“You said you didn’t want to waste your time on people who aren’t going to matter,” I said, and he nodded. “But how do you know they’re not going to matter? Unless you give it a shot?”
Warren opened his mouth to reply, but nothing followed. I could practically see his brain working furiously, his future-lawyer logic churning through answers. He took a breath to say something but then let it out. “I don’t know,” he finally said.
I had planned on going in, but I changed my mind as I looked at my brother, sitting in the semidarkness, reading books he wouldn’t even need for months or years. I slid the highlighter back across the table at him and he gave me a brief smile before picking it up. I settled back into my seat as he started slowly going through the book again, highlighting the relevant passages, making sure that he wasn’t missing anything important, as all around us, the rain continued to fall.
chapter thirteen
five summers earlier
IT WASN’T A DATE. THAT WAS WHAT I’D BEEN TELLING MYSELF EVER since Henry had asked me, the day we’d walked our bikes home from the pool with our wet towels slung around our shoulders. We were just seeing a movie together. It was not a big deal.
Which didn’t explain why I was so nervous now, sitting next to him in the dark of the Outpost theater. I was barely paying attention to the movie at all, because I was fully aware of his presence next to me, every time he shifted in the red velvet seat, every time he took a breath. I was more conscious than I ever had been in my life of the movie theater armrest between us—wondering if I should rest my arm on it, wondering if he would, wishing that he would reach across it and take my hand.
The summer without Lucy was turning out to be less painful than I’d expected, mostly because of Henry. We’d spent the first few weeks hanging out, long afternoons together at the beach or the pool, or in the woods, when Henry needed to show me some rock or insect that he promised would “blow my mind.” Whenever it rained, and nobody was willing to take us to the Stroud Mall, or bowling at Pocono Lanes, we would hang out in his treehouse. Sometimes Elliott would come, and we’d play the three-person poker game he’d invented. I didn’t do as well at this as with other card games, because Henry, for whatever reason, always seemed to know when I was bluffing, and wouldn’t even reveal to me what my tell was. Unlike with Lucy, being friends with Henry meant that there wasn’t any makeup-swapping, watching of cheerleading movies, or candy-sharing going on. (Henry, I’d discovered, was ruthless, and claimed not to be able to taste the difference among any of the Skittle colors.) I also no longer had anyone to endlessly pore over the library’s back issues of Seventeen magazine with, studying each page carefully. Despite that, Henry and I had been having fun.
But something had started to change last week, on the lake’s wooden float. It was big enough across that almost ten people could be on it at once (although the lifeguards blew their whistles when more than five people were on it at a time, and always if you tried to push people in). We’d been challenging each other to races that had gotten more and more complicated as the afternoon went on. The last one—swim from the raft to shore, run across the beach, around the concession stand, back across the beach, and swim back to the raft—had left us both exhausted. We’d been lying on the raft, getting our breath back, but now I was pretty sure that Henry had fallen asleep.
To check, I’d been squeezing out the water from the bottom of my braid on him, trying to get him to wake up. And either he really was asleep, or he was really good at pretending, because he wasn’t moving. Since my braid was pretty well wrung out, I dipped my hand into the water and started letting the drops fall from my fingers onto him, but Henry didn’t even flinch. Figuring he must actually be sleeping, and feeling a little bad for tormenting him, I started to brush some of the water droplets off his face. I was brushing one off his forehead, when his eyes opened and he looked at me. We just froze that way for a moment, looking at each other, and I noticed for the first time what nice eyes he had. And suddenly, out of nowhere, I wanted him to kiss me.
The thought was so unexpected that I immediately moved away from him on the raft, and we started talking—both of us a little too loudly—about other things. But something had shifted, and I think we both felt it, because a few days later, walking our bikes home, he’d asked me if I wanted to see a movie, just me and him.