“None of them are speaking to me! Half of them aren’t speaking to each other, and Emerald isn’t speaking to anyone. We have a field trip to an art museum on Thursday, so that should make for a fun bus ride.”
“The girls in your grade don’t like you?” He looks at me with so much sympathy that I want to laugh. “The girls in my grade like you,” he adds quickly, obviously trying to cheer me up. “They always talk about you.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah, they talk about your, um…” He looks down, embarrassed.
“My what?”
“Well…”
“Jesus, what, Julian?”
“Your lips.”
“Oh, I thought we were going in a totally different direction for a minute there.”
“I didn’t even know boys could have pretty lips. You don’t wear lipstick.”
I have no idea how to respond to that. “They’re just crazy,” I find myself repeating.
“Crazier than Charlie?”
He has a point. “Okay, a different sort of crazy. Charlie’s just a pissed-off person, so you get it, but with the girls I have no freakin clue. I mean, we should all be happy today. A bunch of us got our letters, but instead everyone’s just…I don’t even know.”
“Your letters?”
“Yeah. College acceptance letters. It’s not a huge deal. We all knew we were getting in, but still.”
“Which college?”
“Risley. About an hour from here.” He doesn’t look particularly impressed. “Yeah, I know, but I never really wanted to go somewhere far away. My mom’s here, and all my friends are going there, so yeah.”
“Will you live at home?”
“No, the dorms. Part of the college experience, you know? What about you?”
“Me?”
“Do you have any idea where you want to go?”
“I’m not going to college.”
“Why not?”
“My grades aren’t good.”
“Not everyone who goes to college has amazing grades.”
“You do.”
“But do you want to go?”
“Does that really matter?”
His question startles me for a minute. “Does what you want matter? Of course it matters.”
We head back down the stairs and out into the courtyard. It’s cold, so I hop up and down for a minute to warm up while Julian leans against the brick wall.
“Leaving,” he says, “does sound fun. When I was younger I always wanted…”
I wait for him to finish his thought, but the thing with Julian is sometimes you can wait, but sometimes you have to push. “What?”
“Adventure?” He looks wary, like he thinks I’m about to make fun of him.
“Yeah, I can totally see that.” I nod enthusiastically enough to keep him talking.
“I really liked movies and books about people exploring new places. When I was little, I never wondered how I’d do it. I just knew one day I would go everywhere. But when you get older, you realize wanting isn’t the same as having. There are all those places you want to go, but it doesn’t mean you can actually get there.” He takes a breath. “When I was little…in our backyard…”
“Yeah?”
“We had a forest, a bamboo forest, and I’d pretend…I’d pretend to be an explorer.” He grabs his skinny bicep in that broken arm stance. “I miss my house.”
Sometimes Julian says things that are like a sucker punch to the chest. I wish I could buy his house and give it to him, but it would still be sad because it would be empty, so I wish I could change that too—that I had time-travel-world-spinning superpowers and could undo everything.
“We should go there,” I suggest impulsively. It’s something I think I’d want if I were him, but then again maybe it’d be too painful, like walking through a cemetery.
“I do.”
“You do? You know the people who live there now?”
“No. I mean…I don’t go inside or anything.”
And now I’m picturing Julian standing outside the house where he lived with his parents, watching, but never going in, and…Jesus.
“Well, we should go introduce ourselves. I bet they’d let you inside.”
“I don’t know….”
“Is this Julian-shyness, or do you really not want to go in? Because if you really don’t, I’ll shut up.”
He looks at the ground.
“Well?”
“Shyness.”
“So you want to go inside?”
“Yes.”
“Then we will.”
“TURN HERE,” I tell Adam.
“Okay.”
I feel sort of empty and absent as I touch the vent on the dashboard. “This looks like a robot face.”
He chuckles. “I know.”
“Turn right at the stop sign. It’s the third house on the left.”
“The green one?”
“Yes.”
Adam hops out, and slowly I follow.
This is my house, my real house. For the most part it looks the same as it always did, but there are small differences. A mailbox that isn’t ours. A wreath on the door. Red curtains in the window.
We’re halfway down the path that leads to the front door when I halt. “Maybe we should…”
“What?”
“Leave.”
“Do you really want to? We can if you want.”
I don’t know what I want.