“Don’t,” Gyver warned.
“Don’t what?” I peeled my eyes away from the beach debris.
“Don’t you dare start looking for pessimistic signs. You’re going to be fine.”
The windows were fogging, obscuring the lake from my view. “I need … I need air.” I pushed the door open and stumbled into the humid night. Wiping my eyes, I crossed to a picnic table and sat facing the lake.
“Here. Drink.” Gyver handed me his water bottle and sat on the tabletop.
We faced each other in a showdown of fear. I spoke first. “I don’t want to go home yet.”
“Understandable. How are your parents? I can’t believe they let you go out tonight. Well, actually, I can.” I looked away from the ripples on the lake and up at his disapproving frown.
“Dad’s turned into Captain Cancer Facts—charts and spreadsheets in full force. And Mom? She’s alternating between hysterics and a Prozac-fueled insistence that I’m going to be fine. When I left she was taking a bubble bath to ‘calm herself down,’ and Dad was cooking dinner with a spoon in one hand and a pamphlet in the other. There wasn’t room for my reaction—I had to get out of there.” I rolled the bottle between my hands and fussed with the sand at my feet, creating furrows with my toe and then smoothing them flat.
“Oh, Mi.” Gyver, with his perfect parents, shouldn’t be able to understand mine, but he’d spent enough time around my mom’s melodrama and my dad’s analytics to nod with comprehension. “You should’ve called me, or just come over.”
“I should’ve. Is your mom going to make a big deal out of tonight?” My parents might accept that parties were a part of high school, but his mother—the chief of police—never would. Living next door to Chief Russo meant D.A.R.E. lectures at neighborhood barbecues. “I don’t think I can handle her yelling right now.”
“Don’t worry about her. It’s not a big deal,” he reassured me.
“I guess not, comparatively.” I kicked at the pile I’d built beneath the bench and watched the sand scatter into darkness.
Gyver reached out to touch my shoulder. “I’m here.”
“Thanks.” I leaned my cheek against his hand and took a deep breath. It stirred the faintest sense of comfort, the first flicker of reassurance. “You have your guitar with you, right?”
“I’ve got my acoustic in the car.”
“Can you play me that song? Do you know it?” It had seemed scarily appropriate: “blood,” “fear,” words whose definitions had changed overnight. Knowing the singer had faced this too, I needed to look for more signs in the lyrics.
He’d already pulled a pick from his pocket and was twirling it as if this were any other night and this were any song request. Then he paused, “You really want to hear it again?”
“Please.”
He squeezed my shoulder before backtracking to the car. After finishing the water, I fiddled with the empty bottle, spun it, and told myself if it stopped with the cap facing me, my friends would take the news well. If it stopped facing the lake they wouldn’t. It twirled an irregular circuit across the table. I held my breath.
Before it finished rotating, Gyver plucked it off the sun-bleached boards and tossed it into the recycle can. “You want to play spin the bottle?” he joked, then saw my stricken face and gestured to the guitar. “You sure, Mi?”
I nodded.
No matter which singer he covered, I preferred his version to the original. A girl could fall in love with a voice like his and lose herself in his performance. Not tonight. His deep voice was unsteady—it cracked on the first line and broke the word “hopeless” in half. Normally his eye contact was electric, but tonight he looked away as he sang.
When he got to the chorus, his intensity was intimidating—until he choked and stopped playing. I wasn’t surprised to find tears blurring my view of the lake, but I was shocked when he looked up and he was crying too.
I wanted to hug him—to remove the guitar strap from his neck and drape myself around it instead—but I couldn’t move. I’d made Gyver cry. The knowledge reverberated somewhere beneath my rib cage with an ache too intense to name.
Gyver put the guitar on the tabletop and moved to sit on the bench next to me. I tilted my head against his shoulder. He slipped an arm around me and leaned his head against mine. We stared out at the water, united in our fear. The silence was filled with the chirps of crickets and the splash of fish surfacing to swallow mosquitoes.
“I think you’re wrong,” I whispered.
Gyver eased his head off mine and examined my face. He smiled, but it faded before erasing any of the pain from his eyes. “You usually do. What am I wrong about this time?”
“It’s not an angry song. It’s a sad, scared song. You’ve got it on the wrong playlist.”