It doesn’t surprise me that Noah’s chosen the most popular toy. I used to make fun of the kids who stood in line all recess waiting for a ride on it. They just wanted a turn because it was the cool thing to do, and I didn’t do cool things, even then. I always thought it was because being a cool kid was beneath me. Now I think it’s probably because the cool kids didn’t like me. I mocked them out of self-defense.
What if, for the first time, a cool kid does like me? Not that he does. But what if?
Grabbing the bar, Noah pushes away from me, zipping into the night. He’s heavy enough that he flies away.
Away, but not gone. He zips back to me.
Certain small thoughts click together in my mind. “Zan didn’t buy me that poetry book, but his mom didn’t either, did she?” I think about earlier, about Noah scribbling on his napkin.
Silence.
“You bought it, didn’t you?”
He sighs. “We were playing basketball in my front yard. It was the only thing we ever really did together, you know? I knew your party was that night—Kristine invited me—and when I mentioned it to Zan he went off on his whole Haven-parties-suck spiel. I was all, ‘Thanks a lot, man,’ because it was a direct blow at me—he knew those were the kinds of parties I loved. Zan was always saying stuff like that, but every time I just convinced myself he was kidding around.”
“You’re nicer than he is,” I say, honestly.
“Nah. Just didn’t want to fight. It wasn’t that important. I mean, Zan and I’d been friends since we were little kids—shooting hoops kind of friends. But I always knew we’d never be real friends. He was never happy when he was with me, you know? Even back in the old days.”
Was Zan happy when he was with me? Now it’s so hard to remember.
“So it hurt me when he left, but it bugged me, too. I mean, he didn’t even say good-bye. It was like, seriously, you can’t even be bothered to say ‘Hey, nice knowing you.’ My good-bye is just a text saying ‘keep Joy away from me.’”
Even when I’ve already heard them, the words ache like a sucker punch. But this isn’t about Zan leaving me. This is about Zan leaving Noah.
“I shouldn’t have been surprised he left how he did. Even that night, when he told me he was blowing off your birthday party and making up some bogus study group, it bugged me. I knew if you found out, it’d ...” He does one pull-up on the bar hanging from the Zip Line, and then sends it sailing to the other end of the playground. “I just knew you couldn’t find out. So I bought you the book.”
“But ... how did you know what to get me?”
Noah half grins. The happy part of grin is the half that’s missing, though, so his expression is just a wilted upturn of his lips. “Did you honestly think no one else saw you? That everyone else was so clueless about who you were?” He stares at me, brows furrowed. He’s really the one with thick, soulful Barry Manilow eyebrows. “It’s like I said before. I knew you. I tried to, at least.”
“Why?” I ask. In the darkness I can be honest. With him and with myself. “Why would you even want to know me? I was an utter and complete wench to you.”
He laughs, and in the still air the sound travels forever. “Maybe I’m a glutton for punishment. Or maybe it’s just because you weren’t like the other girls.”
And it’s almost like we are any guy and any girl, walking in the night. Playing in the park. Flirting. And I know I’m fishing, but I can’t help it, and I say, “Is that good or bad?”
“Good,” Noah answers too automatically. Of course. Noah looks for—and finds—the good in everyone. Do I want more than that from him? I can’t deny that I do.
“No,” I say, shaking my head to prove it. “I mean different-from-the-other-girls special. Special like . . . not a service project.”
“A service project?” Noah kicks up a flurry of wood chips from beneath him. “Like, the way I know the Husky Sub-4-Santa kids? Because I don’t want to know any of them the way I know you. Not that they aren’t awesome kids. They totally are.”
“I believe you.”
“Then I don’t think I understand the question.”
“I guess what I’m really asking is . . . that poem you read tonight, was it . . . true?” I’m embarrassed even as the words leave my mouth, but they keep coming. “I mean, I know the part about Zan was real, but was . . . all of it?”
Noah ducks his head and doesn’t answer. Finally he says, “It’s a song, actually.”
“A song? Like, with music?” Most songs, of course, have music, but I’m too shocked to say anything else. My mind can’t decide where to go. Since when does Noah write songs? Since when does Noah write songs about me? And which one am I supposed to be surprised about first?
I try to remember his exact lyrics, but it’s hard to recall just what he said about me. I keep getting tripped up on the part where I find out Zan wanted to keep me away. What came after that? The rest of the song
felt
like Noah liked me, but now that I search for evidence of that in the actual words, I can’t come up with any.
And, of course, Noah isn’t saying anything.
I look up at him, try to find his eyes in the darkness. He feels me staring and looks back at me. For a too-long minute I look at him, and he looks at me, and it smells like school and old times and new times and we just keep staring until I figure it out.
Noah doesn’t
like
me like me. He can’t. Because maybe I’m not a service project. Maybe he did try to know me special, not service project special or everyone else special. Maybe he tried to know me special-special. And I proved to him that the only person I know how to be is Zan’s girlfriend.
Now I’m not even that. Why would he want a girl who only knows how to be one thing? One thing she can’t even hold onto—one thing she can no longer imagine holding onto? Who would want that kind of girl?
We are not any other guy and girl, walking in the night. Playing in the park. Flirting. We’re just Joy and Noah. We will always be just Joy and Noah.
“We’d better get back,”
I whisper.
PEOPLE DON’T ASK ME WHAT I MISS MOST
People don’t ask
me what I miss most about Haven, but what I miss most is what I never had.
In Haven, I never had Zan.
Not the way I wanted to.
I never had him. I miss him anyway.
WHEN GRETEL FINDS OUT
She just holds
me. I can finally cry, so I do, and she lets me.
THE HAPPIEST PLACE ON EARTH
Once, when Gretel
and I were thirteen, our parents let us go to Disneyland by ourselves. In my foolish thirteen-year-old way I hoped we’d meet two guys: friends/brothers/cousins between the ages of thirteen and fifteen, funny and nice. Cute, too, but that was secondary. I wasn’t picky. I was thirteen.
I spent the morning in a daze, imagining what it’d be like with a guy on Space Mountain, spinning through the darkness, holding hands hard, screaming with a smile that made my face hurt. When Gretel and I stopped for churros I imagined sharing one with him, each of us nibbling at one end until our lips met in the middle.
There were no guys that day, but by noon I’d forgotten about them anyway. It started raining and the park cleared out enough that Gretel and I rode Splash Mountain eight times in a row, until our clothes were heavy with rain and ride-water and we couldn’t feel our toes. We went into shops to warm up and tried on cone-shaped princess hats and safari fedoras. We didn’t dry off that entire day, but it didn’t matter.
Being soaked alone is cold. Being soaked with your best friend is an adventure.
ON THE ROAD AGAIN
It’s too bright
when we pack up the SAAB the next morning.
Gretel’s there to send us off, even though it’s Saturday morning and she could—should—be sleeping.
Noah adjusts his stupid Senior Discount cap. “Thanks for everything,” he says, shaking Gretel’s hand more firmly than he did when we got here.
“Have a safe trip,” Gretel says. She stretches and yawns. “Call me, okay?”
“I will.” The sun is still glinting, harsh, in all directions. My body is sore, every part of it: headache, tense neck, knotted shoulders. I feel a hundred years old.
Gretel’s mom gives me a huge hug. “Thank you so much,” I tell her.
“Anytime, sweetie. Tell your parents I send my love.” She must feel me cringe, because she whispers:
“Don’t worry, I won’t say anything. Just be safe, okay?”
“I will.”
“I know.” She keeps on hugging, even when I let go. “Most of us have had an Alexander Kirchendorf in our lives,” she says into my ear. “And we’re all glad we didn’t end up with him.” She lets go, holds me at arm’s length, and smiles.
I nod, and it hurts my back.
Noah holds the car door open for me. “Ready to go?”
I take one last look around. “Ready as I’ll never be.”
WISH LIST
It’d be easy
to wish I’d never gone looking for Zan. And making a wish is easy—that’s why it’s a wish, not a reality. But that’s not my wish.
And it’d be easy to wish that Zan had wanted me back. That it had been like I wanted it all along, that he saw me and knew, instantly, that we needed to be together. But that’s not my wish.
I wish that last night we’d found Zan, and he’d smiled and waved us over. I wish that he’d been pleasant and congenial, and introduced us to his friends, none of whom he was “in a relationship” with. And maybe he would have been wearing flip-flops and maybe he wouldn’t have, but it wouldn’t matter either way, because in my wish I’d already decided.
I wish that Zan hadn’t had to be a jerk for me to realize I didn’t want him.
DO YOU KNOW WHO MY FATHER IS?
It’s been less
than forty-eight hours since I traveled this same stretch of freeway. It feels like another lifetime. It feels like it was a different girl who sat in the front seat of this crazy old SAAB 900 and daydreamed about finding Zan and getting her life back, not realizing that it wasn’t really a life at all. Not realizing that when they say “be careful what you wish for” it’s not only true in cliché world. It applies to reality, too.
I can’t think about this. I can’t have an empty, blank mind today. Not today, when I don’t have the luxury of exhausting my brain and falling asleep. I can’t remember how to fall asleep.
“Do you want to play a game?” I ask Noah.
“What kind of game?” he asks, skeptical.
I shrug, “You know, one of those car games families play on long trips.”
I see the beginnings of a smirk. “What, like the license-plate game?”
Every time I drive in California, I forget how quickly you can go from a major city to being thoroughly in the middle of nowhere. On this sunny Saturday morning just outside of Barstow in the Mojave Desert, we haven’t passed another car for miles.
“Have you ever played My Father Owns a Grocery Store?”
He scrunches his nose. “Can’t say that I have.”
“Okay, so it goes like this. I start out, ‘My father owns a grocery store, and in it he sells something that starts with the letter . . .
C
,’” I say, thinking of an item. “So then you try to guess what it is, asking yes or no questions.”
“Is it a vegetable?” he asks, playing right along.
“Nope.”
“A fruit?”
“Yep.”
“Is it cantaloupe?”
Amazing. “You got it! In only two questions and one guess.”
“Yeah,” says Noah, sounding about fifteen times less impressed than I do. “Great game.”
I wiggle a bit in my seat, trying to get comfortable. “Come on, you have to give it more than one round. It’s your turn.”
He sighs. Is it a sigh of irritation, or is he just breathing and I’m reading into it? Does it matter? No, it does not. It does not matter at all. So why am I thinking about it? Why do I notice?
“Um ... my father owns a grocery store, and in it he sells something that starts with the letter
P
.”
“Pumpernickel bread!” I blurt out.
“Uh, no.” Noah’s perplexed.
Not that I blame him. My reaction was, in a word, nutty. I explain. “Okay, so whenever my friends and I play this game, and it’s Mattia’s turn, she always,
always
chooses pumpernickel bread.”
“Does she really like pumpernickel bread or something?” Noah sounds no less confused by my explanation.
“She’s never even had pumpernickel bread! She just always chooses it.” The longer I talk, the lamer it sounds. “Maybe you had to be there.”
“Maybe so,” Noah agrees, nodding; shaking it off.
But my own words stick with me:
Maybe you had to be there.
WHAT IF?
Our sleepovers were
epic. The stuff of legends, really.
It’s not like we ever decreed it: Mattia, Kristine, and I shalt have sleepovers every Friday night, and we shalt become known for it. It just started one weekend and became tradition.
The venue varied. We took turns hosting, except when Kristine’s parents repainted the whole house and her place was out of commission for six weeks. We always made treats: peanut butter fudge, sugar cookies, frozen bananas dipped in chocolate.
Some nights we had movie marathons. Some nights we went on drive-bys. Some nights we even studied for tests together, making up flashcards and stupid mnemonic devices. But always,
always
, we played What If?
“You’ve never played What If?” asked Kristine, wide-eyed, at Charlotte’s inaugural sleepover event. She said it like playing What If? was as common as wearing Chap-Stick, or visiting a shoe store.
Charlotte shook her head, eyes equally wide. “Nuhuh. Is that bad?”
“No,” I said, tearing sheets of paper into little squares. “It’s easy to learn.” We were at my house that night, sitting in a circle on my family-room rug. As hostess, I was in charge of preparing for the game.