I shake my head, but I’m still laughing. “You’re so weird.”
“That’s why you love me,” he jokes, which sobers me right up again. My smile falls, and my face gets hot, and I have to concentrate to keep from bringing a hand to my lips, to the place where he kissed me less than an hour ago.
But Teddy doesn’t notice. He just grins, clearly pleased with himself, then disappears back into the piles of trash.
After that we work in silence for a while—him throwing the bags out one at a time and me searching each one for something that might have come from the McAvoys’ apartment—until finally I see it.
“Teddy!” I call, and there’s a quick bang, then his head appears. I look down at an envelope with the name Katherine McAvoy on it, which had been buried beneath a mess of red plastic cups from last night’s party. “I think this might be it.”
“The ticket?” he asks, a little breathless as he vaults back out of the bin, sliding gracelessly down the side and slipping on the snow as he lands.
“No, just the bag,” I say, handing him the envelope. “Should we take it inside?”
He looks torn and I understand. Part of me wants to rip it open right now, to dump it all out and begin the frantic search in spite of the cold and the damp and the wind. But there’s another part of me that understands what might be about to happen—that our whole world could very well be cracked wide open—and I’m not sure I’m quite ready for that yet.
Teddy is breathing into his hands and stamping his feet, waiting for me to tell him what comes next. I meet his eyes from beneath my woolen hat, and when he looks back at me I feel suddenly numb.
“Inside,” I say, and so we go.
We sit across from each other on the kitchen floor. Our cheeks are still pink from being outside and our fingers are still stiff with cold, but we’ve shed our boots and coats and now face each other solemnly, the garbage bag between us: a strange and unlikely arbiter of our fate.
Teddy nods at me. “You look.”
“You stink more,” I point out, nudging the bag in his direction.
He rips open the top, then stands up. “Okay,” he says, dumping the contents onto the floor just as I scramble to my feet, narrowly avoiding the landslide. “Here we go.”
We stare at the pile of dirty napkins and empty bags of chips and soggy slices of pizza, which go skidding onto the recently spotless floor. Teddy is the first to dig in, squatting like a kid playing at the beach as he sifts through the papers. I kick aside a tangle of stained napkins and poke at the pile with my toe.
In the living room the TV is still on, and I can hear the tinny laughter of a sitcom. Outside, the voices of a few kids rise up through the steam-covered windows as they tussle in the snow. But I’m suddenly aware of how quiet it is in the kitchen: just me and Teddy and the hum of the refrigerator, which is still steadfastly guarding my note to him.
Looking again at the pile of trash, I’m struck by the urge to reach out and grab his hand, to stop him before he can find that little slip of paper that will change everything.
Because how many times can one life be split into a before and an after?
It was just a joke,I want to tell him.None of this was supposed to happen.
But I can’t bring myself to squash his excitement. It wouldn’t just be money to Teddy; it would be safety and security, possibility and promise. With one little ticket, his life could become completely unrecognizable.
All because of me.
No matter what he said last night, I know that in some ways Teddy understands me better than Leo ever could. Leo has two loving parents and a house with enough beds for an extra kid. They take vacations and go to nice dinners and buy new clothes without thinking about what they might have to give up because of it. They’re kind and generous, my aunt and uncle, and I’m unbelievably grateful to have landed there.
But it makes Leo different from me. He’s one of the lucky ones. He still lives in a world where the ground beneath his feet is solid.
Teddy and I, on the other hand, have grown up in quicksand. And though we’re there for different reasons, and though we rarely talk about it, something about that simple fact has always bound us together.
So now I watch him search for his ticket to the other side with a terrible, mounting dread, which comes from the darkest, most selfish corners of my heart. But I can’t help it. Already it feels like a kind of loss.
Because just now he looks like he’s about to turn into someone else entirely.
He looks like someone whose ship is about to come in.
He looks like the luckiest person in the world.
Suddenly he goes very still, everything about him frozen for a few beats, before looking up at me. I don’t have to ask. The moment our eyes meet, I know.
For a long time neither of us says anything. Then he picks up the ticket—carefully, gingerly, as if it might break—and sits back, staring at it with wide, disbelieving eyes.
