“True,” he says, “but I haven’t had any luck yet tracking down the stretch of beach where thirtysomethings go to smoke weed.”
“Oh, they’re all just vaping from their beds while watching HGTV.”
“Not us,” he says.
“No, we’re adventurous,” I say.
“Okay, tell me something, Daphne.” He tips his face toward the stars.
I lean back on my forearms. “What?”
He looks over, the left half of his face shadowed. “Where do you go when you’re not at home?”
“Like, other than work?”
“Other than work.” He nods. “Because despite your impressive commitment to the calendar, there actually are slots of time when you’re unaccounted for, but I never see you out. And you’d never been to Cherry Hill, or MEATLOCKER, or here. So where do you go?”
“Nowhere,” I say. “I’m boring.”
“You’re not boring,” he says. “You’re keeping secrets.”
What Ashleigh said comes back to me: a closed book.
There was a time when I was okay at making friends. But that was probably four or five relocations back. Eventually, it didn’t seem worth it anymore, cracking myself open to let someone in, only to have them violently extracted months later when Mom got transferred again.
“Honestly,” I say, “if I’m not at home or work, I’m usually just reading somewhere else. The beach—the public beach—or the Lone Horse Café on Mortimer Avenue. And if I’m not reading, I’m probably working on some program or another. Lots of trips to Meijer and Dollar Tree.”
His eyes shrink to accommodate his spreading smile.
“You’re thinking that all sounds pretty boring, aren’t you?” I say.
He laughs. “No,” he says, a little too vehemently. At the face I make, he relents. “Okay, a little bit. But just because that sounds boring to me doesn’t mean I think you’re boring.”
“Yeah, but you also held up your end of a fifteen-minute conversation with Craig about property taxes, so I think your social standards are exceptionally low.”
“He was a nice guy,” Miles says.
“I rest my case.”
“I like most people. Is that so bad?”
“It’s not bad at all,” I say. “It’s decidedly working in my favor. It just makes it hard for me to realistically gauge how big of a loser I am.”
“You’re not a loser at all,” he says, emphatic.
I roll my eyes. He sits up higher, his face earnest despite his visibly high pupils. “I’m serious. That asshole already took your house. Don’t let him take your self-esteem.”
“It wasn’t really my house,” I say. “It was in his name.”
“It was still your home,” he says.
That word doesn’t gut me quite so bad as usual.
The weed is filtering pleasantly through me, and the night sky is gorgeous, and the air smells like firs and smoke and fresh water, with that little snap of ginger. The truth feels more manageable. I want to manage it.
“That’s what I’m realizing, though,” I tell him, wrapping the sweatshirt more tightly around me. “It wasn’t ever my home. When you take Peter off the schedule, there isn’t really much left. Waning Bay doesn’t belong to me, like it does to him.”
“I’ll give him the house,” Miles says. “But he’s not taking this town.”
I cast a sidelong glance his way. “You’re just fine with knowing you could run into them at any point? Doesn’t it bother you that you could be buying toilet paper and Alka-Seltzer and come face-to-face with Petra’s parents?”
He shrugs. “That’d be fine.” He sits up. “Wait—are you thinking about leaving?”
“More like dreaming about it.” I check the American Library Association job portal daily.
“Would you go back to Richmond?” Miles asks.
There’s that little stab of pain that home didn’t summon.
It was my very first thought, when the dust settled. I could go back. To my old town, my old job, my old friendships.
Then, a few days after the big showdown, I finally pulled myself from the pit of despair long enough to answer one of Sadie’s phone calls.
I’m so angry with Peter I could honestly punch him in the face, she told me.
She was apologetic, comforting. But then the unspoken became spoken: You both matter to us so much. We’re not choosing sides.
Like it was a basketball game, and she and Cooper had decided not to make posters or sit in a specific section of bleachers. Like things needed to play out, and then someone would simply have won and someone else would have lost.
