She sighed happily and hugged him, a warm kitten snuggled against his side.
“I’m glad it wasn’t Dev who called,” she said.
“Me, too.”
“I mean, I’m glad he’s okay.”
“Mmm,” Charlie said.
“Can I ask you something?”
Tension coiled in his stomach. “Sure.”
“What happened to him? Was he born with his legs paralyzed?”
Charlie, as a matter of principle, didn’t talk about Dev that way. Dev’s story was Dev’s to tell, not Charlie’s.
Charlie knew Wren would keep it to herself, though. Anyway, he couldn’t say no to Wren if he tried.
He exhaled. “When he was a baby, his father punched him in the gut.”
“What?” Wren said. “When he was a baby?”
“He got a blood clot in his spine, and a week later he was paralyzed from the waist down.”
“Poor Dev,” Wren said. “And then—social services …?”
Charlie nodded tersely. A baby. Who punched a baby?
“I’m glad he found Pamela and Chris,” Wren said. “Or that they found him. Either way.”
“Me, too,” Charlie said. Dev came to them when he was eight, and having him there was good for everyone. One night, early on, Charlie had helped Dev into a pair of soft pj’s, because Dev asked him to. When Charlie wheeled Dev out to the TV room, Pamela looked at Dev and said, “Aw, honey. You look so cuddly.”
“I am cuddly,” Dev said. “Right, Charlie?”
“Sure,” Charlie said, and when Charlie sat down, Dev found a way to put his head on Charlie’s shoulder. That was it. Sold. Charlie had loved him fiercely and protectively from that moment on.
“I’m glad you found Pamela and Chris,” she said. “Or they found you. Either way.”
“Me, too,” he said. “Dev and I are lucky.”
“Pamela and Chris are just as lucky,” she said.
“That’s what they say. That, and stuff like how we should never feel like guests, and how their house really is our house.” He rubbed Wren’s arm. “You know what’s amazing? I think they really mean it.”
“Of course they do,” Wren said. “You guys make their house a home.” She groaned. “Ugh. Corny.”
“I don’t mind corny. Not from you.”
She sat up straight. “We were talking about ‘home’ recently, P.G. and Tessa and I. Tessa was being mopey about everyone splitting up, and she was like, ‘But Atlanta will always be our home! We’ll always come back to Atlanta!’”
“I hope she’s right,” Charlie said.
Wren shot him a look. “Maybe. I’m just not sure a person’s home is determined by where he or she lives. I think home is more than that.”
Charlie mentally cataloged all the places he’d lived. “Okay.”
“That’s it? Just ‘okay’?”
He nodded. “Okay.”
“You say ‘okay’ to the strangest things.”
“Do I?”
“You do.”
“Okay,” he said, and then he glanced at his watch and realized it really was time for him to go. He told Wren good-bye and gave her one last kiss. He missed her even before he pulled out of the parking lot.
At a stoplight, he fished his phone out of his pocket and flipped it open. Starrla had left not just one voice mail but four, and he grimaced. He was glad he’d turned his ringer off.
you going to do it already?” Tessa asked, loading the term do it with every ounce of cheesy intonation she could muster. Tessa’s mom was out and about, and Tessa and Wren were sharing Tessa’s backyard hammock, Tessa’s head by Wren’s bare feet and vice versa. Tessa wanted girl time with Wren. Demanded girl time with Wren, since soon—too soon—Wren would be gone.
Leaving would mean being separated from Tessa, and that would be hard. It would also mean being separated from Charlie, and that would be awful. Wren was reluctant to admit this to Tessa, and she would never admit it to her parents, but the thought had crossed her mind that maybe she didn’t want to go so far away after all.
It wasn’t as if she wanted to go to Emory instead. She just wanted to be with Charlie. It felt like an unsolvable dilemma, because if she stayed in Atlanta, she’d “fail,” to quote her father. She’d fail to stand up for herself, fail to help the kids she’d committed to helping, fail to escape her parents’ control.
But if she went to Guatemala, she’d fail, too, because she’d have left behind the boy she loved.
Tessa touched Wren’s chin with her big toe. “Tickle, tickle,” she cooed.
“Tessa,” Wren said, pushing Tessa’s foot away.
“Then answer my question. Do you want to?”
Did Wren want to have sex with Charlie? Definitely. It was hard to talk about, that’s all. Tessa had had sex for the first time when she was sixteen, and since then she’d had sex with two other boyfriends before P.G. And, yes, Tessa and P.G. were now having sex (“And it is soooooo good,” Tessa raved), which brought Tessa’s count up to four.
That was a lot of sex, Wren thought.
“Have you at least touched his dick yet?” Tessa said.
Wren squeezed shut her eyes. “Tessa!”
“Oh my God, Wren. That poor guy must have the worst case of blue balls ever.”
“Not helping, Tesseract,” Wren said. She peeked at Tessa through half-opened lids. “I want to. I want to do everything. I just … don’t know how.”
“Dude. Lady. You just do it!” Tessa said. She handed Wren a water bottle full of “special” lemonade. Enough lemonade to make it taste good, but definitely lots of “special.”
“Here,” she said. “Drink.”
Wren obeyed. The late-afternoon sun felt wonderful on her skin. The sun, plus the vodka in the lemonade, plus Tessa’s questions …
She thought of Charlie’s strong chest. His forearms. His kind auburn eyes. She felt tingly, and she draped one foot off the hammock and pushed against the ground.
“Sex is a basic human drive, Wren,” Tessa said. “And you know what else? It’s fun, especially with the right guy, and P.G. is definitely my right guy. Sex with P.G…. oh man.” She softened her tone. “It’s incredible. I had no idea.”
“That’s awesome,” Wren said, and she meant it. It scared her, too, though. If—or more likely, when—Charlie and Wren had sex, Charlie would be Wren’s first. Would Wren be Charlie’s first? She was pretty sure the answer was no, though she hated thinking about that. What if Wren wasn’t good at sex? What if Charlie was disappointed? What if he couldn’t help but compare her to …?
Forget that.
Back to the question of the day: Did Wren want to have sex with Charlie?
She took another swig of lemonade for courage. “Yes, I want to have sex with Charlie. I even”—she stopped breathing—“went on the pill?”
“Are you serious?” Tessa exclaimed. “You? Went on the pill?”
“I did.” She winced. “Is that bad?”
“Are you kidding? Wren! Yay!” Tessa said. She wiggled her fingers for the lemonade, and Wren passed it to her. “To you and Charlie!” she exclaimed, downing a long sip. “This is huge!”
Wren’s heart felt jumpy. She smiled.
“I really like him, you know,” Tessa confided. “Charlie, I mean.”
“Yeah?”
“P.G. does, too. P.G. says he’s a good guy.”
“He is a good guy,” Wren said. “So is P.G.”
Tessa propped herself up, not an easy task on a hammock. “Do you mean that, Wren? About P.G.?”
Wren was surprised at Tessa’s sudden intensity. Then she felt dumb. Tessa’s approval mattered to Wren; didn’t it make sense that Wren’s approval would matter to Tessa?
P.G. had continued to grow on Wren over the course of the hot, lazy summer. She appreciated how outgoing he was. She liked his easy grin, and his ability to act like an arrogant ass-hat while somehow letting everyone know that he was fully aware that he was acting like an
arrogant ass-hat, which made it funny instead of annoying.
More importantly, P.G. saw the real Tessa, Wren thought. Possibly because he was like her in so many ways.
P.G. was Tessa’s “more than.”
“P.G.’s great,” Wren said, and Tessa flopped back onto the hammock, making it bounce.
“Yeah, I love him,” she replied. “Or, I think I do. Do you love Charlie?”
“Tessa,” Wren said.
“What? Why is that not an okay question to ask?”
Wren tilted her head and gazed at the sky. The sun was sending up its last orange rays of the day. Charlie would be finishing work before long.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Why do you only think you love P.G.?”
“I didn’t say only. Even if I think I do …” Tessa pushed Wren’s rib with her bare foot. “Love’s a big deal.”
“You think?”
“I know. And here’s something else I know: I’ve got kind of a big personality, if you haven’t noticed.”
“Ah.”
“Yes, you’re making fun of me. All right. But I wonder if sometimes you forget that I’m putting on a show. I’m almost always putting on a show. Do you know that, Wren?”
“Are you putting on a show now?”
“I’m not, which is why what I’m saying matters. I think I love P.G.”
“That’s huge,” Wren said.
“I know.” Tessa’s foot lay against Wren’s side. It was the same foot from when Tessa was younger. It would be the same foot when she was ninety-nine.
“When I’m sad, do you know what P.G. does?” Tessa asked.
“Why are you sad?”
“Wren. Everyone’s sad sometimes.”
Right, Wren thought. Now she felt young. “What does he do?”
“He brings me frozen yogurt. He picks out a movie for us, one he thinks I’ll like. And he holds me.”
“That’s sweet,” Wren said.
“And for the rest of the night, or whenever, he’s just … extra nice. Like, I can tell that he cares. It is sweet.”
“And you’re not pretending.”
“I’m not pretending.”
“Got it,” Wren said. She hesitated. “Well, Charlie, he’s wonderful. He’s so good, as in a good, good person.”
“Tell me more,” Tessa said, her voice shifting to a less serious mood. Still serious enough, but more back to fun-and-games Tessa. “Don’t get me wrong. I like the guy. But he’s not the most talkative.”
“He talks to me,” Wren said. “And he cares what I think, even off-the-wall stuff like trees having souls, or whether time is linear or stretchy.”
“‘Stretchy’? You lost me.”
Right. The stretchiness of time wasn’t for Tessa, and that was okay. The stretchiness of time wasn’t for most people, perhaps, and, in fact, time wasn’t stretchy for Wren except when she was with Charlie.
But with Charlie, she could—and did—talk about anything. Charlie was super smart, and he was reading up on discrete math before starting at Georgia Tech in August. He was doing this for fun. When he came across an idea he thought Wren would appreciate, he shared it with her.
A couple of days ago he’d told her about a math professor who was interested in multiple, coexisting dimensions—beyond the familiar three. This professor tried to explain those overlapping dimensions by making a cube out of paper, then flattening the cube into a cross.
“It’s hard to visualize,” Charlie said, “but the point was that he’d taken a three-dimensional cube and represented it in two-dimensional space.”
“All right,” Wren said.
“Then he said, ‘Imagine this cube, which now appears to be a flat cross. And imagine I used rubber bands to hold it in that shape, so that it didn’t pop back into a cube. Well, now imagine that a mouse crawls onto the cross, and—bam! The rubber bands pop, and suddenly the mouse is in a cube. Just think how surprised that mouse would be!’”
Wren had tilted her head. “Was it a two-dimensional mouse? Because if it was a three-dimensional mouse, it would already know about cubes. And if it was a two-dimensional mouse, it wouldn’t have snapped the rubber bands.”
“I think the math guy was just trying to find a way of helping his students wrap their minds around the concept of assuming the world was one way, and then—bam—having those assumptions be forever changed.”
“Cool,” Wren said. They were lying in their ditch, and Wren leaned on Charlie and ran her finger down his nose. “Meeting you changed my world forever.”
Their thighs touched. Wren’s breasts grazed Charlie’s chest.
“Mine, too,” Charlie said in a low voice. Then, even lower, his lips just brushing hers, he whispered, “Bam.”
That low voice of his. God. It made her pulse quicken.
Tessa nudged her. She was holding out the lemonade to Wren, and Wren took another sip. She was now truly tipsy, and she closed the bottle and dropped it onto the grass beneath the hammock.
Oh, but she was supposed to be telling Tessa about Charlie, and how Wren thought he was the most caring person she’d ever met. Wren wanted to help people in theory, but Charlie jumped in and helped Chris and Pamela and Dev—and Wren—without thinking about it or seeing himself as any kind of hero.
Wren sometimes thought that Charlie cared for people in a “realer” way than she did, even though she volunteered at the hospital and even though she’d signed up for Project Unity. Secretly, Wren thought Charlie was realer than she was in general. She didn’t want to tell Tessa that part, though.
“He always opens the door for me, if he gets there first,” she said.
“Aw,” Tessa said. “He’s sweet, just like P.G.!”
“And he always makes a point of telling me how beautiful he thinks I am.”
“You are beautiful. What else?”
“Well, his car? It’s a vintage Volvo. He bought it for, like, three thousand dollars, and it’s over forty years old, and when he bought it, it didn’t run or anything.”
“And he restored the engine and fixed up the interior all by himself,” Tessa said. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. I heard about it from P.G. But I don’t care about Charlie’s car. I want the juicy stuff.”
“The juicy stuff,” Wren said. “Hmm.” She gazed at the tree branch that extended over her. “I don’t know if this is juicy, but mainly, when I think about Charlie, I just …”
“Want to jump his bones?”
Wren smiled. Yes, that. Yes, yes, yes. But there was something different she wanted to share, and it contributed to why Wren wanted to jump Charlie’s bones, because it had to do with who Charlie was at his very core.
“When I think about Charlie,” she tried again, “I think … how? How did he get to be this brilliant, gentle, amazing guy? He had a crappy childhood. I’m not going to go into details—and I couldn’t even if I wanted to, because he doesn’t talk about that stuff, so don’t you dare go asking him about it. Really, Tessa. Do you swear?”
From her end of the hammock, Tessa made a peace sign. “Girl Scout’s honor.”
“I mean it, Tessa.”
“I do, too.”
“I know. Sorry. I guess I get protective of him sometimes.” The vodka-lemonade was fuzzing up her thoughts. “He’s been through a lot, Tessa. I sometimes worry that I’ll never understand everything he’s been through. Like, he lived in all these different places, and he had lots of different foster parents … and some of them were bad.”
“But, Wren. Living with your own parents hasn’t been a piece of cake.”
“Compared to what he’s gone through, it has been,” Wren said.
“Really? Are you sure you’re not doing that good-girl thing you do, where you say everything’s fine because you don’t want to cause any trouble?”
Wren was startled. Even though she knew she had a tendency to do that, it threw her off balance to hear Tessa point it out.
“Whatever,” she said. “But even so, he came out of all that
as the sweetest, kindest, most loyal guy ever. He’s, like, a miracle. I mean it, that’s how I think of him.”
“Huh,” Tessa said.
Wren felt slightly foolish. “I mean, he’s not perfect. I’m not saying he’s perfect.”
“P.G. certainly isn’t,” Tessa said, and the way she said it made both girls laugh.
Tessa leaned over the side of the hammock and fumbled for the bottle, which still had a little special lemonade in it. “But back to Charlie. What does Charlie do that isn’t perfect?”
“He lets me down sometimes,” Wren said slowly. “Except, ‘lets me down’ isn’t the right way to put it.”
“How?” Tessa said.
“Well … his family. He’s devoted to them. Especially his little brother.”
“His foster brother,” Tessa clarified.
“His brother,” Wren said.
“Okay, his brother. And it’s bad that he’s devoted to him because …?”
“It’s not bad,” Wren said. “It’s great that he loves Dev so much, and Chris and Pamela. He’s never had a real family before, and now he does, and that’s great. And I tell him it’s great.”
“Oh,” Tessa said. “You’re jealous.”
“Am I? Ugh, I guess I am, but only when he picks them over me. But that’s dumb. I know.”
“I didn’t say it was dumb,” Tessa said. “It’s what you feel, and guess what? Feelings are like three-year-olds. They’re not rational. They’re just there.”
“Yes, but I don’t want them to be there. That’s what I’m saying.”
“And I’m saying, too bad.”
Wren changed the subject, saying, “Also, someone stuck a note under the windshield wiper of my car. It said Bitch.”
“Wren. Shit.”
“It could just be random, but I think it was Starrla.”
“Starrla, Charlie’s ex-girlfriend?”
“It was just a note. It was dumb. Childish. And Charlie says Starrla was never his girlfriend, that they just … they sort of …” She growled. “No, I didn’t tell Charlie. What would be the point?”
“Wren. Come on. So he could tell her to back off.”
But what if he didn’t? Or, more likely, what if he did, but in his good and caring Charlie way, and it ended up bringing Charlie and Starrla closer again? What if Starrla still had some sort of hold on him?