Trade Me (Cyclone #1)

“Does anyone know?”


“You.”

There are now only two weeks until the launch. Two weeks and then I walk away. I’m not supposed to care about him.

Not caring, not worrying—these are not things I can do on command. And I’ve been lying to myself, pretending that it will be bearable to watch him walk away. No. Here’s one thing that will hurt more: knowing that I had the chance to make him feel a little better, and I chose not to.

“I know.” He swallows. “It’s stupid. It’s so fucking stupid, I’m mad at myself. I know it’s stupid. I know I’m stupid. How hard is it to fucking eat more?” His voice is shaking. “But I don’t. I can’t. And when I try, when I make myself—I end up going out for a run.”

“You need to talk to someone about this,” I say.

“I should be able to fix this myself. Dad thinks I can run a company. I can’t even fucking control myself.”

“Blake. It’s okay.”

He shakes his head. “No. It’s not. You know what? That day in class—that day you got so mad at me? Afterward, you said you didn’t have time for my bullshit apology. And I was so fucking jealous. I wanted to not have time for my bullshit, either.”

“Hey.” I reach over and take his hand.

“You were right,” he says shakily. “I thought your life would be magic. Like it would somehow make this better. That if I just had what you had, I wouldn’t…do this. But we’ve never traded, not really. None of this has done a damned thing. It’s not my life that’s fucked up. It’s me.”

I don’t want to care. I don’t want to hurt because he hurts. But here I am, caring anyway, and it scares me. It scares me, but still, I squeeze his hand. He glances down, as if realizing for the first time that I’m touching him. That our fingers are intertwined. That the current of electricity is arcing between us uninterrupted.

And then he lifts his head and truly looks at me. There’s a raw hunger in him, something bigger than what he’s just admitted.

There’s a lot of truth in what my mother told me. I don’t let myself have fun. I pull away from people who could be my friends. I refuse to let people help me. And right now, I realize that Blake and I have a lot in common—a lot more than either of us can admit.

“Do you remember when you told me that you’d bought something ridiculously luxurious, and it was a mango?” he asks. “I was so fucking jealous of you. I wished that I could feel what that was like. I wanted to want something like that. I wanted to have that so badly.”

I don’t have answers to any of his problems. I don’t even have solutions to mine. But this one thing? This, I can handle. “Come on,” I say. “Let’s get some mangoes.”

We pull off the freeway a few miles later and follow the computer’s directions to a little grocery store. Fifteen minutes later, we’re sitting in a rest stop, cutting our mangoes to bits.

“Here,” I tell him. “Trade me. Pretend you’re me. Let me tell you what it was like when I had that mango.”

He shuts his eyes obligingly.

“I didn’t have a lot of money,” I tell him. “And that meant one thing and one thing only—fried rice.”

He smiles despite himself. “Kind of a stereotype, don’t you think?”

“Whose stereotype? Rice is peasant food for more than half the world. It’s easy. It’s cheap. You can dress it up with a lot of other things. A little bit of onion, a bag of frozen carrots and peas. A carton of eggs. With enough rice, that can last you basically forever. It does for some people.”

“It actually sounds good.”

“If you have a decent underlying spice cabinet, you can break up the monotony a little. Fried rice with soy sauce one day. Spicy rice the next. And then curry rice. You can fool your tongue indefinitely. You can’t fool your body. You start craving.”

He’s sitting on the picnic table, his eyes shut.

“For me, the thing I start craving first is greens. Lettuce. Pea shoots. Anything that isn’t coming out of a bag of frozen veggies. And fruit. If you have an extra dollar or two, you buy apples and eat them in quarters, dividing them throughout the day.”

I slide next to him on the table. The sun is warm around us.

“But you get sick of apples, too, pretty soon. And so that’s where I want you to imagine yourself: sick to death of fried rice. No respite. No letting up. And then suddenly, one day, someone hands you a debit card and says, ‘Hey. Here’s fifteen thousand dollars.’ No, I’m not going to buy a stupid purse. I’m going to buy this.”

I hold up a piece of mango to his lips. He opens his mouth and the fruit slides in. His lips close on my fingers like a kiss, and I can’t bring myself to draw away. He’s warmer than the sun, and I feel myself getting pulled in, closer and closer.

“Oh, God.” He doesn’t open his eyes. “That’s so good.”