I pushed it back. “Would you have told me if I hadn’t seen the text?”
He was quiet a moment. “No. Probably not.”
It was a disturbingly honest answer that made me sad and a little angry, but mostly curious. “Why?” I asked.
“Because I didn’t want you to think I was an asshole for stringing her along. I mean, I was, I admit that.” He sighed. “But not telling you about it doesn’t make it less true. Some things are just over, you know? They don’t have anything to do with now.”
I couldn’t have agreed less.
I’d learned the hard way that events of the past led directly to the present, and I was about to say so when Max spoke first. He touched my hand and I let him. “If anything existed between me and Chloe, if I was holding back or hiding something about right now, the present, then you’d have every right to hate me and not trust me. Because I wouldn’t be the person you thought I was. But that’s not what this is.”
That’s exactly what it was, but it wasn’t his fault.
My whole relationship with Max was based on one long lie by omission—how could I not expect him to have secrets of his own? It was the ultimate moment to tell him everything in a way that might save him from hating me, but I paused. Max must’ve interpreted my silence as deliberation, when in fact it was cowardice. Again, he spoke first, saying, “I’m a normal person, Sara Jane, with faults like anyone else. What I did to Chloe was wrong, but it had one good effect—it made me resolve never to lie to you. I promise.”
“I . . . I don’t know what to say,” I mumbled honestly, since I was the one who felt like a fraud. So I spoke about myself instead, adding, “Except . . . except it would be great if everything could always be up front and perfect, but it can’t be, because . . . because . . .”
“Because we’re not little kids. And this is real life,” he said.
I nodded slowly and stared across the lake as Max put his arm around me again. “So,” he asked, “are we okay?”
“Yeah. We are,” I said, happy to answer in the affirmative but aware that it was more than partly wishful thinking.
“You know I’m all in, right?” he said. “There’s no one else I want to be with. In some ways I know you better than any person in the world, and in others, there’s so much about you I don’t. It’s cool that we still have so much to learn about each other.”
“Yeah. So much . . .”
“Just promise me one thing while I’m gone, okay?”
I turned to him, resting my head on my knee. “What?”
“Have a really boring summer.” He grinned, placing a hand gently on my face and kissing me.
And now he was kissing me again, holding me tightly as kids streamed past on their way to first period, when a deep voice said, “Break it up, Romeo and Juliet. Get to class, now.” We turned to a large, stone-faced security guard, smiled weakly, and walked away holding hands. With cameras and metal detectors at every entrance, Fep Prep is run like a scholarly penitentiary. It was a Chicago thing, a big-city, urban thing after guns began popping up in lockers in the 1990s in even the best schools. The threat of random violence was regarded as inevitable, even if nothing ever happened, and at Fep Prep it hadn’t. Still, that didn’t affect the security rhythm of the school, which was basically locked down at all times. Beginning today, for almost a whole year, I’d be sheltered, watched, and protected seven hours a day.
Even better, Max and I would be together in that bubble of safety every day.
For the entire first week of school, I was the supportive, affectionate girlfriend he deserved. We met each morning at Bump ‘N’ Grind for espresso, ate lunch together, and hung out after class, and I even managed to have dinner with him in Greektown without looking over my shoulder every five seconds.
Most of all, I listened.
I’d been consumed by my secret life before he left for California, but now I gave him undivided attention. That’s how I learned his summer was spent splashing around a pool with his dad’s new stepsons (ten-year-old twins), and that after a couple of weeks he was thoroughly depressed. He’d left me behind to reconnect with his dad, but instead became a de facto babysitter. His dad left early for work each day and then, at around ten a.m., his stepmom slid on huge sunglasses and asked Max if he minded watching the boys. All he could say was okay, and she waved as she backed out in a Mercedes convertible and didn’t return for hours. She and his dad were good together; in fact, his father seemed so happy in a new life with a new family that Max felt like an interloper, and wondered what the hell he was doing there. Max being Max, he asked his dad using those very same words.
To his surprise, his dad apologized profusely.
It turned out that he and his wife hoped that time alone would help Max bond with his stepbrothers, and that she was actually a little intimidated by him. She’d stayed away each day longer than intended, nervous about being compared to his mom. In fact, she and the twins liked Max a lot, and he liked them, and once it was all out in the open they came together as a patchwork family. Max had important, overdue talks with his dad about the divorce, about his dad’s abrupt departure from Chicago, and about feeling deserted by him. As Max told me, they still had a few miles to go before things were okay, but by the time summer ended, it was actually tough for him to leave.
“Then I thought of you,” Max said, squeezing my hand, “and it was easy.”
I smiled, unable to repress a twinge of jealousy at Max having two families, or at least one and a half, while I had none. And then he asked me what I’d done all summer. At first I bobbed and weaved around the question like the boxer I am, explaining how the details would bore him, and that all I wanted was to spend time together. During that first week of school, I’d enjoyed healthy doses of peace and affection, and even the creatures receded (which should’ve set off alarm bells). I was lulled into thinking that maybe I could enjoy a semi-normal existence. So when Max asked again what I’d been up to while he was gone, I decided to tell the truth as well as I could. “I ran a lot,” I said, omitting that it had been from creatures, and added, “and I read a ton,” thinking of the countless times I combed the notebook. “Also, I hung out with Doug almost every day.”
Max nodded and asked, “What about your family?”
“Um, well, you know how summer is. People get busy,” I said with a shrug. “It’s like I didn’t see them at all.” He looked at me suspiciously, since it sounded like I was holding back information. I ran, read, hung out with Doug, and didn’t see my family? That’s it? The doubt in Max’s eyes, the idea that he had even the slightest negative thought toward me, was scary. I stumbled past it, asking too loudly if Doug told him what the theme was this week in Classic Movie Club.
“He didn’t mention it,” Max said, avoiding my gaze.
I took his hand and squeezed it like he does to mine. “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Whatever it is, as long as we’re watching together, it will be great.”
“Yeah. You’re right,” he said, looking at me with a grin in place. “Or if not great, then at least interesting,” he added, “since Roger Ebert Jr. is in charge.” I’d handed leadership of the Classic Movie Club to Doug this year (Doug, Max, and I were still, pathetically, its only members), and he’d proclaimed that we would view films based on themes of his choice, instituted at his whim. In the past, his obsessions shifted between actors, genres, and directors, but now they were based solely on finding my family—basically, everything we watched was research. Of course, Max didn’t know this, and Doug would never give it away. Instead, he framed the series of three movies (the club normally met Monday, Wednesday and Friday) by theme. For the first week of school, it was “Disappearance.” We watched The Lady Vanishes from 1938, Frantic from 1988, and finally L’Avventura from 1960.
The last one gave me pause, since it felt like real life.
Afterward, I looked in Doug’s book, The Great Movies, and read Roger Ebert’s quote about the film L’Avventura, in which a
woman vanishes during a trip to an island, never to be seen again: “What we saw was a search without a conclusion, a disappearance without a solution.”
Thinking about it caused a pang of anxiety, but it didn’t affect me nearly as much as the Sausage King of Chicago.
The second week’s theme was closer to home—“Chicago-centric.” The first two were Angels with Dirty Faces and The Untouchables, but it wasn’t until Friday that I saw and heard something that rattled me. For years, when my family couldn’t agree on a movie to watch, we would default to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off since there are things in the film that appeal to each of us.
Lou’s favorite part of the movie takes place in a fancy restaurant.
Ferris is trying to BS a maître d’ into giving him a table by claiming to be someone he’s not. The maître d’, with his weasel mustache and puffy pompadour, looks at the reservation book, then at fresh-faced, teenaged Ferris, and the scene goes like this:
MAÎTRE D’: You’re Abe Froman?
FERRIS: That’s right, I’m Abe Froman.
MAÎTRE D’: The Sausage King of Chicago?
FERRIS: Uh, yeah, that’s me.
I would ask Lou, but isn’t it just lying—isn’t he just a con man? My brother would shrug and say that a con man is a glorified thief, and Ferris doesn’t steal anything; he borrows the alternate identity of Abe Froman, gets a great table, and pays for a delightful meal. It’s all about having the self-confidence to take a risk and seize an opportunity. Afterward, whenever Lou encountered an act of bravado—a Cubs player committing a daring base steal or one of those stories where someone leaps onto the subway tracks to save a life—he’d murmur, “Abe Froman,” and I’d know exactly what he meant. Sometimes, whether a chance pays off or not, it has to be taken, since the “taking” part is the whole transformative point.
My parents’ favorite scene in the film couldn’t be more different than Lou’s.
It’s a sappy song that makes them exchange a look as my dad caresses my mom’s lovely long fingers.
The first time they met, my mom was working as a hand model at Marshall Field’s, an improbable gig if there ever was one, but her natural beauty really did extend to her fingertips. It’s an often-told story in my family—my mom displaying a diamond ring, my dad removing it from her hand, inspecting it, putting back on her finger and asking her to marry him. There are so many little details—what they wore, what they discussed, but the one that stuck with me was the song playing over the tinny department-store sound system. It was a pop tune from 1963 sung in a falsetto that I’d later be surprised to learn was sung by a man, and famously lip-synched by Ferris Bueller on a parade float.
The song is “Danke Schoen.”
It means “thank you” in German.
When the scene appeared, my parents gazed at each other and sang along, while I tried to pretend that their nostalgia fest wasn’t happening on the same couch. I didn’t think much of it when Doug announced that we would be watching the film in Classic Movie Club. But first came Abe Froman and then “Danke Schoen,” and I was overcome by that plummeting feeling, pulled over the edge by helpless sentiment and desperate love. And then anger took root and mushroomed in the muck, an organic wrath spreading through my brain and body. I thought about what Lou had told me at the Ferris wheel about my dad’s brain being invaded by merciless captors, pictured my family being violated like lab rats, and the blue flame flickered. I was filled with the same preternatural calmness that stills the sky before lightning strikes, and when I blinked, blips of blue light from my eyes reflected in the dark. I gritted my teeth, trying to hold it back, and turned away so Max wouldn’t see me, but it was impossible to stop thinking about my family. I was peppered with tiny sharp volts, and it was even more impossible not to picture my dad caressing my mom’s hand as Max tenderly took mine in the dark.
I thought, All of the love my family had for me is dead, while he has both of his parents plus a whole new family? Showers of sparks turned the room orange and gold as I squeezed his hand as hard as I could and didn’t let go, even after he stopped screaming. And then I was on the ground being smothered by Doug, shaking my shoulders so hard that my head danced on my neck. I wasn’t sure where I was or what had happened until he shrieked, “Are you done now? Is it you again?”
“Doug . . . what . . . ? Where’s Max?” I said, trying to sit up, feeling little electrical clicks and zips draining from my fingertips.
“There, on the floor!”
He was crumpled on his side, unconscious, with his hand raw and purple where I’d touched it. It was burned, not seriously but sure to be painful. I felt his pulse—it was steady—then lifted his head, touched his face, and whispered, “Max. Oh, Max . . .”
“What did he do to piss you off?” Doug hissed.
“Nothing!” I said, staring at Max’s eyes, willing him to wake up. “It wasn’t like with Teardrop when the thing was trying to kill me, or you when you were trying to make me mad! Something about the movie ignited cold fury, and then the electricity kicked in, and Max was just sort of there.”
“You mean like a convenient target? You attacked him because he was nearby?” Doug said, gaping at me with awe and dread, shaking his head. “This is getting too dangerous. You could’ve hurt him a lot worse than a simple burn. You could’ve . . .”
“Don’t say it,” I muttered, as Max emitted a faraway groan.
“It’s time you told him.”
“Told him what?” I said, as Max’s eyelids fluttered and he groaned again.
“Everything,” Doug said. “Not just this electrical crap, but all of it, every detail. You can’t be with him and not tell him. It’s not fair. I mean, Christ, you just blew the guy out of a chair!”
“If he knew, he’d want to get involved,” I said. “Or else he might . . .”
“Not want to be with you anymore?” He held my gaze, saying softly, “Sara Jane, did it ever occur to you that that might be the best thing for him?”
Once Doug said it aloud, I realized that the idea of Max being safer without me had been in my mind all along. The threats posed by my Outfit connections, ice cream creatures, and now this internal lightning storm easily made me the most dangerous girlfriend at Fep Prep. I’d missed him every second he was gone, but now it was undeniable that he’d been safer in California. Something whispered of sacrifice and responsibility—that the best thing would be to drive him away so none of the collateral damage that followed me like a shadow could ever harm him.
“Tell him!” Doug whispered.
“Shut up!” I hissed as Max muttered a few words, blinked his eyes, and stared around with huge, disoriented pupils.
“What . . . the hell . . . ?” he said, trying to stand up, stumbling backward and flexing his hand. “Ow! That stings.”
We helped him into a chair as I said, “You probably don’t remember what—”
“Yeah, I do. You shocked me. Sorry, you shocked the living shit out of me.”
“It must have been some kind of electrical surge,” Doug said, fake-fumbling with his laptop until the movie reappeared on the screen. “Yep, that’s what it was. Crazy, huh? Max, are you okay? You need anything for your hand?”
“It looks worse than it feels,” he said. “Maybe some water . . .”
“Water, right, I’m on it,” Doug said, going for the door, looking back and mouthing the words “Tell him!” as he left.
He inspected my face, searching my eyes. “Are you okay?”
“Oh, yeah. Yeah, I got shocked a little bit but I’m fine.”
Max was quiet a moment and then said, “I guess I don’t mean from the surge or whatever it was. I mean, is everything okay between us? You sort of explained what you did all summer, but it feels like there’s a lot more that you didn’t. Did something happen while I was gone that you’re not telling me?”
Ferris Bueller set off a tidal wave of loneliness and anger, which ignited cold fury, which somehow turned me into an electrical kil
ling machine, which is not the sort of thing you tell someone you love and are terrified of scaring away. On the other hand, looking into Max’s concerned eyes, knowing how smart and cool he was, I thought maybe Doug was right; maybe it was time to tell him the truth. I sighed, bit my lip, and said, “I’m not sure how to start, but it’s basically a family issue.”
“I knew it.” He sighed.
“You did?”
“Look, I shouldn’t have put them before you. I mean, going to California for the entire summer to be with my dad’s family wasn’t fair . . .”
“Oh. Well,” I said, his misinterpretation a perfect excuse not to tell the truth. “I mean, yeah. I really missed you.”
“So, look, you can tell me if . . .,” he said, and paused. “Did you meet someone?”
“What? Max . . . ,” I said, but I held back as it occurred to me that loneliness while he was in L.A. combined with a phantom “other guy” could serve as the perfect reason-excuse why I’d withheld information. In fact, it could explain much of my behavior—instead of a freakish organized-crime girl, I was just neglected, conflicted, and confused! Besides, people met other people every day and were attracted to other people all the time—surely Max and I could work through it, even though it was a fabrication. Something possessed me then, which seemed inspired at the moment but in retrospect was one of the stupidest things I’ve ever done. Before I could stop myself, I blurted, “His name is Tyler. He’s older than we are. About to start college.”
“Tyler,” he said, trying out the name, and I could see that it hurt him to say it.
“It was just a flirtation, Max. He and I are . . .”
“Let me guess. Friends?”
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