit and it was quite chilly. She folded her arms across her chest and hunched her shoulders a bit as she picked up the pace and hurried to the end of the sidewalk. The driver’s side door opened and she could see someone step down out of it.
“Watch out for the snow bank on that side! The snow’s pretty deep over there” she called over the truck as she walked around the front of it. A hand reached out around the edge of the door and grabbed it to swing it shut, revealing Jake standing knee deep in the snow.
“You must be Jessica,” he said as she came around the front corner of the truck. He had a back pack slung over one shoulder and one hand shoved in his coat pocket and was the exact opposite of what Jessica expected him to be. Even though Michael was basically a poster child for a typical art student, she expected Jake to have a bit of a family resemblance at first glance but there was none. While Michael had shaggy black hair that was always in his eyes, Jake had longer light brown hair seemed to easily be swept out of his face with a quick flick of his head. Jake stood about a head taller than Michael did, Jessica guessed about six feet to Michael’s five and a half feet, and was built like he was made to play every sport you could imagine while Michael looked like a strong wind would send him flying through the air. He held out his hand and said, “Hi, I’m Jake.”
CHAPTER 5
Michael watched from the backseat in a mixture of shock and awe as a herd of deer leapt across the road in front of the Jeep. He couldn’t believe Jessica had managed to miss all of them. The Jeep’s speed had slowed to a crawl now, and he could see that Jessica was visibly shaking.
“Oh this is INSANE. Why can’t I get a break today?” Jessica shouted. She took a few deep breaths and each time she let them out she forced herself to calm down a bit. She refused to let her nerves show much longer. Today’s emotional assault was quickly draining her already limited patience with the world, and she wasn’t about to let it totally break her down.
“Are you okay?” Michael spat out quickly, running his words together. He was more frazzled by the deer than Jessica had been.
“For the last time, I am FINE. Please stop asking me that,” Jessica snapped back through gritted teeth. She was tired of reassuring him that she was fine, and she sighed for what seemed like the thousandth time today. A nagging thought in the back of her mind told her that she should apologize for snapping at him again, but she ignored it. She started to ask him to either come back into the front seat or at least buckle up if he was going to stay in the back because he was making her a bit nervous, especially after almost sending him through the windshield a few minutes earlier but she was cut off by a rather loud chorus of some overplayed mainstream song that she wished she had never heard of emanating from Michael’s cell phone. He either didn’t hear her or chose to ignore her as he glance at the caller ID and then flipped the phone open to answer it.
“Hey Jake, what’s up?......No, we’re not at the coffee shop anymore, why?......Oh, seriously man? Why would you do that? I got a ride somewhere, you should have called me before you left.”
Jessica could only imagine what the other end of the conversation was like. Judging by what Michael was saying she guessed that Jake, who she vaguely remembered was his brother, had showed up at Rob’s place to pick Michael up only to find the place shut down for the day and the parking lot probably empty. She hated eavesdropping on phone conversations, but there was really no way around it since she was the only other person in the car.
“Well, just hold on a second. Let me figure something out.” He pulled the phone away from his ear, and pressed his thumb over the mouth piece.
“Let me guess,” Jessica started in before he could explain anything. “Jake showed up at Rob’s place expecting you to still be there waiting for a ride, and now you want to know if I’ll drive you back there so you can go home.”
“One out of two isn’t bad, I guess. Almost. He showed up at the coffee shop, but I’m not going to ask you to take me back there.”
“Good, because we’ll be at my house in approximately seven minutes and I’m not turning around now.”
“Would you stop being so snippy and just listen to me for a second? I know it’s already an awkward situation and a lot to ask of you, but would it be okay if Jake came over too? He was staying at our grandparent’s house and they lost power so they packed up and they’re driving upstate to our aunt and uncle’s house tonight. And our parents are out of town, and he doesn’t have a spare key so he can’t really go home.”
Jessica thought about it for a few seconds. She had never met Jake, and before today didn’t know Michael existed. It’s not really going to hurt anything if he does. You’ve pretty much skipped over most of the awkward first date scenarios in the last few hours with Michael so there isn’t much left to make things really uncomfortable. And you could use the company, and maybe the extra help, if the power goes out. Plus it’ll keep the dogs occupied for a while, anyway.
“Um, yeah. I guess that’s fine.”
“Great,” he said and put the phone back up to his ear. “Jake?...Yeah, that’ll be fine. Start heading east on Main Street toward the park. Take a left -”
“Wait. What kind of car does he drive?” Jessica broke in, and Michael over looked at her.
“A truck that’s about the size of your tank here. Why?”
“Never mind. If it was something small I would have told him to take another route because this road hasn’t been driven on except for us, but he’ll be fine.”
“Right. Jake? Yeah. Sorry. So take a left when you get to the end of Main Street and follow the road through the park.”
“Tell him to watch out for deer,” Jessica interjected again.
“Oh. Yeah. Make sure you keep an eye out for deer, I guess. Call me when you’re almost through the park, okay? See ya then.” He hung up the phone as they pulled up to the stop light at the end of the park road and Jessica eased down on the brake as they got closer to the intersection’s red light. They stopped at the red light and Jessica turned around to Michael in the back seat again, who had discovered the bag of books Jessica had bought earlier today during the break between her morning classes.
“Can you do me a favor? I don’t care if you stay in the back seat, but either way I want you to put your seat belt on. If we have another deer incident and you end up through the windshield, that’s your fault and not mine.”
“Technically, I don’t have to. There’s no law that says back seat passengers have to have a seat belt on.” Michael said, contradicting his statement as he latched the seatbelt around his waist.
“I don’t care what the law is, you’re in my car so you abide by my rules. I say I want your seat belt on, so put it on unless you want to walk the rest of the way.” She twisted back around to the front and waited rather impatiently for the light to turn green. She was starting to regret offering to let Michael come with her, but wasn’t about to leave him stranded anywhere. I hope Jake is more manageable than he is. I don’t think I can take two of them. Realizing that they had never successfully hooked up her iPod, she yanked the auxiliary cable out of its port on the dashboard and punched the CD button with her index finger. It was pointless to try to mess with the iPod now, as they’d be home in a few minutes. She relaxed a bit when the familiar, soothing strains of music started to fill the empty silence in the car.
“On an ocean full of gravel,
In the middle of the night.
We were all there together,
All dressed up in the headlights
Of the little blue pick up with the stereo loud
We danced to the music of the band from the bar
And we knew, we knew.
We knew this was the start
This was the start of the fall.”
“This guy is really into the depressing kind of stuff, isn’t he?” Michael observed rather unnecessarily from the back seat. Jessica glanced up to look in her rearview mirror at him, only to see that he was absently flipping through one of the books she had bought earlier that day.
“So what if it is? We just went over this. My car, my rules, my music,” she retorted. She was starting to get sick of his downer attitude and criticism. There wasn’t any reason for it, and she was starting to wish she had taken him back to the coffee shop with his brother.
“I’m just saying. He has a pretty bleak outlook on things, and everything has been about love. There’s more to the world than that,” he said.
“Look, does it really matter? We’ll be in my driveway in roughly 30 seconds and then you won’t have to listen to it anymore. While we’re being blunt, if you’re going to be like this all night we’re going to have problems. I don’t take well to annoying people,” she said as she slowed down to turn into the winding driveway. Her response seemed to work to shut him up, as he didn’t spit back an attempt at a witty remark, but instead continued to lazily flip through another book. She was quickly becoming unimpressed with Michael. He had come across as pretty reasonable earlier today and the jab at Twilight when she was clearing off the car had eased her mind a bit more, but it seemed that the more they drove the worse he got. He’s starting to prove that he’s a decent match for Vanessa. Apparently I was wrong about that. She had momentarily forgotten about the small dip at the end of the driveway and had to jab at the gas pedal to get through it, but thankfully that was the only problem she encountered as she made her way up to the house. The driveway was nearly a quarter of a mile long, which in the city seemed like an unnecessary length but out on the edges of town was a fairly common occurrence. Jessica, for one, was extremely happy to live this far out in the country, and by the park. When she had lived in LA they lived on the outer edges of the center of the city, which meant that while they weren’t crammed into a tiny apartment or studio loft they still didn’t have a ton of room outside. Sure, their property had been one of the biggest lots in their area, but compared to her aunt’s house that she lived in now it was quite small. One day a few years ago while she was incredibly bored, she had done the math to figure out that approximately twelve and a half of her old property would fit on her aunt’s lot.
She hit the large button on the garage door opener attached to her visor with her thumb as they pulled up to the edge of the house. Normally she would park in the garage, but with the possibility of losing power later due to the continuous storm she would rather dig the car out of the snow instead of getting it stuck in the garage and having to deal with the fiasco that would entail manually detaching the opening contraption from the door in order to accomplish anything. Pulling up so there was about four feet between her front bumper and where the door would be when it closed she put the car in park and turned the engine off. The last few bars of the song that Michael had labeled as ‘hopelessly depressing’ a few moments ago faded out as she opened the door, unbuckled her seat belt, and slid out into the ever falling snow.
“Woah.” She had to grab the still open door to steady herself as to not fall face first into the drift that had gathered at the edge of the garage. Apparently the snow had accumulated a lot more out here because she drift she was now standing in was up to her knees, as opposed to the ones back at Rob’s place that were between ankle and mid-calf height. That’s going to be fun later, she thought as she eyed the gigantic snow plow attached to their lawn mower that was parked in the corner of the garage, even though she would probably wait until morning to even start to make an attempt at clearing off the driveway. Struggling a bit with walking she worked her way to the back door to collect her stuff when she heard a soft thud and some muffled cursing coming from the opposite side of the car.
“By the way,” she called over the car, “the snow is a lot deeper out here.”
“Thanks. I actually managed to figure that one out for myself, strangely enough.” Michael appeared in front of her as he opened the door on his side of the car. She just shrugged as he gave her a slightly dirty look. That’s what you get for being an insufferable jerk, I suppose. She was a big believer in karma, and she just hoped something didn’t come back to haunt her from her mental commentary today. She reached in and pulled her bag toward her before picking it up and hitching it over her shoulder. It felt a lot heavier than it had when they had left Rob’s place, but she decided to chalk that up to the fact that all of its weight was on the shoulder she had used to bust open the doors earlier. She hadn’t realized how sore her shoulder actually was until just now. Still clutching her keys in her hand, she made her way around the front of the car and into the garage. Michael followed behind her to the small set of steps that lead up from the garage into the house. Even though the heat had been on the entire way home, her hands were still freezing and she kept up today’s theme of fumbling with the keys as she tried to find the right one to open the door that lead into the house.
“What’s the point of locking the door if the garage is closed?” he interjected from behind her.
“Because the back door to the garage doesn’t lock most of the time,” she said as she rolled her eyes for what seemed like the hundredth time that day and jerked her head toward the back corner of the garage where the aforementioned door was. She finally found the right key and shoved it into the lock with a bit more force than was really required and twisted it. She was relieved when it turned without sticking, and before she pushed it open she turned around to issue a quick warning to Michael.
“Just so you know, the dogs are probably going to bust out of the door as soon as I open, so you might want to stand to the side unless you want to get knocked over,” she said and barely gave him a second to get out of the way before she easily popped the door open with her hip. Just as she had warned would happen, all four of her dogs burst through the doorway before she even had the door half open. Three of the four completely skipped the stairs as they leapt down to get out of the house. The fourth, who was also the smallest being a corgi with short little legs, had to hit a few of the steps as she bounded after the rest. “Come on. If you get inside before they realize you’re here you’ll probably be safer. They tend to be a bit calmer about new people once they’re actually in the house.”
Michael scaled the set of four steps in two strides and squeezed past Jessica into the house. She shut the door behind them and flicked one of the light switches that was on the wall next to the door revealing the slightly cluttered mud room they were now standing in. She pulled off her shoes so she didn’t track snow and mud through the rest of the house, and Michael followed suit. He started to set them on the ground by the door but Jessica stopped him before he even got close to the ground.
“I wouldn’t do that. I can bet at least one of the dogs will make off with one, or both, of your shoes if you leave them there and you’ll never get them back. You can put them and the rest of your stuff in my room if you want, it’ll be safer there.”
“Okay,” he said elongating the word, and sounding as if he didn’t believe what she was saying.
“Just trust me,” she said over her shoulder as she walked past the open linen cabinet and disappeared around the corner into the kitchen which lead to the main part of the house. Michael followed her lead again, but was a bit too slow and rounded the corner too late to see where she had gone next. “Jessica?” he called through the silent house. Instead of a verbal response he heard a thud from some where over his head, and he realized that he hadn’t noticed until now that the house had multiple stories. He had been too wrapped up in flipping through the bag of books that had been in Jessica’s back seat when they pulled up to the house to notice anything about the house itself. While he had been pondering the idea of where she had wandered off to, Jessica had silently re-appeared behind him and didn’t bother to make her presence known. She took the opportunity to let him stand there, still confused as she walked back around through the kitchen so she could properly re-appear in front of him. She might have been slightly annoyed with him, but that didn’t mean she was going to purposely, or even unintentionally, scare him. She had a habit of moving silently even when she didn’t try to, especially when she didn’t have shoes on. Her aunt Sarah claimed she was part ninja, but didn’t know where she got it from because both of her parents were the loudest people she knew when it came to walking.
“Hey,” she said as she came around a corner at the front of the house. “Come with me, you can put your stuff upstairs. I have to call Rob and Sarah to let them know we got home fine, but go ahead and make yourself comfortable in the living room or library if you want.”
Michael followed her through the hallway that connected the kitchen to the front foyer, taking a second to observe his surroundings. The house was huge, there was no doubt about that. It probably could easily rival some of the houses on the North end of town where some of the more wealthy families lived, like Vanessa’s family. There was a massive staircase at the back of the fairly large entrance hall that they started to climb, and Michael continued to take in his surroundings. Jessica’s family definitely had a lot of money, that was quite obvious from the sheer size of the house and property, and it was only emphasized by the elaborate, and slightly eccentric, decor that adorned nearly every spare square inch of wall and table space. The more he looked around as the neared the second floor, the more amazed he was that Jessica was as down-to-earth as she was. He had spent his fair share of time with Vanessa’s family and friends of Vanessa’s that probably had underground dragon guarded vaults filled with money, and they were absolutely clueless about the world around them and people who didn’t have as much money as they did.
“Here we go,” Jessica said, bringing him back to reality. “Go ahead and put whatever you don’t want the dogs to get ahold of in here. They won’t bother your books or anything but your shoes, coat, and keys are fair game if they find them.” She opened the door in front of her to reveal a bedroom that rivaled the front entrance hall in both size and decor. At a quick glance, Michael guessed her room was roughly the size of the entire coffee shop they had been at earlier. There was a king-sized four poster canopy bed centered on the wall to his right flanked by two enormous bookshelves that were packed to capacity with everything from used textbooks to hard cover copies of new release books. He set his shoes down on the ground just inside the door and discovered that what looked like wall-to-wall carpeting at first glance was actually an area rug that covered most of the floor on the front half of the room, leaving about 8 inches between the edge of the rug and the wall. He balled up his coat and dropped it down next to his shoes before bending down to set his bag down with his growing pile of stuff. Jessica had crossed the room and was perched on the edge of a desk that had a few more piles of well-worn books spaced around the edges with the phone base cradled in her lap, receiver in hand as she quickly punched in the number.
“Hey Rob, it’s Jessica.” Her voice carried across the room in a soft whisper. He couldn’t tell if she was just speaking quietly or if the acoustics in the room were just really bad. “Yeah, we’re fine. No problems here just yet......Yeah, the power is still on......No, I haven’t checked that yet......Well, I’m going to call Sarah first, and then double check the generator just to be safe......Yeah. It should be fine...” Michael let her voice fade out as he continued to dig through his bag for various supplies. He stood up as she hung up the phone and hopped off the desk.
“Alright. Ready?” she asked as she crossed the room, stopping just short of the door.
“Yeah. You said my bag and books will be okay with the dogs if I take it back downstairs, right?”
“Absolutely. They know not to touch books of any kind, and they’ve never given us any issues with backpacks or anything like that.”
“Okay good. I’m just gonna take the whole bag back downstairs then. I’ve got a lot of stuff to work on in my portfolio, and it’d just be easier to have everything down there and not have to run back and forth up the stairs every time I need something.”
“Sounds good. There’s a couple of pretty big tables in the library, you can take over one of those if you want. I think we still have the studio table Sarah used to use set up in there too, if you want that instead,” she said as she walked out of the room ahead of him. She waited just outside for him to follow her out before she reached back and closed the door behind them. As they walked back down the hallway toward the staircase Michael did a quick mental tally of the doors in front of them and came up with a total of 7, not counting the ones behind them down the other end of the hallway. He still couldn’t get over how much the house reminded him of the obscenely large houses in Vanessa’s neighborhood but at the same time felt like it was a cozy townhouse nestled on one of the side streets in the center of town. Half-way down the staircase Michael’s phone started to ring again.
“It’s Jake,” he said to Jessica, who was quite aware of who it was even without looking at the phone. “Hey Jake. Where you at?”
It took a lot of self control for Jessica to not visibly cringe at that last statement. Doesn’t anyone speak in complete sentences anymore? For the love of -
“Alright, he’s through the park. What now?” Michael asked with the phone still pressed to his ear.
“Here, let me talk to him,” she said as she stopped on the stairs and turned around to reach for the phone. Michael handed it to her, and she brought it up to her ear.
“Hey Jake, this is Jessica. Are you still at the first intersection at the edge of the park?”
“Yeah, I’m sitting at the light still. What next?” came the unfamiliar voice through the receiver. It caught her a bit off guard. Since they were brothers, she expected Jake to sound a lot like Michael: a bit whiney and argumentative.
“O - okay,” she stuttered, trying to regain a bit of composure. “I would almost bet there haven’t been any other cars on the road leading out here, so you can probably just follow the tire tracks all the way here. Go straight through the light you’re at now, and then turn right at the next intersection, which is Sarasota and Prince Street. You’ll be turning on to Prince.”
“Straight, then right on Prince. Okay,” he repeated the directions back to her.
“Once you turn right, my street is about a mile from the light. You wont hit any more lights after you turn, so keep an eye out for it. It’s Carson Lane that you’re looking for, it will be on the left side of the road.”
“Left onto Carson Lane. Got it.”
“After that, just follow the road. I’m almost ninety eight percent sure that no one else on my street has left or come home since we got here, so just follow the tire tracks. If you need it, the house number is 693. There’s a giant navy blue Jeep in the driveway, you’ll see it from the road. It should only take you about 5 or 6 minutes to get here from the intersection you’re at now.”
“693, follow the tracks. Anything else?”
“No, I think that’s it. I don’t know if Michael told you but we do have four dogs. If I can’t get them inside before you get here, don’t worry about them when you pull in. They won’t get in your way, and they’re really friendly.”
“No problem, I love dogs. Alright then. See you guys in a few minutes.”
“See you!” She hung up the phone and handed it back to Michael. “Alright, he’ll be here soon. I’m going to go try to get those idiots inside before he gets here. The library is through those doors right there, make yourself at home.” She pointed to a set of ornate wooden doors to the left of the staircase as they reached the main floor again. Michael looked over to where she pointed and his jaw nearly dropped. Completely baffled at the sight before him, and entirely perplexed as to how he didn’t see the doors when they had passed through the foyer the first time. He stood there, just staring at the massive doors in front of him.
The library itself was a separate wing of the house, taking up the entire side that it was on for all three stories. The doors that flanked the entrance were a dark mahogany color with antiqued gold hardware, including everything from the hinges and the door handles to the studs that highlighted the intricate carvings that ran the entire length of the door. Inside, the first floor was more of a typical study or den than it was a library. There were two giant meeting tables, one on either end of the room, both complete with a set of ten chairs around the perimeter. All of the wood work and furnishings were the same dark mahogany with gold hardware that the doors were, even down to the bookcases and stairway banisters. Both the front and back walls had mirror image floor to ceiling windows on the first two floors, and a wide window on the third floor that stretched the entire width of the wing instead of running floor to ceiling. Jessica’s Aunt Sarah had wanted the windows on the third floor to be floor to ceiling as well, but no matter what she did she couldn’t get the contractors who built the house to budge because of safety restrictions. So instead she settled on windows that were two and a half feet from both the floor and ceiling but ran the entire length of the wall instead, allowing for wonderful seating areas on both ends. There were two over sized arm chairs that were on either side of a matching over sized couch, all of which were facing the window. The remaining two walls on the top floor of the library had a few scattered bookshelves lined with small leather bound books. Jessica’s Aunt Sarah collected journals, and this is where she kept them. Some of them were her own, and a good portion of them were from members of her family. Sarah had gotten Jessica to start journaling when she had moved to this side of the country and it was a task that quickly became more of a necessity than anything else for her. Jessica had her own bookshelf situated in the corner, right next to the window, of which the top two and a half shelves were completely full of journals of hers that she had accumulated and filled over the past six years. They ranged from the cute, spiral bound notebooks that were always the constant craze of teenage girls to thickly bound leather editions that rivaled the multiple sets of encyclopedias that were housed down on the first floor. The bottom shelf was filled as well, but instead of journals it was packed with Jessica’s writing. She had volumes of short stories and poetry, and her parents had insisted on getting bound copies of her novels made, even though they weren’t technically published anywhere, so she not only had her finished drafts collected in three ring binders, but a plain hard cover copy of each as well. The second floor of the library was where they kept all of what Jessica’s Aunt Sarah referred to as ‘recreational books’. The walls were lined with with rows and rows and rows of books ranging from the latest installment by James Patterson to cracked and yellowed copies of Chaucer. There was no real rhyme or reason to the way Sarah kept things organized on this floor. Some shelves were kept in alphabetical order, some were sorted by series and some were sorted by collections. For the most part she kept books by the one author in the same general area, although there were always exceptions to the rule. The main floor was where they kept what Jessica considered research books. They had at least four full sets of encyclopedias, a complete set of both biographies and autobiographies of the first 42 presidents and vice presidents, biographies and autobiographies of all of their favorite authors, records and maps of all of the National parks across the country, and atlases detailing every square foot of countries from Italy to Japan to Peru and everything in between. On the wall opposite from the doors leading into the library from the entrance hall was a gigantic wood burning brick fireplace that stretched from floor to ceiling on the first level with an oversized leather sofa and tapestry like floor rug in front of it.
“Hold on, before you go in there let me disable the alarm,” Jessica said as Michael started to move toward the massive doors. She pulled open a small hidden door to the right of the library entrance and tapped in the code she had memorized. She closed the small door and it virtually disappeared into the wall again. There was a loud click that sounded like it came from inside the doors themselves, followed by a series of three short beeps and two longer ones which let her know that the alarm was finally disabled. “Okay, go ahead. Sorry, I almost forgot about that.”
“You guys are pretty serious about your books, aren’t you?” Michael remarked. “I mean, you don’t have an alarm system on the rest of the house but you do for the library?”
“Wait until you see the inside. You’ll understand why,” she said, and moved in front of him to open the doors. Jessica was insanely proud of their library, and she usually made a point to make sure that everyone that came over saw it at least once. Taking advantage of the fact that Michael was quite obviously impressed with the house so far she turned both door handles and pushed both of the doors open at the same time, allowing for an overly dramatic reveal of the contents inside. She stepped over the threshold and turned around to face him. “Here it is. Take your pick of tables. The front one usually gets more light, and I think the studio table is tucked behind the bookshelf to the right of the front window. Make yourself comfortable, I have to get the dogs in before Jake gets here.”
“O...okay...” Michael said, letting his words trail off. He was literally speechless and awe struck at the sight before him. He took a few steps inside and just stood there, taking in everything around him. He was so enthralled with the library that he didn’t notice Jessica walk up beside him and stand with him.
“Pretty impressive, isn’t it?” She said softly which cause Michael to jump as she startled him. She laughed a bit at that. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to scare you. I’m going to go get something to drink before I get started on my portfolio, do you want anything?”
“Uh, water. Water would be good for now, thanks,” he said as he turned to his left to look at her as he said that.
“Okay,” she said, and before she could continue she was interrupted by the dogs barking and running through the house to the front window in the living room which was across the entrance hall from the library.
“I’ll take that as a sign that Jake is here,” she said and turned around and quickly walked to the front door. She cracked it open to see what the commotion outside was, and watched as an enormous black pick up truck turning into the driveway. She shoved her feet into a pair of boots that were sitting by the front door and stepped outside to greet the new comer as he pulled up behind her Jeep. Making sure to close the door behind her so the dogs didn’t follow her outside, she carefully walked down the steps that lead to the sidewalk and made her way toward the driveway. She hadn’t bothered to put a coat on this time since she figured she would only be outside for a minute or so, but she was regretting it already because the wind had picked up a bit and it was quite chilly. She folded her arms across her chest and hunched her shoulders a bit as she picked up the pace and hurried to the end of the sidewalk. The driver’s side door opened and she could see someone step down out of it.
“Watch out for the snow bank on that side! The snow’s pretty deep over there” she called over the truck as she walked around the front of it. A hand reached out around the edge of the door and grabbed it to swing it shut, revealing Jake standing knee deep in the snow.
“You must be Jessica,” he said as she came around the front corner of the truck. He had a back pack slung over one shoulder and one hand shoved in his coat pocket and was the exact opposite of what Jessica expected him to be. Even though Michael was basically a poster child for a typical art student, she expected Jake to have a bit of a family resemblance at first glance but there was none. While Michael had shaggy black hair that was always in his eyes, Jake had longer light brown hair seemed to easily be swept out of his face with a quick flick of his head. Jake stood about a head taller than Michael did, Jessica guessed about six feet to Michael’s five and a half feet, and was built like he was made to play every sport you could imagine while Michael looked like a strong wind would send him flying through the air. He held out his hand and said, “Hi, I’m Jake.”
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Chapter 4
CHAPTER 4
One thing that Jessica had noticed about the winters in Vermont over the last six years was that the weather was highly unpredictable. Like now, for example. In the minute and a half they had spent in the car, the snow had almost completely stopped. She noticed this when she had slid out of the car and nearly tumbled into the snow bank that had piled up around her car while she had been inside Rob’s place.
“Finally,” she said looking up toward the sky with a small smile. As much as she loved the snow, she hadn’t been looking forward to navigating the winding roads that lead to her house once they reached the outskirts of the small town. The sky had lightened up a bit as well, and she could actually clearly see the buildings across the road, and the cars trying to make their way through the deep trenches that had been plowed by the tires of some of the larger vehicles. Noticing that Joseph was still searching for the ice scraper in the back seat, Jessica climbed back up in to the driver’s seat to help him.
“Y’know, if it’d be easier you can actually go into the back seat. There’s nothing back there that’s going to bite you,” she said with a hint of sarcasm in her voice.
“What are you -” Joseph started to say as he leaned back into his seat, but was interrupted by Jessica tumbling over the arm rest between the two front seats and into the back. Within seconds she produced the elusive ice scraper, and dropped it onto the seat next to Joseph. He watched as she disappeared again, this time over the back seat and into the trunk space where she returned with what he assumed was the snow brush she was referring to earlier. The brush was actually a piece of industrial grade styrofoam about eighteen inches long by nine niches wide attached to a broom handle. Wedging the handle between the head rest and the body of the drivers seat, Jessica clambered back into the front seat and almost fell into Joseph’s lap. Catching her balance, she slid out of the car again before she found herself in another awkward situation.
“Alright,” she said, leaning back in to the car to grab the broom handle contraption. “I’m going to clear off as much of the snow as I can, can you follow behind and get started on the ice while I try to open the back two doors?”
“Uh, sure. What -”
“Thanks,” Jessica said, and disappeared out of sight toward the back end of the car before he could finish his sentence. Joseph followed her lead and stepped out of the car, and promptly fell into a snow drift. He hadn’t realized how high the car sat when he had gotten into it, but was well aware of it now that he was laying face down in a pile of snow.
“I know snow is enjoyable and all, but this really isn’t the time to be making snow angels.”
Joseph rolled over to see Jessica standing over him, her gloved hand outstretched to help him up. He took her hand and pulled himself up, and quickly brushed the excess snow off of him.
“Sorry. Believe it or not, that was actually unintentional,” he said. He looked over at the car, which was now nearly cleared off, and got a good look at just how big it really was. Glancing back at Jessica, he made a small connection in his mind that he was pretty sure would annoy her, even though he didn’t know her very well. The tiny powerhouse driving the massive jeep reminded him vaguely of a fictional vampire family and judging by the little time he had spent with her, he could venture a guess that she wasn’t a fan of sparkly, immortal, self-proclaimed vegetarians. “I wasn’t aware your name was really Alice.”
“Oh please. Everyone who’s read the books or seen the movies knows that Emmett drives the Jeep. Get your facts right,” she snapped back, cocking her head to the side and grinning at him. “And please tell me that was a jab at the series, not an honest reference because you like them. Because if that’s the case, you can walk home.”
“Hell no. I know more about those stupid books than I ever wanted to, only because Tessa is obsessed with them. And by obsessed, I mean for Halloween she bought me a wig and gold colored contacts.” He shook his head at the disgusting memory.
“Sadly, I can totally believe that. Now come on. I want to get home sometime before midnight.” She stepped up onto the running board, grabbing the luggage rack on top to keep her balance, and heaved the snow brush up to the roof to finish clearing the top of the car off. Seeing what was coming, Joseph scrambled out of the way just in time as a pile of snow landed right where he had been standing a second before. Jessica hopped down and moved around Joseph to the front of the car to clear off the windshield and the hood of the Jeep. Joseph replaced her spot at the side of the car and within a few minutes they finally had the car cleared off.
“Alright. Nice team work,” she said. “Now for the fun part. I want to get the back doors and the trunk open before we take off, just to be safe.” “Just to be safe? You weren’t planning on crashing, were you?”
“No, smart ass. Just get in the car, okay?”
She propped the giant brush on her shoulder and maneuvered through the piles of snow that had accumulated from clearing off the car and made her way back to the driver’s side. Pushing the brush handle in first, she gave it a light shove and it landed with a quiet thud in the trunk space, and she proceeded to climb back into her seat.
“Where do you want the ice scraper?” Joseph asked as he climbed in as well.
“Just set it on the ground back here. Actually, I need you to do me a favor. In one of the small pockets on the front of my bag is the lighter. We’re probably going to need that for the back hatch, if you could get that out for me that would be great,” She said as she situated herself against the door, ready to bust it open like she had done to her own door earlier.
“Are you sure...” Joseph trailed off, deciding it was better not to finish his sentence as Jessica gave him a skeptical look. He was going to ask if she was sure it was a good idea to throw herself at the door again, but figured the good idea was to actually not even think about it. He was getting the impression Jessica was a lot tougher than she looked, both physically and mentally. Her quick wit about his Twilight remark earlier had actually impressed him.
“Yes, I’m sure.” Jessica said, and quickly emphasized her point by pulling up on the door handle, leaning back and throwing her shoulder against the door, which popped open quite easily. She reached out and closed the door, then opened it again and shut it just to make sure before she shimmied across the seat to the opposite door which opened just as easily.
“Alright, so what’s the plan for the back door?” Joseph asked, reaching down to find the lighter in Jessica’s bag.
“Well, actually, I’m just going to try to open it from the outside using the handle. If that doesn’t work, then I’ll try the lighter and kick boxing method and see what happens.” She opened the door closest to her again and hopped out, quickly dropping out of sight as she shut it behind her. Joseph watched through the back window as she reappeared in his line of vision, and took notice of the fact that despite his initial impression of her from earlier today, she really could take care of herself. He hadn’t done much in the way of helping clear the snow off of the car or opening the rest of the doors, that had all been her. His train of thought was abruptly stopped at a burst of cold air that hit him as Jessica managed to wrench open the back hatch of the Jeep. Slamming it shut again, she bounded around the car and hopped up into the driver’s seat.
“Alright. Time to go. I don’t want to be stuck out here any longer than we need to, and my hands are freezing now.” She reached down to her side to grab the seatbelt and buckle it, and when she looked up and out the windshield she saw that it had started snowing heavily again.
“Wonderful. I can’t get a break today,” she sighed, sarcasm dripping from every syllable as she spoke. She waited until they were both buckled in, adjusted the gear shift into reverse and slowly backed out of the almost non-existent parking spot her car had inhabited for the last few hours. Easing around the row of trees that separated the parking lot from the main road she pulled up to the stop sign at the exit of the parking lot and waited for what looked like a run down Escort to make its way past the driveway.
“Oh man. I’d really hate to be them,” Joseph said as he watched the car carefully amble down the road in the wake of a large truck that had passed a few seconds before.
“Yeah, well be thankful we’re not. Summer’s never failed me in a storm before, and I have faith she won’t do it now either.” She glanced both ways again, not wanting to pull out in front of anyone in these conditions. She took her foot off of the brake and the car eased forward a bit before stopping.
“Looks like you spoke too soon.”
“Oh no. I didn’t. Hold on, just in case.” Jessica put her foot back on the brake and geared into her four wheel drive, checked the road again, and floored the gas pedal. The Jeep lurched forward into the road and Jessica expertly steered it into the general location of where she assumed the lane was. Judging by the way the tire tracks in the road swerved, no one was really sure where the road ended and the sidewalk began. She did her best to follow the general idea of where she should keep the car aimed, which really wasn’t too hard considering she’d made this same drive nearly every day since she had moved to Vermont. Once she was comfortable with where the car was going she jabbed at the power button on the radio and quickly flicked the volume knob down. She couldn’t remember what she had been listening to when she arrived at Rob’s place, and knowing her luck it would be something slightly embarrassing. To her somewhat relief, the all too familiar soothing voice of her favorite male vocalist started to softly fill the car, and she couldn’t help but smile when the song that was playing registered in her ears. It wasn’t what most people would classify as a happy song, but the beautifully haunting melody and acoustic guitar and piano accompaniment always relaxed her and made her feel a bit better regardless of the situation she was in. She reached forward again and flicked the volume knob back up to it’s original setting.
“And every time I have to wake
I come to terms with my actual fate
That the only thing lying next to me
Is a couple books and a pile of CDs.
I open my eyes and begin to return from
Either the past or the future that could have been
Even though it’s been almost a year now
It’s like you’ve left me all over again.”
“Wow. That’s almost depressing,” Joseph observed out loud. “I like it, but it’s depressing.”
“It’s wonderful, is what it is. All of his music is like that, even the more upbeat songs. I don’t think I’ve ever heard him sing something that couldn’t be interpreted as a love song, no matter what the content is. Here, listen to this.” She punched the next track button a few times to get to the song she was looking for.
“Salinger says that fame is only ego,
And if you want to be important then you never really will.
And F. Scott says that unrequited love will
Tear you up from the inside ‘til there’s close to nothing left.
So don’t wait and God don’t pine,
‘Cause in the end it’s just a distant line.
Shakespeare says that we’ve only got two options,
It’s either everyone gets married or everybody dies.
And God says that we need to love our neighbors
Even when they try to hurt us we just turn the other cheek.
So don’t try to make things square
‘Cause being good ain’t about being fair.
And I say that I think you’re really pretty
And I like in the June time when you wear that summer dress
And I say that I wish that I could dance
Cheek to cheek and heart to heart with you in the middle of your room
Because darlin’ I love you so
Even though I let you go
And I wish you would ask me one more time
So I could tell you that I want you for my own.”
They sat in silence for a moment as the song faded out, and Jessica did her best to focus on the road ahead of her.
“I really feel like that should have been a happy song. But it’s not, is it?” Joseph asked, breaking the comfortable silence. That was the second time today they had fallen into that feeling, which was quite strange for Jessica. Her life usually consisted of awkward silences and even more awkward encounters with strangers.
“Not entirely. I mean, depending on how you look at it, it really could be either. It’s definitely a love song, no doubt about that. You could listen to it as someone who’s remembering the past and wishing they could have a second chance to prove something they couldn’t manage the first time around. Or, you could listen to it as someone who is completely happy with their relationship but is missing their partner because of distance or something like that,” she explained. She took a split second chance to take her eyes off the road and glanced over to see what kind of expression Joseph had on his face. She was relieved to see he was actually thinking about what she had said, or at least it looked like he was. She was pretty good at reading facial expressions and body language and she hoped she was right.
“Here, try this one. It’s not as much thinking,” she said and punched the button to switch tracks again.
“If I wrote a song,
It would be a song to tell you that I love you.
And If I wrote a play,
It would be a comedy so I could marry you.
If I wrote a movie I would end it with a kiss,
The camera spinning three sixty degrees around our lips and
It would be a happy ending.
There’s a brand new ribbon that I bought,
Black as sin with ink.
And these pages that I’ve loaded in,
They are white and they are blank.
So I start to play a record and
I dim down all the lights.
And I sit down at my typewriter,
But I don’t know what to write.
If I wrote a song,
It would be a song to tell you that I love you.
And If I wrote a play,
It would be a comedy so I could marry you.
If I wrote a movie I would end it with a kiss,
The camera spinning three sixty degrees around our lips and
It would be a happy ending.
So I start to write short stories,
Just a page or two for each.
And the plots all start the same,
The boy and girl they meet.
And the middles they are also all the same,
The kids they fall in love.
And I never write the endings.
They kids just fall in love.
When I write a song,
It’s going to be a song to tell you that I love you.
And when I write a play,
It’s going to be a comedy so I can marry you.
When I write a movie I will end it with a kiss,
The camera spinning three sixty degrees around our lips and
It will be a happy ending.”
“How’s that? No thinking about it, it’s a straight forward love song,” she said as she turned the volume down a bit, and glanced back over at Joseph to see what he was thinking.
“Yeah, I guess so. It’s a bit twangy for my liking though,” he said with a wide grin as he looked back at her. Jessica quickly averted her eyes back to the road in order to avoid looking directly into his eyes. She was doing okay for now, and didn’t want to risk another mental battle of emotional onslaught. Joseph had started to pick up on the little quirks in her behavior today and because he didn’t know any better he took a chance and called her out on it.
“Okay, I don’t mean to be offensive about this, but why won’t you look at me directly when I’m talking? You keep looking away, and I can’t figure out why,” he said, keeping his eyes locked on the side of her face as she watched the road in front of her. She should have known it was coming at some point. He wasn’t stupid, but she wished he wasn’t also blunt on top of it. Before she could help it, there was a fast mental battle raging in her mind. Well, you could just tell him. But that would bring up a lot of awkward questions. Although you seem to have covered most of the awkward bases today, so it shouldn’t be that bad. But then that would mean trying to talk about Dan while driving in 3 feet of continuous snow. You can’t even sit still and think about him right now so that’s probably a bad idea anyway. You could always make up something. Or tell him half the truth. That’s always an option. That way you’re not lying, and there aren’t any gory details to get into.
“Jessica?” Joseph interrupted her train of thought. “D’you want to talk about anything? I know it’s a bit awkward since I’m basically still a complete stranger, but I’m willing to listen if you want to get anything out.”
“Thanks Dr. Phil, but it’s fine.” Jessica’s natural reaction to things like this was to be sarcastic and cynical. She cringed at her response, and quickly apologized. “Sorry. I didn’t mean it like that,” she sighed.
“It’s okay. If it’s really that big of a deal, don’t worry about it. I was just curious. I’d rather not die on the way to where ever we’re going, so if you don’t want to talk about it then don’t.
“Sorry. Honestly, it’s going to sound a bit random and odd, but basically you remind me a lot of someone I used to be really close with and it keeps freaking me out a bit. There’s nothing you can do about it, so don’t even worry about it,” she explained, being careful to not really disclose any real information. She knew she could probably really trust Joseph, there was just something about him that she felt comfortable with, but delving into anything involving Dan was not a good idea right now. If it came down to it, she might open up about it later. Her family didn’t even know about everything though, so no matter how comfortable she was with Joseph she doubted it would come out any time soon.
“I feel like I should be quoting a song or something here about reminding you of someone, but I can’t even figure it out right now,” he laughed, which made her smile.
“I can think of a few but I’ll let you figure them out,” she said quietly. The combination of the few songs they had listened to along with Joseph’s slight confrontation left her feeling a bit strange, but she tried to brush it off. Concentrating on getting both of them to her house safely and in a decent amount of time required more effort than she really wanted to put out right now.
“Okay, we’re about to approach the point in the day where you’re probably going to label me as a complete nerd if you haven’t already, but I need you to do me a favor,” she said, being careful not to take her eyes off of the road. They had been driving straight on Main Street toward the outer edge of their tiny town, and were about to turn onto a dirt and gravel road that would take them through the corner of the national park that Jessica lived on the other side of. The first curve could be dangerous on a dry day if you weren’t paying close attention and she had seen her fair share of people roll into the ditch on the other side of the road because they weren’t paying enough attention to what they were doing.
“I’m somewhat scared. But okay. What’s up?”
“My iPod is in my bag, along with the auxiliary cable that connects it to the stereo. Can you get those for me? They should be in the top pocket.”
“Uh, sure. Hold on a second.” Joseph turned around in his seat and tried to reach for Jessica’s bag, but ended up losing his balance and flopping rather ungracefully into the back seat instead.
“Well that was impressive. Are you okay?” she asked as she eased the car to a stop at the light before the aforementioned curve into the forest. She switched her left turn signal on and twisted her head back to see if Joseph needed help with anything. He had managed to right himself and was sitting on the seat now with her bag between his feet.
“Yeah, I’m fine. Not everyone has the same mad skills you do to clamber around this monstrosity in a graceful way.” “You’re just full of it today, aren’t you? I try to be helpful and this is what I get. Thanks,” she shot him a look that was supposed to be a bit intimidating, but ended up just laughing instead.
“Yeah well I do what I can. Here, is this what you wanted?” he asked as she turned around to face the front of the car again.
“If it’s a black iPod touch and a black auxiliary cable with a piece of green tape toward one of the connectors, then yes. But hold onto it for a second, unless you want to die while I try this curve.”
“Not dying today, thanks. I’ll wait.” He sat still in the back seat as she carefully eased off the brake and the car started to roll forward. The road sloped downward slightly, so gravity played a role in getting the car to move this time. There was no need to gun the engine thankfully, which she knew from previous experience would have propelled them directly into the line of trees to their right as she turned. The car was silent as they slowly made the complete turn onto the park road and Joseph could tell Jessica was concentrating far too much on making sure they didn’t roll the car as they made it into the lane she was aiming for. She could feel the tires sliding a bit with the lack of traction on the road even with four wheel drive enabled, and it made her nervous. The first time she ever made this turn during the winter she ended up wedged in the ditch between two trees. Now, any time the weather was even remotely less than ideal she was a bit uneasy taking this route home. Usually she would avoid it, but going around the edge of the park instead of through it added another twenty minutes to her route and in this weather would probably end up being twice that. She slowly guided the car along the curves of the road, paying close attention to where the snow drifts dropped off on either side of the road. No one had driven on this road since the storm had started, it was easy to tell because there were no other tire tracks to follow, and that unnerved her a bit. She had enough practice at this road that she probably could have driven it in her sleep and made it home safely, but she wasn’t a fan of almost blindly navigating through a mini ravine. She released the breath she didn’t realize she had been holding as she straightened the car out around the last part of the curve. Relaxing her grip on the steering wheel, she realized how nervous she had actually been.
“Okay. So about that iPod,” she said, extending her hand back over her shoulder as she kept her eyes forward on the road. She knew from here on out it was a fairly straight path to get out of this corner of the park but she didn’t want to take any chances.
“Oh no way,” Joseph said. “You may be an expert at driving this tank through anything, but I do not want to die before we get to your house. I’ll hook it up for you, and you can tell me what to put on.” He reached out and pushed her hand back toward the steering wheel, and leaned over the console in between the front two seats to find the input plug for the auxiliary cable. Jessica laughed to herself as he searched the dashboard for the tiny hole. She didn’t bother to tell him it wasn’t labeled, and that most people missed it the first seven or so times they looked for it. Letting him struggle for a few moments, she gave in and pointed to the almost invisible black spot by the CD slot.
“That looks like a screw. Does everyone do that, or am I the only dumb one who missed it?” he asked, looking up at her.
“No, hardly anyone finds it the first five times they try to find it. I don’t know why, I’ve never had a problem with it,” she shrugged.
As Joseph reached forward to plug the cable into the dashboard, Jessica caught a slight hint of movement out of the corner of her eye. She glanced over at the tree line, but couldn’t see anything. Figuring it was probably a branch moving with the wind or under the weight of snow she just brushed it off and didn’t give it a second thought and moved her eyes back to the road in front of her.
“Okay, so what do you -” he was cut off by a shriek of surprise from Jessica and the sound of grinding brakes as a massive blur of brown streaked across the road directly in front of the car.
One thing that Jessica had noticed about the winters in Vermont over the last six years was that the weather was highly unpredictable. Like now, for example. In the minute and a half they had spent in the car, the snow had almost completely stopped. She noticed this when she had slid out of the car and nearly tumbled into the snow bank that had piled up around her car while she had been inside Rob’s place.
“Finally,” she said looking up toward the sky with a small smile. As much as she loved the snow, she hadn’t been looking forward to navigating the winding roads that lead to her house once they reached the outskirts of the small town. The sky had lightened up a bit as well, and she could actually clearly see the buildings across the road, and the cars trying to make their way through the deep trenches that had been plowed by the tires of some of the larger vehicles. Noticing that Joseph was still searching for the ice scraper in the back seat, Jessica climbed back up in to the driver’s seat to help him.
“Y’know, if it’d be easier you can actually go into the back seat. There’s nothing back there that’s going to bite you,” she said with a hint of sarcasm in her voice.
“What are you -” Joseph started to say as he leaned back into his seat, but was interrupted by Jessica tumbling over the arm rest between the two front seats and into the back. Within seconds she produced the elusive ice scraper, and dropped it onto the seat next to Joseph. He watched as she disappeared again, this time over the back seat and into the trunk space where she returned with what he assumed was the snow brush she was referring to earlier. The brush was actually a piece of industrial grade styrofoam about eighteen inches long by nine niches wide attached to a broom handle. Wedging the handle between the head rest and the body of the drivers seat, Jessica clambered back into the front seat and almost fell into Joseph’s lap. Catching her balance, she slid out of the car again before she found herself in another awkward situation.
“Alright,” she said, leaning back in to the car to grab the broom handle contraption. “I’m going to clear off as much of the snow as I can, can you follow behind and get started on the ice while I try to open the back two doors?”
“Uh, sure. What -”
“Thanks,” Jessica said, and disappeared out of sight toward the back end of the car before he could finish his sentence. Joseph followed her lead and stepped out of the car, and promptly fell into a snow drift. He hadn’t realized how high the car sat when he had gotten into it, but was well aware of it now that he was laying face down in a pile of snow.
“I know snow is enjoyable and all, but this really isn’t the time to be making snow angels.”
Joseph rolled over to see Jessica standing over him, her gloved hand outstretched to help him up. He took her hand and pulled himself up, and quickly brushed the excess snow off of him.
“Sorry. Believe it or not, that was actually unintentional,” he said. He looked over at the car, which was now nearly cleared off, and got a good look at just how big it really was. Glancing back at Jessica, he made a small connection in his mind that he was pretty sure would annoy her, even though he didn’t know her very well. The tiny powerhouse driving the massive jeep reminded him vaguely of a fictional vampire family and judging by the little time he had spent with her, he could venture a guess that she wasn’t a fan of sparkly, immortal, self-proclaimed vegetarians. “I wasn’t aware your name was really Alice.”
“Oh please. Everyone who’s read the books or seen the movies knows that Emmett drives the Jeep. Get your facts right,” she snapped back, cocking her head to the side and grinning at him. “And please tell me that was a jab at the series, not an honest reference because you like them. Because if that’s the case, you can walk home.”
“Hell no. I know more about those stupid books than I ever wanted to, only because Tessa is obsessed with them. And by obsessed, I mean for Halloween she bought me a wig and gold colored contacts.” He shook his head at the disgusting memory.
“Sadly, I can totally believe that. Now come on. I want to get home sometime before midnight.” She stepped up onto the running board, grabbing the luggage rack on top to keep her balance, and heaved the snow brush up to the roof to finish clearing the top of the car off. Seeing what was coming, Joseph scrambled out of the way just in time as a pile of snow landed right where he had been standing a second before. Jessica hopped down and moved around Joseph to the front of the car to clear off the windshield and the hood of the Jeep. Joseph replaced her spot at the side of the car and within a few minutes they finally had the car cleared off.
“Alright. Nice team work,” she said. “Now for the fun part. I want to get the back doors and the trunk open before we take off, just to be safe.” “Just to be safe? You weren’t planning on crashing, were you?”
“No, smart ass. Just get in the car, okay?”
She propped the giant brush on her shoulder and maneuvered through the piles of snow that had accumulated from clearing off the car and made her way back to the driver’s side. Pushing the brush handle in first, she gave it a light shove and it landed with a quiet thud in the trunk space, and she proceeded to climb back into her seat.
“Where do you want the ice scraper?” Joseph asked as he climbed in as well.
“Just set it on the ground back here. Actually, I need you to do me a favor. In one of the small pockets on the front of my bag is the lighter. We’re probably going to need that for the back hatch, if you could get that out for me that would be great,” She said as she situated herself against the door, ready to bust it open like she had done to her own door earlier.
“Are you sure...” Joseph trailed off, deciding it was better not to finish his sentence as Jessica gave him a skeptical look. He was going to ask if she was sure it was a good idea to throw herself at the door again, but figured the good idea was to actually not even think about it. He was getting the impression Jessica was a lot tougher than she looked, both physically and mentally. Her quick wit about his Twilight remark earlier had actually impressed him.
“Yes, I’m sure.” Jessica said, and quickly emphasized her point by pulling up on the door handle, leaning back and throwing her shoulder against the door, which popped open quite easily. She reached out and closed the door, then opened it again and shut it just to make sure before she shimmied across the seat to the opposite door which opened just as easily.
“Alright, so what’s the plan for the back door?” Joseph asked, reaching down to find the lighter in Jessica’s bag.
“Well, actually, I’m just going to try to open it from the outside using the handle. If that doesn’t work, then I’ll try the lighter and kick boxing method and see what happens.” She opened the door closest to her again and hopped out, quickly dropping out of sight as she shut it behind her. Joseph watched through the back window as she reappeared in his line of vision, and took notice of the fact that despite his initial impression of her from earlier today, she really could take care of herself. He hadn’t done much in the way of helping clear the snow off of the car or opening the rest of the doors, that had all been her. His train of thought was abruptly stopped at a burst of cold air that hit him as Jessica managed to wrench open the back hatch of the Jeep. Slamming it shut again, she bounded around the car and hopped up into the driver’s seat.
“Alright. Time to go. I don’t want to be stuck out here any longer than we need to, and my hands are freezing now.” She reached down to her side to grab the seatbelt and buckle it, and when she looked up and out the windshield she saw that it had started snowing heavily again.
“Wonderful. I can’t get a break today,” she sighed, sarcasm dripping from every syllable as she spoke. She waited until they were both buckled in, adjusted the gear shift into reverse and slowly backed out of the almost non-existent parking spot her car had inhabited for the last few hours. Easing around the row of trees that separated the parking lot from the main road she pulled up to the stop sign at the exit of the parking lot and waited for what looked like a run down Escort to make its way past the driveway.
“Oh man. I’d really hate to be them,” Joseph said as he watched the car carefully amble down the road in the wake of a large truck that had passed a few seconds before.
“Yeah, well be thankful we’re not. Summer’s never failed me in a storm before, and I have faith she won’t do it now either.” She glanced both ways again, not wanting to pull out in front of anyone in these conditions. She took her foot off of the brake and the car eased forward a bit before stopping.
“Looks like you spoke too soon.”
“Oh no. I didn’t. Hold on, just in case.” Jessica put her foot back on the brake and geared into her four wheel drive, checked the road again, and floored the gas pedal. The Jeep lurched forward into the road and Jessica expertly steered it into the general location of where she assumed the lane was. Judging by the way the tire tracks in the road swerved, no one was really sure where the road ended and the sidewalk began. She did her best to follow the general idea of where she should keep the car aimed, which really wasn’t too hard considering she’d made this same drive nearly every day since she had moved to Vermont. Once she was comfortable with where the car was going she jabbed at the power button on the radio and quickly flicked the volume knob down. She couldn’t remember what she had been listening to when she arrived at Rob’s place, and knowing her luck it would be something slightly embarrassing. To her somewhat relief, the all too familiar soothing voice of her favorite male vocalist started to softly fill the car, and she couldn’t help but smile when the song that was playing registered in her ears. It wasn’t what most people would classify as a happy song, but the beautifully haunting melody and acoustic guitar and piano accompaniment always relaxed her and made her feel a bit better regardless of the situation she was in. She reached forward again and flicked the volume knob back up to it’s original setting.
“And every time I have to wake
I come to terms with my actual fate
That the only thing lying next to me
Is a couple books and a pile of CDs.
I open my eyes and begin to return from
Either the past or the future that could have been
Even though it’s been almost a year now
It’s like you’ve left me all over again.”
“Wow. That’s almost depressing,” Joseph observed out loud. “I like it, but it’s depressing.”
“It’s wonderful, is what it is. All of his music is like that, even the more upbeat songs. I don’t think I’ve ever heard him sing something that couldn’t be interpreted as a love song, no matter what the content is. Here, listen to this.” She punched the next track button a few times to get to the song she was looking for.
“Salinger says that fame is only ego,
And if you want to be important then you never really will.
And F. Scott says that unrequited love will
Tear you up from the inside ‘til there’s close to nothing left.
So don’t wait and God don’t pine,
‘Cause in the end it’s just a distant line.
Shakespeare says that we’ve only got two options,
It’s either everyone gets married or everybody dies.
And God says that we need to love our neighbors
Even when they try to hurt us we just turn the other cheek.
So don’t try to make things square
‘Cause being good ain’t about being fair.
And I say that I think you’re really pretty
And I like in the June time when you wear that summer dress
And I say that I wish that I could dance
Cheek to cheek and heart to heart with you in the middle of your room
Because darlin’ I love you so
Even though I let you go
And I wish you would ask me one more time
So I could tell you that I want you for my own.”
They sat in silence for a moment as the song faded out, and Jessica did her best to focus on the road ahead of her.
“I really feel like that should have been a happy song. But it’s not, is it?” Joseph asked, breaking the comfortable silence. That was the second time today they had fallen into that feeling, which was quite strange for Jessica. Her life usually consisted of awkward silences and even more awkward encounters with strangers.
“Not entirely. I mean, depending on how you look at it, it really could be either. It’s definitely a love song, no doubt about that. You could listen to it as someone who’s remembering the past and wishing they could have a second chance to prove something they couldn’t manage the first time around. Or, you could listen to it as someone who is completely happy with their relationship but is missing their partner because of distance or something like that,” she explained. She took a split second chance to take her eyes off the road and glanced over to see what kind of expression Joseph had on his face. She was relieved to see he was actually thinking about what she had said, or at least it looked like he was. She was pretty good at reading facial expressions and body language and she hoped she was right.
“Here, try this one. It’s not as much thinking,” she said and punched the button to switch tracks again.
“If I wrote a song,
It would be a song to tell you that I love you.
And If I wrote a play,
It would be a comedy so I could marry you.
If I wrote a movie I would end it with a kiss,
The camera spinning three sixty degrees around our lips and
It would be a happy ending.
There’s a brand new ribbon that I bought,
Black as sin with ink.
And these pages that I’ve loaded in,
They are white and they are blank.
So I start to play a record and
I dim down all the lights.
And I sit down at my typewriter,
But I don’t know what to write.
If I wrote a song,
It would be a song to tell you that I love you.
And If I wrote a play,
It would be a comedy so I could marry you.
If I wrote a movie I would end it with a kiss,
The camera spinning three sixty degrees around our lips and
It would be a happy ending.
So I start to write short stories,
Just a page or two for each.
And the plots all start the same,
The boy and girl they meet.
And the middles they are also all the same,
The kids they fall in love.
And I never write the endings.
They kids just fall in love.
When I write a song,
It’s going to be a song to tell you that I love you.
And when I write a play,
It’s going to be a comedy so I can marry you.
When I write a movie I will end it with a kiss,
The camera spinning three sixty degrees around our lips and
It will be a happy ending.”
“How’s that? No thinking about it, it’s a straight forward love song,” she said as she turned the volume down a bit, and glanced back over at Joseph to see what he was thinking.
“Yeah, I guess so. It’s a bit twangy for my liking though,” he said with a wide grin as he looked back at her. Jessica quickly averted her eyes back to the road in order to avoid looking directly into his eyes. She was doing okay for now, and didn’t want to risk another mental battle of emotional onslaught. Joseph had started to pick up on the little quirks in her behavior today and because he didn’t know any better he took a chance and called her out on it.
“Okay, I don’t mean to be offensive about this, but why won’t you look at me directly when I’m talking? You keep looking away, and I can’t figure out why,” he said, keeping his eyes locked on the side of her face as she watched the road in front of her. She should have known it was coming at some point. He wasn’t stupid, but she wished he wasn’t also blunt on top of it. Before she could help it, there was a fast mental battle raging in her mind. Well, you could just tell him. But that would bring up a lot of awkward questions. Although you seem to have covered most of the awkward bases today, so it shouldn’t be that bad. But then that would mean trying to talk about Dan while driving in 3 feet of continuous snow. You can’t even sit still and think about him right now so that’s probably a bad idea anyway. You could always make up something. Or tell him half the truth. That’s always an option. That way you’re not lying, and there aren’t any gory details to get into.
“Jessica?” Joseph interrupted her train of thought. “D’you want to talk about anything? I know it’s a bit awkward since I’m basically still a complete stranger, but I’m willing to listen if you want to get anything out.”
“Thanks Dr. Phil, but it’s fine.” Jessica’s natural reaction to things like this was to be sarcastic and cynical. She cringed at her response, and quickly apologized. “Sorry. I didn’t mean it like that,” she sighed.
“It’s okay. If it’s really that big of a deal, don’t worry about it. I was just curious. I’d rather not die on the way to where ever we’re going, so if you don’t want to talk about it then don’t.
“Sorry. Honestly, it’s going to sound a bit random and odd, but basically you remind me a lot of someone I used to be really close with and it keeps freaking me out a bit. There’s nothing you can do about it, so don’t even worry about it,” she explained, being careful to not really disclose any real information. She knew she could probably really trust Joseph, there was just something about him that she felt comfortable with, but delving into anything involving Dan was not a good idea right now. If it came down to it, she might open up about it later. Her family didn’t even know about everything though, so no matter how comfortable she was with Joseph she doubted it would come out any time soon.
“I feel like I should be quoting a song or something here about reminding you of someone, but I can’t even figure it out right now,” he laughed, which made her smile.
“I can think of a few but I’ll let you figure them out,” she said quietly. The combination of the few songs they had listened to along with Joseph’s slight confrontation left her feeling a bit strange, but she tried to brush it off. Concentrating on getting both of them to her house safely and in a decent amount of time required more effort than she really wanted to put out right now.
“Okay, we’re about to approach the point in the day where you’re probably going to label me as a complete nerd if you haven’t already, but I need you to do me a favor,” she said, being careful not to take her eyes off of the road. They had been driving straight on Main Street toward the outer edge of their tiny town, and were about to turn onto a dirt and gravel road that would take them through the corner of the national park that Jessica lived on the other side of. The first curve could be dangerous on a dry day if you weren’t paying close attention and she had seen her fair share of people roll into the ditch on the other side of the road because they weren’t paying enough attention to what they were doing.
“I’m somewhat scared. But okay. What’s up?”
“My iPod is in my bag, along with the auxiliary cable that connects it to the stereo. Can you get those for me? They should be in the top pocket.”
“Uh, sure. Hold on a second.” Joseph turned around in his seat and tried to reach for Jessica’s bag, but ended up losing his balance and flopping rather ungracefully into the back seat instead.
“Well that was impressive. Are you okay?” she asked as she eased the car to a stop at the light before the aforementioned curve into the forest. She switched her left turn signal on and twisted her head back to see if Joseph needed help with anything. He had managed to right himself and was sitting on the seat now with her bag between his feet.
“Yeah, I’m fine. Not everyone has the same mad skills you do to clamber around this monstrosity in a graceful way.” “You’re just full of it today, aren’t you? I try to be helpful and this is what I get. Thanks,” she shot him a look that was supposed to be a bit intimidating, but ended up just laughing instead.
“Yeah well I do what I can. Here, is this what you wanted?” he asked as she turned around to face the front of the car again.
“If it’s a black iPod touch and a black auxiliary cable with a piece of green tape toward one of the connectors, then yes. But hold onto it for a second, unless you want to die while I try this curve.”
“Not dying today, thanks. I’ll wait.” He sat still in the back seat as she carefully eased off the brake and the car started to roll forward. The road sloped downward slightly, so gravity played a role in getting the car to move this time. There was no need to gun the engine thankfully, which she knew from previous experience would have propelled them directly into the line of trees to their right as she turned. The car was silent as they slowly made the complete turn onto the park road and Joseph could tell Jessica was concentrating far too much on making sure they didn’t roll the car as they made it into the lane she was aiming for. She could feel the tires sliding a bit with the lack of traction on the road even with four wheel drive enabled, and it made her nervous. The first time she ever made this turn during the winter she ended up wedged in the ditch between two trees. Now, any time the weather was even remotely less than ideal she was a bit uneasy taking this route home. Usually she would avoid it, but going around the edge of the park instead of through it added another twenty minutes to her route and in this weather would probably end up being twice that. She slowly guided the car along the curves of the road, paying close attention to where the snow drifts dropped off on either side of the road. No one had driven on this road since the storm had started, it was easy to tell because there were no other tire tracks to follow, and that unnerved her a bit. She had enough practice at this road that she probably could have driven it in her sleep and made it home safely, but she wasn’t a fan of almost blindly navigating through a mini ravine. She released the breath she didn’t realize she had been holding as she straightened the car out around the last part of the curve. Relaxing her grip on the steering wheel, she realized how nervous she had actually been.
“Okay. So about that iPod,” she said, extending her hand back over her shoulder as she kept her eyes forward on the road. She knew from here on out it was a fairly straight path to get out of this corner of the park but she didn’t want to take any chances.
“Oh no way,” Joseph said. “You may be an expert at driving this tank through anything, but I do not want to die before we get to your house. I’ll hook it up for you, and you can tell me what to put on.” He reached out and pushed her hand back toward the steering wheel, and leaned over the console in between the front two seats to find the input plug for the auxiliary cable. Jessica laughed to herself as he searched the dashboard for the tiny hole. She didn’t bother to tell him it wasn’t labeled, and that most people missed it the first seven or so times they looked for it. Letting him struggle for a few moments, she gave in and pointed to the almost invisible black spot by the CD slot.
“That looks like a screw. Does everyone do that, or am I the only dumb one who missed it?” he asked, looking up at her.
“No, hardly anyone finds it the first five times they try to find it. I don’t know why, I’ve never had a problem with it,” she shrugged.
As Joseph reached forward to plug the cable into the dashboard, Jessica caught a slight hint of movement out of the corner of her eye. She glanced over at the tree line, but couldn’t see anything. Figuring it was probably a branch moving with the wind or under the weight of snow she just brushed it off and didn’t give it a second thought and moved her eyes back to the road in front of her.
“Okay, so what do you -” he was cut off by a shriek of surprise from Jessica and the sound of grinding brakes as a massive blur of brown streaked across the road directly in front of the car.
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