“For what?” she says finally.
“For being so distracted.”
“It’s a busy term,” she says. She leans back and tugs at a loose thread at the hem of my jeans. “I’m sorry I haven’t been the best friend lately either.”
This surprises me, and I look up at her. “What do you mean?”
“I know you’ve become friends with Sebastian, and I guess I was jealous.”
Oh. Alarm bells go off in my head.
She swallows, and it’s awkward and audible, and her voice wavers when she says, “I mean, he’s getting some of your time that I usually get. And there’s something so intense about it when you guys are talking, so I feel like he might be taking something that’s mine.” She looks up at me. “Does this make sense?”
My heart jackhammers up and down in my chest. “I think so.”
Her face goes red, telling me that this conversation is more than just about friendship. If she were just staking her bestie territory, she wouldn’t blush; she would be brass. But here it’s something else. And even if she doesn’t know the extent of things between me and Sebastian, she feels the intensity of it. There’s some awareness she can’t name yet.
“I’m jealous,” she says, and tries to look brave with her chin in the air. “For a lot of reasons, but I’m working on some of them.”
It feels like I’ve been knocked in the chest with a hammer. “You know I love you, right?”
Her cheeks flush bright pink. “Yeah.”
“Like, you’re one of the most important people in the world to me, okay?”
She looks up, eyes glassy. “Yeah, I know.”
In truth, Autumn has always known who she is and what she wants. She’s always wanted to be a writer. She’s white; she’s straight; she’s beautiful. She has a path she can follow that will lead her to these things, and no one will ever tell her she can’t or shouldn’t want them. I’m good at the physical sciences but am ambivalent about following my dad down the doctor trail, and have no idea what else I could be. I’m just a bisexual half-Jewish kid who’s falling in love with an LDS guy. The path for me isn’t as clear.
“Come here,” I say.
She crawls onto my lap, and I wrap her up in my arms, holding her as long as she’ll let me. She smells like her favorite Aveda shampoo, and her hair is soft on my neck, and I wish for the hundredth time to feel something like desire for her, but instead it’s just a deep, desperate fondness. I see now what Dad meant. It’s easy to say that I’ll keep my friendships, but I need to do more than that. I need to protect them too. More than likely we aren’t going to be going to the same college next year, and now is the time to make sure we’re solid. If I ever lost her, I’d be devastated.
• • •
The Warriors are playing the Cavs in a rematch, and Dad is planted on the couch. Every line of his body is tense. The degree to which he despises LeBron James eludes me, but I can’t fault him for his loyalty.
“I saw Autumn today,” I tell him.
He grunts, nodding. He’s clearly not listening.
“We eloped.”
“Yeah?”
“You need a beer, and a beer gut, if you’re going to be this zoned out at the television.”
He grunts again, nodding.
“I’m in trouble. Can I have five hundred dollars?”
Finally, Dad looks at me, horrified. “What?”
“Just checking.”
Blinking a few times, he exhales in relief as the game goes to commercial break. “What were you saying?”
“That I saw Auddy today.”
“She’s well?”
I nod. “I think she’s dating Eric.”
“Eric Cushing?”
Again I nod.
He processes this the way I expected him to. “I thought she was into you?”
There’s no way to answer this without sounding like a dick. “I think she is, a little.”
“Did you tell her about Sebastian?”
“Seriously? No.”
The game comes back on, and I feel bad for doing this now, but it’s like termites eating at a wooden beam. If I don’t get it out of me, I will be riddled with anxiety. “Dad, what happened when you told Bubbe that you were dating Mom?”
He gives the television a last, reluctant glance before he reaches for the remote, muting it. And then he turns, pulling one leg up on the couch to face me. “This was a long time ago, Tann.”
“I just want to hear about it again.” I’ve heard the story before, but sometimes we hear things as kids and the details sort of wash over us—what sticks isn’t always what is meant to. The story of my parents’ courtship is one of those things; it was romantic when they first told us about it, and the reality of how hard it was on Dad and his family—and Mom, too—was lost in the greater narrative that they got their happily ever after.
I was thirteen, Hailey was ten, and the story they gave us was abbreviated: Bubbe wanted Dad to marry her best friend’s daughter, a woman who was raised in Hungary and moved here for college. It was normal, they told us, for the parents to be hands-on with the matchmaking. They didn’t explain the other bits that I learned over time, talking to aunties and cousins, like how having the family involved makes sense in a lot of ways: Marriage is forever, and infatuation wears off. Finding someone that comes from the same community and has the same values, in the end, is more important than being with the person you want to have sex with for a few months.
But Dad met Mom at Stanford, and, as Mom says, she knew. He fought it, but in the end, he knew too.
“I met your mom my first day in med school,” he recounts. “She was working at this funky sandwich shop near campus, and I came in, frazzled and starving. I’d moved only the day before classes started, and the reality of being away from home was so different from my expectations. It was expensive, and busy, and my workload was unbelievable already. She made the most perfect chicken sandwich, handed it to me, and asked if she could take me to dinner.”
I’ve heard this part. I love this part, because usually Dad slips in a joke about the bait and switch with Mom’s cooking. This time, he doesn’t.
“I thought she meant it to be friendly because I looked so overwhelmed. It never occurred to me that she would think we could date.” He laughs. “But when she showed up, it was clear what her intentions were.” And now his voice lowers. I’m no longer given the surface version of the story. I’m given the version a grown man gives to his grown son.
Mom is beautiful. She’s always been beautiful. Her confidence makes her nearly irresistible, but combined with her brilliance, Dad never stood a chance. He was only twenty-one, after all—young for a med student—and that first night, at dinner, he told himself it wouldn’t hurt to spend some time with her. He’d had a couple of girlfriends before, but nothing serious. He always knew he would eventually return home and marry someone from the community.
Mom and Dad dated in secret, and for two years together, even while he was staying at her place, he still insisted he would marry a Jewish woman. Every time he said this, she would hide her hurt and say, “Okay, Paul.”
When Bubbe and Dad’s sister Bekah came to visit for three weeks, Mom never once met them. He didn’t tell them anything about her, and the entire time they were in town, she never once saw him either. It was like he disappeared. He didn’t call or check in. She broke up with him after they left, and Dad never argued. He told her he wished her well and watched her walk away.
Whereas Dad has always been mute on the subject of their time apart, Mom has jokingly referred to it as the “Dark Year.” Joke or not, I’ve seen photos of them from this time, and the images always made me mildly uneasy. My parents are capital I, capital L In Love. Dad thinks Mom is brilliant, beautiful; he thinks she hung the stars. She thinks he is the smartest, most wonderful man alive. I’m sure their time apart made them grateful for what they have, but it’s clear they felt this way even before the breakup. In those photos, they both
have this sort of carved-out, hollow look. The bluish circles under Dad’s eyes seem like dark phases of the moon. Mom is already on the thin side, but in the Dark Year, she was skeletal.
He admits to me now that he couldn’t sleep. For nearly a year, he slept only a couple hours a night. It wasn’t rare to find med students who were up all night studying, but Dad is an organized, dedicated guy and had no problem staying on top of his work. He couldn’t sleep because he was in love with her. That year, it had felt like he was a widower.
He went to her old apartment and begged her to take him back.
I never knew this. I’ve always heard that they just happened to run into each other on campus one day and Dad knew from then on he couldn’t stay away from her.
“Why did you tell us that you ran into Mom on campus?”
“Because that’s what I told Bubbe,” he says quietly. “It hurt her for a long time that I married Jenna. But to think that I had sought her out and begged her to come back to me would have been a more active betrayal.”
My heart aches when he says this. Every time I go see Sebastian feels like an active betrayal of Mom. I’d just never had a name for it before now.
“Jenna sat me down,” Dad says, “and yelled at me for an hour. She told me how much it hurt to be put in a position where she had no power. She told me that she would always love me, but she didn’t trust me.” He laughs. “She sent me away and told me to prove myself to her.”
“What did you do?”
“I called Bubbe and told her that I was in love with a woman named Jenna Petersen. I bought a ring and went back to your mother’s apartment and asked her to marry me.”
Apparently, Mom said, “When?” and Dad said, “Whenever you want.” So they were married at the courthouse the next morning, another detail I’d never heard. I’ve seen countless photos of their official wedding: the signing of the ketubah, Mom obscured from view beneath her veil, waiting to walk down the aisle, my Dad breaking the glass under the chuppah, the row of photos of honored friends and family members giving the sheva brachot—the seven blessings, my parents being lifted on wide wooden chairs while their friends danced around them. Their wedding photos line the upstairs hallway.
I had no idea they were legally married nearly a year before.
“Does Bubbe know that you were married earlier?”
“No.”
“Did you feel guilty?”
Dad smiles at me. “Not for a single second. Your mom is my sun. My world is only warm when she is in it.”
“I can’t imagine what that was like for you.” I look down at my hands. “I don’t know how to stay away from Sebastian, or if I even could.” I need to ask, as much as I dread the answer. “Did you tell her that you walked in on me and Sebastian?”
“I did.”
“Was she mad?”
“She wasn’t surprised, but she agreed with what I said to you.” He leans closer, kissing my forehead. “What Jenna learned with me was that she always had power, even when she felt like I didn’t acknowledge her. You are not helpless here. But you need to be clear about what you are and are not willing to tolerate.” He tucks a finger under my chin, lifting my face to his. “Are you willing to be a secret? Maybe you are for now. But this is your life, and it will stretch out before you, and you are the only person who can make it whatever you want it to be.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Sebastian texts me before bed every night and first thing every morning. Sometimes they’re as simple as Hey.
Other times they’re longer, but barely. Like the Wednesday after dinner at his house, he sent me a note that said simply, I’m glad we agree on the situation.
I take it to mean we’re definitely together.
I also take it to mean we’re definitely a secret.
Ergo . . . we’re a little homeless. My house is now out of the question. His house is definitely out of the question. We could hang out in my car, but not only does that feel too shady, it feels dangerous, like we’d be inside a fishbowl with a sense of privacy and no real walls.
So—beginning the weekend after we’re busted in my room by Dad—at least twice a week, we hike. Not only does it allow us to get away from prying eyes during a time of year when no one else is out on the mountain, but—at least for me—it helps burn off the extra energy I seem to be carting around. It’s cold as hell some days, but worth it.
Things we have done in the two weeks after he whispered the word “boyfriend” into a kiss:
• Celebrated our one-week and two-week anniversaries, in the cheesiest way possible—cupcakes and handmade cards.
• Stealing knowing glances in every Seminar class we’re in together.
• Passing off letters as subtly as we can—usually under the guise of handing him pages of “my book” to read and him handing them back. (Sidenote: My book is flying out of me, but it’s still not the one I’m supposed to be writing. Thinking about it sends me into a spiraling panic. Moving on.)
• Rereading the letters until the paper is practically falling apart.
• Finding creative use for emojis in texts.
Things we have not done since he whispered the word “boyfriend” into a kiss:
Kissed.
I know it’s hard for both of us to be able to feel closer without feeling closer, but everything else is so good right now, I won’t let the lack of groping pull me down off cloud nine.
Autumn takes a page off the stack of handouts going around the room and drops the pile onto my desk, pulling me out of my fog. Sebastian is at the front of the room, bent over a notebook with Clive and Burrito Dave. It doesn’t matter that Clive is dating Camille Hart and Burrito Dave is dating half the junior class. Jealousy spikes sharply between my ribs.
As if he can sense the fire of my stare, Sebastian glances up and then quickly away, blushing.
“Do you . . . ?” Autumn starts, and then shakes her head. “Never mind.”
“Do I what?”
She leans in, whispering, “Do you think he likes you? Sebastian?”
My heart trips over her question, and I force my attention back down to the laptop in front of me, typing the same word over and over again:
Thursday
Thursday
Thursday
Thursday
Thursday is three days from now, and when we’re going on our next hike.
“How would I know?” I ask. Casual. Unconcerned.
Maybe I should ask Sasha to prom.
Fujita makes the rounds, checking in on us to see how we’re progressing with word count, character arcs, plot development, pacing. It’s March 10, and we’re supposed to have twenty thousand words written, as well as our critique buddies picked out. I have more than forty thousand words written, but they’re all this—and I can’t turn this in.
Autumn didn’t want to work with me—everyone but me was surprised by this—so I lack a partner and am going to fly under the radar with this as long as possible. I should have known better though. Despite his hippie, messy-literary-dude vibe, Fujita is on top of the details.
“Tanner,” he says, coming up behind me so stealthily that I jump, slamming my laptop closed. Laughing, he bends in close, stage-whispering, “What kind of novel are you writing, kid?”
If I had my way, it would go from young adult to pornography, but I’m pretty sure that’s not going to happen. See also: secret, homeless relationship.
See also: must start new book ASAP.
“Contemporary,” I tell him, adding in case he saw my string of Thursdays, “I’m just a little stuck today.”
“We all have days when it flows and days when it doesn’t.” He says this loud enough for the benefit of the entire class, and then leans in again. “You’re on track otherwise?”
“Surprisingly,” I say, “yes.”
Depending how you look at it.
“Good.” Kneeling down, Fujita comes eye to eye with me. “So, it looks like everyone else i
s paired up for critiques. Since you’re on track but struggling today, I’m going to have Sebastian give you feedback.” My pulse trips. “I know he’s been talking to you a bit about your idea, and in the absence of an even number of students in the class anyway, that seems like the easiest way to go.” He pats my knee. “Work for you?”
I grin. “Works for me.”
“What’s this?”
Fujita and I both look up as Sebastian materializes at our side.
“I was just letting Tanner know that you’ll be his critique buddy.”
Sebastian smiles his easy, confident smile. But his eyes dance over to me. “Cool.” A pair of perfect, dark eyebrows rise. “That means you’ll have to show me what you’ve got so far.”
I lift my brows in return. “It’s pretty bare.”
“It’s okay,” he says breezily. “I can help you find the shape of it.”
Autumn clears her throat.
Fujita claps us both on the back. “Great! Onward!”
Sebastian slides a folder onto my desk. “Here are some of my notes from our last meeting.”
My pulse sprints out of the starting gate, and my voice shakes when I try for a casual, “Awesome, thanks.”
I feel Autumn’s attention on the side of my face the second he walks away.
Without looking over at her, I ask, “What’s up, Auddy?”
She leans in, whispering. “You and Sebastian just had an entire conversation in sexual innuendo.”
“We did?”
She goes quiet, but her intentional pause is a living, breathing thing between us.
Finally, I meet her eyes, and before I look away, I wonder whether she sees it all there. I know it’s written on my face as clearly as it would be on a banner in the sky:
SEBASTIAN + TANNER = A BOYFRIEND THING.
“Tanner,” she says again, slowly, like she’s nearing the end of an Agatha Christie novel.
I turn in my seat to face her. My skin is on fire beneath my shirt, chest hot and prickly. “I think I’m going to ask Sasha to prom.”