But he didn’t reply.
The night of Noel’s return, Hutch, Meghan and I drove to Snappy Dragon in Meghan’s Jeep, leaving my parents to take the Honda.
“Are we supposed to pick up Noel?” Meghan asked, pushing a CD into the car stereo and pulling out of Hutch’s driveway.
I was sitting in the back and I could see Hutch wince in profile as Beyonce came through the speakers. Hutch and Meghan are friends only of the school variety. They don’t hang out unless I’m there to be the link, and Meghan spends a lot of time with Finn and his soccer buddies—a social group in which Hutch would be woefully out of place.
Hutch shrugged. “Haven’t talked to him.”
“I haven’t either,” I said. Meghan knew this already. She asked because she was hoping Hutch would have.
Hutch turned and looked at me, some hurt in his eyes. “I thought you said he was coming.”
“I said he
“Let’s call. Do you have his number?”
But Meghan had already found it in her cell.
“DuBoise, are you home?” she asked when Noel answered.
“Don’t talk and drive,” said Hutch. “Give it to me.”
But she didn’t hand it over. “It’s Meghan, you doof,” she said to Noel. “I’m in the car with Roo and Hutch. Do you need a ride?”
Hutch grabbed the phone. “Dude. Welcome back. How was New York?”
I leaned back in my seat and stared out the window, blinking away tears.
Noel was here.
He was here in Seattle and he’d picked up his phone for Meghan when he hadn’t picked up for me.
“I’m leaving tomorrow, dude,” Hutch was saying. “No more Tate till December.”
Silence. Hutch listening.
“Nah, not even Thanksgiving. I thought Ruby explained it all.”
Silence again.
“Well, you should check your e-mail. We’re going to Snappy Dragon and then some dessert place with white chocolate cake.”
Pause.
“I don’t like white chocolate either, but Ruby says trust her.”
Hutch shook his head as Noel was talking. Then he turned and rolled his eyes at me.
“Whatever, dude. I’ll be back in four months. Nah, it’s fine.”
He hung up.
“Lame!” Meghan said.
“He’s jet-lagged,” said Hutch. “And he forgot about it. And his parents want him home. He said to tell you he’s sorry, Ruby.”
He wasn’t coming.
He was back in Seattle and he hadn’t called and he wasn’t coming.
I mean, I kind of knew he wasn’t.
But until then, I had been able to hope he was.
I’m a vegetarian, so I ate asparagus in black bean sauce and vegetable pot stickers. Hutch, Meghan and Dad shared mu shu pork and sliced cod in Szechuan sauce, and my mother abandoned her raw food diet because she likes the Snappy smoked duck so much.
It wasn’t a very good celebration. Everything tasted like straw because of the choking feeling at the back of my throat. I was trying not to sob and my father was staring morosely into his plate of rice, occasionally saying things like: “My mother used to make asparagus on holidays.”
“My mother liked orzo better than rice.”
“My mother went to China once.”
“My mother used to bleach our tablecloth in the sink.”
Mom kept trying to get Dad to change the subject and tell Hutch about how they’d backpacked through Europe before Dad insisted on settling down and building his dream houseboat. “We slept on the trains, John,” she told Hutch as he unwrapped a Lonely Planet guide to Paris. “We’d shove our wallets down our shirts so no one could steal them. I didn’t shower for days. It was wonderful.”
Hutch smiled at her in the way teenagers smile at their friends’ parents. “I’m staying with a host family,
