Mae feels the air go whistling right out of her. Suddenly that doesn’t seem like very much at all. “And then another sixteen till I leave for LA,” she says.
“And then another twenty-four till I go back to England.”
She puts her head on his shoulder, and he rests his chin on the top of her head. “It’s not enough.”
“No,” he says, his voice heavy, “it isn’t.”
She looks past him to where the last few wispy clouds are laced with gold. Utah and then Nevada and then California. She’s hardly thought about the fact that she’ll be starting college next week, that all she has to do is cross a few more states and head south along the coast and then she’s there, in the place where she’ll be spending the next four years.
“Your world is going to get so big,” Nana told her before she left, and Mae marvels at how much it already has, with Hugo here beside her and the enormous western sky rolled out ahead of them. They spent the whole day doing interviews, and now her head is filled with stories, all of them buzzing madly. She can’t wait to piece them together, all these lives that have intersected as they wind their way across the country for different reasons.
She was lying about Hugo, though.
It’s not that she’s changed her mind about interviewing him. She still doesn’t think he belongs in the film. It’s something else. Something more important than that.
It came to her earlier, when he was sitting on the other side of the table in the café car, his face nervous as he waited for the answer to a question he hadn’t even really been able to formulate. Mae realized that no matter what happens over the course of these next twenty-one hours on a train and then sixteen hours in San Francisco, they’ll have to say goodbye at the end of it.
And she’s going to miss him.
It doesn’t seem like a big enough word, but it’s all there is: she’ll miss him. Already, and improbably, it feels like a hole has started to open in her chest. So she decided she wants to take something with her. If she can’t keep all of him, she at least wants to try capturing a tiny piece.
“How does this work, then?” Hugo asks, noticing her eyes are on the camera, which is sitting on the shelf beside the opposite seat. “Do I get the same questions as everyone else? Or do I get special ones because I’m so—”
“Annoying?” she asks with a grin.
He bumps his shoulder against hers. “I was going to say charming. But sure.”
“You get the same ones as everyone else.”
“You know,” he says, “if I were interviewing you—”
“Which you’re not.”
“—I’d never ask you the standard questions.”
“What would you ask?”
He thinks about this. “I’d ask you the best advice your nana ever gave you.”
“She said I should try to meet a cute boy on the train,” she says, and Hugo lets out a laugh.
“Did she really?” he asks, incredulous.
Mae nods.
“Well, she sounds extremely clever. I’d definitely want to hear more about her. And your parents too.”
“What about them?”
“What they’re like, how they met, what it was like growing up with two dads.”
She’s about to say what she always says to this question:It was lucky. The luckiest thing in the world. Because my dads are the greatest.
In the hallway, a door opens and voices call out to each other. But in here it’s quiet, just the sound of their breathing and the roar of the train underneath it all. They could be anywhere and nowhere, but they’ve somehow found themselves here, and she’s suddenly grateful for it, all of it, for the extra ticket and the way it brought them together despite everything, the bigness of the world and the unlikeliness of a moment like this.
Hugo is watching her with a look of such warmth that she’s reminded of Priyanka’s words.It’s like the sun,she said,in that it makes everything brighter and happier.
Mae knows her line too:You can get burnt by it.
