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Shira’s face didn’t change. “Don’t you have anything better to do?”

He knew she didn’t mean it in a negative way, but something still twisted in his gut. He pulled in a deep breath, blew it out. “I really, really don’t.”

She stared at him for a moment, as if calculating something, and then finally, her face relaxed. She smiled, and it was like the sun had come out over the trees. “Okay. If you think we can do it, let’s do it.”

It had been so long since Leo’d seen a look like that: one of satisfaction, or approval, or trust, or maybe all three mixed into one. Honestly, he couldn’t remember the last time someone had looked at him with something other than pity or disappointment. Not that he cared at all—what did it matter what other people thought of him? He just needed some time to figure his life out. He’d do it at his own pace. Even if every day he took to do it meant another day working at the warehouse, a place he left with all his muscles aching and his feet throbbing, his brain filled with resentment over how closely the big boss monitored his work, like he couldn’t be trusted to set his own perfectly good pace. “Let’s do it,” he said.

3

There was no way Shira was going anywhere without a shower, obviously. She had working nostrils, even if Leo had been too kind to mention her odor. She smiled a bit as she scrubbed herself off, thinking she’d deserve it if she left the shower to find a stick of deodorant sitting on her bureau.

He’d seemed okay, honestly. She’d expected worse when her mom told her he was having a tough time of it. Sure, he was living at home and hadn’t said anything about a job, but it wasn’t like she’d asked; she hadn’t wanted to make him feel bad or anything. Not everybody could be her, with everything figured out by age twenty-two.

She pulled off her shower cap and shook out her hair, the endorphins from her run coursing through her. It had been wild seeing Leo again after so many years. She hadn’t recognized him when she first caught sight of him in the woods; she’d actually started giving him that polite nod of acknowledgment you give to neighbors you don’t really know before doing a double take and stopping. He’d looked…grown up; that was the only way to put it. His nose, which had been overlarge for his face as a teenager, much like hers, could now be described as strong, and his jawline matched. His dark hair was longer and shaggier than it had been, but she wouldn’t describe it as a mop the way it had been when they were preteens. And those eyes, dark and piercing, had thrown her back into teenagerhood with the flutter they’d given her in her chest when they met her own.

Her fingers had flexed unconsciously as they spoke, wanting to paint him, and eventually she’d stuck them in her mouth to make them stop moving, because that was a weird thing to be thinking, right? She’d paint him in blacks and whites and grays, strong, jagged lines that somehow didn’t end up looking overly harsh. Maybe one streak of color somewhere. She wasn’t sure where; she’d have to think on it.

By the time she’d thrown on pants and a T-shirt from high school she was pretty sure was originally Talia’s, Leo was on the front stoop. “Coming!” she hollered through the door, jamming a fuzzy hat over her ponytail and shrugging on her puffy coat. He’d changed clothes, too, she noticed as they were walking to his car; he’d ditched the nasty sweatpants and put on jeans that were a little loose around the hips—maybe he’d lost weight recently—and he’d covered the too-long, a-little-too-shiny curls with a Yankees baseball cap. Could it be possible he was self-conscious about how she saw him? She shook her head, rolling her eyes at herself. He’d never had feelings for her like that, or that was what his constant string of girlfriends when they were teenagers testified.

When he started the car, metal music came blaring out of the speaker. He nearly dropped his keys in his rush to turn it off. “We can listen to your music,” Shira said, curious. He’d never been a metal guy before.

His cheeks flushed red. “No, it’s fine. I just listen to it to get some of my aggression out after leaving work.” Work. So he did have a job. A job he clearly hated. “I’d rather catch up on the last—how long has it been? Eight years?”

“Something like that,” she replied. It had been almost exactly eight, actually—that specific day she saw him for the last time was seared into her memory, the way she’d gone home as if in a trance and waited for a text that never came, the way her parents finally showed up and dragged her out to light the menorah even though she could barely register the blessings. The next day she’d gone to Sunday school—most kids stopped going to the synagogue for classes after their bar or bat mitzvah, but she’d signed up for continuing classes, loving the calm that studying the Torah and debating Mishnah with other congregants brought her. Eventually she’d dropped out to make room in her schedule for the literary magazine because Sunday school wasn’t impressive on a college application the way editing the literary magazine was, but sometimes she still thought of those days wistfully. “I don’t know, how can I catch you up on eight years in one car ride?”

“I know,” he said. “Maybe we should skip the grocery store and road trip somewhere fun. Somewhere warm.”

“Please not somewhere warm,” she said. “That’s the one thing I don’t like about Southern California. The weather.”

He threw his head back and laughed, which would have been cute, except maybe not while he was trying to make a left turn onto a busy street. Eyes on the road, friend. “What could you possibly hate about having sunny, warm-but-not-too-warm weather all year round?”

Her foot crunched on something. She glanced down to find her sneaker resting upon a pile of smashed Doritos. “It’s so boring. No variety. No excitement.”

“Yes,” Leo said. “Nothing’s as exciting as waking up one morning and discovering that you have to go outside into the blizzarding snow and shovel until your arms hurt when all you want to do is lie in bed. Or when you want to go take a shower afterward and you can’t because the snow means you’ve lost power.”

“Snow days,” she countered.

“Okay, true. Though now that we’re adults, we don’t get snow days anymore. Or at least I don’t.”

“Fair. Things were better when we were kids.” Not just because of snow days; because of Leo. She sometimes felt like she came off as prickly to new people, like a new wool sweater. They’d find that she kept them warm and toasty eventually, but at first she made them itch. And it had been so long since she’d seen Leo, he was basically a new person. But they’d slid right back into their old friendship like those eight years had never even happened.

“They really were,” she said. “Our friendship kept me sane. Whenever I was going through something at school or at home, the swing set was always there.” A smile twitched at her lips as they turned onto the town’s main drag, which was lined by strip mall after strip mall. Bright signs advertising what seemed to be every chain store in existence—Kohl’s, Petco, Dressbarn, Applebee’s—loomed overhead. Living in LA, she’d thought half these places had gone out of business. It was reassuring to find them still trucking. Just like Leo was still trucking. She hesitated, then took a deep breath before saying, “I was so sad when you left.”

He was quiet for a moment. She glanced over to find him frowning at the road. “Yeah,” he said, sliding into the right-turn lane without a signal. She’d almost forgotten that, too—how it was almost a point of pride here to make turns without signals. Stupid. “I was, too.”

Stupid. Of course he’d been sad. She might have lost her best friend, but he’d lost his home, his dad, his sense of security, and all his friends. Hopefully he didn’t feel her stupid comment like itchy wool on his neck. “Sorry, I didn’t mean—”

“I hear that in addition to working at a famous gallery, you’re a famous artist now.” He made a sharp right into a parking space before another car could swoop in; the place was packed, which she probably should have expected, considering it was only a few days before the holidays. “Your paintings are going to be in the Met? Something like that. Your mom had a lot to say.”

Shira rolled her eyes as they got out of the car and slammed the doors behind them. “None of that is true,” she said dryly. They walked up the row of the parking lot toward the front of the store. “I don’t have a—”

Leo flung his arm out, catching her across the front; she stopped short against it. Her mouth opened in a silent O of surprise just as a car flew past, so close the wind blew her hair back. “Sorry,” he said, glancing over. “You okay?”

His arm was still there, holding her back from the lane. She blinked and was suddenly thirteen years old again, and he’d slung his arm around her shoulders as he always did, but the feeling of his skin warm on hers was now something new and strange, something that brought warmth flushing her belly from the inside out. “Yeah,” she said. “Totally fine.”

Inside, she quirked a smile to see the supermarket displays featuring giant hams and bags of cranberries instead of an assortment of organic juices and salad kits. Some things she didn’t love about LA, chief among them being the food culture. Sometimes she just wanted a muffin that wasn’t gluten-free or sugar-free or full of black beans but in a way you couldn’t taste them (you absolutely could taste them). “Okay,” she said, clapping her hands together. If they stood here in the entrance much longer, they’d get mowed down by a shopping cart. “So, where to?”

“Potatoes,” Leo said. He squinted off to the side. “Over there.”