Emmy & Oliver

by Robin Benway

  “No, you want to figure out the tangent,” I said as she walked back, then waited to hear her footsteps on the stairs. I was supposed to be tutoring him in pre-calc since I had taken it the year before, but Oliver didn’t need too much help.

  “Did you talk to UCSD yet?” he asked once the coast was clear.

  “I have until May first,” I told him. “I don’t have to decide until then.”

  “So when are you going to tell your parents?”

  “Um, hopefully as my car pulls out of the driveway on the way to San Diego.” I wrapped my hand around his, still holding on to the pencil. “That should be a good time, right? They can’t run as fast as the car.”

  “I think a lot of people can run as fast as your car,” Oliver said.

  “What it lacks in speed it makes up for in personality,” I said. “Besides, all the sand probably weighs it down.”

  He laughed and leaned in to kiss me. Who knew pre-calc could be so romantic? “No, but seriously,” he said after a minute. “You need to tell them.”

  “Dude, I know. I will. Just . . . I have to do it on my own time. I know my parents, I know when it’s a good time and when it’s not.”

  Oliver regarded me with suspicion. “You weren’t joking about that driveway comment, were you?”

  “ANYWAY,” I said. “Focus on math.”

  “What do I get if I get the next one right?” His breath was warm on my neck, making goose bumps raise up on my arms as I shivered.

  “You get a gold star,” I whispered back, then turned around to kiss him.

  “Is that a metaphor?” he asked.

  “Get it right and see,” I replied, and started to kiss him.

  Cccccrreeeeeeaaaaaaakkkk!

  “Laundry time,” Oliver muttered as we flew apart again.

  “Worst chore ever,” I added, and he could only nod his head in agreement.

  Oliver was right, though. The clock was ticking and I had only three weeks before I had to tell UCSD whether or not I would accept their offer. Which meant, of course, that I had only three weeks to tell my parents that there was even an offer to accept. I tried a few times—at dinner one night, while we were all in the car the next—but every time I started to say something, the words seemed to fall apart in my mouth and all that came out was a cough. “Are you getting a cold?” my mom finally asked after the third time at dinner. “You sound a bit wheezy.”

  “I’m fine,” I said automatically.

  “You’re not eating very much,” she said. “I thought you liked this pasta?”

  It was bow-tie pasta with cream sauce, my mom’s secret recipe that she wouldn’t even give to my grandmother. (And if you don’t think that caused a ruckus at Thanksgiving last year, then you would be very wrong.) And yes, I did love it, but between Caro and school and college and Oliver, it felt like the anxiety boulder in my stomach left no room for food.

  “I’m fiiiine,” I said again, suddenly aware that I was whining. “I’m fine,” I repeated, trying to sound like an almost college student and not a three-year-old. “I just have a lot of schoolwork and Caro and I . . .”

  Both my parents froze with their forks to their mouths. “Caro and you what?” my dad said. “Don’t leave us hanging. Caro and I are joining the circus? Caro and I have decided to become neurosurgeons? Caro and I have decided to reimburse our parents for the eighteen years’ worth of room and board that they’ve so lovingly provided us?”

  “Honey, she and Caro are fighting,” my mom said. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “How did you know we were fighting?” I asked.

  “Because you’re only sending a million texts a day, rather than two million,” my mom said, but I could tell that she was trying to be nice about it. “What happened?”

  She was clearly dying for more information. I wonder if she and Maureen had discussed this at all. “We just had a stupid fight,” I said. “She said some things and I said some things, that’s all. No biggie.”

  “You and Caro have never fought before,” my dad said.

  “We argued over that My Little Pony doll when we were four,” I pointed out. She won. I was still bitter.

  “Well, I’m sure you’ll make up,” my mom said. “You and Caro have been friends forever.”

  “Can I be excused?” I asked, wiping my mouth with my napkin in preparation to flee. “Oliver and I wanted to do some homework together.”

  My mom raised an eyebrow at me. “Where? Here or there?”

  “There,” I said. Our house didn’t have any squeaky floorboards.

  “Two more bites,” she said, and I swallowed them in one, relieved to be off the hot seat.

  For now.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  The high school had an open house on Wednesday night, one of those things where all the parents and their kids can come to the school and show off their work and talk to the teachers about how great/wonderful/abysmal their little darlings are. It’s a big community to-do, and my parents, of course, haven’t missed one ever. Even when my mom had bronchitis, she managed to make a miraculous recovery and show up to discuss my B-plus grade with my eighth-grade history teacher. (My mother thought it should have been an A-minus. She thought wrong.)

  Oliver’s mom, on the other hand, hadn’t been able to attend one for ten years, so she was over the moon. “Come on, we’re going to be late!” I heard her yelling that evening as she herded everyone into their cars. I heard this because I was being herded by my parents into our car.

  “Emmy, step on it,” my mom said. “If we don’t get there soon, there’s always a line to talk to your AP Bio teacher.” Mr. Hernandez was thirty years old and very, um, in demand by most of the moms in our school. Not that my mom wanted to hit on Mr. Hernandez. She was probably the only mom who actually wanted to discuss my participation in class with him.

  “Aren’t you tired of talking to my teachers?” I asked them as I fastened my seat belt. “I can just reenact the conversation for you.”

  “You’re a poor man’s Mr. Hernandez,” my dad told me.

  “Oh my God. Dad.”

  “Fasten your seat belt,” my mom said.

  “It’s fastened.” Like it always was every single time she asked.

  Oliver and I both looked at each other as our respective cars backed out of the driveways. I was about to wave when he suddenly crossed his eyes and stuck out his tongue at me.

  I had to laugh. That’s what I had done to him back on his first day of school, back when I could barely imagine talking to him, much less sitting on his lap or wrapping my arms around his neck or sprawling on the warm sand, my head resting against his shoulder as he ran his fingers up and down my back. He had been a friend, then a stranger, and now something more.

  And going to UCSD meant that this time, I would be leaving him.

  School always seemed so weird on open house nights, lit up in the dark and suddenly filled with parents. It was even weirder hearing your parents refer to your teachers as Mr. or Mrs. So-and-So, like they were students, too. My parents were pretty much on a first-name basis with every other parent there, and my mom shouted “Oh, hell-lo!” at five other families even before we got inside.

  I managed to hang in there for about thirty minutes, showing my parents where I sat in French class (“Why are you so far back?” my mom wondered), introduced them to my calculus teacher and let her talk about what a great math student I was, and waited with them in line for the famed Mr. Hernandez. “Emmy is an excellent diagrammer,” he told my parents, smiling at them, and I swear I heard half the moms swoon.

  I looked at my dad. He looked back at me. Then we both tried not to laugh.

  “How long does this go on for?” someone said into my ear as we headed toward my civics classroom and I turned around to see Oliver standing next to me as our parents all greeted one another. (Rick was at the twins’ future elementary school, probably taking copious notes for Maureen.)

  “Forever,” I whispered back, then foun
d his hand and squeezed it. “Hope you didn’t make plans for the next three days.”

  “Does this seriously happen every year?” he asked.

  “Look at my eyes,” I said, then widened them dramatically. “Does this look like the face of someone who would joke about this?”

  “You look deranged,” he said, and we both leaned forward a little before we remembered where we were, and more important, who we were with.

  “You must be so happy to be here,” my mom said, and Maureen could only nod as her eyes filled with tears.

  “Mommm,” Oliver said. “You promised you wouldn’t, not here.”

  “I know, I know,” she said, then waved her fingers in front of her eyes as if to fan away the tears. “I just haven’t been to one of these since first grade, you know?” She started to tear up again, then stopped herself. “It just feels good to be back in the swing of things.” Maureen smiled at Oliver, then reached for his hand. “We’re just . . . we’re trying.”

  Oliver nodded, but didn’t let her hold his hand. “Mom,” he said again. “We’re at school, okay?”

  “Sorry, sorry,” she said again, then rolled her eyes at my mom as if to say, Teenagers. My mom smiled back and luckily for her, didn’t try and hold my hand, either.

  “Do you wanna go walk?” I asked Oliver. “Unless you want to see all of your teachers for a second time today, that is.”

  “Um, no,” he said.

  “Is it okay if we . . . ?” I asked, pointing down the hall. “We’ll stay on campus.”

  My mom raised an eyebrow at me. “Only walking,” she said. “No funny business.”

  “Got it,” I said, even as I linked hands with Oliver. “No telling jokes or making humorous observations.”

  “Oh, get out of here,” my dad said, swatting at my head as I ducked past, and I giggled as Oliver ran to keep up with me.

  I don’t know why my mom thought we’d spend our time kissing on campus. To be honest, high school isn’t the most romantic setting. It smells like dirty linoleum and tempera paint, along with paper and burnt coffee and gym socks, and besides, there were probably a thousand students and their parents wandering around. Still, it was nice to wander with Oliver and not have to listen for a creaky floorboard or keep an eye out for the twins, who were forever curious about why we were always studying together.

  “It’s gonna be weird to be here next year without you,” Oliver said. “Who’s going to eat lunch with me?”

  “Don’t say that,” I said. “I’ll still come back and visit. And who knows, I might not even go.”

  Oliver glanced down at me. “You don’t mean that.”

  I shrugged. “Maybe. I don’t know. It’s scary, you know? Moving. Leaving my bedroom. Leaving my parents.” I took a deep breath. “Leaving you.”

  “Well, I left you,” he pointed out. “Think of it as payback.”

  “You didn’t leave,” I started to say, but just then Caro came running up. I had seen her at school, but both of us had been going out of our way to avoid talking to each other, and I actually took a step back when she came closer. “Caro?” I said.

  “Yeah. Hi. Look, Drew’s upset.”

  “Drew is? About what?”

  “You should probably just come with me.”

  My heart was starting to pick up pace. Drew never really got upset. He had always been the peacemaker between me and Caro, between Kane and his parents, between his parents and himself. “Okay,” I said, then gestured to Oliver to follow me.

  “Wait, no,” Caro said. “Just you, Emmy.” She looked at Oliver, her face a protective shield. I knew what she was thinking: Oliver isn’t one of us anymore.

  I was about to protest, but to my surprise, Oliver spoke up first. “Caro, wait,” he said, and she sighed and turned to face him, her arms folded over her chest. The campus lights had come on, bathing us in a watery yellow light. Under them, Caro looked tired and concerned and unsure, so unlike her normal self. “What?” she asked.

  Oliver glanced at me before taking a deep breath and turning back to Caro. “Look, Caro, I know that I came back and sort of changed everything, especially for you and Emmy and Drew. I get it, okay? But we were friends once before and it’d be cool if we could try to be friends again. Not, like, re-creating what we had when we were seven, but as who we are now.”

  Caro’s eyes filled with tears before she hastily brushed them away, and I realized that Oliver’s return had impacted more than just my family and his family. We weren’t the only people who had known him. Caro and Drew had been there the day Oliver’s dad drove off with him. The police had questioned them, too. And when Oliver came home, they had been standing right next to me.

  “Fine,” she said. “Come on, Drew’s waiting.”

  We followed her out to the parking lot, where Drew was standing near his parents’ Escalade. It loomed in the near darkness and made Drew look even smaller. “No, I don’t know,” he was saying into his cell when we arrived, his back turned to us. “Okay . . . yeah, okay. Love you, too, Kane. Okay, yeah. Bye.” When he turned and saw us, his cheeks were wet, and Caro immediately went to his side and wrapped her arm around his waist.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, shivering a little as the fog started to roll in. Next to me, Oliver pulled on his hoodie and zipped it up a little more in front.

  “It’s stupid,” Drew said, shaking his head. “It’s just . . . so stupid. It doesn’t matter.”

  “It matters,” Caro murmured. “It matters a lot.”

  “What happened?” I asked again. “Is it Kevin? Did you break up?”

  “No, no,” Drew said. “At least, not yet.”

  “Dude,” Oliver said. “Just tell us what happened.” His voice was kind, though, and I thought it was a good thing that he was there, because I was about ready to shake the answer right out of Drew.

  “I asked my parents if I could bring Kevin to my grandma’s birthday party,” Drew said, his voice trembling a little. “And at first they said they had to think about it, and then tonight before we came here . . . they said they thought it wouldn’t be a good idea.” He was twisting his own hoodie strings around his fingers so that they cut off the circulation. It looked painful but I didn’t move to stop him.

  “Wait, why?” I asked as Caro rubbed his back. “I thought they were cool with this. I mean, not cool, but . . .”

  “Yeah, well.” Drew laughed a little. “They say they’re cool with it, but my grandma’s a different story.”

  “So tell your grandma to fuck off,” Caro spat, and Drew gave her a one-armed hug.

  “It’s a little hard to do that when she controls the money,” he said, then took another deep breath. “I guess my dad’s business isn’t doing so well?” He said it like a question, like he wasn’t even sure if it was the truth or not. “And she’s been helping my parents out with, like, mortgage payments and stuff like that.”

  “And they think she’ll cut them off if she finds out you’re gay?” I cried.

  “Apparently, Grandma’s old school,” Drew sighed.

  “Apparently, Grandma’s a homophobe,” Caro corrected him. (I hoped for Drew’s grandma’s sake that she and Caro never met in a dark alley.)

  “Whatever she is, it means that I can’t bring Kevin to the party.”

  Oliver, who had been very still, suddenly spoke up. “It’s not about the party,” he said quietly. “You want your parents to stick up for you.”

  “I just want to know I’m worth more to them than some fucking mortgage payment!” Drew said, then quickly wiped his eyes on his wrist cuff. “Like, this was all just fine in theory. But now that they actually have to tell people and deal with that, they’re just bailing. And I don’t get to bail because this is my life, you know? And I don’t want to bail, I don’t mean it like that, but I just wish they weren’t standing so far behind me.”

  He glanced over at Oliver. “Can I tell you something?”

  “Yeah, man, sure.” I could feel Oliver’s post
ure stiffen, though, his spine suddenly straight.

  “Sometimes I get so jealous of you.” Drew stabbed at the ground with the toe of his shoe. “Your parents both wanted you so much. I know that’s not fair and I’m sorry it sounds bad, but that’s how I feel.”

  Oliver nodded slowly, taking it in. “I feel like I should apologize or something,” he said, and we all giggled nervously. I looped my arm around his, holding him close. “Wanting someone isn’t the same as loving them, though,” he said. “You know? It doesn’t mean the same thing.”

  “No, I know, I know,” Drew said, wiping at his face again. “Sorry, that sounds so awful. I hate that I think that.”

  “It’s okay,” Oliver said. “I get it. I do.” He put his hand on Drew’s shoulder, anchoring him.

  “I just don’t want Kevin to think that, like, I’m ashamed to be seen with him or something,” Drew sighed. “Or that I don’t want him around my family. Well, actually, now I kind of don’t want him around them, but—”

  “Drew?”

  A dark figure was walking toward us in the parking lot, a little unsure. It was Kevin.

  “I texted him,” Caro said. “I thought you might want to see him.”

  Kevin looked at the four of us. I guess we were a little formidable, gathered around Drew like a small army. “Hi,” he said. “Um, Caro texted me? She said you were out here.”

  “Hi,” Drew said. “God, I’m a disaster right now. Sorry.”

  “Hey.” Kevin’s face grew concerned and he seemed to close the distance between them into two steps. “What’s wrong?”

  Drew took a long, shaky breath, then hugged Kevin. They were talking, their voices muffled against each other’s shoulders, and I was about to gesture to Caro and Oliver that we should probably leave when I heard my mother’s voice cut across the parking lot.

  “Emily!”

  My head jerked up. My parents rarely, if ever, used my actual first name. No one else ever used it. The only time I really heard the name Emily was on the first day of school when teachers took roll for the first time. Then I’d say, “I actually prefer being called Emmy,” and that’d be it until the following year.