“Right. But also, your whole insistence on, I don’t know,provingto him you’re capable and smart and everything, when obviously he knows you are, and you should tell him if you want to hang out more. You don’t need to change yourself.”
“I don’t think it’s changing myself to prove I’m smart,” I shot back.
He groaned. “That’s not what I meant.”
“Besides, I don’t see you telling your family they don’t take you seriously enough.”
He let out a long sigh, squeezing the back of his neck. It made the muscles in his arm stand out, and I tried hard not to stare at them. “I think sometimes our parents get stuck on what we were like when we were kids. They think we’re the same as when we were at five, ten, fifteen. We don’t change.”
“But everyone changes. They have to realize that.”
“I dunno,” he said skeptically. “I didn’t eat tomatoes until I was sixteen, and it’s been two years, and my parentsstillthink I don’t like tomatoes.”
“You didn’t…eat tomatoes?”
He shook his head. “I thought they were shit. Watery. Gross.”
This wasn’t the detour I’d expected this conversation to take, but I couldn’t let it go. “What about, like, pizza?”
“Oh yeah, I ate tomato sauce and cooked tomatoes. Just never fresh ones. Then I went to Turkey and the bed and breakfast we stayed at served a platter of tomatoes and cheese and olives every morning and I wasso hungryI was like, well, better learn to like them. Also, it turns out tomatoes in Turkey are way better than here.”
I stared.
He tilted his head. “You’re thinking,Fuck that boy, not all of us can fly out to Turkey to change our minds about tomatoes.”
I snorted because he wasn’t far off. “No! Just, uh, maybe you could have tried a farm-fresh tomato first.”
“True.” He laughed, then sobered. “I’m just saying, your dad thinks you’re great.”
“Hm,” I said, noncommittal.
“Your job sounds cool,” Ethan said, because Ethan was sometimes a golden retriever who wanted people to feel better. “I feel like we’re both…I dunno. Cartographers. You of the sky, me of the sea.”
I laughed, though I liked the way he made it sound. “More like, I’m an assistant to a cartographer of space trash, and you’re an assistant to an historiographer of cartography.”
He grinned. “My version’s easier to say.”
“You have me there.” I tilted my head back. It was too light to see the stars, though the faint white moon floated through the sky. “You know Polaris?”
“The North Star? Yeah.”
“I’m learning about a group of astronomers who categorized all the stars in the sky by their brightness. They needed a scale to measure the brightness against. The director, Pickering, picked Polaris as the comparison point. Not because it was the brightest star, but because its light is unwavering. It would be the steadiest, the truest. It’s least susceptible to distortion. I like that, don’t you? It’s a nice metaphor.”
“What’s the metaphor?”
“You know. You don’t have to be the best or the brightest to be the true star. The starriest star, the Rudolph of the stars. You just have to be unwavering.”
He stared at me, for long enough I started to feel uncomfortable. “What? Was the Rudolph metaphor too weird?”
“No. Not at all. I think—being unwavering is a great quality.”His attention switched over my shoulder, and I turned. Dad approached us—Cora nowhere in his vicinity, drat.
“Hi, honey,” Dad said. “Having fun?”
“Yeah.”
“I was telling Jordan about ’Sconset,” Ethan said, which he patently had not been. “You guys should go.”
“You haven’t been yet?” Dad said in surprise, as though I’d been anywhere here he didn’t know about. I shook my head. “It’s very nice.”
