by Joy Preble
And then I think this: I don’t care why we’re out here. There are worse places to be than driving around in the night, a neon canopy glittering over our heads.
We cross Paradise again, the glitz behind us in the rearview. Sands Avenue becomes East Twain, not the same thing at all.
Paris touches my hand. “What’s that?” She points to a long, thin scratch on the underside of my wrist, where I’d nicked myself on the sharp edge of my nightstand the other day.
“Nothing,” I say, pulling my wrist away.
“You need a Band-Aid?” Paris pulls a Hello Kitty Band-Aid—she has this thing for goofy Band-Aids—out of the cup holder. “Here.”
“Fine,” I say. “It’s a scratch. Here, look. I’m taking the Band-Aid, okay. Love that Hello Kitty.” I snatch it from her hand, but I don’t unwrap it.
My sister slams the brakes, and we both jolt forward, seat belts tightening. “You know I’d do anything for you,” she says. “Well, maybe not work at that yogurt place. Because it’s yogurt, you know?”
Over on the sidewalk, a skinny guy in a ball cap and cargo pants lifts his head to the sky and gives the world the finger.
THREE
ELVIS IS GUARDING THE HEARTBREAK HOTEL DINER AS WE CHUG UP. He’s the older, chunkier, gold lamé Elvis—all those fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches and probably the drugs having taken their toll. If you’re going to build a twenty-four-hour diner three miles off the Vegas Strip, in between a Rite Aid Pharmacy and a massage parlor, you’d think you would go for young Elvis.
I knee open the passenger door, putting my weight into it. The Mazda, like Elvis, has seen better days.
It is 2:13 a.m.
“Pie!” Paris shouts into the night. She hurtles out, practically flying, and pulls me from the car. “Get a move on!”
“Pie,” I say, not shouting. We push through the heat toward the Heartbreak, my flip-flops smacking the sticky asphalt, but Paris detours to the Elvis statue. Patting Elvis on the leg for luck is our tradition, but I’m not in the mood. “You see it every day you work here.”
Paris traces her hand down Elvis’s leg, ignoring me. She blows him a kiss, multicolored nails drifting up his leg one last time.
“Ick,” I say, nudging with my elbow, then walk away and eventually she follows.
Inside, we slip into a red leather booth. “I’m back,” my sister announces, stretching her arms wide like she’s about to break into song.
She rolls her eyes at her own cheesiness.
We’d found this place last year, after Tommy bought us the Mazda at some auction and we didn’t have to share our mother’s car anymore. It’s not slick, like the theme restaurants on the Strip. It’s just this diner that’s been here forever and kept adding Elvis memorabilia. Pictures and guitars and fake blue suede shoes in a shadow box on the wall behind the cash register.
Tourists don’t come here much. But one of the hostesses walked out mid-shift in April and Paris applied for the job.
Maureen, who works the graveyard shift, shuffles over and slides glasses of water and straws in front of us. She’s wearing a pink waitress dress with pockets at the hips that make her look wider than she really is. Also: clunky white lace-up shoes and pink ankle socks. A pencil is tucked behind her left ear. Her lipstick is fire-engine red. Except for the waitress dress, none of it is a required uniform. I admire this on general principle.
“Miss me?” Paris asks, smiling toothily.
Maureen clutches her hands to her chest. Her knuckles are big, like a guy’s. “Horribly,” she says, rolling her eyes to the ceiling. “I could barely go on.” She drags the back of one hand across her forehead, then makes a fake crying sound.
“That’s the spirit,” says my sister.
They both laugh even though, honestly, I don’t find it that funny. But Paris adores Maureen. Says she tells it like it is, which is one of those clichés but I know what she means. “She’s a tough one,” Paris informs me. “She’s been through stuff.” My sister has not told me what kind of stuff she means, and I haven’t been inspired to ask.
Now Maureen drops the fake drama and tells my sister, “You’re on dinner shift tomorrow.” She does not ask why we are here at two in the morning. Then again, this is Vegas. Lots of people are lots of places at two in the morning.
She brings us menus and, gesturing to our waters, observes that we look tired and perhaps we should hydrate.
“I broke up with Tobias,” Paris announces happily, scooting her straw from its wrapper with her thumb.
Maureen cocks a thin, penciled-in eyebrow. “Good,” she says, and she eyes both of us—back and forth until something feels twisty in my stomach because unlike Paris, I don’t really know her. But something crashes in the kitchen and she swears under her breath and shambles off.
“What will it be tonight?” Paris asks in her fake formal voice, drawing out the “be” with a flourish of her hand. “Coconut cream? Peanut butter and banana?”
I decide on coconut cream. Paris pisses me off by not choosing, telling me that she’ll eat some of mine. She takes a delicate sip from her water glass. My sister is the effortlessly thin person who can wear cotton sundresses with spaghetti straps and no bra.
I am the more solid type. I do not need the pie.
“So Tobias?” I ask, since she keeps bringing it up. Sometimes my sister has trouble with the truth. Especially when it’s personal. “He didn’t go to prom with you,” I say.
“Because I didn’t go,” she reminds me. “Prom is antiquated.”
But I knew that a vintage seventies dress—sleek, red, sexy—sat in the back of her closet. On the night of her prom, we’d hung out downtown till after three, playing penny slots when no one was checking to see that we were underage, then sharing a Belgian waffle doused with way too much syrup at Du-par’s in the Golden Gate.
I didn’t ask her why she wasn’t at prom, just waited for her to tell me, which she never did. Like when she failed senior English first semester last year because she was staying up making dozens of those gem-and-leather bracelets. A gift shop in the Flamingo had said they’d stock them for her and it was all she could think about. She pulled all-nighters, designing and gluing and then the deal fell through and so did her English grade.
After she confessed what happened, Paris didn’t make another bracelet for almost a month. “I can’t,” she said. “I mean, why? What’s the point?” And what I wanted to say was that it was her passion. That I had nothing I loved as much as she loved art—not even science, which I adored. I played the violin for a year in middle school. In junior high, I played volleyball for a season. But they were not—it turned out—portable passions. We moved and moved and I changed schools and sometimes it was the middle of the year. I was too late for tryouts when we moved here my freshman year.
“Make the damn bracelets,” I finally told her one day, sick and tired of watching her mope. “Enough already.” As much as I hoped I could someday be a doctor, I knew I wasn’t attached to this goal in the same way as my sister was to making pretty things. But I was good at math and biology and chemistry. I dissected frogs and fish and even a fetal pig in biology with no problem. When my counselor sophomore year asked me what I wanted to be, this is what I told her. She nodded sagely and checked it off in my folder.
The idea felt real then, I guess because I’d said it aloud.
After that, things felt better. I joined Mu Alpha Theta and went to math competitions. I made National Honor Society. I was an alternate on the Academic Bowl team and when Zach O’Malley got caught drinking under the bleachers at the football game, I moved up and helped us win the competition in Reno. (Where we snuck vodka into our water bottles in the Holiday Inn.)
Paris pushes from the booth, skips (yes, actually) to the back counter. “Coconut cream,” I hear her call into the kitchen.
My gaze drifts over the booths and pictures and what claims to be an authentic Elvis guitar hanging from the ceiling. Below it, smack in t
he middle of the Heartbreak, elbows on the table, a boy hunches, reading, fingers holding a triangle of club sandwich.
His dark hair is longish—like he forgot to cut it or maybe he’s just dead broke. There’s a lot of that going around.
He angles his feet under the table. He’s wearing khakis and a blue button-down with the sleeves rolled up and worn-looking cowboy boots. My friend, Natalie, would turn up her nose at the boots, but she moved back to New Jersey, so I don’t have to remind her that even though we’re in Vegas, Nevada’s the west and there are cowboys here. Maybe some of them even wear khakis. Natalie was judgmental like that.
Something about the tilt of his chin catches my attention. A strong chin, kind of squarish but in a good way.
Paris strolls back then, sliding the plate between us, the thick slab of pie wiggling, a few tiny shavings of too-brown toasted coconut drifting to the plate.
“Talk to him,” she says, and my pulse jolts when I realize she’s seen me checking out sandwich/book/cute guy. “I dare you.” She leans toward me in the booth. Her voice is suddenly higher pitched. Paris is all about the challenge. Like life in general isn’t good enough without artificially raising the stakes.
Or maybe she just likes to boss me around because she’s older.
“You won’t, though, Leonora.” She uses my full name, fingers drumming an uneven beat on the shiny Formica table.
“Maybe I will,” I lie, folding the paper from the straw over and over, a skinny accordion. I poke a finger at the pie. Pinch up a couple coconut shavings. They taste chewy and stale.
Cute boy nibbles his sandwich, head still bent over the textbook. A lock of that longish brown hair falls over his forehead. He brushes it back, but it falls again, and this time he leaves it.
He looks older than me but not by much—eighteen or nineteen, maybe. I am not an artist like my sister, but there is something about the way the light hits the side of his face and his neck as he leans his chin onto the curve of his hand. Like those Renaissance paintings we saw once at the Getty in LA—this museum so high up on a hilltop that you have to take a tram to get up there and when you do, it’s all bright white curving buildings and gardens and so much pretty stuff that it almost hurts your heart.
And then my sister says, “He’s no Buddy Lathrop,” and I feel my face redden. But her voice is soft and I can tell that she means this to be encouraging.
“You go if you’re so interested,” I say, scraping a bit of cream topping with my fork. “You’re the one who’s on the Tobias rebound, right?”
What is with her tonight? If cute boy senses us staring, he doesn’t let on, just bites more sandwich and keeps reading whatever he’s reading. His head dips lower, piece of hair still flopping, light angling his face.
Something loosens inside me, which is silly, right? He’s a boy who looks good even under fluorescent lighting. That’s all. I am not Bella Swan or one of those other girls in those books.
Only here’s the thing: I don’t want pie. I don’t want to talk about Tobias. I don’t want to go back home and watch some old detective movie with Tommy Davis whose fifty-dollar bill may still be drifting along Paradise.
I calculate all this briefly. Come up empty because some things have no mathematical answer.
“Okay,” I say, and Paris’s eyes widen. She grins like an idiot, showing her gums. My sister is a crazy person. I flick my purple-streaked sort-of-bangs with my thumb. Bad idea, this haircut, but these things happen. I slide from the booth. Almost as an afterthought, I take the plate of coconut cream pie with me.
Heart pounding, I saunter to the boy, his head still bent over what I see now is a textbook.
“Pie?” I ask casually, setting the plate on his book. He looks up, blinking. His eyes are gray. Not dark. Not light. Just gray. Ordinary eyes, which relieves me somehow.
“Coconut cream,” I say, pulse speeding as he glances at the pie then me. He has a tiny scar over his left eyebrow, thin and white like it’s been there awhile.
A drizzle of mayo drips from the wedge of sandwich and trickles down his wrist.
When he still doesn’t say anything, I glance at the textbook.
Physics. Okay, that’s good.
He’s still looking at me, waiting. There’s a smudge of escaped mayo on his wrist. I resist the impulse to reach over and wipe it off. He lifts one eyebrow—the one with the tiny white scar cutting through it. His superhero chin angles up, just a little. His jawbones stretch straight and even, with just a hint of stubble.
My breath catches. I can walk away. I should walk away.
But I’ve already handed him the pie.
“A neutron walks into a bar and asks how much a drink costs,” I say, bolder now.
The boy blinks again. One side of his mouth curves up and then he’s smiling full-on, bright as the sun. My chest tightens. Any second now, I’ll know that the physics book is just a prop to pick up girls in the middle of the night.
“And the bartender replies, ‘For you no charge,’” he finishes.
This is how I meet Max Sullivan.
FOUR
“I’M MAX,” SAYS MAX. HE’S STILL SMILING.
“You finished my joke,” I say, and then, “Leo.” I hold out my hand.
“Leonora,” I amend, and feel my face ignite because it sounds so bossy, which is not what I had in mind.
Max’s lips twitch. I realize with a jolt of stupidity that I’ve initiated a handshake with someone who’s got to drop his bacon and turkey on whole wheat to accommodate me. “Leo Leonora.”
“Just Leo,” I say, annoyed.
He sets his bite of sandwich on the plate, wipes—finally!—the mayo from his wrist, and pushes back from the table, chair scraping the white tile. He’s a lot taller than me. I have to look up to talk to him, and there are those eyes again—those eyes! A medium gray with little blue flecks near the irises. I know this because he’s still staring at me. And despite the mayo, I find myself staring back.
Any second now his eyes will do a Buddy Lathrop and stray to my boobs. But Max’s eyes do not leave my face.
Then he reaches out and shakes my hand vigorously, like a politician or something—his palm and fingers warm and rough against mine.
“Leo?” he says. This time his voice is a question. “Do you always bring strangers pie?”
I don’t think, just say, “Only if they know about neutrons,” then as our hands let go, I pivot on my heel, heart pounding, and walk back to Paris, who is smirking and twirling a piece of her long hair around her index finger.
Behind me, I hear boot steps.
Above us, Elvis finishes “Don’t Be Cruel” and begins crooning “Love Me Tender.”
I turn. Max is right behind me, plate in hand.
He forks a bite, chewing, and licks a strand of coconut from his lip.
“This is Max,” I tell Paris. “Max, this is Paris. My sister.”
Paris smiles, high wattage. Her pulled-back hair swishes. She studies Max, green-eyed gaze roving his face and then flitting over the rest of him:
Arms and face tan—the kind of tan you get when you’re outside a lot. Nice, straight nose. Nice-shaped lips, too. Buddy Lathrop had this thin upper lip that disappeared when we kissed, so that my mouth kept slipping upward and bumping into his nose. Yet another reason that we never went out a third time.
“Paris,” Max says. “As in France?” He runs the tines of the fork over the top of the pie, raking up cream filling.
“Exactly,” Paris says, smiling again, and I wonder if Max can hear the lie in her voice. “My mother loves France. It’s her favorite country. In fact, she loves it so much that I was conceived there. Isn’t that right, Leonora?” She turns to me, grinning.
“Yes,” I say. “Our family is big on France.”
My brain starts churning, thinking what else I might add to this story that is what people expect but not at all the truth, when Max asks, “What about you?” He points at me with the fork, licked clean. In
these situations, when I am with my sister, no one usually asks.
“The lion?” Max says. “Someone wanted you to be brave?” He means the Leo part.
Paris clears her throat.
“Bright and shining,” I say, which is what Leonora means, although right now I feel neither of these. Maybe because this makes me uncomfortable, I swipe the plate from his hand, fork too. I slide into the booth next to Paris and, hoping that he has no communicable diseases, dig into the remains of the coconut cream.
Any second now, Paris is going to decide we need to go home or to the all-night movie theater or maybe over to the Strip or to Fremont Street, to watch the tourists zipline on SlotZilla, if it’s still running this late.
I will follow her, and Max will go back to his physics and his club sandwich and that will be that.
I wait for Paris to make her move. The pie is gone. It’s time to go.
But she says instead, “You forgot your book,” pointing to Max’s table.
There’s a pause, and then Max says, “Ah,” like Paris has made a philosophical observation or posed a question about thermodynamics or the laws of attraction.
“Be right back,” says Max, eyes flickering darker.
In the short seconds, not even thirty, that it takes him to collect his book and leave his sandwich, Paris whispers excitedly, “He’s nice, right?”
And I say, “Yeah, I guess,” not whispering. I don’t even attempt to interpret her enthusiasm.
My sister leans across the table, her silver Dream charm tapping the Formica. “He is,” she insists.
“Okay,” I say, running my finger through a dot of filling left on the plate. “Sure.” Sometimes with Paris it’s easier to agree.
“Good, Leo,” Paris says. “Good.” She pats my arm, crazy multicolored nails bobbing.
Book in hand, Max returns.