“The bird doesn’t even deserve a name?”
“I think maybe she does,” says Meredith; she’s rolled over in her chair.
Dash shakes his head. “It’s like Mr. Cat.”
At one point long ago, Dash and Lexie had a cat called Mr. Cat.
“What the hell does that mean?” Bryan asks, looking lost.
“That’s a strange name for a cat,” I say, as if I’ve never heard it.
Dash runs a hand back through his hair, pressing his lips together for a moment before he says, “Sometimes people go for simple names.” He looks around the room. “In my experience with test groups, we’ve found the audience responds better to more general character names.”
“I’ve heard that before,” says Ashley, Dash’s fellow animator.
“I guess so,” I say. “I’m not sold yet, though.”
“We’ll think on it,” Bryan says, winking at me.
“We’re going to go over some software stuff,” Dash says, waving Adam and Ashley to his desk.
Carrie, Bryan, Meredith, and I spend the next hour discussing story. It’s a fun enough discussion, meaning there is no excuse for how thoroughly Dash holds my attention. I note everything he does: finishing his meeting, giving Adam and Ashley marching orders, putting on headphones, checking his phone, checking his phone again, rubbing his hand back through his stupid pretty hair, touching his glasses. He’s a few feet away from me, to my right. In my periphery, I notice him take out a pack of gum and catch myself waiting to hear the punch of gum through foil. Instead I hear the whisper of a wrapper. Trident. Sweet mint.
Is he really still chewing that stuff?
I bite down on my bottom lip, my mind whirling. I’ve told myself so many times that he’s so different than he was; that over time, people change so much sometimes you can’t recognize them even if you’re in a small studio making a film with them.
But here he is with his fucking Trident Sweet Mint gum. I can even smell it now.
I toss a glance over my shoulder. When Dash’s eyes meet mine, I get up.
Bathroom break. I’ve earned one.
I step back out and almost run right into him. His hand wraps around my elbow loosely.
“Sorry, Am.”
I jerk my arm away. “Amelia.”
“Right.” His eyes widen slightly as he stuffs his hands into his pockets.
“What are you doing out here? Stalking me?”
He nods at something behind me.
“What?”
I turn around and realize: it’s a unisex bathroom.
Perfect.
“Sorry.” I stalk past him, moving fast as hell, because seriously, I’m embarrassed. For the thousandth time, I think of going home, just calling the internship coordinator, John Weiss, and telling him I can’t. I can’t with Dash. But then I’ll never know.
Maybe I should just admit…I want to know. How could I not? Dash’s jetting out of town the morning after what happened has been one of my life’s biggest mysteries, right up there with what was my mother thinking and the Titanic. Maybe I don’t even want to know, but I deserve to. Dash deserves to have to tell me.
I think that’s what I really want. On the last day of this internship, I’m going to accost him in the parking lot and demand he tell me. I owe poor, fifteen-year-old Amelia that much. Nineteen-year-old Amelia who ended every relationship just shy of sex and let a lot of nice guys get away. Twenty-two-year-old Amelia who doesn’t trust anybody to be what they seem to be.
By the time he comes back into the studio room, my crew and I have fanned out at our own computers, typing up the ideas we just brainstormed. I’m banging comfortably on the keyboard, feeling in my element.
Fuck Dash.
I don’t want him. Even though he’s close and smells like our old gum, I wouldn’t kiss him if my life depended on it. Even though he’s acting nice and being weird and serious and quiet and not as rude today, I don’t feel sorry for him. He did this. Not me. I would have walked through fire for Dash. He couldn’t even stay in town a couple hours for me. Hell, he couldn’t even call.
I put my own pair of ear buds in my ears and crank up the one Coldplay album I like: A Rush of Blood to the Head. It’s not perfect, but I really like the energy. Quiet fury.
When my computer tells me it’s noon, I decide to get the hell out of dodge and take a liberal lunch break. I stand up, and Dash stands with me. Like a shadow.
“Am—I mean, Amelia.”
I take a slow breath before I turn to face him.
“Hey… Look.” He looks so big and tall, so…grim. “I was hoping you might take a walk with me,” he says, too soft for any ears but mine. I’m sure shock and confusion twist my face; I see them echoed in his features. “To see birds,” he clarifies. “I need to watch them fly.”
“Okayyy…”
I see him double down on his resolve. “There’s a park near here, a block or two. It has a pond. I wanted you to walk with me—if you don’t have other plans.”
“I don’t.” Damn me. “But I don’t think I want to go.” Good save, Amelia. Good job. I see his brow rumple and feel a shot of glee. Take that, asshole.
His face softens. So does his voice. “Please?”
I blink. And of course, I fold.
Nine
Dash
I know she doesn’t really want to do it. That’s the hardest part of this: I can still read her like a book. I know she doesn’t want to work with me, but she can’t pull the plug either. I know she hates me, and she cares, too—despite her own good sense.
She doesn’t understand. Of course she doesn’t. I don’t know what she went through after I left that day—Lex and her stopped being close their senior year—but I know I must have hurt her.
I had no idea I’d see Amelia again until yesterday morning, when Weiss emailed me her CV and I nearly lost my breakfast. For the few weeks prior, he’d mentioned her a few times without saying her name, telling me he had a beautiful, brilliant intern for me.
“Smart as a whip,” he said proudly. “You’re going to love her.”
Truer words have never been spoken.
As we ride the elevator down to the lobby in silence, my mind slips back to the night we shared out on the roof of my house, right before I left for art school in Rhode Island. Her convincing me—or trying to—that I would love it up in Providence. By then, everything had gone to hell, and I thought nothing would ever be good again. But I remember her trying. How much I wanted to kiss her right before I left, and how I hugged her hard instead.
I remember one of my college roommates asking if I was joking when I told him, one night when we were doing shrooms, that I was in love with a fifteen-year-old, my sister’s best friend.
“Quaint,” that smug hipster had said. “And kind of rapey.”