“Luca Michaelson!” a voice yells from the front door. “I know that’s you! You better get your scrawny butt off my property before I call nine-one-one!”
“I am not scrawny,” Luca mutters from behind a bush somewhere to my left, his tone ridiculously calm and even.
“Abort!” I call, rolling myself onto my stomach. I stand up and look for Eva. She’s near an oak tree, frozen in place with a gnome in a pink bikini clutched in her hands. When we lock eyes, she sticks the gnome on the back of another one already seemingly sucking face with a red-bearded gnome and runs toward me, our hands joining again like it’s a habit.
A door slams and a growling noise starts up and increases in volume behind us.
“Oh, god!” Kimber says, tripping to my side, a twig tangled in her long ponytail. “I knew this was a bad idea. I can’t believe she let Sugar out!”
“I can’t believe she named him Sugar,” Luca says as we all run. “That thing is like Cujo—goes straight for the nads.”
“Maybe you should sacrifice yourself,” I say, “since you’re the only one with actual nads.”
“Unlikely.”
“Unlikely that you have nads?” I ask. Luca reaches across Kimber and tries to noogie me, which is damn near impossible, considering we’re running.
“Just move, idiots,” Eva says, shoving Luca’s arm away.
We hit the pavement and bolt down the dark street. Glancing behind me, I see the outline of a huge dog barreling toward us, its paws scraping the asphalt as it snarls its way closer and closer.
“Uh, guys . . .” Kimber says, nearly whimpering.
I imagine my mother identifying my torn-to-shreds body in the morgue tomorrow morning. Maybe she’d make me a necklace then, lacing it around my cold, dead throat for burial.
A deafening bark pulls me from my morbid thoughts. “Split up!” I yell, pulling Eva with me off the main road and onto a sandy path leading into the woods. A quick glance behind me shows Luca and Kimber, hand in hand, running toward LuMac’s. That quick glance also shows that Sugar has chosen Eva and me as his conquests. Foamy drool drips from his snout.
“I’m pretty sure this is a scene right out of a horror movie,” Eva says.
“Just run!”
A little chuckle bubbles up and escapes Eva’s mouth as I zigzag us through trees.
“I can’t believe you’re laughing,” I say, gasping for air. “We’re about to get eaten.”
“Hey, this was your idea. Besides,” she says, barely winded, “I grew up in New York City, I can handle a damn Doberman.”
We carve a path across the sandy floor as Sugar’s bark reverberates through the blue-dark. It’s not long before I feel him nip at my heels. Literally.
The pull on my pants makes me lose my footing and trip over a root. Sprawling on the ground for the second time tonight, I mutter a thanks to the gods of teenage stupidity that Sugar seems startled by my fall and stops in his tracks instead of taking a chunk out of my leg.
Before I know it, Eva is pulling me to my feet and shoving me toward a huge and gnarly oak tree. Then she’s pushing me up, pushing my waist, my ass, my thighs. Good god, her hands are everywhere, but we’re moving up and away, one branch at a time until only barks trail behind us. Sugar has two paws on the tree trunk, blinking up at us like he’s sort of sad the game is over.
“Holy shit,” I say, my lungs gulping air. We’re both perched on a thick branch at least ten feet off the ground. Sugar whines for a few seconds, but then starts sniffing around the trunk.
“I can’t believe you wanted to do that for fun,” Eva says.
“Oh, come on, that was totally awesome,” I say, laughing. My tone is sarcastic, but this is exactly what I wanted. Not to get chased by a rabid dog exactly, but this. Heart pounding, fingertips tingling with adrenaline, an energy lighting up my veins that has absolutely nothing to do with paying rent or freaking out when my mother won’t pick up her phone.
Or lasagna verde cooked for a girl who’s not me, nails that aren’t mine coated in aubergine.
I push the thought away and take another deep breath. Beside me, Eva only sips at the air, barely out of breath and clearly in amazing shape from years of ballet. Like I couldn’t tell from her sleek calves and plank-like stomach.
Not that I’ve noticed.
Okay, I’ve definitely noticed.
Below us, Sugar lies down under the tree. He yawns and then rests his massive head on his paws. He looks pretty damn comfy for a bloodthirsty beast.
“Great. Now we’re stuck up here until he goes home,” I say. The tree, however, is not pretty damn comfy. The branches are gnarled and barely thick enough to hold my butt without lopping me over the edge.
“Sorry about earlier,” Eva says. She shifts around, scooting until her back is pressed against the trunk. At first, I think she’s talking about my mother, the dinner and the nails and the storming out, but then she goes on. “All the”—she circles her hand in my direction—“groping.”
“Oh.” I release a single laugh. “I think I can forgive a little ass grab. At least I still have an ass.”
“Good point.”
A silence settles over us. The air has turned even cooler, stars blinking in between the tree’s leaves. It’s quiet, the normal summer night noises hushed, giving me an unwelcome chance to think too many thoughts. Tonight has been one giant cluster.
Eva exhales and it sounds so content, I feel it relaxing me too. “Actually, that was really fun,” she says, smiling. “Just what I needed, really.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know, just . . .” She waves a hand. “Distraction. Forgetting.”
“Is that what that was earlier?” I ask before I think better of it. “With my mother? Forgetting?”
She turns to look at me, her expression turning almost unbearably sad. “No. That was remembering.”
“Oh.”
“Does that bother you? Me hanging out with your mom?”
I don’t know what to say. What can I say? This girl next to me is sad and lonely. How can I begrudge her comfort, even if it’s found in my own mother?
And if I said, Yes, back the hell off, what then? Because, god help me, I don’t want to be a mess with Eva. I just want to be me.
“No,” I say, forcing my eyes on hers, forcing the tremors out of my voice, forcing myself to mean it.
Her shoulders visibly descend, relief clear in her exhaled breath.
“Good. That’s good,” she says softly, rubbing a hand across her forehead. She doesn’t look at me, but I watch her as a few tears bloom and slip down her cheeks. I’m aching to hold her hand, press my fingers against her back, anything to help. Surely my mother’s not the only one who can. Surely, Eva’s and my big world is still out there, waiting for us to slip back into it where we belong.
“Are you okay?” I ask instead, lacing my fingers together in my lap.
She nods and looks down, picking at a hangnail.
“Tell me something about her,” I say. “Something good. Anything you want.”
She lifts her head, staring into the tree branches cocooning around us. After a few moments and a few deep breaths, she starts talking. “There was this café on Sixtieth Street. It’s pretty famous and sort of a tourist trap, but it’s near the dance studio and my mom and I would go there after class every Tuesday and get frozen hot chocolates.”
Her eyes mist over with the memory. “I miss those stupid overpriced drinks. There was usually a huge line outside the café, but it never mattered to Mom, even though she was always tired after teaching. We’d stand there for an hour, talking about everything and nothing. Even when it was freezing outside, we’d wait. I miss that. Just . . . standing there with her, you know?”
I nod, even though I’m not sure I do know.
“I miss ballet,” she goes on. “I miss the movement, the line my arms would make with the rest of my body. The smell of resin and varnish that coated the hardwoods in the st
udio. I miss New York.”
“Do you really hate it here?”
She shakes her head. “I don’t know. It’s where I need to be. I miss home but I can’t be there, you know? It’s not New York without her. It’s not anything.”
“Eva—”
“I want to go back. I just don’t know if I can. New York, ballet, any of it. I used to want to teach ballet like my mother did. She loved it so much.”
“Do you love it?”
A line creases between her eyes. “Mom made me try out different things when I was little, but I always came back to dancing. It’s in my blood. I loved that I could forget everything and anything. Or remember it. Whatever I wanted. I was in total control when I danced, but I also wasn’t, like something bigger than me, bigger than everything that made me anxious inhabited my body, moving my arms and legs. I wanted to help other girls feel like that. Especially girls like me.”
“Wow.”
She laughs. “You mean, Wow, that sounds ridiculous.”
“No. Not at all. I get that.”
Her mouth tilts up in a smile, and she tilts her head at me. “Pianists are very important to dancers, you know. To shows and studios.”
“Are you still a dancer?”
Immediately, I regret my question. That tiny smile fades like a chalk drawing in the rain, and Eva’s mouth parts as though my question is a literal shock.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I only meant that when you talk about dance, you always talk about it in the past tense.”
She nods but doesn’t take her eyes off of mine. “Are you a pianist?”
“Always.” I blink at her, surprising myself with my lack of hesitation. But it’s true—there’s no way I’ll ever not be a pianist, even if I spend the rest of my days in the Book Nook with Patrick as my only audience.
We sit in silence for a few seconds, Eva’s breaths steady and thoughtful next to me. It’s easy, this quiet between us, and I can’t help but think that piano isn’t the only thing that makes all the bullshit fade into the background for me. At least not right now.
“So, riddle me this,” she finally says. Her voice is light, her posture straightens against the tree trunk, and I know we’re done talking about ballet. “Jay walked into your house after you left earlier. Your mom called him Julian.”
I groan dramatically and bury my face in my hands. “Well, he would. He lives there.”
“I mean, I got that, but why?”
I rub at my forehead. “Yes, that is the question, isn’t it?”
“Your mom is actually dating his dad?”
“And—here’s the real kicker—she had no clue who he was until I pretty much grabbed her by the shoulders and spelled out his name really slowly.”
She frowns. “Seriously?”
“True story.”
“Holy crap.”
“‘Shit,’ Eva. The phrase you’re looking for is ‘holy shit.’”
She laughs, bracing her hand on the branch. Her pinkie touches mine, and neither of us moves our fingers away. “That’s so wild. Maggie doesn’t seem—”
Her words cut off abruptly, and she bites on her lower lip.
“Maggie doesn’t seem what?” I ask.
“She doesn’t strike me as that clueless.”
I swallow down a bitter laugh. Because, no, at first Maggie seems charmingly charismatic to most people. Beautiful and free. I know better than anyone how alluring those things are. And Mom is all those things, times a hundred.
“She’s many things, Eva,” I say quietly, looking down at my hands. Next to me, I feel Eva’s eyes on me, waiting for me to go on, and I want to. Maybe I even should, so she’ll get what’s going on in my head right now, so she’ll understand what those purple nails mean to me, but it’s so hard to say it. To confess that my own mother, the woman who gave me life and is supposed to love and cherish me above all else, forgets my age half the time. Letting all this crap about Jay and Pete spill is enough.
“Tell me something else about you,” Eva says, and I’m grateful for the subject change.
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. I know you’re a pianist. I know you hate dolphins.”
I crack a smile.
“I know you’re beautiful and you’re fond of swearing and that Luca would commit legit murder for you and you’d do the same for him.”
I force my thoughts away from the beautiful comment and the fact that when she said the word, her pinkie moved closer and covered mine. “That’s about all you need to know.”
“No way. Tell me . . .” She narrows her eyes, thinking. “Tell me about your first crush. The first time you really liked someone.”
“Why?”
She shrugs. “First crushes are unforgettable and scary as hell. It’s something real and I’m naturally nosy, okay? Mine was a girl named Clara, and she had red hair and brown eyes. We’d been dancing together since we were six, and one day during a costume change, I overheard her refer to me as a ‘desperate dyke’ in front of her friends.”
“Oh, god.”
“Yeah, it was lots of fun.”
“Sorry.”
She shrugs, keeping her eyes on me, clearly waiting for my own story, probably expecting me to moon over some guy with floppy hair and a lopsided smile. This whole conversation is starting to make me squirm. But it’s not an uncomfortable kind of feeling. It’s an opening up, a hovering on the edge of a cliff after a long climb, the view and height stealing your breath and thoughts.
So I push my hand over a little, twining my pinkie around her ring finger.
And I tell her about my first crush.
“There was this girl,” I begin. Eva’s eyes widen, but I keep going. “Her name was Natalie.” I tell Eva about meeting Natalie at the pool, my fourteen-year-old self instantly enamored with this older girl. How I watched her. How I couldn’t breathe around her. How she’d smile at me and bring me different shades of purple nail polish, and we’d paint our fingers and toes during her breaks. How she listened to me, let me tell her all about my mother and piano and how I wanted more from life. How guilty I felt, even then, for wanting more. How she told me it was okay to want more, to want the world, even. I tell Eva about the way Natalie smelled—like coconut sun lotion and oranges. I tell her how Natalie’s skin hypnotized me, how one day when we were getting Diet Cokes from the vending machine in the clubhouse’s tiny breezeway, I slid my hand softly down her forearm before linking our fingers. How good it felt to finally touch her.
“What happened?” Eva whispers when I pause, my throat thick from the memory, which is just freaking annoying. It’s been three damn years.
“Nothing. She looked down at our hands and smiled. Pulled away and said I was cute. Later that day, she made sure I saw her boyfriend pick her up and then promptly stick his tongue down her throat.”
“Ugh.”
I shrug, the tree bark rough against my shoulders. “Not her fault.”
“It’s not yours, either.”
“I guess not. I just felt stupid.”
“Yeah, I can imagine. Thanks for telling me all that.”
“Sure.”
“Can I ask you something?”
“Yeah.”
“You and Jay . . . he was your boyfriend, right?”
“Yes.”
“And you liked him?”
“I liked him okay. I didn’t love him. But I liked being with him while it lasted. We had fun until we didn’t.”
She frowns. “Oh.”
“Just ask me, Eva. Just say it.”
Her fingers twitch on mine. “So . . . Natalie . . . did you . . . like her like her?”
“Yeah. She was the first person I really, really liked. You asked me to tell you about my first real crush, remember?”
“I did, didn’t I?” she says, her mouth curved into a half smile.
“Before Natalie, it was just little infatuations and spin the bottle.”
“Okay,” she says,
but the question is still there, hovering.
“I guess I’m bisexual,” I say, inhaling a deep breath with my words.
She lifts a brow. “You guess?”
“I mean—”
“No. Crap, I’m messing this up. Wherever you are with this, that’s totally cool. I guessed I was queer for a long time before I really let myself just . . . be queer. I just want to make sure that I understand what you’re saying.”
I nod. I’ve only ever said all of this to Luca. I tried telling Mom, and that was so wildly unsuccessful I never really tried again. But I haven’t shied away from talking about it because I’m confused.
I glance at Eva’s face—her open, curious expression. Her amber-flecked eyes. Her gorgeous mouth, slightly parted and patiently waiting for me to go on. The little dip at her throat created by her sleek collarbones.
Nope. Definitely not confused. But with my confession, Eva and I are edging away from impossible, edging closer to possible. We’re shifting from a gay girl and a straight girl to two queer girls.
“It’s just a word, you know?” I say, meeting her gaze. “And sometimes words help; sometimes they don’t. But . . . well, I like who I like. I like the person.”
A little smile lifts her mouth.
“That makes a lot of sense. Cool.”
I wait for more—another question, a scoff, even an untangling of our fingers—but nothing comes. She stays still, stays quiet, presses her fingers into mine a little more.
Then her whole hand slides across my whole hand, and our fingers are all mixed up, pale and dark, lavender on dark purple, wrapped over and around. The tree creaks ominously, but I don’t care. I forget about everything that came before this—every pissed-off and jealous emotion I had from earlier tonight, gone.
Sugar snores loudly right below us, but I don’t care about him, either.
I lean closer, needing her closer, needing me closer, and soon she’s right there, her mouth inches from mine. I stop, remembering she’s never kissed anyone before. She searches my face, and wonder is the only word for her expression. I close the tiny distance between us, just a bit, and let my lower lip brush hers. She sucks in a breath, so I stay there, letting her make the last move.
How to Make a Wish Page 11