And then there was his charm. I’d seen a glimpse of it that first day on his doorstep, but the second time we crossed paths, when he met us at Frazier Bakery one afternoon, it was in full force. Anyone else seeing him arrive wearing a big smile and carrying flowers would have probably been just as tickled as Layla was. But I knew what that mix of confidence and entitlement looked like.
“You,” she said as he slid in beside her, handing over the flowers with a flourish, “are crazy.”
“Crazy for you,” he replied, then leaned in, giving her a kiss on the lips. When they separated—about two beats longer than I was comfortable with—he turned his attention to me. “Sydney. Hey.”
“Hi,” I said.
This courtesy done, he turned back to Layla, who flushed happily. It had been her idea to pick Frazier and not Seaside, as she maintained that both her dad and Mac hated everyone she dated on sight. I seemed to remember Mac saying this was not true of her last boyfriend, even if Mr. Chatham hadn’t wanted to admit it. This was just a small detail. But the secrecy didn’t help with my suspicion.
It soon became clear that Spence felt about as enthusiastic about me. At first, he seemed fine that I was always tagging along to their various meetings. After a couple of weeks, though, I could tell that the little time they did get between his busy schedule and the fact that Layla was always working they wanted to spend alone. Maybe I should have taken this hint and left them to do just that. Instead, I made her spell it out for me.
“It’s just,” she said one day at lunch, while Eric, Mac, and Irv were having yet another loud debate about possible band names, “Spence really likes you. I mean, he thinks you’re so funny and smart. Because, you know, you are.”
I raised an eyebrow. This kind of kiss-up always led to a rug being yanked out from beneath you.
“But,” she continued, looking down at her hands, “we both want to, you know, have a chance to get to know each other. Alone.”
I glanced at Mac, but he was eating a handful of sunflower seeds, listening to Eric defend the name Cro-Magnon as a reference to the “evolutionary” nature of the band’s direction. “How are you going to do that, though?”
“Well.” She cleared her throat. “If I went home with you once in a while . . .”
“You want to hook up at my house?” I asked.
“No!” Now she looked at the boys, then lowered her voice even further. “He could meet me there, get me. And then I could come back. Later.”
“You want me to lie to Mac, too?”
“Sydney, it’s not lying.” I gave her a look. “It’s not! I’ll be at your house. Just . . . not the entire time.”
I knew I should say no: this sort of thing never ended well. But it was Layla asking, and she’d done so much for me. So I agreed.
The first time, everything went according to plan. We went to my house after school, where my mom immediately fell back into her snack-and-school-day-summary mode. When she went to the War Room to do some stuff for the Lincoln graduation, we took a walk, ostensibly to the convenience store just outside the neighborhood for Slurpees. Two blocks from my house, Spence was waiting.
“We meet in one hour,” I told her as she climbed happily into the passenger seat of his huge Chevy Suburban. “Right here. Yes?”
“Yes!” she said. He already had his hand on her knee. “Thank you!”
And they had showed up right on time, parting with a kiss so long, I had to distract myself by studying the topiary in a nearby yard. As we walked the two blocks back, she was happier than I’d ever seen her. That was enough to make me feel like whatever this was we were doing couldn’t be all bad.
We tried again the following week, with these same steps. This time, though, two things happened: Layla was late, and Mac showed up unexpectedly.
I was sitting on the curb when I saw him coming. At first, I felt the same burst of nervousness and happiness that I always did in his presence. The latter waned, then disappeared altogether, when I realized not only that his sister was nowhere in sight or nearby, but that I didn’t even know where she was.
It was too late to try to dodge him. So I just sat there as he pulled up beside me. He had on a blue long-sleeve T-shirt, and as he leaned out the window, looking at me, his Saint Bathilde pendant slid down the chain into view. Every time I saw it, I tried to imagine his neck so thick it was tight there. I still hadn’t been able to.
“Hey,” he said. “What are you doing?”
This was a fair question. Unfortunately, I did not have an answer. “Um, just sitting,” I said. “Waiting.”
“For?”
He didn’t say this in an accusing way. His voice was not pointed nor his tone suspicious. But I caved, immediately and totally, anyway. “Layla.”
Somehow, he did not look surprised to hear this. He cut the engine, then sat back. “She’s with that guy, huh? The three-pizza eater.”
Now I was taken aback. “You know about him?”
He just looked at me. “Sydney, please. You guys are not that stealth.”
“Hey!” I protested.
“What, you want to be a good liar?”
He had a point. “She does seem to really like him.”
“She must, if she’s leaving you sitting here alone.” I looked down at my hands, not sure what to say to this. “I’ve got to run a delivery. Want to come?”
“Really?” I asked.
In response, he cranked the engine, then reached over, clearing a spot on the seat next to him. I walked around, pulling open the door, and got in.
Mac showed up, I texted Layla as he turned around and we headed out of the neighborhood.
A moment later, she responded. Shit.
We’re doing a delivery, I typed. Same spot in 20?
OK. Then, just as I was about to put my phone away, one more message. Sorry.
I wasn’t. In fact, as Mac and I pulled out of the Arbors, I was happier than I’d been in a while. And, weirdly enough, not nervous. As if where I was—riding beside him in the dusty truck, the radio on low—was not a new place, but one altogether familiar that I’d returned to after a long absence.
It was a testament to how being with Mac pretty much made me oblivious to everything else that I didn’t notice the situation with the ignition at first. As we turned onto a side road, though, something hit my leg. When I looked down, I was surprised to see a pair of pliers dangling from some coiled wires, just hanging there.
“Um,” I said, in a voice I hoped didn’t sound as panicked as I was starting to feel, “I think your truck is falling apart?”
Mac looked at me, then the pliers. “Nope,” he replied. “That’s the starter.”
Granted, I was no expert on cars. But I felt relatively confident as I said, “I thought that was in the ignition?”
“In a perfect world, yes,” he said, putting on his turn signal and slowing down. “But this is an old truck. Sometimes it has to be modified to, you know, actually run.”
I had a flash of all those clock radios on his desk, the protruding springs. “Layla said you liked to tinker with stuff.”
“I don’t tinker,” he replied, sounding offended. “Tinkering is for grandfathers in shop aprons.”
Whoops. “Sorry,” I said.
He looked at me again. “It’s okay. Tender spot.”
I smiled. “Everyone has one.”
“So I hear.” He sat back. “Layla has a tendency to make everything I do sound kind of twee. My ‘woods wandering.’ My ‘tinkering.’ It’s like I’m her own personal gnome or something.”
This was so far from how I saw him, I almost laughed out loud. Thank God I managed to resist, saying instead, “For what it’s worth, I was impressed by your alarm clock. And if my starter were busted, I’d be walking. End of story.”
“Well, thanks.” He slowed for another turn. “There’s n
o shame in trying to make stuff work, is how I see it. It’s better than just accepting the broken.”
I wanted to say he was lucky he even had a choice. That for most of us, once something was busted, it was game over. I would have loved to know how it felt, just once, to have something fall apart and see options instead of endings.
The order had been called in from a gymnastics school, and it was a big one: seven pizzas, four salads, and enough garlic knots that I could smell them through the plastic. I took the cold stuff and one pizza, he got the rest, and then I followed him up to the building. Inside, there was a window that looked into the gym itself, a huge room lined with mats featuring a balance beam, uneven bars, and a vault. There were girls of all ages milling around in brightly colored leotards and sporting ponytails, like an army of Merediths.
“Just put that here,” Mac said, walking to a nearby counter and sliding his warmer onto it. I put down my pizza, then the bags of salads as he began to unload. He was almost done when I heard the first shriek.
It was sharp, yelp-like, and startled me. When I turned toward the sound, which had come from the big window, I saw there were now about four girls, a couple very small, the other two a bit taller, all skinny, looking at us. One of them—I was guessing the shrieker?—was blushing fiercely.
“Hi, Mac,” two of them sang out through the glass, and then they all dissolved into giggles. Mac, who was still stacking pizzas, nodded at them.
“Coach Washington!” one of the smaller girls called out. “Mac is here!”
More giggles. A few other gymnasts now ran over, while the blusher was turning red enough to make me wonder if they had a defibrillator.
“Okay, girls, clear the way, please,” I heard a voice say, and then the assembled ogling crowd was parting to let a woman with short, spiky blonde hair, wearing sweatpants and a tank top, come through. She had a whistle around her neck, but even without it you would have known she was in charge. She pushed open the door from the gym and began to walk toward us, a couple of the girls spilling out behind her. “Well, if it isn’t our favorite pizza guy, triggering the usual hormone rush.”
Mac, clearly uncomfortable, put the last pizza on the counter. “Big order today.”
“Scrimmage meet with Beam Dreams,” the woman told him, stopping in front of us. She put her hands on her hips, her posture perfect. I stood up straighter. “And who’s this?”
“Do you have a girlfriend?” one of the girls called out. More giggles.
“Employee in training, actually,” I said to the coach. “Just started.”
“About time he had some help,” she replied. “Let me get some money for you guys.”
As she disappeared into a back office, the girls were still at the window, clearly discussing us. I turned my back, then said, “It’s always like this?”
“No,” he said, so curtly that I immediately knew it was.
The coach returned, giving Mac a tip and a thank-you, and we headed for the exit. As he pushed open the door for me, a chorus of voices rose up behind us
“Good-BYE, Mac!” This time, the giggles were thunderous.
I bit my lip, trying not to laugh as we walked to the truck. I could so remember that feeling as a tween, when just being in proximity to a good-looking older boy could make you feel like you might explode. If all you knew was going crazy over someone famous on TV, like Logan Oxford, meeting the real-life equivalent was almost too much to take.
Mac started the truck and we backed out, still not talking. Finally he said, “It’s the only time I wish we actually did have another driver. When I see an order come in from here.”
“You’re pretty popular,” I agreed. From his expression, this was not the adjective he would have chosen. “What? Some people would be flattered to be so admired.”
“Would you?”
I thought about it for a second. “Probably not, actually.”
He nodded, as if this was what he’d thought I would say.
“But I’m kind of used to being invisible,” I continued. “So any kind of attention makes me nervous.”
This was something I thought a lot but had never said aloud. It was the first time, but far from the last, that I understood being with Mac had this particular effect on me. Before I could regroup, he spoke.
“You? Invisible?” He glanced at me, then turned on his blinker. “Seriously?”
“What?” I asked.
“I just . . . I never would have thought of you that way, is all.”
As he said this, I caught a glimpse of myself in the side mirror and wondered how, exactly, I did appear to him. “Well,” I said, “you don’t know my brother.”
We were at a light now, slowing to a stop. “Big personality, huh?”
I looked out the window, this time making a point not to see my own face. “He just . . . When he’s around, he fills the view. You can’t look anywhere else. I feel that way about him, too.”
“Sometimes it’s preferable to not be seen, though,” he said. “Before I lost the weight, people either stared or made a concentrated effort not to look at me. I preferred the second option. Still do.”
I thought of all those girls at the gym window watching him. How strange it must be to go from looking one way to such a vastly different other. For the attention to change and still not feel better. Maybe the invisible place wasn’t all bad, all the time.
“I think,” I said, “that the best would be somewhere in between. You know, to be acknowledged without feeling targeted.”
“Yeah,” he said as the light changed. “I’d take that.”
A car pulled suddenly in front of us, and Mac hit the horn. The lady behind the wheel shot us the finger. Nice.
“I still can’t believe that was you in the pictures I saw,” I said. “Did you really just lose the weight with diet and exercise?”
“A strict diet,” he said. “You tried those Kwackers. They were my dessert. And lots of exercise.”
“Like wandering in the woods.”
He shot me a look, then smiled, stretching his fingers over the wheel. “It was a free workout and right outside the back door. No excuses. Whenever I had time, I just went into the woods. I brought my GPS and tracked the route, so I knew how far I’d gone.”
I thought of the map I’d seen on his bedroom wall, the pencil marks. Tracing his way, out and back. “And you found the carousel.”
“That was a good day. I just rounded a corner, and there it was. For a long time I didn’t tell anyone about it, not even Layla. But eventually, it was too good a secret to keep.”
Good secrets, I thought. What a novel idea. “I miss exploring the woods. My brother and I used to do it so much.”
“It’s not like it’s gone anywhere,” he pointed out.
“True.” I thought of Peyton, ahead of me, leaves crunching beneath our feet. “It just feels different now. Scarier.”
“Really?”
I nodded, then looked at his pendant. “Maybe I need a patron saint. Of wanderers. Or woods.”
“I’m sure they exist,” he told me. “They have them for everything. Boilermakers, accountants. Divorce. You name it.”
“You’re an expert, huh?”
“My mom is.” He sat back as we hit another light. “She always liked the idea of protection, but especially since she got sick. I’m not wholly convinced. But I figure it can’t hurt, you know?”
Sometimes, this was the best you could hope for. Not an advantage or a penalty, but the space between. “Yeah,” I said. “I do.”
Back at our meeting spot, Layla had still not shown up, so we parked by the curb to wait, Mac undoing the pliers to kill the engine.
“Thanks, by the way,” I said to him after a minute. “For bringing me along.”
“You like running deliveries?”
I turned to face h
im. “I do, actually.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” I paused, looking down at my hands. “It’s something about seeing all these people in their separate places. Like little snapshots of the whole world as it’s happening, simultaneously. Is that weird, to think of it like that?”
Straight-faced, he said, “Yes. Very.”
“Nice,” I told him.
“I’m kidding, I’m kidding.” He reached over, touching my wrist, his fingers the slightest weight there. “I get what you’re saying.”
“But you think it’s crazy, drawing some deep symbolism from pizza delivery.”
“A little,” he admitted. I made a face. “But I kind of like it. Makes the job seem more noble, or important, or something.”
“I’m such a moron,” I said, yet again speaking aloud a thought I had so much, it had worn a groove in my brain.
“Nah,” he said, tightening his fingers on my wrist. “You’re not.”
For a moment, we just looked at each other. It was late afternoon in the fall, the sky the pretty pink you only see right before sunset, like the day is taking a bow. I was in a new place, with someone I didn’t know that well, and yet it felt like the most natural thing in the world, another groove already worn, to lean forward as he did until we were face to face, his fingers still gripping my arm. Then Spence and Layla pulled up beside us.
We jerked back from each other, just as she lowered her window. Immediately, I felt guilty, not knowing what she’d seen. But it was Layla who said, “Hey. I’m sorry.”
Spence smiled. “You must be Mac.”
“Yep.”
Silence. Except for my heart, which was pounding in my chest and ears. But nobody else could hear that. I hoped.
“Isn’t his car awesome? It’s just like that one you’ve had your eye on,” Layla said to Mac, a bit too eagerly. When he didn’t reply, she sighed. “Look, it’s not his fault I didn’t tell you about him. I was just worried about how Daddy would react.”
“To keeping secrets and lying?” Mac asked. “I’m guessing not well.”
“Fine,” she said, throwing up her hands. “I’ll bring him to Seaside tomorrow, okay? Will that make you happy?”