“I’ve seen him at the bakery,” my father continued, opening his Pocono Record slowly, as if he actually had no idea that he was torturing me. “And he’s always been very polite.”
“Yeah,” I said, crossing and uncrossing my legs, wondering why it felt like my face was on fire. Henry and I were barely friends again, let alone… anything else my father, in his oh-so-knowledgeable voice, might have been implying. “Dad, want me to bring you your laptop?”
“Sure,” he said, turning to the crossword, and I let out a silent breath of relief that he was going to drop the subject. I stood to head into the house so my father could work on his mystery project. “You know,” he said, when I had my hand on the doorknob. I turned back to him, and saw that my father was still smiling. “The window in the hallway upstairs faces out toward the dock.”
I gripped the handle harder. “Does it?” I asked. I was trying to keep my voice light, even though, technically, I hadn’t done anything wrong. I didn’t think that it was that bad, after all, that I’d snuck out of the house at three a.m. if the only place I’d gone was the backyard.
“Mmm,” my father said, apparently still engrossed in the paper. After a moment, though, he looked up and smiled at me. “Like I said,” he said, “he seems like a nice boy.”
I felt my cheeks flame again. “Laptop,” I said, in my briskest voice, as I headed inside to the sound of my dad chuckling. But even after I’d retrieved his laptop from where it had been charging on the couch, I found that I couldn’t quite stop smiling.
chapter twenty-eight
“YOU’LL BE FINE,” LUCY SAID, REASSURINGLY. SHE TURNED TO Elliot, who was shuffling his ever-present deck of cards and, when he didn’t agree, whacked him hard on the arm. “Won’t she?”
“Ow!” Elliot yelped. “I mean… um, yeah. Totally. You’ll do great. Way better than last time. Which I’m not… supposed to mention,” he said, noticing that Lucy was giving him a death glare. He gave me a big smile and a thumbs-up, and I felt my stomach clench. Movies Under the Stars had arrived again, and neither of my coworkers were letting me out of doing the introduction. Lucy had just read the self-help book of a former reality TV star, and this woman was apparently big on “confronting your demons.” I’d seen some of this woman’s show, and it appeared that she was big on confronting everything, but this argument made no headway with Lucy. And once Lucy took a stand with something, I knew Elliot would never disagree with her. I had, however, gotten him to promise to rescue me if I crashed and burned again.
The days leading up to the movie had passed in a blur of what had become the normal routine—breakfast and questions with my father, work with Lucy and Elliot, nights eating dinner with my family on the screened-in porch. But now thrown into the mix was Henry. It turned out that we reported to our respective jobs at the same time, and the day after our dock talk, he’d caught up with me as I was attempting to simultaneously bike and drink coffee from my to-go mug. Though we hadn’t talked much on the ride (I was still getting into biking shape, and found that I needed my breath for other things, like getting to the top of Devil’s Dip) it had been nicely companionable. The next morning, I’d caught up with him, and we’d been biking into work together ever since. We hadn’t had any more long talks on the dock, though I found myself checking it several times before I went to bed every night—just to make sure nobody was out there. And even though I knew she’d be interested, I hadn’t told Lucy about it. For one thing, he had a girlfriend. And I didn’t want it getting back to him that I had any interest in him again. Which I wasn’t even positive that I did, so there was no point in pursuing it.
There was also the fact that every time I found myself staring into space at work, and starting to think about Henry, something inside my head would snap to attention and remind me of what really mattered. What was happening with my dad was what was really important, and I shouldn’t let myself forget that, even if my father had developed the annoying habit of asking me far too many pointed questions about Henry, always with a knowing smile. But none of that seemed as pressing at the moment as the fact that I was possibly about to humiliate myself in front of fifty people for the second time.
“You know,” Elliot said with fake nonchalance, “if we had gone with one of my movies, I’d have no trouble talking about it. We should think about that for the next one.”
“No,” Lucy and I said in unison. She turned to me as Elliot started his shuffle again, muttering about people with no cinematic taste. “You’ll be fine,” she said, giving me an encouraging smile. “And if you’re not, I’ll start doing cartwheels in front of you, okay?”
I couldn’t help laughing at that. “Luce, you’re wearing a skirt.”