I twirled my plastic spoon in my mouth. The salted caramel gelato felt like cool heaven against the roof of my mouth. “Want isn’t the right word. I was born in a hospital on base and went home in a USAF onesie. It’s literally never not been on the table.” I couldn’t ignore the skin-crawling feeling of stepping back hard into my own problems. Ever Lawrence would never have spent her first date talking about the air force. But I also wasn’t going to let Ever take my first date from me.
“And it’s not easy,” I said slowly, each word melting a little bit of the gelato on my tongue. “Making a choice that you know people will hate. My dad and stepmom have never been subtle about the fact that they don’t want me to enlist. They want me to stay closer to home, to do something with less risk, less moving. My dad kind of never forgave my mom for having to live on different bases when they were married, especially since she settled in Colorado right after they divorced. She teaches engineering at the Air Force Academy.”
He paused, midchew. “So she’s pretty invested in you joining up?”
My brain replayed a dozen conversations with my mom, all at the same time, her voice flat with expectation—the ongoing countdown of how long I had left in Sacramento, the weighty comments about Colorado weather. Even the way she shook her head when she saw me, as though she could picture the regulation haircut waiting for me in the future.
But she’d never tried to talk me into following Sid’s footsteps and becoming a pilot. Unlike Grandmother Lawrence, she’d never poked the soft spots of my stomach, pointing out everywhere BMT would firm up. To my mom, the future was an unspecified better place.
“I think she wants us to live near each other,” I said. “I think she’d be pissed if I enlisted but didn’t go to the academy. And I love her, but we haven’t lived together since I was in kindergarten. College isn’t the time to play perfect daughter. I think she’d be disappointed if I tried.”
The wrought iron chair legs screeched against the pavement as Brandon scooted closer to me, his eyes shiny with concern. “Who could be disappointed by you?”
“My mom’s never really had to deal with the fact that I’m as much Beth’s daughter as I am hers. I have this whole other family that she’s never even met. And it’s not just that they’re white—they’re Minnesotans. They’re Midwest white. It’s like the direct opposite of my mom’s family. And that’s part of me now, too.”
“So what? She doesn’t get to complain if she’s the one who left.”
“But she left for the air force. That’s the trick. She didn’t leave because she didn’t want to be my mom. She left because she had to. So she gets to have her cake and eat it too. She gets to expect me to do things because she’s my mom, while also not knowing what my day-to-day life looks like. I don’t know if I’m…” My tongue seized on the word Lawrence; I remembered almost too late that it was the name Brandon thought was mine. “Enough of her daughter to be air force. To uphold the legacy.” I shrugged. “I don’t know if it’s better to be another name in my family history or to not exist in it at all.”
“I think my parents expect me to start a legacy,” he said with a frown. “My sisters didn’t care about academia enough. They were fine going to community college. And then I tested into the Messina and suddenly my parents had the chance to have a kid on the track to Ivy League…” He reached over and stole a spoonful of my gelato. He smiled dreamily as he tasted it. “But I just want to do math for a living. It’s what I’m best at.”
My spoon froze halfway to his cup. “Really?”
“I told you that I was the student counsel treasurer, didn’t I? The administrators picked me because I had the highest math scores of the freshman class.”
“Brag.” I laughed. “So why does it matter where you go to school? Are they doing more math at Harvard than they do at state schools?”
“I guess not. But then my parents throw out words like underachiever and potential—”
“And it feels like you’re not running fast enough to catch up with your destiny,” I finished for him. I thought of Isaiah warning me to talk like a civilian, and Beth burying my USAF Academy packet in the recycle bin. My stomach clenched.
“Yes,” he said with a sigh. “Exactly.”
“So why did you tell Meg and Hari that you didn’t know what you wanted to major in?” I asked, dipping into his cup. I’d never been giddy about sharing before, but this felt oddly personal. An invitation to disregard germs and personal space.
“There’s no math in the Melee,” he said. “It wouldn’t instill a lot of confidence in the team if they knew that the thing I’m actually best at won’t help them move forward in the skirmishes. Advanced math doesn’t work well in a lightning-round scenario. Too many long equations. The Melee rounds would be endless. Or more endless, I guess.” His leg stretched out, his ankle resting against mine. “The other night, when you said that you wanted something that was just yours, I thought about statistics. That’s mine. The probability of things, of life. It’s like religion condensed down into percentages. If you put in everything you know, you get the most likely outcome. It sucks that it’s so boring to other people. There’s nothing sexy about math.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Try saying all of that again, but in French.”
His cheeks went strawberry milkshake pink. “L’autre soir, quand tu as dit que tu vouliez quelque chose qui était à toi—”
I cut him off in a searing, gelato flavored, heart pounding, possibly not cool to do in front of a dining establishment kiss. Deep in the recesses of my Gabaroche genes, there must have been a latent hunger that could only be awakened by French. Who knew?
I heard a sound in the back of my throat that I didn’t consciously conjure, somewhere between a sigh of satiated hunger and a moan of pornographic proportions. I considered being humiliated by this, pulling back to explain that I definitely hadn’t meant to make loud yummy sounds into his mouth. But Brandon’s hands went into my hair and he gave a gentle growl in response, which maybe later I would find silly—once goose bumps weren’t raised on my skin and my brain wasn’t mentally trying to punch me in the face for not staying on campus and rolling around in the pumpkin. Rolling around sounded kind of perfect, and I really doubted that Jilly’s Gelato would allow for anything even vaguely horizontal. Even a severe right angle would probably be grounds to shoo us away.
“Fudge?”
Brandon yanked away from me so hard that I almost lost a filling from the force of the decompression.
“Crumbs?” he squawked.
There was a girl standing alone on the curb, her hands hidden in the pockets of a denim jacket. She couldn’t have been much older than the counselors at camp. Her face was angular, and her thick black hair was shaved close to her scalp on one side and flopped into her eye on the other.
“What the shit, Fudge?” she asked.
My hand curled into a fist and I looked over at Brandon, unsure if I’d just been thrown the strangest racial slur of my life.
“She means me.” His shoulders went concave with a sigh. He raised a hand at the girl. “Hey, Crumbs.”
She raised an eyebrow at him. Of all things, it was her eyebrows I finally recognized. Those black calligraphy strokes as wide as my thumb. She was a shorter, slighter, more feminine version of Brandon.