“Right? She was here before Columbus even shat the bed. When the Vikings were still invading England. When the Miwok tribes were living up in the foothills. She’s lived through every war, slavery, holocaust, school shooting, and forest fire.”
“Human beings can be awful, huh?”
“Pretty wretched,” he agreed.
“She’s seen all the bad things we’ve done.…” A voice in my head whispered that I had much to feel guilty about.
Fen lightly bumped my shoulder with his arm—our first touch of the day, and it surprised me. I looked up at his face to find his eyes searching mine. “She’s seen good things, too,” he argued in a softer voice. “Peace treaties. Refugees finding shelter. The Emancipation Proclamation. When the Wright brothers flew the first plane. People falling in love…”
Oh. I definitely couldn’t look at him now. Why did he have to go and say that? I didn’t know how to respond, so I scrambled for something that would shift us into a safer conversational space while I physically moved myself away from him.
“Yep, she was here when Brian Wilson wrotePet Sounds.” There. Music. That was the place we didn’t get into trouble. Where we were just friendly, and we weren’t doing anything wrong.
And yet my heart raced madly.
Frida’s tail disappeared under a fern and her head appeared on the other side. I reached down to scratch her ear as Fen walked behind us.
“Back up a second,” he said, “I was listing momentous occasionsin history. Are you putting forthPet Soundsas your nomination for greatest album of all time?”
“Maybe notthegreatest. I’m just saying that no one in their right mind could argue that it’s not technically an incredibly innovative album. ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice’ is a masterpiece of bittersweet, and I can’t even listen to ‘God Only Knows’ without breaking down.” Frida sniffed dirt while I continued yammering. “But Mike Love is an asshole, and then of course a couple decades afterPet Sounds, ‘Kokomo’ pretty much ruined the Beach Boys’ legacy. What a hack.”
“Hard agree.”
Fen’s voice was closer than I expected. I turned my head to glance at him over my shoulder. His gaze trailed over my neck and met my eyes briefly before I looked away again.
I stretched my arm away from my side and let my fingers brush over the fern fronds. “What wouldyouthrow in as your greatest of all time?”
“Shit, I don’t know. Too hard. But somewhere at the top would beThe Velvet Underground & Nico. That’s chased away a lot of storms for me. Then maybe Carole King’sTapestry.”
“Huh. I’ve never listened to that.” I mean, I knew who Carole King was, obviously.
“Reminds me of family road trips when I was a kid. My grandma’s favorite album.”
“High praise,” I teased.
“Say that to her face. You think my mom’s intimidating? You haven’t met Mina Kasabian, terror of Glendale.”
I stopped walking. “Glendale? Like, L.A. suburbs Glendale?”
“Hey, it’s no Bel Air,” he said, dismissive. “But yeah. I pilgrimage down to Southern California once or twice a year to see my grandparents on holidays or birthdays, that kind of thing. Half the Kasabian side of my family is down there.”
OfcourseEddie never once told me that he had grandparents nearby when he came down to L.A. At this point I was starting to wonder what hehadtold me. Anything? Maybe he was just a mirage and I’d never really been with him at all. Eddie who?
“All this time we’ve been closer than you realized,” he said. “Not just during the summers.”
“Guess we really have.…” That’s how he knew about the concert hall at UCLA, but—
“Jane?”
“Yes?” I turned around to look at him and did a double take when he wasn’t right behind me anymore. His warm hand wrapped around my ankle, pulling my attention down. He sat on the ground in a small clearing between the tree’s roots, an arm slung around one bent knee.
“Sit. Please?”
“Here?” Guess this was his thinking spot.
“Afraid of me now?”
I chuckled nervously. “Um… no.” I sat down next to him and all the air left my lungs. “Not much, anyway.”
