My Heart Skips a Beat (completed)

Chapter 15: A Forming Secret

On January 5, Jonathan and I returned to Vernon and Foxfield Academies. It was a new year: 1983. Grace and I’s favorite book, The Outsiders, was going to come out as a movie in theaters three weeks and it before spring break and the film was starring her celebrity crush, Matt Dillon. I had to talk her out of hanging posters of him from magazines on her walls at Foxfield. Something told me that Ashley wouldn’t have been too amused by the new décor.

Skip called me every day just to check in with me. He asked about Christmas in the Ogner home and even called me one minute before midnight on New Year’s Eve. He was such a dream boyfriend. He was kind, polite, loving, and he would jump in front of a train for anyone he cared about. I didn’t even want to think about how deep that well of his truly went.

Jonathan was right about what he told me about his and Ellen’s affair; I felt like I could comfortably keep it a secret from Skip. I knew I wouldn’t tell. Jonathan would rather die than tell Skip, and hopefully, Ellen would just stay away from Jonathan and just let the entire event become a thing of the past. Hopefully.

Christmas was absolute chaos at home. The worst part was housing every one of our relatives under one roof. Uncle Milt and Aunt Beth were happy to stay in a motel a mile away from our house, and they also offered to house anyone who didn’t have a place to stay. Sally and Kate, Jonathan and I’s thirteen year old twin cousins, slept on air mattresses in my bedroom. Sally and Kate were the daughters of Uncle Milt and Aunt Beth. They weren’t hard to keep in my room. I loved them dearly and I regarded them as the younger sisters I never had, but after four nights of female twins staying in your room, you were pretty thankful that they moved out the day before New Year’s.

Grandpa Harry and Grandma Lee were forced into the guest bedroom with four of the cousins on the floor beside their bed. Mom and Dad had to squeeze Jonathan in their room so cousin Carol, the older sister I never had, could stay with her fiancée, Kyle.

“But what if they do it in my bed?” Jonathan hissed to me when he found out about the living arrangements for the week and that two soon-to-be newlyweds were sharing his bed.

“They won’t. Trust me. Carol wouldn’t do that to you!”

“Fine,” he grumbled.

Grace’s family had also come over to celebrate New Year’s Eve with us. She spent the night at our house and we talked the entire night away about Skip and Ross. Grace had developed a little crush on him at some point.

Ashley spent the Christmas season and New Year’s in New York City. She claimed that she had some cousins about our age up there, but Ashley didn’t seem like the type that vacationed in a big city. It was a shock to me that she even traveled through the city of Chicago just to get to Foxfield.

“Claire. Claire. Claire. Claire. Wake up. Wake up. Wake up. Claire, wake up,” said Grace like a robot. She shook my shoulders back and forth.

“What?” I asked groggily. The first day of classes in the new year was over, and I wanted to get a little extra sleep time after dinner.

“Ashley said that Roger said that Skip said for the three of us to go up and meet in the Sky Hall lounge. Roscoe apparently has something important to say to us all about something that happened today,” she explained. “It must be pretty serious. He likes to fly below the radar.”