But Will isn’t listening. Before I can stop him, he’s out of the car, dashing around to my side, an athletic jacket held over his head. He opens my door and pulls me out under his warm, heavy boy arm, under the umbrella of his coat, and we run to The House, me squealing the whole way.
Once we’re shrouded by the canopy of our front stoop, Will looks down at me with a smirk, his eyes sparkling as he shakes the wetness out of his hair. “This was fun,” he says, his voice is low. Then he pulls the jacket down from his arms and wraps it snugly around my shoulders. “Looking forward to tomorrow night. And thanks again for today. Stay dry.” And just like that he’s gone, dashing back out to the car through the rain, my knight in shining armor. But suddenly, he stops.
“Hey, Annabelle!” he calls out, squinting through the rain.
“Yeah?” I yell back.
“You never actually answered my question.” He grins, even though he’s soaked.
I start giggling. I can’t help it. “Yes, Will Hale, I will go out with you!” I exclaim, and when he does a fist pump, I laugh harder.
When I walk through the kitchen, I know where Napoleon is by the low growl that comes out from below the kitchen table. Sometimes my mom gives him the dry end of a loaf of French bread, and he takes it under there like a tiny wolf in his cave. We call them Bread Bones.
“Good afternoon to you, too,” I mutter.
My mother is at the center island with Jae, drinking tea and reviewing some blueprints.
“Is it my imagination or did you get picked up by one cute guy today and returned by another?” she asks. But I just wrap Will’s jacket around my shoulders and head upstairs with a smile.
5
What’s Breaking Your Heart Tonight?
MY DAD taught me a long time ago that a run would calm me down. He walked into my room one Saturday afternoon and found me rearranging my bookshelf, stacks and stacks surrounding me like building blocks.
“Didn’t you just do this a month ago?” he asked.
I paused. “That was by genre,” I explained. “This time it’s by color.”
“Come with me,” he said, turning around and walking back out my bedroom door. “But first put on gym clothes.”
My dad gets it because he’s that way, too. A little intense. But you’d never know, because every morning he gets up and does something. Maybe it’s a run; maybe it’s surfing. But he works it all out so he can get down to what matters. And yeah, maybe he doesn’t have a lot on his schedule, so to speak, but he’s always in a good mood, and he’s always there to listen. Or he was. Who knows where he will be after they separate?
Now I run almost every day in the late afternoon or evening, just before dusk. When I run, I can’t think about the homework I still have to do or the articles I have to finish for the school paper, because there’s no way I could possibly do them at this moment, two miles away on the beach in Santa Monica, dodging people on bikes and dogs of all sizes on leashes. And it’s exactly when I get to that place, when I start making the jog from Main Street down to the Boardwalk, the ocean waiting up ahead, palm tree silhouettes cutting into the sky, that’s when I really get going. When I feel like a bird that’s broken through the net of its sanctuary. That’s when I really fly.
Today when my feet hit the pavement, I’m already bouncing with energy. No thanks to the ground, which is as dry and cracked as ever, and once again makes me consider the strangeness of that temporary downpour with Will. But to be honest, I don’t really care. Will, with his sweet smell and his chivalry, his heavy arm wrapped around me as he hustled me to my door. Will, grinning at me through the rain.
It’s not that I have never had a boyfriend in an official capacity. In the fifth grade, Nisha decided we all needed one. Just like that, like we all needed the newest pair of jeans. We talked about it casually at a sleepover, the idea of boyfriends, and then she just called me up one day and was all, “So what do you think of Teddy Shipman?” And I was like, “He’s okay,” and she goes, “Well, I called him and asked him if he wanted to go out with you, and he said cool, so I guess it’s a thing!” “I guess,” I remember mumbling, kind of stunned. The logistics of the arrangement were starting to overwhelm me. What would this mean, exactly? How much of my time would now belong to Teddy? What color should he be in my calendar?
Turns out very little. Turns out Nisha, at the tender age of eleven, knew more about life than any of us did. We didn’t have to hang out with boyfriends so much as we had to be able to say we had them. There was an awkward exchange of valentines, a couple group hangs, and that was really all the effort I had to put in. I ended it a few months later when Teddy told someone he wanted to kiss me. I wrote him a polite note saying I felt we were moving too fast. I just wasn’t prepared for the intimacy. But it didn’t matter; our places were solidified as the coolest girls in the grade from there on out.
What I mean is, I’ve never had a boyfriend in the practical sense. Nobody saving me a spot in the library, or holding my hand during assembly, or leaving a note on the whiteboard at school before my next class. Having a boyfriend requires so much time. There is so much “being chill” that needs to be done. So much “go with the flow” to be faked. And the games! You are supposed to like someone but not really say so . . . You are supposed to be able to tell when someone wants to kiss you when it hasn’t been discussed. There is too much that isn’t said. I don’t really understand a lot of guys, and they don’t seem to understand me. Plus, boys my age don’t make advanced plans. They text What’s up? or What are you doing now? and you are expected to be there. Can you imagine what that would do to my schedule?
And so, for this very reason, we can all just imagine what Will “I don’t like ambiguity” Hale and his invitation to see Paper Girl are doing to my insides.