OOM: Arrangements
Hannah looks around the arts and crafts room. It's somehow just as messy now, after the kids have left for the day, as it was when they were still here, though it's a much quieter mess. She's sorting crayons and feathers and bits of paper back into their appropriate bins (and wondering how to get glue stick out of her hair), when Hilary comes in.
Hilary sinks onto a carpet square up against the wall with a melodramatic sigh. "I swear they clone themselves as the day goes on," she says. Hannah just shakes her head and goes on sorting, though now with a very exaggerated martyr air, until Hilary gets up to help.
"Oh, I think someone has a crush on you," Hilary says.
"Bradley?" asks Hannah, unconcerned. Bradley is ten. "I told him he was very sweet but that I thought I was a little tall for him."
A middle schooler with a crush is really not anything Hannah's going to worry about. It was more of a problem when Hilary's older brother Heath made a very tentative gambit at flirting with her, just after she got here. Hannah shot that down immediately, in the firm but still polite manner required by the fact that she's staying in his parents' house this summer.
"So," says Hilary, sitting on top of one of the tables, "you having a good time this summer?"
Hannah hesitates. She is. She likes Hilary's family, the constant state of cheerful chaos that is a family of six children, four of whom (Harmony, Heath and his twin sister Heather, and Hilary) are still living at home. (Helena and Harrison have both married and moved out, but neither has left town, and both drop by a lot.) She'd been worried about it at first, but Hilary's mother (Harriet) had just laughed and told her she'd fit right in, clear down to the initial.
And Hilary is a fun person to be around, always doing something -- and there's a surprising lot to do. (Hilary laughed when Hannah said maybe they could just relax one evening, and pointed out that she had to make up for all those months of no where to go and lights out at school.)
So the problem isn't that Hannah's not having a good time.
It's that she feels a little guilty about doing so.
A lot guilty, even.
It's been three months, for Hannah, since she spoke to Merriman Lyon at the end of the universe. There's been no news since the first.
She can never decide if there should be an "only" in front of the "three months."
"Hannah?" asks Hilary.
"Yeah," says Hannah. "I am."
Emily would have pressed at this point, but Hilary just looks at her like she's making a decision, and then starts making arrangements for the evening. DVDs and board games and milkshakes.
And Hannah smiles and nods and pushes the guilt to the back of her brain.
Again.