“I did.”
Something about the way he says this makes me stop. “You did?”
He nods, unable to keep from grinning.
“How much?”
“A thousand dollars.”
I stare at him. “You did?”
“I did,” he says again.
“So when you took out your wallet…”
“I was just seeing how much cash I had to give her.”
I open my mouth, then close it again. Suddenly I’m so proud I want to hug him. Instead I let out a laugh, shaking my head in wonder. “You’re a really good guy, Teddy McAvoy. You know that?”
“Thanks,” he says, putting an arm around my shoulders as we walk over to one of the benches. “But you don’t always have to sound so surprised about it.”
There’s a knock on my door in the middle of the night.
It starts out quietly, a soft thumping that works its way into my dream. But then it gets louder and my eyes snap open. The clock on the bedside table says it’s 3:24 a.m., and I squint into the darkness for a minute before remembering where I am.
“I’m coming,” I murmur, swinging my legs out of the bed. At home the nights are punctuated by streetlamps and stars, which sneak in through the slats of my blinds. But here in the hotel the heavy curtains blot out everything, so I switch on the desk lamp as I make my way across the massive room, blinking fast at the sudden brightness.
At the door I stand on my tiptoes and look through the peephole, where I’m surprised to see a fun-house mirror version of Teddy: his nose too big and his forehead too small. He hops from one foot to the other, knocking every so often.
“What’s wrong?” I ask as I fling open the door. For some reason he looks just as surprised to see me as I am to seehim.
“Oh,” he says, as if this were an odd question. “Nothing.”
I widen my eyes at him. “Then why are you knocking on my door?”
He pushes past me and into the room without answering. He’s wearing plaid pajama pants and a Chicago Bears hoodie, and there are still creases from the pillow on one side of his face. When he spins around I can see just how jittery he is—he’s tapping his fist against his open palm as he paces—and it occurs to me that there aren’t all that many reasons to show up in someone’s hotel room at three-thirty in the morning.
The idea that it could be the obvious one is both thrilling and terrifying, and my heart flops around, fishlike, as I turn to him, thinkingmaybe,thinkinghopefully,thinkingfinally.
But then he stops moving long enough to meet my eye, and I can see in his face that it isn’t that—of course it isn’t. There’s nothing romantic in his gaze, only a kind of frantic wakefulness, a jangly excitement that I’ve only ever seen in him one other time: the morning we found out about the lottery.
“Are you okay?” I ask, sinking down on the bed, trying not to feel so deflated.
He nods. “I know it’s really late, but I’ve been going over this again and again in my head, and I just couldn’t wait till morning.”
“What is it?”
“I have,” he says, walking over to sit beside me, the bed dipping beneath us, “the best idea in the entire world.”
“Wow,” I say, distracted by his knee brushing against mine. “Okay.”
He looks disappointed. “I was kind of hoping for a bigger response.”
“Well, maybe if you tell me what it is…”
“Right,” he says, clapping so loudly that I flinch. He hops off the bed and resumes his pacing. “So remember the chicken lady today?”
I stare at him. “What?”
