Chapter Twelve
Griffin had, he hated to admit, always been good at playing a game of pretend.
He could remember it from early on: snippets of memory where he stacked Legos, made worlds for himself while a babysitter or day care provider ignored him, or while his mom fought much-needed sleep on the couch, occasionally rousing herself enough to praise him. Later, when he met Michael, their days of play had been full of pretend: They were baseball heroes, hitting huge home runs; they were generals lining up armies; they were Jedis with lightsabers running on low batteries.
Once he got older—baseball mitts and toy soldiers and plastic swords too small for his grown-up hands, his growing-up brain—pretending had been a secret pathway for him, a way into the kind of problem-solving that would eventually end up changing his life.What if I’m on the side of the road?he would think.I’m on the side of the road, and two of my tires blew, and I only have one spare. There’s no such thing as a cell phone on this day where I’m on the side of the road. There’s nowhere to walk.
He didn’t tell anyone that’s how he got his ideas. He didn’t wantpeople—his teachers, his professors—to think everything was a game to him.
Later, when pretending really failed him—when he was lying in bed half-crazy, high and hurting and impossibly alive, telling himself desperately,Pretend it doesn’t hurt, pretend it didn’t happen, or pretend that it did and that you’re dead, you’re dead, you’re dead—it became another thing about his life before that he thought he’d never return to.
But here he was. Five thirty in the morning on a Paris street.
Pretending.
The church, he pretended, was still a burned-out shell of itself, like he’d seen on the news over the last couple of years, still shored up with huge, spidery grafts of scaffolding, still strangely blackened in some places. He imagined it without its great Gothic spire, now newly rebuilt.
He pretended it was still in ruins. That no one would ever come back to fix it.
If that were true, he knew, he wouldn’t be able to stand this close to it; he knew it would be surrounded by barricades and warning signs and probably French policemen.
But that little hurdle was no match for his apparently still-skilled pretending brain.
It helped that Paris was so sleepy in the dawn hours. He hadn’t passed even one cyclist or runner on his way here, no one trying to frantically squeeze in a half hour of fresh air before going to sit in a cramped cubicle all day. The few people he had seen—a teenager ducking sheepishly through the glass door of a tiny bakery that beamed a U of gold light onto the street, an older woman clucking affectionately at a small dog, a man maybe Griffin’s own age blowing out a plume of smoke as he passed—seemed not to notice him, and that helped, too.
Because in this game of pretend, he wasn’t meant to be seen at all.
He was meant to be in one of those burned-out bell towers. A monster, hiding from the world below.
A monster who never came down long enough to say something as colossally, shortsightedly stupid asSo you’ll look at me, then.
I live in there, he thought desperately, picturing it now.I sit on blackened beams of wood. I talk to sooty gargoyles who never talk back. I draw pictures in the ashes. I crouch on stone buttresses and watch Michael get married from way up high.
Layla Bailey doesn’t think to look at me.
“Look at you how?” she’d said to him last night, beneath the dome at that big department store unlike anyplace he’d ever seen, standing there in a sweater that he thought for sure was the right kind of soft, a pair of jeans that hugged her hips and hid the shape of her legs, her feet covered by the socks and shoes he’d thought to get for her.
He thought,How I feel like I’m always looking at you, ever since I first saw you.
Like I can’t help it.
Like you’re the only thing worth looking at.
But he said, “Like we’re friends.”
As these things went—these things being, he guessed, getting through a destination wedding with more than the usual messy dynamics—it wasn’t much of a plan.
But they’d hatched it haltingly on a long walk back to the hotel from the Galeries—two and a half miles, according to his phone, but she’d refused another rideshare, “Now that I have the sneakers,” and anyway, walking was good for him, a better alternative totightening, painful stillness, especially if he was any kind of stressed.
And after that boat ride—after getting Layla Bailey off that boat ride, after he impulsively said,Soyou’ll look at me, then—he was fucking stressed.
“It makes sense, if you think about it,” he told her as they passed by another huge, ornate building, important enough to draw a well-dressed crowd around its front.
“The opera,” she said, by way of brief explanation, not looking twice. Her hand clutched tight around the thin rope of her shopping bag. “What makes sense?”
Did he take you to the opera here?he didn’t ask.
“That we’d, you know. Become friends. On a trip like this. Neither of us with dates. Neither of us, you know. Family.”
