Or should I be mean and snippy and hold him accountable for what he’d done?
Mean and snippy was more appealing—but acting like I’d forgotten all about him was probably the power move.
Too bad I’d never been very good at acting.
Maybe we could just ride in silence.
But we’d barely hit the highway before he lowered his voice intoreal-talkmode and said, “How’ve you been, Lily?”
How dare he? “How have Ibeen? Sincehigh school?”
Walker shrugged. “Yeah.”
“I’ve been great, Walker—thank you for asking. I am absolutely thriving.”
“I’m glad,” he said, his voice gravelly, like he meant it.
In response, like Ididn’tmean it, I said, “How haveyoubeen?”
Walker thought about it. “I’ve been okay, I think. I’m taking prerequisites for school. I’m working a lot. I miss my dad sometimes.”
Oh, god. He wanted to have a real conversation.
“I miss your dad, too,” I said. That wasn’t untrue. I could admit to that.
“And I bet you miss your dad.”
“I do,” I said. “But I’ve had a lot longer to get used to life without him.”
In high school, I’d been the only one who was fatherless.
That was the beginning of the end, in fact. Because after my dad died, when we were both in tenth grade, Walker and his parents closed ranks around me and my mom. Our dads had been best friends from childhood, and then the couples had become friends. We grew up with the four of them—Kristie and Big John (my mom and dad) and Taffy and Steve (Walker’s)—always hosting parties and taking us to the beach and grilling burgers. We spent weeks every summer at the Shaws’ ramshackle cabin in the Rockies.
We’d always been close is what I’m saying. But after my dad died, we got closer.
After my dad died, my mom went back to work as a nurse, and the Shaws insisted that Walker drive me to their house after practice in the afternoons—we’d do homework, and then all eat dinner together when my mom came to pick me up after her shift.
It was a good thing. It was a generous, kind, brilliant way to help ease our grief. But here was the problem: I had always, always had the most terrible, aching, agonizing crush on Walker.
And spending every day with him only made it worse.
We did our homework at their kitchen table, and his mom sang along to the radio while she sautéed onions for dinner, and when we finished working, we’d hang out in Walker’s room, or watch TV in sock feet, or throw the frisbee for their dog, Lola.
Walker was the person I saw the most of on almost any given day. But by any objective high school measure, he was fully and completely out of my league.
He was a golden boy—a straight A athlete who won the citizenship awardtwice.
I ... was a classic nerd.
A bookish, bespectacled, somewhat introverted nerd who’d spent the better part of my childhood self-consciously working to correct an eye that kept wanting to drift out of place.
That’s true. Through much of sixth grade I had to wear an eye patch on the better eye to help strengthen the vision in the weaker one. It worked—but I got teased so bad at school that I finally started faking illnesses so I could stay home. Until Walker—class president that year—put a stop to all the trouble by drawing a pirate anchor on the patch with a paint pen and somehow making it cool.
How could Inothave loved him?
I had no choice.
But we were friends by circumstance. We were friends by proximity. We were friends because we had to be—because life, and school, and our parents, put us together and kept us there. Walker also had a million other friends, of course, like extroverts do. Most notably his buddy Ryan—hisotherlifelong pal—who was my biggest competition for his time.
