He answers with a grim nod. And even though he still looks like he’s recovering from reliving his worst trauma, Tyler’s smile breaks through. “I told you I had a good one.”
“You did.” I nod mock-solemnly, reaching under my seat and miming lifting a huge trophy out from my bag. “So I believe this belongs to you, the brand-new owner of the World’s Juiciest Secret Award.”
He reaches over and takes the invisible trophy from me, princess-waving at the other sleeping passengers on the plane.“Thank you, thank you. I hope this will clear airport security on the way home.”
“I got it on the plane,” I point out. “I had to be prepared in case I wound up sitting next to my ex-boyfriend on a thirteen-hour flight, we got into some awkward conversations, and we patched it up with a secret-telling contest.”
Tyler nods seriously. “Obviously. One can never be too prepared.”
“Never.”
“Like the time Delia showed up to the SATs with a huge deli sandwich in her bag, which they wouldn’t even let her eat, but she insisted on keeping it in there for emergencies. And then the kid sitting next to her fainted ten minutes into the test, and the sandwich ended up helping him bring his glucose levels back up.”
I snap my fingers in recognition. “Oh, that was Kenny Ploy! I remember hearing about that. I wasn’t in the same room as you guys, though.” I gesture between us, our A and F last names a canyon that separated me from Tyler Ferris and Delia Franklin, the two people I most wanted to be in the room with during SATs at the start of junior year. I remember jealously listening to the story in the cafeteria the next day, Delia’s excited hand gestures drawing more attention to her shock of newly bright pink pigtails as she recounted the event.
“That reminds me.” I pause as the flight attendants swoop by again, generously refilling Tyler and me up on Cokes and bags of chips. “How’s Delia been doing?”
The crunching of the chip between Tyler’s teeth is deafeningly loud on the quiet plane as people around us sleep and watch their movies in the darkness. Various overhead lights are on abovedifferent passengers, tiny pinpricks of warm beams. He seems to think for a second before speaking.
“D’s been fine,” he eventually offers. “She has a new girlfriend now, Cassie something or other. She’s from a few towns away, but they actually met during one of those Science Olympiad competitions and hit it off right away. We all really like her.”
I try not to let my brain snag on thewethat I’m no longer a part of. I can still remember the day we were sitting in one of the booths at Suburban Slices, and in between bites of pizza, Delia casually mentioned that she may be questioning some aspects of her identity and who she was interested in at school, and then went back to eating like it was no big deal. Which, in true Delia fashion, it wasn’t. She never wanted a big deal to be made out ofanythingin her life, and who she chose to date was no different.
“Good for her,” I offer weakly, thinking back to the last few months of our friendship. “I’m glad that she’s happy. Did her parents take it well? I didn’t know she’d finally told them.”
His silence is all the answer I need, a sharp reminder of her ultra-conservative parents who looked down on anyone who dared to “disrupt the status quo.” A tiny fissure opens in my heart as I think about my best friend going through the grueling process of not being accepted by her family, and I wasn’t there to be part of her support system. She has Tyler, and all of their mutual friends, but still…in the time I’d gotten to know Delia, we became something akin to sisters—something I never got to have growing up. And even a year and a half later, being without her still sometimes feels like I’ve lost an important limb and am just stumbling around off-balance.
Tyler, ever the mind-reader after all this time, catches onquickly. “Delia wasn’t, like,alonealone through the whole thing, Olive. She had the rest of us.”Even though it wasn’t the same as it would’ve been if you were there,he doesn’t add. But it doesn’t mean I’m not thinking it.
A sharp burst of sadness blooms in my chest, a painful reminder of how much I’ve missed in this past year and a half. Especially Delia.
Finally, I find the words to answer Tyler. “I’m glad she had you to be there for her. And the others.” Tyler and all of our mutual friends, his Dungeons & Dragons and skating buddies, the fellow nerds who I used to spend time with, all melding together into a happy little blended family.
One I ejected myself from, on purpose.
Tyler claps his hands and interrupts my thoughts, while also startling one of the toddlers in the seat in front of him, who starts to wail. I can only imagine the eye-daggers their father is directing our way right about now. “No more reminiscing. Food’s here!”
The nonstop flight on Hawaiian Airlines gives patrons the luxury—which is a generous word—of an in-flight dinner or breakfast. Since we’re actually crawling back time zones as we zoom west, it’s breakfast, although we’ve been in the sky for several hours already and my time-confused body is craving lunch.
“Damn it,” Tyler mumbles under his breath, echoing my thoughts as he watches breakfast sandwiches being doled out to the passengers in front of us. “I was really hoping for the meat loaf. That was pretty good last time I flew out.”
I lean over nosily as the flight attendant approaches our aisle and hands over the breakfast sandwiches. “What kind is it?” Next to me, Cranky Lady awakes from her nap with a yawn and givesus a curious look, as if she’s checking to see the state of our awkwardness since she dozed off. Luckily, it seems like Tyler’s secret-sharing idea was a good trick to break the ice, because while things aren’t 100percent back to the way they used to be when we were dating (which, admittedly, I don’t think we could ever get back to), it feels like the early days of working together at Suburban Slices again. The easy banter, the flowing laughter, the gentle comfort of knowing that you’re in the orbit of someone who isn’t just kind and amazing, but alsogetsyou.
He passes one of the breakfast sandwiches my way with a wink. “How about that airplane food, huh, Olive?” I glance down at the label and suppress a groan.
“Sausage egg and cheese on a croissant?” Cranky Lady exclaims in a huff when I pass her a sandwich. “I don’t trust any sausage stored on a plane. I’d much rather have egg salad.”
Tyler gives her a quizzical look. “You’d trustegg saladstored on a plane?”
She waves him away impatiently as she unwraps her sandwich and takes a tentative bite. “Better than I’d trust plane sausage, but this isn’t too bad.” She nods at us and speaks through a mouthful of breakfast sandwich. “My name’s Ellen, by the way.”
The three of us eat our breakfast sandwiches (two- to three-star rating at most, honestly) in relative silence, grateful for any kind of nourishment that isn’t sugary soda or bags of candy or chips.
When he finishes, Tyler crumples up his wrapper and stores it in the pouch on the seat in front of him. “Well, that was positively mediocre,” he comments, smoothing the creases in his jeans and looking at me. “What’d you think?”
I shove my wrapper in next to his. “When you’re this highin the air, food is food and you can’t be too picky about it.” Something—or rather, several somethings—on his hands catches my eye, and I lean in for a closer look. Tyler, understandably, is now looking at me like I have ten heads.
“Uh, Olive?” he hedges, and my eyes snap back up to his. “Not that I’m not flattered, but is there any particular reason you’re staring at my crotch with such vested interest? I thought we’ve moved past that point of our lives.”
