“And—?here’s the real kicker—?she had no clue who he was until I pretty much grabbed her by the shoulders and spelled out his name really slowly.”
She frowns. “Seriously?”
“True story.”
“Holy crap.”
“‘Shit,’ Eva. The phrase you’re looking for is ‘holy shit.’”
She laughs, bracing her hand on the branch. Her pinkie touches mine, and neither of us moves our fingers away. “That’s so wild. Maggie doesn’t seem—?”
Her words cut off abruptly, and she bites on her lower lip.
“Maggie doesn’t seem what?” I ask.
“She doesn’t strike me as that clueless.”
I swallow down a bitter laugh. Because, no, at first Maggie seems charmingly charismatic to most people. Beautiful and free. I know better than anyone how alluring those things are. And Mom is all those things, times a hundred.
“She’s many things, Eva,” I say quietly, looking down at my hands. Next to me, I feel Eva’s eyes on me, waiting for me to go on, and I want to. Maybe I even should, so she’ll get what’s going on in my head right now, so she’ll understand what those purple nails mean to me, but it’s so hard to say it. To confess that my own mother, the woman who gave me life and is supposed to love and cherish me above all else, forgets my age half the time. Letting all this crap about Jay and Pete spill is enough.
“Tell me something else about you,” Eva says, and I’m grateful for the subject change.
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. I know you’re a pianist. I know you hate dolphins.”
I crack a smile.
“I know you’re beautiful and you’re fond of swearing and that Luca would commit legit murder for you and you’d do the same for him.”
I force my thoughts away from the beautiful comment and the fact that when she said the word, her pinkie moved closer and covered mine. “That’s about all you need to know.”
“No way. Tell me . . .” She narrows her eyes, thinking. “Tell me about your first crush. The first time you really liked someone.”
“Why?”
She shrugs. “First crushes are unforgettable and scary as hell. It’s something real and I’m naturally nosy, okay? Mine was a girl named Clara, and she had red hair and brown eyes. We’d been dancing together since we were six, and one day during a costume change, I overheard her refer to me as a ‘desperate dyke’ in front of her friends.”
“Oh, god.”
“Yeah, it was lots of fun.”
“Sorry.”
She shrugs, keeping her eyes on me, clearly waiting for my own story, probably expecting me to moon over some guy with floppy hair and a lopsided smile. This whole conversation is starting to make me squirm. But it’s not an uncomfortable kind of feeling. It’s an opening up, a hovering on the edge of a cliff after a long climb, the view and height stealing your breath and thoughts.
So I push my hand over a little, twining my pinkie around her ring finger.
And I tell her about my first crush.
“There was this girl,” I begin. Eva’s eyes widen, but I keep going. “Her name was Natalie.” I tell Eva about meeting Natalie at the pool, my fourteen-year-old self instantly enamored with this older girl. How I watched her. How I couldn’t breathe around her. How she’d smile at me and bring me different shades of purple nail polish, and we’d paint our fingers and toes during her breaks. How she listened to me, let me tell her all about my mother and piano and how I wanted more from life. How guilty I felt, even then, for wanting more. How she told me it was okay to want more, to want the world, even. I tell Eva about the way Natalie smelled—?like coconut sun lotion and oranges. I tell her how Natalie’s skin hypnotized me, how one day when we were getting Diet Cokes from the vending machine in the clubhouse’s tiny breezeway, I slid my hand softly down her forearm before linking our fingers. How good it felt to finally touch her.
“What happened?” Eva whispers when I pause, my throat thick from the memory, which is just freaking annoying. It’s been three damn years.
“Nothing. She looked down at our hands and smiled. Pulled away and said I was cute. Later that day, she made sure I saw her boyfriend pick her up and then promptly stick his tongue down her throat.”
“Ugh.”
