“Hi,” she said.
“Just drove over from the senior parking lot,” he said.
“Juniors are allowed to park there?”
“Yeah, well, I know a guy.” He brushed his thumb to his chin and looked away, looked back at her and grinned. “But you’re not asking the right questions, Madison.” He jiggled the keys in the air in front of her, like a pet owner trying to coax a trick from a distracted puppy.
“Where, you should be asking, did these come from? Come outside.”
He stood and left without looking back to see if she’d followed, leaving her to bundle her things together, endure an excruciating moment of uncertainty about whether or not to bring her unrequested Frappuccino. She left it. When she emerged onto the Avenue, he was waiting, shielding his face from the sun with one hand.
“Anytime, I don’t mind waiting out here,” he said. Then he clicked something on his key chain and a car behind him beeped its reply.
“You got your license,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Well. Congratulations? Enjoy.”
“Enjoy . . . what? Your jealousy?” He tipped his head to one side like he was trying to listen to something she couldn’t hear and she felt that gesture settle in her chest, heavy at first but then settling down like a light dust over everything, like she wouldn’t be able to have a single thought anymore that wouldn’t carry with it a trace of that gesture.
“So here’s the thing,” he said. “I know you and Amanda are usually, like, attached at the hip after school, but I saw her drive off, and I wonder if I can snag you today.”
“Schedule’s wide open,” she said. She liked that reply. It was encouraging but not desperate, which had begun to feel like an impossible note to strike.
“I just wanna drive,” he said. “I just wanna cruise around, you know?”
“Yes. Yeah. Sounds good.”
“It’s the black Mercedes over there. Usually, you’d find it in spot 220. If you’re ever looking for it.”
He drove up into Cos Cob, the windows down. He seemed focused on driving, his hands at the ten and the two, his shoulders squared. She didn’t know how much to talk. He put her in charge of the radio and she hunched awkwardly forward in her seat, her finger pressed to the dial, and couldn’t decide on a station.
“Enough, enough,” he said finally. “When you start driving you’ll see how annoying that is, the music constantly changing.” She froze in her seat, still holding her body awkwardly forward, afraid to move and resettle. But then he started humming along to “Fortunate Son” and she realized the word annoying had meant nothing at all.
“My dad loves these guys,” he said, and she swallowed, caught herself before the knee-jerk response of, “Mine too.”
It had rained that afternoon, perhaps the last of the late-summer sudden flashes of rain, and everything was unbearably green. The houses were all tucked up behind the trees, only their wrought-iron gates visible from the road, which curved and weaved its way up farther and farther from the train line down below.
Chip was a smooth driver, braking into the curves, accelerating out of them—he’d explained to her that this was one of the things you learned before you took the test—and she felt almost soothed, as though she could fall asleep in the seat beside him and he’d just keep driving her around. Her mother had once told her that she’d had a rough spell, as a baby, couldn’t sleep through the night, and had only quieted down when Isabel walked her down Park Avenue to Grand Central, then back up almost to Seventy-Second Street, the wide avenue silent, nothing but them and the flowers planted in the middle of the street and the doormen winking at them from beneath forest green awnings.
Probably no one’s going to teach me to drive this year, she thought. He always said he would, but now he won’t have time.
She observed the idea as it visited her, passed her by. It had been almost three weeks, and he still hadn’t come home.
“You haven’t come to any more games,” Chip said finally. Every part of her body felt lighter than it should be in an unpleasant way, like she hadn’t eaten for days, but it also felt as though she’d been grinding her teeth for two weeks and had only just realized she’d stopped.
She cupped her hand around her seat belt and ran it back and forth. She wanted to hold Chip’s hand, but he was driving, and besides that would be a bizarre thing to do down here in the real, non-dreaming world.
“I know,” she said, “I’ve wanted to. I’ve been busy, after school.”
He managed to look toward her without taking his eyes from the road, just inclining his head in her direction, really.
“Can’t, or would rather not?”
She peered up at the leaves above her window, sunlight streaming through them and creating patterns like lace on her skin. Something about her bare legs in the seat, so close to him, felt too exposed. It was so much easier than it usually would have been for him to touch the skin on her upper thighs.
“I’ve been busy,” she repeated.
“Look,” he said, “Wyatt and those guys are assholes. I don’t know if you know this, but people have spent way more time talking about what an asshole Wyatt is than about, you know, any other part of it.”
“I don’t care about those guys,” she said, and it was only hearing this sentence out loud that made her realize it was true. Her father was her father. As soon as he came home, as soon as his presence reoriented the house. His thunderclap hands on her shoulders while she ate breakfast, surprising her, kneading the muscles between her neck and spine. That was her father. The men who worked for him called him Silverback, and to his face, so you knew it was admiring and not bitter or sniping. What did she care what Wyatt Welsh, of all the voice-cracking boys she knew, said about him? This was what they’d been for, all the little pieces of her father’s advice. He’d given them to her like poker chips, trusting her to know when it was smart to cash them in.
“I don’t care what Wyatt says, really.”
“I know you don’t,” Chip said. “I know you’re, you know. You don’t seem like you give a shit, honestly. But just in case he’s been bothering you.”
Every few seconds Chip leaned forward to gaze up through the windshield, some unconscious part of him expecting things to come flying down at them through the trees, danger without warning.
She wanted to reply but she didn’t know how petty she could be in front of Chip, how much of his sense of who she was relied on the fact that she was always terrified and mute in his presence.
“Actually, he’s been texting me. To apologize. The texts are so weird, it’s so obvious that Suzanne types them out for him. Like, so eager for me not to hold a grudge. It’s actually sort of . . . I don’t know. Funny? Pathetic? Something.”