He took another draw on the cigarette. I watched and then took a step closer. There was something I had been meaning to say to him.
“At the party, with Stanton, you looked out for us. Thank you for that.”
He shrugged. “Yeah, well. I like you.”
I opened my mouth to speak and nothing came out.
“Not like that. Don’t worry. I know you’d rather have the strong, silent type.”
“How do you know that?”
“Everyone knows it.”
That was the same thing Cas had said at Homecoming. I guess I was no sphinx.
“Your family took in your cousin,” Emir said after a moment. “And I always see you with him.” A pause. “Our family here took in my mom and my sisters and me when we first came. It’s nice when people do the hard thing.”
“It’s not hard.”
“It’s not easy, either.”
“Why did you leave home?” I asked.
“It’s complicated.”
I nodded. I didn’t think he was going to go on, but after a long pause, he threw his head back and looked at the sky and then said, “We had this big old tree outside our house. The kind with a rope swing. Older than the house. Older than my parents.”
When he didn’t continue, I prompted, “Yeah?”
“Yeah. They burned it down.”
He took another draw and exhaled. “And we knew it wasn’t safe anymore to be there. It was like … a turning point or some shit. We had to go.” He smiled a little, up at the stars. “It’s funny, it was kind of pretty in a fucked-up way, burning like that.”
He met my gaze for a moment and I saw it. Just for an instant, it was the look I had searched his face for before—the indication of past tragedy. I recognized it now, and in that instant, I was grateful to be boring Devon Tennyson, extraordinary in how unextraordinary my life had been.
We stood in silence while Emir finished his cigarette. He crushed the butt in the concrete ashtray, gave me a nod, and walked off into the darkness.
38
After Jordan and Cas and Lindsay left, after the conversation with Emir, after my parents told me for the fifth time to go home and get some sleep, Ezra and I went downstairs, ostensibly so he could give me a ride home.
But I didn’t want to go, and Ezra knew it, so we just hovered by his car. He fumbled with his keys, and I said something mindless about the weather, to which he very kindly replied with something equally mindless.
Only after a few more similar back-and-forths did he look at me and say, “I’m glad Foster’s okay.”
“Me, too.”
A pause. “I … I’m sorry,” he said. “I told you I would look out for him and I should’ve … that shouldn’t have happened. He shouldn’t have gotten hurt.”
“Ezra, what would you have done to stop it? Acted as Foster’s human shield?”
“I told you I would look out for him.”
Like a brother would. “So … about that letter—”
“Did you—so you read it?”
“Yeah. You didn’t have to do that.”
“I did.”
“But not like that. Now you’re going to have Rachel Woodson trying to buy your life rights so she can write a Lifetime movie.”
“He’s Kind of a Dickhead: The Ezra Lynley Story?”
“You’re not,” I said. “But you could’ve just told me. I would’ve…” I shook my head. “You could’ve told me.”
“I know. I was scared.”
“Why?”
“Because…” A pause. “Because I’m ashamed.”
“Of what?”
He didn’t answer at first. Just passed his keys from one hand to the other for a moment and then, finally, said, “It’s like Foster’s mom. He doesn’t go around talking about her and it’s kind of for the same reason, I think. They’re part of who we are. We’re like a reflection of them. So what they did is like … some extension of us.”
“It’s not … it’s not like your dad did it on purpose, right?”