I was tempted to raise his follower count to seventy-seven, but then he’d know about my virtual stalking.
I havesomepride.
I keep thinking about his suggestion that we set up his dad with my sister. Henry is cute and smart, which means his dad likely is too, if there’s truth to that adage about apples falling from trees. Tati would approve of Henry, which means she’s sure to like his father.
This issogoing to work.
Except when I get home from the park, Tati’s in a mood.
“Work stuff,” she snaps when I inquire during dinner.
Once, a few years back, I asked her why she didn’t ditch her apartment management job and go back to interior design. The reasons were varied and delivered in an exasperated tone, but the gist was that her position at the Towers gives us a lovely yet affordable place to live, results in reliable twice-monthly paychecks, and doesn’t require her to waste time hunting for a position at a design firm, building a client list, or working herway up from the bottom all over again.
“Adulthood requires sacrifices,” she told me, like she was the only one who’d lost out.
Now, she lets her angst out in a barrage of complaints: my beach bag tracked sand into the laundry closet, I left my breakfast dishes in the sink, and my room’sstilla mess. “Have you started drafting admissions essays?”
“Not yet.” She’s nudged me about getting a jump on this task about twelve hundred times. She wants me to go to college in-state—no farther than Tallahassee, which is only two hours from home. She wants me to get a business degree. She wants me to be practical and boring.
“You never do what I ask,” she grumbles, tucking into her stir-fry.
Before dinner, she found printouts about Hawai‘i Pacific University’s marine biology program on my desk and predictably lost her mind. “Hawaii’s almost five thousand miles away!” she squawked, crumpling the paperwork.
Those miles have a lot to do with why I find Hawaii appealing. When I tried to tell Tati all the other reasons Hawaii interests me, she literally put her foot down, hard, on the floor. “Absolutely not.”
She says she wants me to go to college locally because she’ll miss me if I’m far away, and because she wants to be sure I’m safe and cared for, and because out-of-state tuition is sky-high. I believe her—I do. But I often wonder if there’s more to it.
She didn’t get to chase her dream.
Why should I?
As I slip out of the apartment after dinner, I make myself a promise: I’m going to leave Florida after high school. I’m not sure where I’ll go—maybe a university, maybe community college, or maybe I’ll spend a year working various jobs to get a feel for different career paths. Whatever the case, I need a break from the Sunshine State.
One more year, I think, passing the pool.And then, freedom.
But a different sort of freedom could come even sooner, if Henry and I can figure out a way to nudge his dad and my sister into a relationship.
He’s all smiles when he swings the door open. His dad’s apartment is a mirror image of ours, but while Tati is meticulous about cleanliness, Henry’s dad appears to give zero shits. The living room isn’t dirty, per se, but it’s cluttered with sports equipment and flip-flops and restaurant supply catalogs. The sofa pillows are all over the place. A huge TV spans most of one wall. There are half a dozen remotes on the coffee table, along with a stack ofSports Illustratedmagazines and an empty water bottle.
“It smells weird in here, doesn’t it?” Henry asks while I take it all in.
I sniff the air. “I don’t think so.”
“Kind of, though? Like…dude?”
Laughing, I say, “You’rea dude. You’re supposed to be impervious to the stench.”
“So there’s a stench?”
“Not even a little bit.” I inhale again. “All I smell is Frenchfries.”
He grins and leads the way to the dining room.
“I made us a snack,” he says, gesturing toward the table.
It’s set with paper plates and bottles of soda. There’s a platter of perfectly golden fries in the center, plus a supersize jar of tartar sauce and a bottle of ketchup—the latter, I suspect, a kindness to me.
“All that’s missing is candlesticks.”
