“No,” I say without hesitating. The word comes out forcefully, echoing around the empty kitchen. I shake my head and say it again: “No.”
Sawyer nods slowly, like he isn’t quite sure whether to believe me. “Okay.”
“We’re not,” I say, blushing. “Really.”
“Okay,” he says again.
“We’re just friends. Or at least we were.”
He folds his arms across his chest, waiting for me to continue.
“This lottery thing has made everything kind of weird,” I admit. “We’ve always been…close. And then this huge thing happened, and now everything is different.”
“And it feels like you’re losing him.”
I go still. “I didn’t say that.”
“Yeah,” he says. “You sort of did.”
When I turn to look at him he holds my gaze, and it should be weird, this moment between us, but for some reason it’s not.
“Do you want to go out with me sometime?” he asks.
“Like, for cocoa?”
“Like, for dinner.”
“Like, a date?”
He grins. “Exactly like a date.”
“How about tomorrow?” I say, and I realize I’m smiling too.
When I stagger into the house the next afternoon, Uncle Jake—who is working from home today, his computer balanced on his lap and his feet up on the coffee table—looks over.
“What in the world…?” he says as I cross through the living room and toward the basement stairs, lugging a huge bundle of cardboard. I’m breathing hard and sweating. It’s already been an enormous hassle to get this from the store to the bus and now home, and I’m so aggravated at having to do it all by myself that I can hardly see straight.
Uncle Jake jumps up from the couch and jogs over, slipping on the wooden floors in his socked feet. “What are you doing?” he says, taking the cardboard from me and leaning it against the wall. “I would’ve helped you with this.”
It didn’t even occur to me to ask him. It’s not that he isn’t helpful when it comes to these sorts of things. Over the years, he’s assisted in the making of too many macaroni necklaces to count, continued to dye Easter eggs with us even after the great purple stain incident, and learned how to braid strings into bracelets when it was all the rage among sixth-grade girls and nobody else would make them with me.
But I was so focused on the fact that I was going to have to build this boat without Teddy—so bitter about it—that I didn’t even think to mention it. And now the word pops into my head again, entirely unbidden:island.
“It’s for physics,” I explain, leaning against the wall alongside the slabs of cardboard. I kick off my sneakers, still panting. “We have to build a boat.”
Uncle Jake raises his eyebrows. “Weas in…you and me?”
“Weas in me and Teddy.”
“Ah,” he says, rubbing at his chin. “So…weas in you and me.”
I start to shake my head, to tell him I’m fine on my own, because that’s what I always do. But then I stop myself, thinking:peninsula.Thinking:at least that.
He eyes the cardboard, then peeks inside the plastic bag I’ve set down beside it, which is filled with rolls of tape. “This is it? All you can use? Seems less than ideal.”
“Well, I wouldn’t want to have to cross the ocean with it,” I tell him, “but hopefully it’ll be enough to get us to the other side of the pool.”
“You and Teddy both? In a cardboard boat?” He laughs. “I’d pay to see that.”
