The Space Between Us by Megan Hart Page B

the way he flipped me off as I left the lot, I figured he wasn’t that impressed.
    At the grocery store I pushed my cart through the aisles and tried to remember what was on the list I’d left on the kitchen table at home. I wasn’t paying close attention to where I was going, which was why I nearly ran over a little kid who was spinning out of control in the candy section.
    I recognized a tantrum in progress and meant to steer my cart past him, but stopped when I saw his mother. “Mandy?”
    She turned. “Oh, my God! Tesla? Wow. Long time, huh?”
    Mandy had been one of my best friends in Lancaster before my parents dropped their mutual basket and my life had spun into something else. I hadn’t seen or heard from her in years. To find her here now, with a child, was surprising—but good, I discovered, when she clung to me in a hug that left her kid staring with goggle eyes.
    “You look fantastic!” She beamed, taking me in. “You haven’t changed at all. Wow.”
    “You have.” I grinned, pointing at the boy now clinging to her leg. “Yours?”
    She lifted him, pride all over her face. “Yep. This is Tyler. Say hi.”
    Tyler buried his face in his mom’s neck. I wasn’t offended. “So…you live around here?”
    “Yep. My husband and I moved here a few months ago. He’s working for the state. And I stay home with the kiddo here. How about you?”
    “I work at Morningstar Mocha. You probably don’t know it.”
    “Sure I do! Sure. I’ll have to stop in sometime. Are you still living with…?” She let the question trail off.
    “Vic? Yeah. And his wife, Elaine. Their two kids. Cap moved out, though.”
    “Oh, Cap.” Mandy laughed. “How’s Cappy doing?”
    “He’s doing great. Really great.” It was hard to believe that once we’d spent almost every day blabbering each others’ ears off, and now we were reduced to chitchat in front of a display of candy bars. “Listen, stop in to the Mocha. Really. It would be great to catch up with you.”
    “I’ll do that,” she said, even as I think we both knew she probably wouldn’t.
    Time had passed. Life had changed. She had a husband and a kid, and I was still single. Stuff like that gets between people, even if the years hadn’t.
    “I have to run. This one’s about to melt down. You take care, Tesla. So good to see you.”
    “You, too.” I watched her go.
    I’d never wanted what Cap and I had always called “the front door,” from that old Adam Ant song “A Place in the Country.” The front door was marriage, kids, a mortgage, a dog. But there was envy again, that funny thing. It can creep up on you without warning, hit you over the head with a snow shovel. Envy can taste like the candy you buy because you suddenly crave something sweet.

Chapter 7
    H ere’s a story I never told Meredith.
    At the end of my junior year of high school and Cap’s eighth grade, our father walked in on our mother fucking one of her colleagues from the college where they both worked. Apparently, even in an open marriage you can still be cheating if your partner doesn’t know what you’ve been up to, because my dad promptly packed up his stuff and left without telling any of us where he’d gone. With no more Compound to retreat to in the summer, my mom decided to take a cross-country camping trip with her new lover in an ancient Volkswagen Rabbit.
    While Cap and I had no problems with her new boyfriend, there was no way we were going to subject ourselves to traveling across the United States in the back of a Rabbit. My mom, who could certainly have been called a free spirit or even flighty, was nevertheless the more responsible of our parents and wasn’t about to leave us living alone even though at seventeen and fourteen we were capable of taking care of ourselves. She insisted we go with them. We insisted we didn’t want to. So I did what any red-blooded teenage kid would do when faced with what promised to be a certain kind of hell.
    I ran away.
    I