Chapter Twenty-Six
Drew doesn’t answer his phone when I leave, which is fine, because I think I know where to find him.
When I come around the corner, marching toward my old elementary school, there’s Drew, legs dangling off the top of the lookout tower on the playground, cloud-watching.
Drew didn’t fit up there even when we were teenagers, sneaking out, full of angst about everything. Now, he’s Alice after she eats the mushroom, bursting out of the White Rabbit’s house, limbs and head poking through the slats.
So as not to alarm him, I clear my throat. “If you were running away from me, you picked a bad hiding spot.”
Drew’s eyes flick from me to his phone, where a missed call notification blinks. “Shit, sorry. I must’ve dozed off.” I join him right as he points above us. “Doesn’t that cloud look like a dove?”
“Sort of,” I reply, closing one eye and outlining its wings with my pointer finger. “Might look more like a dove once we smoke this.” I pull the weed out from my bag.
Drew’s hooded eyes flicker with mischief, like he’s tapping into his early twenties self. Then, he reconsiders when he sees how crumbly and dry the weed is. “How old is that stuff?”
“I barely even know how oldI am. You think I know that?” I ask. “What’s the harm? If anything, we just won’t get very high.”
“Probably for the best.” Drew sits up on his elbows, yawning.
“Yeah, old men need the weak stuff,” I joke as I begin rolling the paper up into a little tube. I’ve never been great at this.
“For the sake of both your cover and my ego, let’s refrain from that kind of talk.” Drew’s laugh makes some of the cannabis spill as he taps it out of the baggie below the filter, taking over from me.
Long fingers pinch with precision to make sure it’s enclosed before he licks the end paper, which is so erotic I have to look away. Heat blossoms up from my pelvis and into my sternum. Never have I wanted to be an inanimate object so badly before.
“Do you have a lighter in that treasure trove?” he asks, kneeing the paper bag.
My face falls. “Shit.”
“A joint without a light,” Drew recites like it’s poetry. “There’s a metaphor in there somewhere.” Rolling my eyes, I hop down the ladder, kicking through the mulch. “What are you doing?”
“It may be 2030, but kids can’t have changedthatmuch,” I say, getting on my hands and knees so I can inspect the low-hanging tire swing beneath. “I’m sure this is still the number one smoking spot in town.” Reaching into the inner ring, I find exactly what I’m looking for. “Told ya.” I shove a Post-it-note-pink BIC lighter in his face.
“Watch, it doesn’t work,” he says, joint waggling between his teeth, drawing my attention to his enticing lips even more. Rocketing memories of our kiss at CeeCee’s wedding and our practice kiss at prom to the forefront of my brain. To discard those, I prove him wrong by lighting him up. His first drag causes bliss to whisper over his features, smoke to puff out into the air. “Maybe your luck is changing after all. How did it go with your mom?”
“Good. Really good, actually.” Aside from when Drew agreed tohelp me, my time with Mom was the only moment in this unprecedented experience that has felt sincere. “I got CeeCee’s new number, so I can try to call her, but also I found out she has akidin Colorado.”
Drew nods, handing me the joint. “Yeah, I would’ve said something, but I didn’t think it was my place. The reason I had her personal email address is because she and I talked a lot when things first blew up with you after the wedding. Your parents had to be impartial. CeeCee needed someone to vent to. So did I.”
The hurt of the lost years was not my doing, but the wedding fiasco was completely my mistake. To witness how much hurt spiraled out of that one heat-of-the-moment choice is harrowing. “I’m glad you had each other.”
“She moved pretty shortly after Doop imploded. I think she needed to start over,” he says, staring off at another cotton-candy cloud lingering over the roof of the redbrick school building. “We lost touch when Imogen was born. She was becoming a mom and I was becoming a business owner, so life got in the way and your comedy stopped being about us. It was a natural end.” The way Drew tells it—the throaty rasp of his voice—clues me in to the fact that he may not have many friends. He was never a social butterfly before. What if my public blasting of his love for me caused him to crawl into his shell even more, like a turtle in protection mode?
The beard. The glasses. The store with its murdery vibes and crime scene display windows. I wonder if it’s all his way of redefining himself. Like Mom’s new hair. Like CeeCee’s new address. Little things to distance themselves from the people I wrote jokes about. The people I hurt.
“I wish I could take it back,” I whisper, a thousand more words backlogged in my windpipe.
“I know.” Drew kicks at the crystals. “Maybe you can.” There’s a nervousness that underscores his statement; for the first time, Iwonder if he’s also having reservations about the efficacy of our plan, but I can’t find the words to ask.
As I’m staring at the bag beside his clean, off-white sneakers with red racing stripes across them, his hand finds mine on the board between us. Not a full hold. Not a clasp. Not even a cover. Just a single finger brushing back and forth, causing goose bumps to chase each other up my arm and across my clavicle.
“This isn’t how it was supposed to go,” I say. “Strange that I got the funhouse-mirror version of everything I ever wanted.” I stop myself to consider this, the weed doing its work to unwind me. “Well, I guess noteverything.”
Drew exhales; swirls of smoke carry the familiar skunky smell in my direction. They make my head whirl and make this reality seem even more carnivalesque. “What more could you want?” Drew says, suppressing a cough. “You got the fame, the money, the comedy special, the dog.”
“CeeCee and a niece in my life, for starters,” I admit. Largely, I took CeeCee’s antagonism as judgment, but maybe it was never more than misplaced care. A need for a sense of control over everyone and everything—playing at being the quintessential older sibling from a ’90s movie. Completely unhealthy, but not intentionally harmful.
The niece part…well, it’s not like I ever vision-boarded being an uncle—aguncle. But I knew from a young age I never wanted kids of my own. A corgi was enough of a responsibility in the grand life plan. Now, in this timeline, I’m completely missing out on an entire branch of my family tree.
