Andi gasps, appropriately.
“Wasn’t pretty,” I agree. “I didn’t think I’d get the smell out of my nose for a week. Gave Sadie nightmares. She’d named all the hens.”
I don’t bring up that my brother Elliott and I were the ones who wound up cleaning the blood and feathers or that when Sadie had a nightmare, it was me she’d come looking for. Andi throws me a glance like she knows anyway.
“I saw her,” Andi says. “Lucia’s friends with the managing editor at the Sentinel-Star, and they needed someone to cover a school board meeting, so I did it.”
“I didn’t know you were a reporter.”
Andi laughs, glancing over at me like we’re sharing a joke. I wonder what would happen if I just kissed her right now, whether the moment has passed, whether she’s decided it was a bad idea or what. I don’t know what the rules are here, and I’m adrift.
“Oh, I’m not,” she says. “I’m a grant writer, but that means I can string sentences together decently and they were desperate, so I went.” Andi pauses, clearing her throat, not looking at me. “Your dad and brother were there. Actually, I thought it was Elliott, but I guess not if he lives in Boston.”
“Matt, probably,” I say, and carefully place a tortilla on the hot cast iron pan. “He and my father still… agree on a lot of things.”
“Ah.”
“This was the meeting where they wanted to ban books?” I ask. The tortilla is puffing up in a few spots, so I grab it with my fingers and quickly flip it.
“There are tongs,” Andi says, frowning at me. “Don’t—”
“Quit fussing, I’m fine,” I tell her.
“I’m not fussing.”
“That was textbook fussing,” I say, and I can see her roll her eyes on the edge of my vision.
“Wasnot,” she says. “Anyway, yeah, they were trying to get a bunch of books taken out of the school library for immorality. And it’s not like Sprucevale Public Schools are a bastion of progressive thought, it was like, the book about the penguin chick with two dads.”
“Sadie say anything?” I ask, taking the hot tortilla out and plopping it onto a plate, then handing it over to Andi.
“No, she was just there. I saw her talking to Matt later and it looked… tense. I didn’t say hi, I didn’t think she’d remember me and wasn’t in the mood to talk to Matt just then.”
“Understandable,” I mutter. I’m also not often in the mood to talk to Matt, who’s only a year younger than me but seems to have had a completely different childhood.
“They didn’t get the books taken out, but it was close,” Andi says, loading beans and cheese onto the tortilla as I heat another one and pointedly don’t watch her try to roll the one she just overfilled. “Shit, I’m terrible at this.”
“I’m sure they’ll try again. My father doesn’t enjoy being toldno,” I say, and lean toward her. A few stray hairs stick in my beard, and the spot where I kissed her neck in the snow earlier is rightthere, so close, and I have no idea what the fuck I was doing in the first place.
“Yes, I fucked up the burrito,” she says. Right. “Take some of the filling so I can—thanks.”
“My father is,” I start, rolling my own much neater burrito, but I’m not quite sure where to go from there. “I don’t agree with him on most things.”
Andi finally finishes wrangling her mess into a burrito, then licks refried beans off her thumb. It shouldn’t be as enticing as it is.
“Me either,” she says, and we head to the kitchen table.
* * *
That night,she doesn’t even try to convince me to sleep in the bedroom with her. She says goodnight after she brushes her teeth, and then there’s a long moment where we look at each other—her in the threshold to the bedroom, me on the couch reading a book—and then she smiles like a flash of sunlight, says goodnight, and turns away.
I feel a little like I’m being asked to make small talk in a language I don’t speak, and instead of sayingyes, isn’t this lovely weatherI’m telling her that some animals eat their young when they feel threatened because their instinctual calculation isif someone’s gonna get the energy from consuming these, it may as well be me.
When I was eighteen, I started feeling bad for what I’d done to Andi and her parents. I know it’s too old. I know I should have felt bad right away, but it took joining the Army and getting sent halfway around the world for me to finally understand justhowwrong I’d been and how small a world my parents had made for us.
All kinds of people join the military, is the thing, and it turns out most people aren’t evil. People are mostly people. They do some good shit and some fucked up shit, and people who thought the same way as my parents sure didn’t have a monopoly on doing good shit. Once I realized that, everything else started to crumble.
I should have reached out to her. I found her Facebook profile and her LinkedIn; I could have contacted her, but I didn’t think I’d ever see her again, so why dredge up the past? I imagined her furious at me, and I imagined her sobbing, or screaming, or being frostily polite if we had to interact, but I never imagined her kissing me in the snow until my brain felt fuzzy.
