“Mine too,” he said, pulling her closer, and they fell asleep like that.
But now it’s morning, which means it’s time. They’ve already had breakfast, and their beds have been folded back into seats—the last time their compartment will perform this sort of magic trick—and they’re somewhere near the top of Nevada now. Everything out the window is a bright dusty-orange, a color Hugo has never seen before, with the occasional ridged mountain rising out of the dirt. The sun is still climbing, and the light—according to Mae—is now perfect.
“Just a minute,” she says, and Hugo sits back, content to watch her work, thinking about what a lovely thing this is, to be interviewed by her. And how there will now be other, less joyful interviews ahead of him, where he’ll sit down with reporters ranging from the student newspaper to the Sunday Times and give them the uncomplicated version of himself, the one who is simply grateful for the scholarship and thrilled to be with his siblings and excited about all that’s ahead.
It won’t be a lie, because he feels all those things.
But it won’t exactly be the truth either.
When Mae is finally ready—the camera stabilized on a makeshift tripod constructed out of a pair of trainers and a hairbrush—she sits forward and looks him right in the eye. “So.”
“So,” he says, “you probably want to know how someone could possibly be this good-looking.”
She laughs. “Not exactly.”
“How someone could be this charming, then?”
“I want to know what your biggest dream is,” she says, glancing down at the camera, and Hugo uses the moment to gather himself.
“Right,” he says. “Well, you already sort of know.”
Mae looks at him like he’s thick. “Yeah, but now there’s a camera.”
“Yes. Right. Okay.” He swallows hard and eyes the lens. “Well, I never really had one before. Everything was laid out for me a certain way, and it never occurred to me that things could be different. But then I got on this train and everything changed.” He glances out the window at the sunbaked dirt. “It’s like I’d been living on a map my whole life and have only now realized the world is actually a globe. And even though I have to go back, I know that now. And I can’t unknow it.”
Mae flicks her eyes up to meet his, but she doesn’t say anything.
“I’m starting to realize that a lot of people don’t put much stock in dreams. They think of them like these faraway planets they never really expect to reach. I was only supposed to step out of my life for a week, but that’s another thing nobody tells you: that once you get there, it’s never enough. There are always more planets to see.” He smiles and gives his head a little shake. “This makes it sound like my dream is to be an astronaut, doesn’t it?”
She smiles at him. “I hope you get to see them one day.”
“Me too,” Hugo says.
“So what’s your biggest fear?” she asks, and he feels his heart jerk as if someone has tugged it with a rope.
He has many fears. Too many to count.
But right now—right in this moment—the biggest one is saying goodbye to her.
Instead, he says, “Sharks.”
Mae rolls her eyes at him. “Come on. How many sharks have you ever come across in England? Give me something real.”
He thinks about this, his heart still jittery.
“I worry that I’m not enough on my own,” he says eventually. “I love being a sextuplet—I do. It can be nice being part of a pack, always having someone around, knowing we’re there for each other no matter what, sharing a lifetime of experiences. It’s unusual, I think. To be known that well. And it can be really lovely. But I don’t want to just be one-sixth of something my whole life either. That’s why this week has meant so much. And why I wish it didn’t have to end.”
He closes his mouth, not sure what else to say. It’s strange, talking to Mae and the camera at once; he doesn’t know where the interview stops and the conversation between them begins, which parts are public and which are private.
But she just nods and moves on to the next question: “What do you love most about the world?”
“I love…,” he says, feeling dangerously close to adding the word you. He’s distracted by the warmth of her eyes and the way she’s looking at him, by the still-rising sun out the window, by the impossibility of being here—in Nevada, of all places—with this girl he’s known for such a short time but whom he can’t bear to think of losing.
“I love…,” he begins again, then raps his knuckles against the window. “This.”
“The train?”
“Yes,” Hugo says. “And the window. And the view. It’s mind boggling, isn’t it? To be so far away from your real life. To see so many entirely new things.” He shakes his head in wonder. “I love my parents, even when I don’t. And I love my brothers and sisters, even when it feels like there are too many of them. I love my friends from school and my ex-girlfriend and my teachers, even the ones who used to tell me off for daydreaming. I love my room at home, even when Alfie comes back from rugby and his feet smell like shite. I love my mum’s books, even though they’re mortifying. I love this trip, and the way it came together, and that I get to be here with you. I love what it’s made me realize about myself. And what it’s sparked in me. But mostly I love this.”
Mae follows his eyes to the window again; then she switches off the camera. “Listen, you have to write that letter, okay?”
“I already told you—”
“It doesn’t matter. You need to tell them all that.”
They’ve left the desert behind now, and the train has slowed as it climbs up into the mountains. Soon there are thick forests of pine trees and, in the distance, patches of clinging snow. An announcement comes over the speaker: they’ve crossed into California.
Which means they’re almost there.
“You didn’t ask me the last question,” Hugo says, and Mae smiles at him, but she doesn’t turn the camera back on.
“I figured you were just going to say ‘pizza.’?”
“Who in the world would compare love to a pizza?” he asks, expecting her to laugh.
But instead she looks at him seriously. “Someone who doesn’t know very much about it.”
In the hallway, the family staying in the compartment next door trundles past, the voices of the younger kids bouncing around the train. When they’re gone, Hugo leans forward, resting his elbows on the wobbly table between them.
“In fact,” he says, grinning at her, “I was going to say ‘pizza.’?”
She tosses a pen at him, and he ducks. “You were not.”
“I was,” he says, though this isn’t quite true. The question has been on his mind all week, through every interview and the hours spent with Mae in between, but he hasn’t been able to come up with something that captures it. The truth is, love isn’t just one word. At least not to him. It’s different things for different people.
With Margaret, love was like a blanket, mostly warm and comforting, but occasionally itchy and, toward the end, a bit frayed too.
His parents don’t have a word at all. Instead, when he thinks of them, what he pictures is the doorframe in the kitchen where they mark off their heights each year. It’s so crowded with scratches and initials that most visitors assume it was something that the children scribbled on when they were younger. To Hugo, though, it measures something more than simply their heights.
For Alfie, the word is friend, which is somehow bigger than any of the others that might fit too: brother, sibling, family. Isla is comfort, and George is steadiness, the twin guardians of their little pack. For Poppy, who is always the brightest, it’s laughter. And Oscar would hate having a word. He’d much prefer some line of code that nobody else can understand.