“I did really want to see this movie, but we can blow it off to chat him up, if you want,” Katy says, wriggling her eyebrows at me.
I give a long-suffering sigh. “No, let’s see the movie.” The lady at the counter didn’t look amused by me hanging around to talk, and I don’t want Bus Boy to get in trouble, but I act like I’m making the ultimate sacrifice for Katy’s benefit. “The things I do for you.”
She bumps my shoulder with hers. “The thingsIdo for you. You don’t even know.”
As we wait, she starts telling me about how she’d been hanging out with Mitch Enns yesterday and had just driven him home—“Hanging out sounds a lot like making out,” I interrupt to point out—when she realized her bracelet was gone. I feel guilty for not remembering when she first told me it was missing, because she sounds more upset about it than I’ve seen her about anything in months. But she lights up quickly when she recognizes someone in the line next to ours. “Addie, this is Lena from Act! Out!”
Me and the girl wearing a winter jacket over a spandex volleyball uniform exchange polite “Nice to meet yous,” but she and Katy do most of the talking while our respective lines inch forward. I’m still mildly annoyed that I didn’t get to say a proper goodbye to Bus Boy. Not to mention find out his name.
We are apparently doomed to minute-long conversations. Still, I’m relieved he’s okay. And the fact that he lives in Lyndale means I have a good chance of seeing him again.
I replay today’s conversation in my mind.
My mind hitches a little on his smile. The way it starts so slowly and then stretches, magnifying quickly across his face. Maybe Iamhaving a Psychological Episode because it makes me think of physics: How quickly does the twitch of lip corners accelerate into the kind of smile that makes a stomach somersault?
Another question: Am I so starved for male attention, as Katy claims, that I overreact every time a boy smiles at me?
We reach the counter, and Katy is starting to spout off our order when I realize that it’s not that I’m desperate or lame or lovesick.
His smile makes me feel something I’ve never felt before.
BEFORE
Early July
(eighteen months ago)
Thick air sticks to my body, hanging on so tightly it’s hard to believe other seasons exist that aren’t summer. I sigh with relief as I enter the air-conditioned movie store, my phone buzzing in the pocket of my dress. I try to tuck my hair out of my face, but it is prime frizz season and my hair won’t be reasoned with. I inherited my mom’s aversion to heat and the same tight ringlets as my father’s sisters from St. Vincent, so July is always a delight.
The store looks dead, which isn’t a surprise, since nobody really borrows DVDs anymore. At Home Movies is the last of its kind in Lyndale, and adults like my mom who have lived here forever and can remember the days of video stores and ice cream trucks and children playing in the streets till sundown are weirdly nostalgic and protective of it.
Though the checkout area is empty, I can hear movement, muttering going on underneath the counter. I’m enjoying the store’s miraculous coolness too much to wonder about the source of the sound. I pull my phone out and brace myself for one of twenty texts from my mom, reminding me to grab one thing or the other for our family movie night. Or one of twenty texts from Katy, detailing her, by my count, decade-long road trip.
The message is a picture of four pairs of bare feet on asphalt, a crowd of toes. I pick out Katy’s feet by the black nail polish she started sporting when school let out. In another picture, she’s standing beside a road sign that saysCURVES AHEAD, pouting seductively and holding her hands up like a show queen. The silver bracelet her dad sent her three years ago that she never takes off is catching sunlight, so it looks like she’s giving off both angelic glow and sex appeal. It’s very confusing.
There is no actual text. NoMissing you, boo!orHow are you holding up?which I don’t expect from Katy to begin with. But I do expectsomesympathy, if only out of consideration for my plight. She is exactly where I want to be at this moment. In a car, breeze blowing though her piss-straight hair (her words, not mine), on her way to New York City for three whole weeks. A trip being funded by Katy’s dad, of course. New York is, like, seven hours from Maine, but Katy and her theater friends are making a whole trip out of it, stopping over at Hampton Beach and a million other places.I,on the other hand, am picking up DVDs for a movie night with my mom and older brother.
I spent all of April and May pleading with my parents to let me go on the trip with Katy, and all of June pouting when they refused, derailing my plans for a great summer and possibly my only chance to see New York before I move there. If theyletme move there.
Being stuck at home is bad enough, but it was during the summer when Dad left four years ago, so July and August are famously gloomy in my family. Katy says it’s like our version of seasonal affective disorder.
Maybe it makes me a horrible person—I get that it’s sad my parents aren’t together—but I don’t feel as upset about it as everyone else in my family does. It just feels like so long ago.
Still, we rallied last week for an awkward dinner at Café Amore to celebrate my sixteenth birthday and Caleb’s high school graduation a couple of weeks ago. My parents are always self-conscious when we’re out anywhere as a family. We used to get a lot of weird looks from strangers, acquaintances staring too long, squeezing my mom’s shoulder as they passed or patting Caleb’s head uninvited. When I was younger, there were even times I wondered whether it was because my dad is black and my mom is white. But the weirdness happened even when my parents weren’t around. I got strange looks from classmates’ parents and the occasional special treatment from teachers; it was sympathy more than gawking. I guess my mom being on Channel Se7en makes her moderately famous in a smallish town, and the gossip about my parents splitting up was big news at some point. The odd attention happens much less now, but I remember my parents hated it then and still seem wary of it happening again. So our celebratory dinner basically consisted of uncomfortable small talk, Caleb looking like there were a million places he’d rather be, and me overcompensating to make everyone feel more at ease.
On weekday mornings for the next two months, I’ll have lessons at the home of Clarence, a retired viola instructor Mrs. Dubois introduced me to last year. Mostly, it’s an excuse to play for Clarence, since her arthritis prevents her from doing so now and she says recordings never sound the same. So I’ll play pieces I’m working on and she’ll give me notes and we’ll talk music for an hour. Then I’ll spend the rest of the day biding time, practicing, and reading (something off next year’s reading list so I’ll be ahead in English class in the fall) before doing it all over again.
The one and only relief about being home this summer is not being crushed in a car with Katy’s the-yuh-trical friends. I was drawn to Katy for her energy, her commitment to being herself, but some ugly, secret part of me wonders whetherI’mKaty’s best friend because she needs someone she doesn’t have to compete with. For Juilliard, for attention. Whether the moment something or someone better comes along, she’ll move on to that. Because if there’s one thing Katy is good at, it’s moving on.
I push the thought out of my mind now and stare at a shelf of movies with foreign names. My mother’s exact orders:“Something emotional but uplifting.” Nothing against the foreign film industry, but none of these covers really scream “uplifting” to me. Maybe because I’m not fluent in Hungarian.
The last couple of weeks, Mom has unsuccessfully insisted on family movie nights with me and my brother. Unsuccessfully because we’re not the kind of family that does well with bonding time and shared space and basic eye contact. Such advanced stuff is for TV families. My brother likes to keep to himself, holed up in his room, and I like classical music and imagining myself someplace far away. There’s not a whole lot of overlap between us.
Right then I hear a noise from the checkout section and turn to watch a boy leap over the counter and hurry towardme.
“Hi!” he shouts, smiling, and a little out of breath. “Welcome to At Home Movies! Can I help you find anything?”
I blink at him, alarmed. “Yeah, I’m looking for a movie?”
