10
Before
“Who with?” was the first thing my father wanted to know when I told him I was going out for a bit after work—a fair enough question, seeing as how I’d spent the last eight months hanging out with no one so much as the pizza delivery guy from Papa Gino’s. He’d been chatting with the drummer in the band and he smelled like coffee and cologne, familiar; it was a smell I thought I’d miss when I left home.
“Allie,” I blurted, not knowing I was going to lie until I did it. “With Allie.”
I don’t know why I didn’t tell him. There was no reason to think he’d say I couldn’t go: Sawyer was his godson, after all, heir to his musical talent in practice if not by blood. Still, he’d have wanted to know the wheres and whys and the what are you doings, and a thousand other things I could only begin to guess. For now it just seemed neater not to say.
“Allie,” he said slowly, slipping one bearlike arm around my shoulders. “There’s a name I haven’t heard in a while.”
“Um,” I said. “Yeah.”
My father shrugged, nodding at one of the waiters to comp a round of drinks. He trusted me. He’d never had a reason not to. “Have a good time,” he said, lips against my forehead in a distracted good-bye kiss. “Home by curfew.”
“Yeah,” I said again. “Of course.”
I found Sawyer in the back hallway, leaning against the door to the office and scrolling through his phone, vaguely bored. “Did you just lie to your dad about me?” he asked, smirking a little.
“Yes,” I said.
The smirk bloomed into a grin. “Well, okay then,” he told me, perversely delighted. “Long as I know where I stand. You ready?”
“Sure,” I said, hoping against hope that he couldn’t tell what a big deal this was for me—that just the thought of being alone with him had my stomach doing the kind of gymnastic tumble that would have made Béla Károlyi proud.
Sawyer held the back door open and I followed him across the parking lot to his ancient Jeep. He didn’t talk. I had no idea where we were going, and at this point it felt a little late to ask: I opened my mouth, hesitated, shut it again. Sawyer didn’t seem bothered at all.
I glanced around the Jeep as surreptitiously as I could manage, beginning a list in my head as he hit the gas. Floor of Sawyer LeGrande’s car, a complete inventory: empty Snapple bottle, peach iced tea, check. Duke Ellington Live at Newport 1956, check. Dashboard: sunglasses, check. Tree-shaped air freshener still in the package, check. Mix CD with Allie Ballard’s handwriting on the label, check.
I closed my eyes for a second. Allie used to make me mixes all the time, songs for my birthday and Christmas and springtime and Tuesdays. My favorite was called “The Bad Behavior Mix”: sixty minutes of ridiculous hip-hop capped with Phil Collins’s “A Groovy Kind of Love,” presented to me on the occasion of our first high school dance. We ended up back at my house by nine thirty that night, making brownies with Soledad and shouting along with Kanye, doubled over in hysterical giggles.
I didn’t mean to sigh, never even heard myself do it, but I must have, because Sawyer glanced over at me as he turned onto A1A, sharp features lit reddish by the neon lights on the dash. “Long day?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said, letting him think that it was the monotony of service work getting me down and not the absolute hopelessness of being in this Jeep with him, his eyes glittering a hundred thousand adjectives beyond green. “Kind of.”
Sawyer nodded. “You want ice cream?”
I blinked. “Ice cream?” I repeated. I don’t know what I’d been expecting, but it … wasn’t that.
“Yeah, princess, ice cream.” Sawyer laughed as he pulled into a parking spot, not bothering to wait for my answer. “What did you think I was gonna offer you, like, some glue to sniff?”
“No!” I said, although to be honest, he was probably closer to the truth than not. I unbuckled my seat belt and climbed out of the car. “No.”
“You think I’m so sketchy.” He bumped my shoulder with his as we crossed the parking lot, so lightly I thought it was probably an accident. “Like, way tougher than I actually am.”
I shook my head and looked away. “I really don’t,” I promised.
“Okay,” he said, in a voice like he thought I was full of shit but didn’t particularly mind. “Whatever you say.”
We ordered at the counter and I dug in my purse for my wallet, pulling out a set of house keys and my Lonely Planet to get to the bottom of the bag. Sawyer pushed my hand away. “I got it,” he told me, handing over a wrinkled ten to the cashier. He nodded at my book. “Planning a trip?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I mean, no.” It suddenly felt enormously stupid, this game I played with myself, like hopscotch or Barbie. “It’s for my admissions essay.”
“To college?” Sawyer raised his eyebrows, licked the dripping bottom of my cone before handing it over. It was an old-fashioned shop, wood paneling and knickknacks on the walls, an antique cash register that sprung open with a loud ring. I smelled sugar and cold air. “Already?”
I nodded. “Northwestern,” I told him. “I’m graduating a year early, so I’m going to apply in the fall.”
Sawyer tilted his head to one side. “That’s ambitious.”
“I’m ambitious.”
“I know,” he said, taking his own ice cream and herding me back toward the door, holding it open with one foot as I scooted through. “So that’s what your essay’s about, then?” he asked as we crossed the lot toward the car, navigating a teeming crowd of noisy, restless kids about our age, shouts and laughter. “Traveling?”
“Yeah, kind of.” I shook my head, embarrassed. “It’s stupid.”
“I doubt that.” We were back at his Jeep by this point. Sawyer climbed up on the hood to eat his cone, angled his head at the empty space beside him until I got the message and pulled my sneakers up onto the bumper along with him. “Tell me.”
“Ugh, fine.” I rolled my eyes a little, blushing in the dark. “The program I’m applying to is for creative nonfiction, you know? Travel writing.” The words sounded wooden and unfamiliar; this wasn’t something I’d told a lot of people besides Allie. “So I’m writing the essay like a travel guide, basically—go here, do this, avoid this gross hotel—only instead of it being about a particular place, it’s actually about, like—my life.” I shrugged again, embarrassed. “Or like, the life I want to have.”
“That’s not stupid.” Sawyer was grinning. “That’s cool. I want to read it when you’re done.”
I snorted. “Yeah, right.”
“I’m serious,” Sawyer said, considering. His white T-shirt seemed to glow in the light from the storefronts. “Early graduation, huh?” he asked after a moment. “You’re that desperate to get out of here?”
“No,” I explained, “it’s not that. I mean, of course I’ll miss my family and everybody. I love my family, I just …” I shrugged. I didn’t know how you could explain something like loneliness to someone like Sawyer—the feeling that I had to find something to wrap my hands around, and that whatever it was, it wasn’t here. “There’s not a whole lot for me here, you know?”
Sawyer smiled a bit, unreadable. “So I better hang out with you while I can, is that what you’re saying?”
Which—what? What was going on here? I had no earthly idea what he was after. “Pretty much,” was all I said.
We sat in silence for a little while, watching the cars go by on the highway. I ate my ice cream. I waited. “You’re quiet,” he said eventually.
I considered that for a moment. “Well,” I said, “so are you.”
“Reena.” We were close enough that our arms were touching, warm and the slightest bit sticky with heat. “Why are you here?”
I looked at him sideways. My heart was a foot on a kick drum inside my chest. “You tell me.”
Sawyer shook his head. “I’m serious.”
“Are you?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I really am.”
“Sawyer.” I hesitated, blushing. I was ninety percent sure I was completely misunderstanding whatever was happening here. “Look. Allie’s my friend. Or was my friend, at least, and—”
“Don’t you get tired?” he interrupted.
I stopped. “Of what?”
Sawyer shrugged. “Being who everybody thinks you are.”
“What? No.” I shook my head, stalling, and glanced out across the highway at the strip malls and the palm trees. I smelled wet pavement and car exhaust. “Who else would I possibly be?”
Sawyer seemed to know I was faking; he looked at me for a second in a way that made me almost nervous, like he could see the tissue underneath my skin. Fighting the creeping feeling that I was in way, way over my head, I did what any rational human being would do when confronted with a question she didn’t want to answer, by a person she’d had a miserable crush on for two presidential terms:
I nudged my cone right up into his face.
“I’m sorry,” I said immediately, giggling a little hysterically. “Jesus Christ. I’m sorry. I can’t believe I just did that.”
Sawyer stared at me for a second, ice cream smudged over his mouth and his nose. “I … kind of can’t believe you did, either,” he said, but he was laughing. When he put his free hand on the back of my skull and kissed me, I tasted chocolate and rainbow sprinkles. I didn’t even close my eyes.
He pulled back a little bit. “Is it okay that I just did that?” he asked, after a second or two.
I nodded dumbly.
“Did you like it as much as I did?”
I nodded again.
“Are you ever going to talk to me again in your whole life?”
I nodded. “I mean,” I said, recovering slightly, thoughts skittering like moths at the panicky edges of my brain. “Yes.”
Sawyer grinned. “Okay,” he said. He tossed the rest of his ice cream into a nearby trash can and cupped both of his hands around my face. “Good.”
He was still kissing me when his cell phone rang inside his jeans a minute later, and I made to pull away but his grip tightened, a gentle fist in my hair. “Ignore it. Ignore it,” he muttered, and I did for a minute, but then mine started ringing, too.
“Sawyer,” I said, reaching for my purse even as the rest of me was still otherwise engaged. “Sawyer, it’s my house. I have to pick it up. Hello?” I said, while—oh God, oh hell, we were in the middle of a parking lot and my dad was on the phone—Sawyer moved his mouth down to my neck. “Hi. What’s up?”
“Reena,” my father said, and there was a sound in his voice I’d never heard before, panic and anger. “Oh, thank God. Where in the hell are you?”
I jumped off the hood of that Jeep so fast that I just about took Sawyer’s head off, squeezing my eyes shut as I tried to figure out what to say: I’d lied to my father for the first time in my entire life and I was caught. How was that even possible?
I was still trying to come up with an answer when he pushed on: “Are you with Allie?” he demanded.
I curled my free hand into a fist, felt my nails dig into my palm. Sawyer was watching me carefully. I fumbled around for something plausible, finally had to settle for the truth. “No,” I admitted. “No, I’m not.”
“Thank God,” he said again, then, to whomever was in the room with him, Soledad or Cade: “She’s okay. I’ve got her.”
“What?” I said sharply. Suddenly I was very, very afraid. “What’s going on?”
“Reena,” he said, and I knew I’d never forget this as long as I lived, the neon lights of the ice cream place in the near distance, the curious expression on Sawyer LeGrande’s pretty face, and the tiny shards of glass embedded in the asphalt, like something fragile and bright had only just exploded there. “I have to tell you something bad.”