“This is the car you drive?” I ask, surprised.
Max has just pulled up next to me in an old turquoise-colored Volvo wagon. I’m struggling to put the blinking safety light on the back of my bike.
“Sentimental value. C’mon, let me drive you home. It’s not safe at this hour.”
I let him get out and lift Frank with one hand, as though the bike weighs as much as a marshmallow, and place it in his trunk, while I hop in the passenger seat. As he pulls onto Memorial Drive, we are silent, the river speeding by to our right. The car is warm, the seats are plush, and I feel safe in this space with Max.
“In my favorite dream of you and me, all we do is drive. Just open road. Sometimes we’re in the desert, other times swerving around woody mountain ledges, this feeling of total wonder and excitement coursing through me. In the dream I always know we are going somewhere great. But even if we never get there, it doesn’t matter, because I’m with you.” He glances over at me, and I wish we were in that dream now. I wish we would never wake up from it. “Have you had this dream?”
“Of course,” I say. “It’s one of my favorites, too.”
Then, I honestly wonder if we are dreaming. Because Max does something so unexpected that every hair on my body stands on end.
Slowly, so slowly I didn’t notice it at first, he reaches for my hand. And suddenly there are two hands on top of my left knee. Mine and Max’s, intertwined.
I stare at them, like if I look away, they’ll cease to exist. How is it possible that even though only our hands are touching, the feeling of warmth has spread up through my elbow and into my chest? I don’t take my eyes off them until we pull up outside my house, when Max is forced to release his grip so he can put the car in park. We sit in silence for a moment staring straight ahead, the interior of the car crackling with something beyond either of our understanding, my left hand feeling empty and cold.
I hesitate before turning to face him, and notice he has done the same thing. Max is giving me an odd look, his head angled down, his eyes peering up at me warily.
Is he going to kiss me? I consider how dry my lips are for a second, then realize I’m biting them and wonder if he knows what I’m thinking about, and am instantly mortified.
“Alice,” Max says, tilting his head to the side and leaning it against the headrest as he watches me.
“Hmm?” is all I say, because I don’t trust myself to form sentences or, for that matter, even whole words right now. But when does the kiss part happen? I want to ask.
“I don’t think I can do this,” Max says instead. And then all the air gets pushed out of my body.
“I don’t understand . . .” I start to say.
Max shifts his jaw back and forth, as he tries to find the words. “Alice, there is so much about me you don’t know,” he says. “What we had, what we have, is awesome, but it existed in our dreams. What about everything we missed when we were awake?”
“So tell me,” I say, putting a hand on his knee. “I want to hear it all, Max. Whatever I missed. Whatever I need to know.”
“That’s not what I mean.” Max shakes his head, shifting so he’s facing forward again, and letting his right arm rest on the back of my seat. “I mean for so long, you were the only good thing in my life. You were what I looked forward to every single day.”
I lean toward him. “It was the same for me.”
“No, you don’t get it,” Max says, his tone taking on an edge. “I mean the dreams were all I had. I wanted so badly for you to be real, and it just got so hard. Especially on those nights I didn’t dream about you . . . It was like I’d become addicted. To the dreams, the world, and you. One day I woke up and I just knew I had to give it up. Maybe I couldn’t stop the dreams—and I didn’t want them to stop—but I could work to make my reality better. And I did. I worked harder in school, I got more involved in sports, I met . . . new people.” He looks away and a feeling of panic begins to creep slowly into my chest.
“You mean Celeste,” I say, so low it’s practically a whisper.
“I mean Celeste,” Max admits. He pauses like he’s waiting for me to say something, but I don’t know what to say. We’ve switched places now. Max has turned to me, pleading, trying to make me understand, while I stare straight ahead, unable to look anywhere but the changing traffic light up ahead.
“Alice, you were the girl of my dreams,” Max says. “But Celeste was with me in reality. She saw all the hard stuff. She saw a quiet kid who kept to himself, and she opened me up, opened up a whole new world to me. She introduced me to her friends and had me over to her house for family movie night and got me out on the weekends. And somehow I became a fully functioning teenager. I owe her so much for that.”