A Blind Spot for Boys

by Justina Chen

  “And Brian obviously lived in some kind of self-sustaining ecosystem of him, himself, and his mom,” Reb said.

  At that, we both laughed the way she, Ginny, and I do on late summer nights in Reb’s treehouse, raucous and loud, when we’re hyper from too much sugar and too little sleep.

  “They’re all nice guys,” I said.

  “Yeah, and they’re all pretty good looking and can form complete sentences, but, Shana, no.” Reb slowed when we hit the traffic going into downtown Seattle. “The longest you’ve been with anyone in the last—what? year?—has been a week.”

  “Two weeks.”

  Her hands clenched around the steering wheel like she was strangling someone. Then, she turned her gaze from the road to peer closely at me before looking away. “I’m not sure what happened, but when you’re ready to talk…”

  As used to Reb’s spot-on insights as I was—after all, the women in her family had uncanny premonitions—I felt flustered and embarrassed. I clasped my hands together. According to my friends, I was the quote-unquote idiot savant of boys. Little did they know the truth: I was pure idiot. Eight dates over one summer with Dom back when I was almost sixteen shouldn’t have slayed me. I knew that. I was Little Miss Rah-Rah Independence on the outside, chanting about seeing the world before settling down, but I had harbored a secret fantasy of me and Dom. He wasn’t just older and wiser, and he didn’t just have to-die-for biceps and superhero shoulders. He was turning his Big Plans for his life into reality, halfway done with business school and had already seen a huge chunk of the world. In other words, he was everything high school boys were not and he was everything I thought I wanted. I could so easily picture him in the future with his jet-setting career, and me with mine. It was a match made in sine qua non heaven.

  Or so I thought.

  I fidgeted with my seat belt, then switched the subject abruptly: “What’re you up to this week?”

  Reb’s primary job was helping her grandmother lead tours to sacred places around the world, like Bhutan, where the gross national product is measured in happiness. I was envious—can you imagine the photos Reb could make in locales that most people never visit? But she was content with the camera feature on her cell phone. It killed me.

  Reb took her eye off the traffic to stare at me. “Oh, my gosh, you know that treehouse builder I like?”

  I laughed. “You mean, the one you’re obsessed with?”

  “Well, a new resort in Bend asked him to build a treehouse restaurant. Zip lining will be the only way to get in. And he wants me to join his team.”

  “That’s so cool! So when are you starting?”

  “In a few weeks, right after Machu Picchu,” Reb said as she merged onto the exit ramp that would deposit us a few blocks from Quattro’s hotel.

  “Oh, just Machu Picchu,” I teased with a careless wave.

  She gasped so abruptly, I thought we were about to smash into the car in front of us. Instead, Reb reached over to grab my arm. “You should come! There’re two spots left. You could take one of them. You’d be saving me.”

  “Reb.” I gasped as her boa constrictor grip squeezed tighter. “My arm. Losing circulation.”

  “Oh, sorry.” She released me. “Only two hundred people can be on the trail, you know. And all the trail passes have been sold out for the season. What do you think? It’d be an adventure.”

  Adventure. I could practically hear Quattro’s echoing challenge: I thought photographers leaned into adventure. I sighed. “I really can’t. Midterms. I can’t even stand the thought of studying for them twice.”

  Nearing Quattro’s hotel, I stole a surreptitious look at myself in the side mirror. Miraculously, my lip gloss was still in place.

  “Okay, I know this is going to sound like whining,” Reb said, glancing at me with an anxious expression, “but the trip’s going to be rough. Grandma Stesha is really worried about some of the people who’re going on it.”

  Who wouldn’t be? Her grandmother’s tours attracted a certain type of clientele, the kind who believed in fairies and water sprites, crystals and auras. Reb had told me once that Stesha was a rock star in spirituality circles, with some clients signing up for a new Dreamwalks trip every single year. So I guessed, “Repeat customers demanding to see impossible star alignments or something?”

  “No. A couple of grievers.”

  Grieving. Now, that I understood. Time might heal all wounds, but here it was, mid-March. Seven months and three days after Dom broke up with me, I was still waiting.

  Once upon an almost-sixteenth birthday, my brother Max was going to miss my big day because he was moving to San Francisco for a new job at a PR agency and wouldn’t have the time or money to come home in seven weeks to celebrate. This, after being gone for two quarters in London already. So he promised we’d spend his last day in town together, only him and me, starting with a shot of espresso (so adult!) at a coffee shop near the university where he had just finished his MBA. I should have known better when he suggested I bring my computer “just in case.” After we ordered our drinks, Max gave me the first of my presents: a shapeless UW sweatshirt. I hadn’t even taken a sip of my espresso when he had to take an “important call.”

  “I’ll pick you up in an hour,” Max promised before he darted out of the coffee shop for a last-minute meeting with the professor who’d connected him to his job. “An hour and a half tops.”

  Three hours later, Max hadn’t returned, and my coffee was long finished. Chilled from the overeager air-conditioning, I slipped on the sweatshirt. Still cold, I walked out into the hot July sun, lost in a fog of color, texture, and imagery from whittling a few weeks of photo safaris down to a single photo essay. Was the fall fashion trend in two months really going to be about long gloves, beanie hats, and boy trousers? Maybe it was going to be plaid paired with—

  “You think you know everything!” a guy vented in the parking lot, his tone contemptuous. “You’re always the teacher!”

  My eyes jerked from the blue sky to a heavyset guy as babyfaced as the petite blonde in front of him. The Yeller’s face was a bombastic red as he jabbed his index finger toward her. “You just can’t stop!”

  “I was just—” she started to speak, shaking her head.

  “Just! It’s always ‘just’ with you!”

  Her lips clamped together. She wasn’t allowed a single sentence, except for “Yes, you’re right” and “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

  “That’s all you ever are. Sorry after the fact.” The Yeller’s next lacerating words were lost on me because I was staring at the wide-eyed girl who was caught in the hailstorm of her boyfriend’s you-you-you rage. About a year ago, the Booksters had read Reb’s pick, a novel about a girl who escaped an abusive relationship, each attack softened with a Judas kiss.

  Then a black BMW screamed into the parking lot and jerked to an abrupt stop. A tall guy who filled out a black Gore-Tex jacket embroidered with UW CREW jumped from the car. He didn’t bother to shut the door but ran straight to the Yeller.

  “Do you know what I’m going to do to you if you ever so much as look at my sister again?” His voice was lethal and quiet. “Do you?”

  “Come on, Dom. It’s not what you think,” the girl protested.

  Without a thought to my own safety, I crossed the parking lot to place my hand on the girl’s bony arm. She looked through me as if she were blind. How long had this gone on?

  “Let me buy you a coffee,” I said. When she didn’t answer, I stared deep into those hurt-clouded eyes. “You need a mocha fix. Come on.”

  “Go,” said Dom, his eyes focused on the Yeller. “Mona, go.”

  As the door closed behind Mona and me, Dom met my eyes through the window as though we were a couple who acted in wordless synchronicity. I shivered then, not from the air-conditioning but with knowledge. I had been twice gifted on my birthday: the college sweatshirt that camouflaged the high school junior I’d be this fall and the college boy who made me f
eel seen.

  “Anybody can be charming when you first meet him,” Reb said as we pulled up in front of the Four Seasons, the only minivan in the brick-paved entry.

  My head jerked to her. How did she know about Dom? But then I realized she was talking about the boy of the moment. I said, “Quattro was hardly charming, unless you call almost running me over charming.”

  “Where are you taking him?”

  “I was thinking Oddfellows.” Coffee shop by day, restaurant by night, the place had a great vibe: cool without taking itself too seriously. Best of all, there wasn’t a whiff of romance about it.

  “How’s about I go ahead and wait there for you?” she asked as a valet in a tidy chocolate-brown uniform started to hustle to her side of the car until he noticed me. So intent on her question, Reb didn’t notice him circling to my side first. “That way, if he turns out to be a total sociopath, I can be your personal extraction team.”

  “You’re being paranoid,” I told her. The valet opened my door. I unbuckled my seat belt. “Thanks for the ride, Reb.”

  “No, trust me,” she said firmly and leaned over the parking brake to peer into my face. “You can never be too sure of anyone.”

  Reb should know: Her dad had up and left her family unexpectedly over the summer, not completely unlike Dom. I exhaled hard, as though I had been holding my breath.

  “You’re on,” I told her, nodding. “Oddfellows in twenty-five minutes.”

  Chapter Three

  Inside the wood-paneled hotel lobby, Quattro was hard to miss, dressed in a long-sleeved, traffic-stopping orange T-shirt. He rose from a cream-colored chair as soon as he spotted me. To be honest, he was better looking than I remembered, but that might have been the halo effect of the unexpectedly good Gum Wall shots I’d reviewed for way too long last night. Even before we reached each other, I bypassed the whole awkward do we hug or do we stand with our arms at our sides moment and cut directly to “Now about those doughnuts…”

  “Bars, not doughnuts,” Quattro corrected, then spread his arms wide. “Totally different.”

  “There’s a difference in fried dough?”

  “It’s like saying golden retrievers and Labradors are the same breed.”

  “They aren’t?” I asked, deadpan.

  He laughed. Without waiting a beat, I sighed as sorrowfully as I could. “Hate to break it to you, but bacon maple bars aren’t in your foreseeable future.” I explained the car situation with my mom and proposed walking to Oddfellows instead.

  “That’s cool,” he said with an easygoing shrug that I appreciated. Once we were outside, Quattro said, “Just as I predicted, my sister freaked out when I told her I met you.”

  “Really?” I smiled, flattered in spite of myself.

  His realistic impression of a bubbleheaded middle school girl—“No way!”—made me snort from laughing hard. I blushed; it wasn’t exactly the most feminine sound to produce.

  “So Kylie had some questions for you, but I can’t remember them. She’s going to kill me.”

  “No prob, I’ll give you my number so she can text me.” Was I smooth or was I smooth? I made a mental note to tell Ginny how to slip her number to all the other Chef Boys in her future. As I started to unclip my messenger bag for my phone, I asked, “How about I just call your cell now so you have it?”

  “I don’t have a cell.”

  “For real?” Stunned, I stopped on the sidewalk to stare at him.

  “I know, I know. Weird.”

  “Well, yeah.” I dodged a piece of suspicious-looking garbage. The route to Oddfellows cut through a few sketchy blocks. “Oh, hey, did your dad recover from the bedbugs?”

  “Yeah, they moved us to a new room, but once he found out that he got the job he was interviewing for on Friday, nothing would have bugged him. Literally.”

  “Wait, I thought you were here looking at UW?”

  Quattro shrugged, then nodded at the crosswalk light that was about to change to red. We charged across the street together as I asked, “Your dad’s actually following you out here?”

  “He prefers to call it relocating.” His face tightened. “But Chicago’s our home. He and Mom… It’s the only house I’ve ever lived in.” His eyes flicked to mine, then down to the sidewalk like he was embarrassed.

  Part of me wanted to tell him that the same thing had happened to Reb, and another part wanted to dig into what was bothering Quattro, but sharing led to revelations, which led to conversation and connection. Before long, if you weren’t careful, you could be staring at commitment. No, thanks. It started to drizzle, and Quattro hunched his back against the light rain, his expression stark. The misty gray light made for perfect shooting conditions. I couldn’t help breaking out my camera. What was a little impromptu photo session between new friends? So I wasn’t paying attention to the street when Quattro grabbed me hard by the arm, yanking me back to the sidewalk.

  “What the—?” I started to demand angrily before a BMW rounded the corner so fast, it nearly plowed into us. The driver didn’t notice, too busy talking on his cell.

  “Get off your phone!” Quattro shot at the vanishing car. Shaking his head, he loosened his grip on me. “Sorry, I hate that. You okay?”

  “Whoa… we could have been hit,” I said, only now measuring the distance between us and the speeding car. Mere inches. “Oh, my gosh, you saved me.”

  He breathed out, then said lightly, “Just add that to my fee.”

  “I owe you breakfast, for sure.”

  “And an entire box of bars.”

  I could only manage a halfhearted laugh, my pulse still racing. As if he knew and wanted to calm me, Quattro asked, “Where were we?”

  After thinking a moment, I said, “Your dad’s move.”

  “Right. I tried to tell him that I didn’t need him ten minutes away from me.”

  “So how about a father-son adventure?” I suggested before we crossed safely to the opposite corner. This time, I was careful to look both ways. “Maybe he wouldn’t feel like he needs to move with you if you did something epic together.”

  Quattro’s wry smile returned from its brief vacation. “We’ve got that covered in a couple of weeks.”

  “Yeah? What?”

  “Machu Picchu.”

  “No way! My best friend just told me she’s going there, too.”

  “It’s a popular spot.”

  “No kidding. My parents have always wanted to go.” As we walked under the freeway overpass, I described my parents’ Fifty by Fifty Manifesto, expeditions and photo safaris all rolled into one grand plan for an adventurous life. Machu Picchu topped their list.

  “That’s such a cool idea,” he said, changing his stride so he wouldn’t walk on top of a large crack in the broken sidewalk. He didn’t strike me as someone superstitious—step on a crack, break your mother’s back and all that—but I swept the thought away to focus on what he was telling me now: “We had to cancel our trip a year and a half ago, and the tour company’s got a policy that trips need to be taken within two years. So it was use it or lose it.”

  Quattro brushed his hand through his rain-dampened hair. Some inner part of me that I thought had withered from Dom’s rejection now wanted to reach for his hand. I fisted my own and thrust them deep into my jacket pockets, glad Quattro wasn’t looking at me, uncertain what he would see if he did.

  Damp and hungry, we finally reached Oddfellows. Quattro’s gaze swept the brick walls, scuffed hardwood floors, and distressed tables. The scent of earthy coffee mingled with the aroma of fresh baked goods. Like half of the customers inside, the baristas and waiters wore the unofficial uniform of the Capitol Hill neighborhood: heavy army boots, funky T-shirts, and tattoos. Luckily, Quattro didn’t notice Reb playing secret service chaperone at a window table, engrossed as he was in inspecting the vintage typewriter in front of the café.

  “I like this place,” he said, smiling at me.

  That warm grin alone could be dangerous for a girl’s h
eart. I vowed to keep our banter light and frothy and completely noncommittal.

  “Just wait until you taste the desserts,” I told him, pointing to the well-stocked glass case under the massive espresso machine.

  After a quick but thorough glance, he said, disappointed, “There really aren’t bacon maple bars.…”

  “Well, yeah, because bacon isn’t a dessert.”

  “To some people it is.”

  When I laughed, he refocused a hundred and ten percent back on me, as though we were the only two people here.

  “Don’t worry. I know just what to order for you,” I said as I started for the register.

  “Really?”

  “Oh, yeah.” As we passed Reb’s table, she arched an eyebrow at me: What are you doing? I flushed and quickly diffused my flirtatiousness with a bland explanation: “That’s what happens when you’ve got two older brothers. Twin older brothers. Trust me, I know guys.”

  Behind me, I thought I overheard Reb snickering. In case Quattro glanced her way, I drew his attention to the menu on the large chalkboard as we stood in line to order. “But on the small off chance that I might possibly be wrong—”

  “Though you doubt it…”

  “—you can check out what they have.”

  “Nah,” he said, “I trust you.”

  “Good.” So a few moments later, I ordered. “I think he’ll want the breakfast panini. Extra bacon and a side of maple syrup, please.”

  He nudged my shoulder with his. “I like the way you think.”

  “I knew you would.” I practically groaned at my knee-jerk flirtation. Maybe Brian’s helicopter mom was right, and I had some kind of commitment disorder. Once boys bit, I fled. I asked the waiter manning the register, “How’s the brioche French toast?” After he described the rich thick slice of fluffy bread dipped in vanilla-infused eggs, I groaned. “That sounds incredible.”

  The man’s expression communicated all too clearly: So do you. If I so much as batted my eyes, he’d slip his phone number to me on the receipt. I lowered my gaze, glad that I could break the moment by insisting on paying for breakfast over Quattro’s objections. “Fine,” I said, “you can pick up my coffee.”