“Of course that’s just there, waiting for you.” Theo sounds resigned. He’s picked himself up and brushed himself off, but there are ugly grass stains on his jeans.
“You want to skate?”
He crosses his arms. “A million times, no.”
“Let me guess. You only play . . . ” I size him up. “Lacrosse. No, polo!”
“I haven’t played lacrosse since college, thank you very much.”
“All right, Suit. In that case.” I tip over the edge and go soaring.
The high I get from skating is like the high I get from singing. It comes from the heady push and pull between control andpowerless-ness, when your body tangles with forces bigger than you, like gravity or the will of a crowd, and you don’t know if you’re going to be strong enough or loud enough or good enough to get your way. I pick up speed, flying down the side of the bowl and soaring up the opposite wall. I want to close my eyes, but instead, I breathe in as deeply as I can, hit the edge and grip the end of my board, then let gravity drag me back down.
Now that I’m coasting back, I catch Theo sliding carefully down the concave wall. Despite his cool, rumpled clothes, no one has ever looked more out of their element.
“Has anyone ever told you that you take your job too seriously?” I shout.
“Yes,” he calls back. “It’s kind of a running theme.”
I shoot past him and grin, feeling the air rush over my cheeks. And maybe it’s because I’m feeling so free that I say, “Ginny and I come here to unwind.”
Theo’s standing right next to Ginny, so it’s funny when he crosses his arms and says, “You don’t mind talking about her?”
“No.” I slow to circle him. “I love it. She’s my best friend. Goofy, brave—”
“Ridiculously hot,” Ginny adds.
I pull a quick kickflip. “The smartest person I know. That’s always been our big difference.”
I catch a bit of Theo’s frown. “I doubt that. I’ve read your lyrics. Who taught you how to write?”
It’s kind of fun skating around him. He keeps trying to face me, which means he’s slowly spinning in circles. There’s a hypnotic quality to our movements.
“My dad,” I say. “He’s a teacher, but he worked part-time at a guitar shop. That’s how I started playing.”
“My dad loved music too.” Theo’s tone is strangely melancholy. “He used to say that if he had one wish, it would be to be born again with talent.”
I lean my weight and twist the board in a new direction. “Yeah, well, mine had the talent. Just not the guts to be a full-time musician. And my mom had the talent but not the means to be a doctor.” I rub my fingers together. “No med school money, so she settled for being a nurse.”
Ginny grins. “And we wonder why we were born with chips on our shoulders.”
“They were strict growing up,” I say. “My mom was obsessed with Ginny and me being star students and getting scholarships.”
“And how’d that work out for you?” he asks, in a tone that says he knows the answer.
“Clearly not as well as for you,” I say, because Theo screams Ivy League tryhard. “My brain wouldn’t cooperate. But Ginny was the kind of smart Mom wanted.”
He watches me as I skate closer. “What exactly does that mean?”
I feel the familiar pangs of the wounds that predate Ginny, the seamed places in my heart where I had to sew the pieces back together. “One day, when I was ten, we were eating dinner—”
“Really?” Ginny complains. “You’re telling him this?”
I ignore her. “Our mom had this routine where she’d make us tell her three things about our day at the dinner table. I could never remember three things. I know that sounds weird, but my brain . . . I was always fixated on something that took all my focus. Around then, it was my first guitar. So instead of inventing three things like I normally did, I told my mom the truth that I had nothing. I figured she’d roll her eyes or something, but she got angry. Like, irrationally angry. She kept insisting I had to remember, and I was being stubborn. Like I was willfully defying her. She couldn’t wrap her head around the possibility that I was telling the truth.”
“I tried to defend you,” Ginny points out.
I wind around Theo in a wide figure eight. “Your intervening kind of made it worse. No offense.” “What?” Theo asked. “Ginny made it worse,” I explain. “I was a shitty student, so I knew
