Weird to be thinking about how she smelled. But hey, what was the harm? Clean slate with her before long.
“So,” I said, turning back to Cat and signing keywords as I spoke, “now let’s get into that name sign you picked for Alyssa.”
Cat gave me a scandalized look. It was fine. She’d do the same for me if I tried something like that.
Chapter 7
Alyssa
Icouldn’t really read Jade. She’d been pretty explicit last night at the Birdhouse, but then when it was me and Cat together at the coffee shop, she stuck around, made no attempts to brush me off. Maybe she’d just been in a bad mood last night? Or maybe she just didn’t want to blow me off where Cat would see.
But it worked in my favor. I was starting to feel resolved, like this would work after all—picturing her and Daniela talking again, making things right, and then even long after I’d left here, I’d keep hearing stories from Daniela about her and Jade being happy together. I was getting ahead of myself, but I couldn’t help it. My crime was enthusiasm.
Besides, it was weird to sit here and talk to Jade and Cat and think of them as the pariahs who nobody wanted to talk to anymore. Cat was impossible not to like, chatting away, with a big infectious laugh, even after I’d learned she’d given me a name sign that basically meantgirl who drives into a tree.Jade’s name sign was the sign forcandleon a J instead of on a flat hand like the standard sign, and Cat’s was a C moved along the cheek like a whisker—they showed me the name signs, and then the alphabet, where I fumbled with their pop quizzes trying to spell words for them and struggling to remember letters,but they were both good sports with my struggles, and we all laughed along.
“So,” Cat said at one point, once the laughter had subsided and our drinks were running low, “are you missing Boston yet?”
I fidgeted with my ring. “Not quite…”
“It’s a lot quieter out here, I’ll bet,” she said, and I shrugged. I almost looked away in awkwardness—I was always one to avoid confrontations by shying away from people, but talking to Cat was quickly training that out of me, knowing she wouldn’t be able to understand me if I looked away.
“I guess so. We weren’t living in the most central area, anyway, so it wasn’t that busy.”
Just like Jade had said, she could understand me better when I spoke more naturally, and she cocked her head—she really did have the perfect name, all her gestures like a curious, slightly hyperactive cat. “We? Who were you living with?”
My stomach sank. The heavy thoughts from this morning had stayed at the periphery while we were chatting, but suddenly they came in like a crashing storm again, and I forced a smile. “Oh, um… well… I was living with my boyfriend. Ex-boyfriend. I mean, he wasn’t my ex when I lived with him.”
Cat furrowed her brow. “You’re mumbling, I can’t tell what you’re saying.”
Jade pushed out a frustrated breath and leaned in front of me, saying something fully in sign. I felt a little bit like the kid on the bus who didn’t get anyone else’s jokes, but Cat’s expression shifted.
“Oh,” she said. “I gotcha.”
“I don’t need kiddie gloves,” I said, my ears burning a little. “I can talk about my ex!”
“What was his name?” Cat said.
“Sawyer.” It took a second to realize there was no way she was lipreading that, and I fumbled fingerspelling it.
“Like Sawyer?” she said, and I nodded. She held her fist in the sign for the letter S and made a sawing motion over her other hand. “Like the sign forsaw.Because it sounds like he deserves his junk cutting off with a saw.”
I spat. “Jesus, Cat.”
Jade broke out laughing, and I think it might have been the first time I saw her full-on laughing, covering her mouth and then laughing again, bending at the waist as she did. Cat pointed at her.
“See? Jade agrees.”
“Okay. How do you sayI’m scaredin sign?”
Jade demonstrated. Cat laughed. “I’m not going to cut anything offyou!Relax!”
“For real, though,” Jade said, “you don’t need to talk about anything you don’t want to. Cat just talks a lot. You can tell her you don’t want to talk about something and she’ll have something else to talk about.”
“I’m really fine… thank you, though,” I said, fidgeting with my ring again. “People have breakups all the time. It sucks, but I’ll get better.”
“I hope things feel better soon,” Cat said. “And I’m glad you have a safe place to land.”
“Yeah. Me too. Um…” I sat up taller, taking a long breath. “You know, I don’t want to bring up anything awkward, but Daniela said a lot of nice things about both of you. She definitely misses being around you both.”
