“Oh my God, fine,” I say, like this is the biggest sacrifice of all time on my part. “I’ll go home and take a pill. I should get going, anyway.”
“Are you sure you’re okay to drive? Let me give you a ride home at least,” Marcus says, but I shake my head.
“Nope. It’s just a tiny headache. I also think you know too much about my life. Too much ammunition.”
Marcus grins, earnest and warm.
“I know too much? How come all I want is to know more?” He says the last part quietly, and I bet if I look hard enough, I’ll find something sweet in that comment. Instead, I stick my tongue out at him.
The pain in my head is growing, but I hop off the bench and start out of the garage.
I walk past Marcus’s truck, parked on the side of the street. I had to leave my car almost down the block because of all the cars in front of The Fix. I see my white Ford when I reach the end of the driveway, so I turn and wave to Marcus.
He gives me a smile that I feel all the way to my toes.
But when I look up again, my car is gone.
Twenty-One
I’m in a meadow.
A meadow with blue poppies and yellow daffodils and dandelions.
“Here they are again,” I say. I reach for one of the blue flowers. It’s soft, slightly wet with the air of spring.
I look around until I find Marcus lying on the grass, hands behind his head, feet crossed at the ankles.
“We have got to stop meeting like this,” he says, the definition of casual. Serious Worker Marcus is gone and Dopey Marcus is here, but I’m starting to understand that they are just different sides of the same coin. “How’s the head?”
“Fine. What’s thatnoise?”
I tip my head to the side at the sound of ice-cream-truck music.
“Let’s find out,” Marcus says, standing and following the sound.
As we get farther and farther down the hill, a full-on fair comes into view. There are merry-go-rounds and clowns on stilts, children holding bags of cotton candy, all behind a massive gate in a tall chain-link fence.
“Where is this?” Marcus asks.
I stare at the lively mayhem behind the gate, trying to figure out why this suddenly feels very, very familiar, but it’s not until we’re close enough to read the orange banner with the wordsWinfield Carnivalon it that I remember exactly what day this is.
And things just got exponentially better.
“Marcus! I love this place. This is where Jason and I snuck off to one weekend last year.” I try to explain it to Marcus as we approach the tail end of a line stretching out from the parking lot.
“Oh my God. We had the best time. Like, one of the best days of our lives.”
We’d been together for months then, and Jason had been pretty proud of himself when he’d planned the date. He wouldn’t give me any details about where we were going or why, but his Cheshire grin told me he thought it was one of his best ideas.
“I’m practically an expert on date organization,” he bragged when I met him at my front door. “Some think it’s a hobby, that maybe he’s born with it, but, friends, it’s a skill. A skill he works very, very hard for.”
I laughed as he spoke. “Oh, yeah. And where did you get all this skill from? All the people you dated?”
“See, it might seem that way,” Jason had said, eyes twinkling as he led me into his car, “but all of those girls, all of those dates, were just practice for you.”
“Aw, I like that you’re a giant cheeseball,” I teased Jason as he started his car.
“What else do you like about me?” He looked over at me like he was genuinely curious. Like he didn’t know. He was clearly fishing for compliments, but I indulged him.
