“…and Fern was up at daylight,” he reads slowly, his finger moving across the page, “trying to rid the world of…”
He pauses, and I lean closer to see the word. “Injustice,” I say quietly, bracing myself, because I already know what his next question will be.
“What does that mean?”
“It means something that isn’t fair.”
His head is lowered, but I see him shift as he thinks about this, and I want to tell him that I understand; that even though it will never stop hurting, what happened to him, itwillget better someday; with the right amount of time and the right combination of people it will still burn like crazy, but the heat of it will come in and out like a radio signal and he’ll learn to live in the spaces in between.
But I don’t. Because it won’t mean anything to him—not yet. I know this, because people tried to say it to me. Instead I watch him consider this a moment. Then, when he’s ready, he turns the page.
Afterward we sit on the steps of the library, waiting for his foster mom to pick him up. When he sees the car, he gives me a wave, then trots down the rest of the stairs, the book tucked under his arm.
“See you next week,” I call after him.
Even once they’ve driven off, I don’t move. I just sit there as it starts to rain. There’s something gentle about it, a drizzle that gets shifted around by the breeze, moving this way and that like a great curtain. The air is heavy with it, a smell like mud, like spring, and I breathe it in, listening to the insistent thrum on the sidewalk.
When I dig my phone out of my bag, I find a voicemail from Sawyer, asking if I want to hang out tonight. But there’s nothing from Teddy, which means either things with his dad are going really well or else they went really badly.
I stand up and walk down the rest of the rain-slicked steps. At the bottom I take a left, heading toward home. But as I do a bus pulls up to the stop right in front of the library, windshield wipers squealing.
It’s pointed in the direction of Teddy’s apartment.
Before I can change my mind, I climb on.
There are three photographers outside Teddy’s building; their eyes follow me as I hurry through the rain toward the entrance. I don’t have an umbrella, so I’m relieved when someone pushes open the glass door just as I get there. I step into the vestibule and do my best to shake the water off my fleece. My shoes squeak on the linoleum floor as I jog up the stairs to number eleven. I knock three times, the way I always do. But when the door swings open, it’s not Teddy who is standing there. It’s his dad.
I blink at him, caught off guard. It’s been six years since I’ve seen Charlie McAvoy, but he looks about twenty years older, his jaw softened by gray stubble, his face scrawled with deep lines. To my surprise he’s wearing an expensive-looking suit and tie instead of the jeans and old flannel shirts that used to be a uniform of sorts.
He smiles at me. “Alex, right?”
“Alice.”
“Sorry,” he says, holding the door for me. “It’s been a while.”
Inside, Teddy is sitting on the couch, and when our eyes meet, he grins. He’s holding a small dog-shaped robot in his hands, which he was obviously showing his dad, and it makes him look just like a kid on Christmas.
“Hey,” he says. “I didn’t know you were coming over.”
“Well, you weren’t answering my calls.”
“Sorry,” Charlie says. “We were busy catching up.”
I kick off my damp shoes, glancing around the apartment, then at Teddy. “Where’s your mom?”
“Grocery store,” he says, still fidgeting with the control panel on the robot.
“So how have you been, Alice?” Charlie asks as he gets himself a glass of water. He looks completely at ease here, though this has never been his home—this is, in fact, the place his family was forced to move to because of everything he did. “It’s nice to see you two are still pals. And who was your other friend? The skinny kid with glasses?”
“Leo,” Teddy says, then looks over at me. “Is he okay?”
“Fine,” I say, which isn’t exactly the truth, but I don’t really want to talk about it in front of Charlie. This whole thing is so surreal, all of us acting as if barely any time has passed, as if he didn’t ruin their lives. I turn back to him. “So you live in Utah now?”
“Salt Lake City,” he says, nodding. “I bounced around a bit after…well, you know. I was in Tulsa, then Minneapolis, and now Salt Lake. It’s a good little town.” He looks over at Teddy and winks. “And no gambling there.”
“And you’re here on business? What do you do now?”
“Well, I got out of the electrician game,” he says. “Turns out flexible hours weren’t great for me. Something I learned at my meetings.” Again he glances over at Teddy, who smiles back at him encouragingly. “So now I do sales for a tech company.”
