“Define skipping.”
“If you say pass, I get to ask you something worse.”
He glances at me. “That seems like a system designed to punish me specifically.”
“You threw my notebook.”
He’s quiet for a second. “Fine. You go first.”
I look at the road ahead. “I had a crush on you when I was a teenager.”
The car doesn’t swerve this time. He’s getting better at receiving information.
“How old?” he asks.
“Sixteen. Maybe seventeen. You were twenty-two or twenty-three. You were doing all this grown-up stuff, going places, and you’d show up at the house and—” I shrug. “I don’t know. You were just very you. Even then.”
“I had no idea,” he says.
“I know you didn’t.” I smile at the glass. “You looked right through me for about two years.”
“I didn’t look through you.”
“You called me kid.”
“Youwerea kid.”
“I was seventeen.”
“Which is a kid,” he says. “Which is why I correctly did not notice.”
“You called me kid until I was twenty-one.”
He opens his mouth, then closes it. “That one I’ll give you.”
I laugh. He’s almost smiling. Almost.
“Your turn,” I say.
He thinks for a moment. “I cried watching a film in Montana,” he says. “Alone. In my apartment.”
“What film?”
“I’m not telling you.”
“That’s a skip.”
“I told you the rest of it.”
“The film is the whole point.”
“Absolutely not.”
“Griffin—”
“Moving on.”
“You need to give me another one.”
