“Oh, I literally live across the street.” I point toward Laye Ave. “On the cul-de-sac.”
Yes! I want to say. Let me get in your surrey with a fringe on top, your rowboat in the depths of the Paris opera house. (Pssst: ten points to you, Gav, if you can guess which shows I’m talking about.) But I can’t get in that car. And I really don’t want to explain why. See, my mom has this rule … I’m so tired of having to narrate the crazy that is my home life.
You raise one eyebrow. I didn’t know that real people knew how to do that. “Good to know,” you say. “Where you live, I mean.”
Butterflies! In my stomach!
“Don’t use that knowledge for nefarious purposes,” I say.
“I make no promises.” You grin. “You know, I could really go for a Pepsi Freeze right now.” You point to me and then to the passenger seat.
Me. Freaking. Too. Are you asking me out? What is happening?
I take a breath and give you the rundown, which is: “So, I don’t know if, like, Kyle or Nat or anyone has told you about my weirdo family. One of my mom’s million rules is that I’m not allowed to drive with people she doesn’t know.”
“Even to the gas station up the street?” you ask.
“Even there.”
“Sucks. And you don’t have a license?” you ask.
“No,” I say. “Parentals don’t want to pay for insurance, blah blah blah.”
“Lame.”
“Pretty much, yeah. But it’s … you know, whatever, it’s cool.”
“Don’t go anywhere,” you say. “Promise?”
“Um. Okay?”
You turn back into the school parking lot, park, then walk over to me. I like watching you do this, the way your shirt rides up a little so I can see the skin at your waist. The cool you exude with your Ray-Ban Wayfarers and skinny jeans.
“Gavin, you really don’t need to walk me home,” I say when you get to me.
“I’m not.” You grab my trig book out of my hand. Why, hello, Gilbert Blythe. “How long do you think it will take us to walk to the Pepsi Freezes?”
“Gavin…” I shake my head. “Seriously—”
“Half an hour there, half an hour back?”
Twenty-six minutes, not like I know or anything. I nod.
“But I can’t just—I need permission? And my mom, she’s … Maybe I shouldn’t.”
“I’m super good with parents.” You grab my hand and pull me toward my house. So. Freaking. Smooth.
You’re holding my hand, you are HOLDING MY HAND.
There isn’t much time to talk on the way, but you don’t let go of my hand and I’m worried mine is sweaty but I try not to think about it because that will make it more sweaty and then if you realize it’s sweaty—hell. I am in hell. But, like, with a view of heaven.
I’m not religious but I literally pray to whatever is out there that my mom isn’t screaming at Sam or fighting with The Giant when we get to the house—how mortifying would that be?
When we walk up to my front porch, though, it’s unexpectedly quiet. Our house is never quiet. I unlock the door and you hover in the hallway, so close I can feel the heat of you. I can’t enjoy being this close, though—I’m about to break out in hives because if I have a friend—especially a friend of the male species—inside the house without anyone else being home, I will be dead. Like, so dead. My mom can’t handle people being inside unless it’s just been cleaned.
“Any embarrassing baby pictures for me to look at?” you ask. Wow, do I love that gravelly drawl of yours.
“Sorry,” I say, grabbing my trig book out of your hands. “We have a no-baby-pictures policy here.”
“Somehow I think you’re lying.”
I roll my eyes, open my bedroom door, and throw my backpack and book inside.
“Your house smells like lemons.”
“Pine Sol Lemon Fresh, to be exact,” I say. Other people’s houses smell like life: food and maybe candles and dog.
“No pets?” you ask.
I laugh. “My mom would probably have an aneurysm if there was an animal in the house.” I seriously can’t imagine what she’d do if there was dog hair in here. “I guess we can go.”
This is an adventure I might pay for later, but it’ll be worth it. On our way out, I see a note on the dining room table for me in my mom’s looping handwriting.
Went to Costco. The laundry needs to be folded and the front and back porch swept. Also, you forgot to clean the baseboards in the dining room last Friday, so that needs to be done before we get home. Put the roast in the oven and make a salad.
The effing baseboards. Mom’s invisible dirt and microscope eyes. There’s no reasoning with her, either. You just scrub until she can’t see it anymore.
“Is this for real?” you ask, reading over my shoulder. You’re so close I can smell your cologne, a woodsy, spicy smell.
“Yeah.” I hate it when people find out about my family for the first time.
I do some time math in my head. No Costco trip is shorter than an hour and the long list of chores suggests Mom’s planning on being gone awhile, maybe running other errands, too. That should buy me at least another twenty minutes, maybe more. I can always say rehearsal went long if she and The Giant get back home before I do. Which isn’t technically lying because rehearsal went five minutes longer than it was supposed to.
Good enough.
I push you out the door. “We have to power walk.”
“I was in the Guinness Book of World Records for power walking,” you say.
In my fifty-seven minutes with you that evening, I learn three things:
1. You’re the only other person I know who looks up at the sky and imagines you’re somewhere else.
2. We both cried at the end of Hamilton.
3. You’ve always wanted to get to know me but were too intimidated.
“Intimidated?” I say. “By what—my efficient stage management skills?”
You shrug. “You’ve just got this thing.…” You start in with some Billy Joel: “She’s got a way about her, I don’t know what it is, but I know that I can’t live without her…”
I love being around a boy who sings all the time. And sings old-school songs only our mothers know.
It’s a perfect first date, even though I know it’s not actually a date. I walk around the house in a daze and when I get an apple to snack on, I catch myself twisting its stem, playing that game from when I was a little girl. You twist the stem around and each rotation is a letter of the alphabet. The letter corresponds to a boy. A-Andrew, B-Brian, etc.
The stem breaks off at G.
SEVEN
I stumble out of the bathroom and crawl into my bed, weak. I think I’m finally done throwing up. I’m at the dry-heaving stage, which is pretty much as low as you can go.