by Nicola Yoon
Hope flashes in the small, stubborn place in my heart, the part that used to read too many romance novels. Maybe this means he’s reconsidering. Maybe this means there’s hope for him and Mom. But the feeling only lasts for a second. I know that’s not what he means.
“Why?” I ask.
“To give you more time to get used to the idea. I want you to be there. It’s important to me.”
The earnestness on his face is hard to look at. I want to say yes. No. I want to want to say yes. But I can’t pretend to be happy for him and Shirley.
Still, it’s nice that he wants me to come.
I shake my head. “Dad, don’t,” I say. “Don’t postpone for me.”
I can see he wants to force the issue, to pull dad rank, but he doesn’t.
“Okay,” he says. “Promise me you’ll think about it.”
It’s not lost on me that both he and Mom have asked me to make this promise.
Before I can answer him, someone calls out to me. “Hey, Evie.”
It’s X. My heart does this weird interpretive dance thing in my chest. His dreads are down and his eyes are bright black and focused on me. His guitar is strapped across his back.
Dad steps closer, like he might need to protect me from X’s good looks.
“Hey, X,” I say, and do a little wave.
Dad clears his throat.
Right. Introductions. “Dad,” I say, “this is X. X, this is my dad.”
Dad guffaws. “Your name is X? Like the unknown variable x?”
“Your daughter already let me have it about my name, Mr. Thomas,” X says, holding out his hand for a shake.
“I should hope so,” says Dad. He points at X’s hair. “Are those dreads religious or just fashionable?”
“Purely for fashion, Mr. T.”
“Go the distance with my name, son. It’s Mr. Thomas,” Dad says. “What about the guitar? That only for fashion too?”
X laughs. “No sir, Mr. Thomas. The guitar is real.”
Dad proceeds to quiz X on his past and future history. X conveniently leaves out the dropping-out-of-high-school part.
I guess Dad is satisfied with X’s answers, because eventually he says: “Am I okay to leave you two alone together?”
“Yes, of course,” I say.
Dad turns to me. “One more joke before I go,” he says.
“All right,” I say, already shaking my head in anticipation of how awful it will be.
“Have you heard the one about the quesadilla?” he asks.
I play along. “Why, no, I haven’t heard it.”
He waves me off dramatically. “Never mind, it’s too cheesy.”
X laughs with his fist over his mouth. “Good one, Mr. Thomas.”
Pleased as punch is an expression Dad uses often. Right now he is. “I like you, despite the ridiculous name,” he says to X.
“Thanks, Mr. T,” X says. Then, “I’m just messing with you, sir,” to Dad’s glare.
“Please think about what I said about the wedding,” Dad says to me.
“Okay,” I say, and I really mean it. Probably tomorrow I’ll be angry again, but right now my tummy is full of delicious food and my face is still smiling at his bad jokes and he feels just like he used to feel, like my very first best friend forever. He pulls me in for a hug and squeezes me tight and I squeeze him right back, wishing in that same small stubborn place that this feeling would last forever.
CHAPTER 33
The Time We Get
X AND I stand on the sidewalk and watch Dad drive away. Once his car disappears around a bend, I turn to X.
“Aren’t you guys supposed to be rehearsing tonight?” I ask.
“We did, but we stopped early.” He tugs on his guitar strap. There’s something sad in his voice that makes me look at him more closely, but he doesn’t say anything else about why they stopped. “We finished up the music for ‘Black Box.’ Thought I’d come by and surprise you with it. That okay?”
I nod. I know we’re supposed to be taking it slow, but it’s more than okay with me that he spontaneously showed up at my door.
Once he’s inside, I offer him some water, which he drinks down in one gulp. I give him another, and he gulps that one too. The third one he just sips. We leave the kitchen and hover in the area between the dining and living rooms. He unstraps his guitar and leans it against the wall next to the sliding glass doors.
“So you and your dad went out?”
I explain to him about our Taco Night tradition, and how Dad surprised me.
“How was it?” he asks.
“It was…nice, actually,” I say.
“Kind of pissed you had a good time, right?”
“How’d you know that?”
“For a while after Clay died, I used to get mad at myself for having fun playing music without him.”
“When did you stop?”
“Haven’t yet,” he says.
I ask him if he wants a tour of the apartment, before realizing that a tour will include my room. Does showing him my bedroom count as taking it slow? It does not.
He follows me upstairs. I point out our lone bathroom and both Mom’s and Danica’s rooms.
“When do I get to meet your sister?” he asks.
“She has a boyfriend,” I blurt out, answering a question he didn’t ask. Why did I do that?
He watches me for a second. “And I can’t meet her because he keeps her locked up in a fairy-tale tower?” The small smile at the corner of his lips says he’s teasing me.
“No, I just mean she’s out tonight. With her boyfriend. So you can’t meet her.”
He nods, but his smile stays where it is. “Your mom?”
“Also on a date. And this is my room,” I say when we get to the end of the hallway. The door is closed. I stop a couple of feet away and stare at it.
He looks back and forth between the door and me. “You going to open it with your mind, or…?”
“What? No. Telekinesis isn’t my superpower. I was just thinking about something else.”
“Okay,” he says. We go back to door-staring.
“Lemme just check there’s nothing weird in there,” I say. I open the door just enough to squeeze my body through and then close it in his face.
By “nothing weird,” I mean no errant underwear or anything else embarrassing. I shove two bras into my chest of drawers.
I make my bed.
Finally, I open the door. “Come on in,” I say, trying for blasé, but it’s hard to be blasé when you’ve just been hiding your underwear.
He stops inside the threshold and does a slow perusal of my room. He starts on the left with my closet, travels past that to my desk under the window, then to my bookshelf and chest of drawers before winding up on my bed.
I feel (metaphorically) naked.
He heads for my bookshelf. I can’t blame him. It’s what I would do too. He scans my books, and I try to guess what he’s learning about me.
“You label your shelves,” he says, turning to look at me.
“Is that good or bad?”
“Not sure yet,” he says with a laugh. “What happened to all these books, though?” he asks, waving his hand over the Contemporary Romance section.
“Just not into them anymore.”
He nods like he understands, because he does understand. He knows what it’s like to have a “before” and “after” period in your life. There’s a pre-divorce Evie and a post-divorce Evie. They look the same but aren’t.
He touches the empty shelf. “Did you have a favorite?”
I don’t even have to think about it. “Cupcakes and Kisses,” I say. The scene with the two chefs making out while making dessert flashes in my head. I decide it’s time to leave my bedroom. X is starting to
look edible.
“Okay, well, that’s my room,” I say. “There’s nothing else to see here. Why don’t we go back downstairs now?” That sounded much more casual in my head.
“Yes, indeed, shall we?” he says, mock-formal, totally making fun of me.
We go downstairs and he grabs his guitar before we head out to the patio.
It’s late, almost nine. Lights are on in most of the other apartments. Everyone’s patios are splashed with little pools of orange-yellow light. Someone, probably Mrs. Chabra, is cooking. The night air smells delicious, like turmeric and onions.
We both sit, me in the armchair and him across from me on the sofa. He gives me a small smile and stares off into the courtyard.
Something’s definitely bothering him. “Are you okay?” I ask.
He covers his eyes with his hands. “It’s the anniversary of when Clay…I mean, it was a year ago today. I didn’t think it would be so hard. Tonight at practice we were all trying to act like everything was normal.” He stares up at the sky for a few seconds.
“Want to talk about it?” I say after a little while.
At first, I’m not sure he’s going to answer. He strums his guitar, changes chords a couple of times and strums some more.
“The thing that gets me is how stupid it was. He was crossing the street. Some guy was driving and sending a text. It’s just so fucking preventable. It’s the law. Don’t text and drive.”
He strums just once, loud and angry. “And it wasn’t a kid. Not one of us irresponsible teenagers. It was a fucking adult. Who was supposed to know better. Isn’t that the one good thing about being a grown-up? You know better?” He scoffs. “They don’t know shit. They’re just better at pretending.”
He strums again, but quieter this time. “We had a show. End-of-summer concert series at Barrington Park. He was late, but he was always late, so I didn’t know—” He shakes his head, like he did something wrong by not knowing. “His sister called. She’s the one who told us what happened. By the time me and Jamal and Kevin got there, he was already gone. He died in the street.”
He leans forward, hunches over the guitar so it looks like he’s cradling it. His locs waterfall his face, so I can’t see if he’s crying or not. I don’t know what to do or what to say to help him, but I have to help him.
I stand up and take the guitar from his hands and put it off to the side.
Without it, he slumps over even farther and covers his face with his hands. I sit down next to him and put my arm around his shoulder. He leans into me and I wrap my other arm around him.
I don’t tell him everything is all right, because it’s not. His best friend died a stupid, completely avoidable death, and it sucks, and it doesn’t make sense, and everything isn’t all right.
I don’t know how much time passes, but after a while, he straightens up. I let him go. He wipes his eyes with the heels of his hands and gives a smile somewhere between embarrassment and gratitude.
“I’ll get you some water,” I say, not because I think he needs more to drink, but to give him time to pull himself together. It’s what I’d want.
“Nah, I’m good,” he says.
“I’m trying to give you a minute alone,” I tell him.
His eyes are damp and red around the rims. “I get what you’re doing, Evie,” he says. “And I appreciate it, but I’d like it if you stayed with me. If that’s okay.”
I don’t know how he manages to let himself be so vulnerable. I sit back down next to him, and we watch the sky get darker together.
I ask him to tell me about Clay and he does. They met in a music store when they were kids. Both of them were just starting guitar lessons, and their dads had taken them to the store to get sheet music.
“He was in the guitar section holding a bass that was about fifteen sizes too big for him. We were friends as soon as I sat down next to him.”
He looks at me. “He would’ve liked you. Would’ve liked how snarky you are.”
“I’ve never been snarky a day in my life.”
He laughs. “Says the snarky girl snarkily.”
Across the way, Mrs. Chabra starts playing music. The song starts off slow but gets faster almost immediately.
He taps his feet to the rhythm. “You ever dance to Bollywood music?” he asks.
I shake my head.
“One of my buddies back home is Indian American. Man, his parents know how to throw a party. The music is loud and the dancing is wild.” He’s grinning now, and I’ve never been happier for Mrs. Chabra’s music. “None of this closed-position ballroom stuff,” he says.
“Show me,” I say.
He springs up and suddenly he’s all movement—neck popping, wrists twisting, hips circling. He even does some knee slapping. He looks like an enthusiastically malfunctioning robot.
I’m sure he’s not doing any Indian dance any actual justice, but it’s so nice to see him smiling instead of crying that I forgive him.
I join him, dancing the moves I’ve “learned” from the handful of Bollywood movies I’ve seen. Pretty soon we’re trying to one-up each other with more and more elaborate neck and wrist action. Somehow my dance morphs into the Robot. He stops dancing to laugh at me and I (robotically) flip him off. He laughs even more, and then he’s looking at me the same way he did on the beach right before we kissed. His hands are on my waist and my palms are flat against his chest.
A light flashes in my periphery. I know I should pay attention to it, but all my concentration is on precisely how close X’s lips are to mine.
X is the one that stops us. “I think someone’s home,” he says.
I step back just in time for Mom to turn the corner into the living room.
She slides the patio door open. “What exactly is happening out here?” she asks.
We aren’t doing any of the things parents worry about—sex, drugs, experimental body piercings—but I still feel caught.
Mom scrutinizes my state of dress. Once she’s satisfied I’m wearing all my clothes, and in the way they’re supposed to be worn, she downgrades her face from scowl to frown. “Who’s this?” she asks.
“This is X,” I say.
“Nice to meet you, Ms. Thomas.”
“Oh yes. You’re the dancing boy. The grandson,” she says. “How’s the practicing coming along?”
“Good, good. Our instructor hasn’t killed us yet,” X says.
“Funnily enough, I didn’t realize I was in danger of losing my firstborn,” Mom says, deadpan.
X laughs. “Ballroom is deadlier than most people realize, Ms. Thomas.”
Mom tilts her head to the side, considering. “You’re funny,” she says. “Well, it’s nice to meet you. Hopefully both you and my daughter will survive the dancing.”
She’s halfway inside when it occurs to me why she’s in such a good mood. “Mom, how was your date?”
“It was…really good,” she says with a happy little smile. “We’re seeing each other again next weekend. We’re going hiking.”
“But you hate nature,” I remind her. “And you don’t hike.”
“I do now,” she says back with another smile. “Your curfew is in five minutes.”
X turns to me once the sliding glass door is all the way closed. “Man, that was close,” he says. “Can’t have your mom’s first impression of me be bad. I need for her to like me.”
“She likes you,” I say, so earnestly I’m sure he knows I’m talking about myself. “My dad likes you too.”
“That’s good,” he says.
We stare at each other for another few seconds. If only Mom had come home a minute later.
“Well, I guess I should get going,” he says. He picks up his guitar and straps it across his back. “I didn’t get to play the song for you.”
“Next time,�
� I say. I walk him back through the apartment and out the front door.
“Think your friends would be up for a bonfire tomorrow night?” he asks.
I almost agree before I remember the state of things with Sophie and Cassidy.
“That’s not such a good idea,” I say.
He rubs the back of his neck. “Sorry, I know you said you wanted to go slow.”
“No, no, it’s not that,” I say, rushing to reassure him. I tell him what happened with Sophie and Cassidy.
When I get to the end, he tilts his head at me, confused. “Wait. You broke up with them because they started dating each other?”
“Not because they started. Because they’ll eventually stop dating. They’re going to break each other’s hearts. It’s too painful to watch.”
“So you’re not friends with them?”
“We’re friends. We just don’t hang out anymore.” I know how nonsensical this sounds. I try for a smile to lighten the mood and move us on from here, but it doesn’t work.
“Evie, you ditched the friends you’ve had since middle school.”
I let out a frustrated sigh. “I can’t explain.”
“Because it doesn’t make sense. Even if your guess is right and they break up and screw everything up, look at all the time you’re missing with them right now.” He turns and stares down the street like there’s something out there he’s been hoping to see. “People don’t come back, Evie. The time we get is the time we get.” His voice is urgent, like he really needs me to understand the thing he’s trying to tell me. He’d give anything to have another day with Clay.
I take a step down and wrap my arms around his waist. It takes him a few seconds before he puts his arms around me too.
“I’ll think about what you said,” I say.
“Was this our first argument?” he asks.
“I think so.”
“Wasn’t too bad,” he says, grinning down at me.
I smile back up at him. “We can try harder next time.”
CHAPTER 34
I Got You, Babe
I WAKE UP knowing what I have to do. It’s Sunday, which means it’s Surf City Waffle brunch day. When I text Martin to tell him I’m going to meet them there, he says to go to Cassidy’s house instead. Sophie didn’t want to go to SCW if we weren’t all going to be together. I get on my bike and try not to think about all the togethers we’re going to miss in the future. X’s words from last night come back to me. The time we get is the time we get.