“Just once,” I say, remembering that long ago day when my parents and I explored it together, my mother as wide-eyed as an incoming freshman. “My mom got into a graduate program there when I was little, so we went to see the campus.”
“Did she like it?”
“The campus? Yeah. It’s beautiful.”
“No, the program.”
I hesitate. This is the part where I’m supposed to tell him my sad story. Where the look in his eyes will change into something more sympathetic, something closer to pity. And I don’t want that to happen. Because I like the way he’s looking at me now. For once, I don’t feel like lugging my tragic history into the conversation. So I don’t.
“She didn’t end up going,” I tell him, simple as that.
“Well, hopefully you will,” he says with a smile. “When do you hear?”
“Tomorrow, actually.”
“Are you nervous?”
“Yes,” I admit. “I’ve wanted this for so long. To go back. To go home. Not that I don’t love it here, because I do. But I miss the way things used to be. When I moved here, it was sort of…abrupt. So it sometimes feels like I left a piece of myself back on the West Coast. And if I was to move back out there…”
“You’d feel whole again,” he says. He doesn’t press for more of my feelings on the subject, like Leo would. And he doesn’t try to crack a joke so that I’ll smile, like Teddy always does. He just sits there, considering this, then nods. “I think I get that. When you move, it’s like your life gets split in two. So you never really feel at home in either place.”
I smile. “Exactly.”
“Plus,” he says, “I really miss the tacos out there.”
“Totally,” I say with a laugh. “They were so much better.”
We sit there swapping stories until it’s time to make the next choice: bowling, a movie, or an arcade. I pick the arcade, and we spend the next hour playing Skee-Ball and fishing for cheap stuffed animals with a useless metal claw.
At one point Sawyer nearly gets one; he snags a plush penguin by the very tip of its floppy wing. As he’s trying to reel it in I jump up and down and hit him on the arm a few times, excited all out of proportion to the prize, and in a fit of enthusiasm the words come flying out of my mouth before I can stop them: “C’mon, Teddy!”
It’s automatic, nothing more than a habit, like accidentally calling your teacherMom.But still I freeze, and so does Sawyer, his hand bobbling on the machine so that the penguin falls out of the claw and back into the soft pile of his stuffed friends.
Our eyes meet briefly, then we both look away again.
“Sorry,” I say. “I didn’t mean—”
He shakes his head, though I can see his blue eyes are full of hurt. “I know.”
“I’m just so used to yelling at him,” I say with a smile, but Sawyer’s face is still serious. “Should we try again?”
“Maybe something different,” he says, scanning the room distractedly. I follow him over to a wall of video games, neither of us speaking, and we spend the next twenty minutes steering Pac-Man and his wife through their pixelated maze. And because it’s easier than talking about it, and because it’s preferable to figuring out what it meant, I find myself being overly flirty with him, as if that might be enough to erase the sound of Teddy’s name. It feels a bit desperate, even to me, but it seems to work, because after a while the awkwardness starts to melt away, and by the time we walk back outside into the chilly March night, things feel normal between us again.
When we finally turn onto my street, Sawyer stops short of our house, pausing a few doors down.
“I’m just over there,” I say, pointing at the brownstone.
“I remember,” he says with a smile. “But I figured your parents might still be keeping an eye out the window, so…”
It’s been so long since anyone made that mistake, and the way it sounds coming from Sawyer—so normal, so obvious, becauseof coursethe pair of adults I live with should be my parents—I can’t bring myself to correct him. “You saw that, huh?”
“Hard to miss.”
“So what now?”
“Well,” he says. “Now you get three more choices.”
“Oh yeah?”
