“I’m realizing that.” He slid his arms back into his shirt and buttoned it up.
“That’s a very muscly situation you have going on there.” I made a gesture with my open palm toward his chest and arms.
“I climb. Rock-climbing, you know. I think maybe that’s how—or why.”
“You don’t have to explain,” I said. “It’s not a bad thing.”
I held the still-warm T-shirt in my hands. I resisted the temptation to put it to my nose. My heart quickened, and for the first time tonight it wasn’t from pure anxiety.
He pulled out of the parking spot, checking his mirrors intently. Now his ultra-cautious driving seemed adorable rather than bizarre.
“You wanna know the worst part about Gracie the pig?”
“Worse than the part where she got slaughtered?”
“Well, okay, yeah, there’s that. But after, the FFA tried to give me some bacon.”
“No.” His face was familiar again, open and kind. “No! Gracie bacon?”
“Gracie bacon.” I felt bad laughing about it. “And I took it.”
“No!” He pulled onto the street after looking both ways twice. “You monster.”
“Well, it was, like, a thank-you gift. I couldn’t say no. I gave it to my dad and he ate it. He was, Oh yay, free bacon.”
“Your dad ate Gracie?”
“He’s a flawed man. I’m telling you.”
After that, the night flew by. The second we pulled up to Pic Quik, I dashed to the bathroom and took off the sweater and put on Nick’s shirt. It was soft and smelled delicious, but it was also very big on me and he laughed when he saw me walk out in it. We ordered our burritos to go, then went to the plaza in the old part of town, right in front of the church my mother’s family had gone to, to eat them. We talked so much, I had to remind myself to stop every once in a while and take a bite of my burrito. I couldn’t have told you if the plaza was busy or if we’d been the only ones there. I had no idea. Only once the whole night had I thought of Syd and felt the jolt of sadness and anger go through my body. I asked Nick if he had any idea why Syd had done what she’d done. “I’ve been thinking about it all day,” I said, sipping my Sprite.
“Yeah. I’ve had, like, eight more months than you to think about it.” He shrugged. “I have no idea. Syd was cool to me until she dropped out of Academic Decathlon last year. We were in the semifinals in El Paso, and she, like, froze up. It was crazy. She missed every question. We lost. Everybody’s parents were there. I thought maybe she was, like, feeling bad because—you know—her parents weren’t there.”
“I remember that. I had a cross-country meet. She dropped out after that. After you became captain.”
“She dropped out that day. She left right after we were done. She said she wasn’t coming to practice. And after that she, like, hated me. Even before prom. I thought maybe she was embarrassed. Because she’d frozen up in front of us. But she was fine with Ian and Bea and everyone else. It was weird.”
“Maybe she had a crush on you?”
“No.” He didn’t even blush. That was how certain he was. “I thought maybe—she had a crush on you.”
“Yeah.” I laughed. “Like a boy fantasy thing? No. Sorry. That was not the case.”
* * *
After dinner, we went back to Milagro and had ice cream. I was glad the woman from the night before wasn’t working. After that, we took a walk on the river road. The river was dry, only a solitary vein of water running through its very center. On the mesa, one long, squat adobe was outlined in pale white Christmas lights. Our shoulders knocked every once in a while. At some point earlier, while we were eating our burritos, I stopped wondering when we’d kiss. It was bound to happen—right? I guessed so. Probably? But things became so easy, I forgot to even worry about it. We came to a bend in the road and saw a footpath leading down to the river’s edge.
“Look,” Nick said. He took my cold hand into his warm one. My chest filled with heat. He pointed his chin to a bench next to the riverbank. We walked down to it, holding hands. But when we sat down on the bench, I felt my phone in my back pocket—I hadn’t thought of it all night. I took it out and checked the time.
“Oh my god, it’s eleven thirty.” My heart sank. Nick was sitting beside me under a waxing gibbous moon, on a bench by the river. And now the night was over. We’d have to walk back to Nick’s car and drive home and say good-bye. “We should go, right?” I stood and looked down at Nick, who hadn’t moved.
“Yeah,” he said. He stood. I had started back up the path to the road when I felt him take my hand from behind. He stopped me. I turned around, and before I knew what was happening, he stepped close and leaned down and put his lips on mine. Just like that. We’d been kissing awhile before he stopped momentarily. “Is that okay? That I did that?” I didn’t even answer. I simply returned my lips to his. The butterflies in my stomach turned into an electric energy, a warmth that spread slowly throughout my body. His smell was everywhere. It made me go a little nuts. I had the weird feeling I wanted to see his chest again, and his back, everything. I wanted to know what he looked like when he was putting on his jeans or reading a book, when he didn’t know he was being seen. I wanted to see him sleeping, brushing his teeth, conjugating verbs for French. It wasn’t about sex, not really. But I guess it was. I wanted to climb into Nick’s smell and stay there awhile. And I also wanted to take his clothes off.
Every time it felt like we were going to stop, we’d start again, and stopping would feel impossible. I tried to convince myself time wasn’t passing, but eventually I couldn’t fool myself. I could see my father checking the clock and then checking his phone and then huffing out of bed into the living room and turning on ESPN.
“I have to go.” I pulled away and my whole body complained. “But I don’t want to stop.” I looked down when I said it, but it was the absolute truth. It felt good to say it. Standing there at the edge of the river, I felt like I could say anything to Nick, like there was nothing between us. I want to eat you. I want to climb inside your body and sleep. I want to touch your chest bone with my palm and show you the craters of the moon. I may want to lick your ears. I’ve never felt this way before.
Nick was dazed. “Me neither.” He brought his hand to his hair and seemed surprised not to find his ponytail.
We walked back to his car, and even though we were late, he drove just as carefully as he had before, never once going over the speed limit. He pulled into my driveway at 12:15. (I’d texted my dad I’d be late and he texted an emoji of a piano keyboard and an avocado. I had no idea what it meant. I texted back a thumbs-up.)
“I’m wearing your shirt,” I said.
“Good,” he said. “I have a reason to come back.” I gave him one more kiss before getting out of his car.
My dad’s light was off, so I didn’t call down the hall to let him know I was home, though I was sure he was still awake. I got into bed, still feeling buzzy. To calm down, I read about Saint Lucy, patron of the blind, who’d had visions so threatening to the powers that be, the emperor demanded her eyes be gouged out. In many paintings, she’s shown holding them up on a golden platter. My mother adored Saint Lucy. Eyeballs on a platter! my mother had written in the margin. LOVE THAT DRAMA QUEEN.
I slipped the book into the drawer and turned out the light.
I slept in Nick’s T-shirt.
10
I never sent Syd a YOU’RE DEAD TO ME text. In fact, I didn’t text her again that year. There was never anything I was sure I wanted to say. And she didn’t text me either, of course. I kept waiting for things to become clear, and they never did. After a month I figured it was safe to assume Ray had turned off her phone and that the last thin strand of possible connection I had to her had been cut.
Patience wrote back a week after I’d written her. The note was short and her handwriting was weird, like a child’s. She’d heard nothing from Syd and told me to leave it alone. Syd was an adult, she reminded me. She could make her own deci
sions.
On the last day before Christmas break, I came to school to find the custodians had taken down all the posters, including the ones of Syd I’d put up. It was a relief, actually. It’d been unbearable having Syd’s gaze follow me through the halls all those weeks. That she looked so happy in the photo only made it worse. Seeing her yell “butt cheeeeeeese” at me between classes was a misery I was glad to give up. The posters weren’t doing anything anyway. I had no leads, no ideas, nothing. Each day that passed, Syd became more of a mystery to me, more of a stranger, and I hated it.
She was gone. I thought it might begin to recede, the pain of not knowing where she was or why she’d left, but it didn’t. And I missed her. It was that simple. I hated her for what she’d done to Nick and me, and I hated her for leaving. But she was still my best friend. We’d adopted each other. We were bound to each other by blood. I couldn’t stop caring about her. I still wondered sometimes about Stanford. Had she heard from them? Maybe she’d gotten in.
I dreamed someday, in a year or two or three, my obsessive Google searches would produce proof that the Plan had worked. She’d get an award. She’d start a club. I convinced myself that someday notice of her success would appear in my search results. The Rhodes Scholarship or the National Merit Scholarship or a Fulbright.
But then again, she’d flunked herself out of school. I felt this irony strongest the afternoon my father came in clutching a letter addressed to The Parents of Miranda Black. With Syd gone, all the seniors moved up one place. For the first time ever, I’d been bumped into the top five. I was genuinely surprised. My father entered instantly into a state of ecstasy that bordered on delirium. He took the letter as just one more sign I’d be accepted at one of the fancy schools he’d talked me into applying to.
“And look at ya boy,” he said, pointing to the name in the number-one slot. Nicholas Allison.
Seeing that name in print was still enough to send the horses in my heart galloping.
At school, people were confused to see us together, and neither of us was good at fending off questions about what happened. Why the change of heart? I figured people assumed Nick had taken pity on me. My best friend abandoned me and he’d given me another chance. But the thing was: I didn’t care. My life was no one’s business. My life was mine alone. I’d stopped being Syd’s spokesperson. I felt free. I was just me, and for the first time in my life I didn’t care what anyone thought.
We spent every day of winter break together. We hiked in the Organ Mountains; we watched the sun go down at White Sands. I took him to my father’s lab at NASA and watched with pure wonder as Nick understood every part of the math and engineering gibberish my father used to explain what his thingies did and how they did it. He took me to the climbing wall at NMSU and, though I’d talked crap all the way there about how I was made to climb—“look at these ape arms”—it turned out that I was terrible at it. We ended up splayed out on the mats, laughing.
“Why do I suck at this?” I asked.
“It’s hard. You’ll get better.” He had a streak of chalk on his cheek. When I tried to rub it off, I only added more.
“Show me again,” I said.
I loved watching him, the way he carefully assessed the foot- and handholds, putting together the puzzle of his ascension before he’d even left the mat. Then he scrambled up and looked down at me and smiled.
He made it look so easy.
“I don’t know,” I called up from the mat. “Maybe if you take your shirt off again, it’d be easier for me to learn. I need to see the muscly situation in action.”
He shook his head. “You’re hopeless,” he said. And then let go one hand and both feet and hung there from the top for a moment before letting himself fall to the mat.
It felt big when we decided to spend part of Christmas day together. Like it meant something, though I couldn’t quite say what. Nick had spent plenty of time at my house. He and my dad were like old pals already. Maybe it was going to his house that was the big deal. I think we were both dreading it.
Apparently, it was tradition that Tomás eat dinner with Nick’s family, which I found peculiar. I knew Tomás’s whole giant family. He was certainly no orphan, and there was no reason he’d have to find another place to eat Christmas dinner. I didn’t get it, but in the end I was glad he was there. I felt so out of place in the Allison household, it was a great comfort to look up and see that face I’d known for so long.
Nick had told Jason the whole bizarre story of us, and so when Jason shook my hand in front of their parents, he made a joke about my appendix right off the bat. As soon as we walked into the kitchen, Nick’s mom hugged me, just as she had that night at La Posta. His dad only emerged from his office when it was time to eat. When the two of them stood together for a moment while Nick’s mom decided who should sit where, I was once again struck by their age difference. Nick’s mom, so young and vibrant, made his dad seem even more dour and serious.
The food was all right, but overcooked. It was the kind of meal my father would over-compliment anxiously, in order to conceal his true opinions. Nick’s mom had seated his dad at the head of the table, and he loomed there over the meal in his cool aloofness. I couldn’t stop thinking about how he was a math genius. Every time he looked in my direction, I felt caught, as if his penetrating blue eyes could look inside me and see my underwhelming math score on the SAT. I remembered the thing Nick said about how there were only seven people in the world who could understand his math. I wished at least one of them was there, to make conversation.
Tomás, thank god, could talk about anything, and did. He talked about school and college and went on for many minutes about the groin injury he’d gotten playing baseball last season, encouraged by Nick’s mom’s oohs and ahhs of sympathetic reaction to each gory detail. Before anyone knew it, he’d used the word testicle. It was heinous. But the weirdest thing was, no one giggled or smiled or even acknowledged it. No one’s face changed at all. Maybe it was because we all knew that as long as Tomás was talking, even if it was about his groin, none of the rest of us would have to. By the end of the meal, I was a nervous wreck. I could see why Nick had made the toothache sound that day on the ditch. Everything felt so heavy. So ugh.
Nick’s dad retreated to his office after dinner, and his mom and Jason went back to working on a massive jigsaw puzzle in the family room. Tomás and Nick and I loaded the dishwasher. And that was it. Nick’s mom hugged me again and sent me home with a tin of slightly burned cookies for my dad, who I guess she assumed had spent the day alone.
Later, when Tomás and I were left outside for a moment while Nick got his coat and my gift from his bedroom, I asked Tomás what the deal was. Why did he eat Christmas dinner with Nick’s family?
“Dude. Come on,” he said in a low voice, looking up from his phone where he was checking sports scores. “I do it for Nick. That’s some intensely somber shit in there, if you hadn’t noticed. I’ve gotta go eat a whole other meal with my family now.” He looked up. “Don’t tell him I told you that.”
“That’s crazy,” I said, though he was absolutely correct. My jaw was sore from clenching.
“Whatever. Sorry if I’m not into silence. Dude, I just talked about my balls for like ten minutes.”
“That was hilarious,” I said. He shrugged and went back to his phone. I turned to make sure the coast was clear. “Hey T,” I said in a hushed tone, “are you a Boy Scout?”
He looked up and stared, then shook his head. “Shut up. No.”
“Nick is one,” I whispered.
“So what?”
“You don’t think that’s weird?”
“Mir, if you think that’s the weirdest thing about Nick, you need to look harder.” He went back to scrolling through his sports scores. “I think it’s weird that Nick’s mom was so interested in my balls. That’s weird,” he said and laughed at his own joke.
* * *
“Your family’s so quiet,” I said to Nick as I drove us
to my house, where my father was hosting his annual NASA Orphans Christmas.
“Quiet is one way to describe them,” he answered. He seemed tired, distracted. I worried he wasn’t in the mood for my father’s party.
When we arrived at my house, there were so many cars in front, I had to park down the street. It was a perfect evening, crisp but not cold, the sky a deep, glorious blue. It was Christmas-day quiet. The world was still. “Be warned,” I told Nick as I trolled for a parking spot. “This is my father’s favorite thing ever.”
It was always a little weird having a hoard of strangers crowd my house on Christmas, but I’d come to love my dad’s tradition of inviting over all the people at his NASA facility, many of them soldiers from the adjoining missile base, who didn’t have anywhere else to go on Christmas. Without us, my dad told me, they’d eat mac and cheese and watch Star Trek by themselves all day.
I suspected that he did it as much for us as for them, though. There was also a possible version of Christmas where my father and I spent the day moping, thinking but not talking about my mother.
There was a version where we were the orphans.
“Did your parents get divorced?” Nick asked me out of nowhere as I was struggling to parallel-park a full block away from my house. “Before your mom left?”
“No,” I answered. “My dad divorced her. Like, a year after. It was awful.”
“Like you wished he hadn’t?”
“Oh. No. I don’t know. I guess I just wished she’d come home. I dunno. I was only eight.”
“Yeah,” he said. He was sitting with my gift in his lap. I could tell it was a book. I was glad he hadn’t noticed I was doing a supremely terrible job at parallel parking. “Do you think your parents were in love? Or whatever.”
“I have no idea,” I said, pulling out again and straightening my tires for the millionth time. “My dad was. I think. It’s weird—we never talk about it—but I’m pretty sure. I mean—you’re a math genius: pregnancy lasts nine months, my parents got married in February, and I was born in July. My dad had to leave MIT and go to NMSU. His parents were super-mad. My mom didn’t even finish college. I think her family—Catholics don’t love the abortions, you know.” I shot him a look. He was listening to me very carefully, as if I were going to reveal the answer to some big question he was pondering. “I’ve thought about it a lot. It’s a little awkward to bring up, you know: Hey, did you kinda want to erase me from the face of the Earth when I was a zygote? But my guess is: sure, they were in love, but they were young and very different. It was a disaster waiting to happen. I was just the accident that set it in motion.”
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