How to Love

car, navigating a teeming crowd of noisy, restless kids about our age, shouts and laughter. “Traveling?”

“Yeah, kind of.” I shook my head, embarrassed. “It’s stupid.”

“I doubt that.” We were back at his Jeep by this point. Sawyer climbed up on the hood to eat his cone, angled his head at the empty space beside him until I got the message and pulled my sneakers up onto the bumper along with him. “Tell me.”

“Ugh, fine.” I rolled my eyes a little, blushing in the dark. “The program I’m applying to is for creative nonfiction, you know? Travel writing.” The words sounded wooden and unfamiliar; this wasn’t something I’d told a lot of people besides Allie. “So I’m writing the essay like a travel guide, basically—go here, do this, avoid this gross hotel—only instead of it being about a particular place, it’s actually about, like—my life.” I shrugged again, embarrassed. “Or like, the life I want to have.”

“That’s not stupid.” Sawyer was grinning. “That’s cool. I want to read it when you’re done.”

I snorted. “Yeah, right.”

“I’m serious,” Sawyer said, considering. His white T-shirt seemed to glow in the light from the storefronts. “Early graduation, huh?” he asked after a moment. “You’re that desperate to get out of here?”

“No,” I explained, “it’s not that. I mean, of course I’ll miss my family and everybody. I love my family, I just …” I shrugged. I didn’t know how you could explain something like loneliness to someone like Sawyer—the feeling that I had to find something to wrap my hands around, and that whatever it was, it wasn’t here. “There’s not a whole lot for me here, you know?”

Sawyer smiled a bit, unreadable. “So I better hang out with you while I can, is that what you’re saying?”

Which—what? What was going on here? I had no earthly idea what he was after. “Pretty much,” was all I said.

We sat in silence for a little while, watching the cars go by on the highway. I ate my ice cream. I waited. “You’re quiet,” he said eventually.

I considered that for a moment. “Well,” I said, “so are you.”

“Reena.” We were close enough that our arms were touching, warm and the slightest bit sticky with heat. “Why are you here?”

I looked at him sideways. My heart was a foot on a kick drum inside my chest. “You tell me.”

Sawyer shook his head. “I’m serious.”

“Are you?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I really am.”

“Sawyer.” I hesitated, blushing. I was ninety percent sure I was completely misunderstanding whatever was happening here. “Look. Allie’s my friend. Or was my friend, at least, and—”

“Don’t you get tired?” he interrupted.

I stopped. “Of what?”

Sawyer shrugged. “Being who everybody thinks you are.”

“What? No.” I shook my head, stalling, and glanced out across the highway at the strip malls and the palm trees. I smelled wet pavement and car exhaust. “Who else would I possibly be?”

Sawyer seemed to know I was faking; he looked at me for a second in a way that made me almost nervous, like he could see the tissue underneath my skin. Fighting the creeping feeling that I was in way, way over my head, I did what any rational human being would do when confronted with a question she didn’t want to answer, by a person she’d had a miserable crush on for two presidential terms:

I nudged my cone right up into his face.

“I’m sorry,” I said immediately, giggling a little hysterically. “Jesus Christ. I’m sorry. I can’t believe I just did that.”

Sawyer stared at me for a second, ice cream smudged over his mouth and his nose. “I … kind of can’t believe you did, either,” he said, but he was laughing. When he put his free hand on the back of my skull and kissed me, I tasted chocolate and rainbow sprinkles. I didn’t even close my eyes.

He pulled back a little bit. “Is it okay that I just did that?” he asked, after a second or two.

I nodded dumbly.

“Did you like it as much as I did?”

I nodded again.

“Are you ever going to talk to me again in your whole life?”

I nodded. “I mean,” I said, recovering slightly, thoughts skittering like moths at the panicky edges of my brain. “Yes.”

Sawyer grinned. “Okay,” he said. He tossed the rest of his ice cream into a nearby trash can and cupped both of his hands around my face. “Good.”

He was still kissing me when his cell phone rang inside his jeans a minute later, and I made to pull away but his grip tightened, a gentle fist in my hair. “Ignore it. Ignore it,” he muttered, and I did for a minute, but then mine started ringing, too.

“Sawyer,” I said, reaching for my purse even as the rest of me was still otherwise engaged. “Sawyer, it’s my house. I have to pick it up. Hello?” I said, while—oh God, oh hell, we were in the middle of a parking lot and my dad was on the phone—Sawyer moved his mouth down to my neck. “Hi. What’s up?”

“Reena,” my father said, and there was a sound in his voice I’d never heard before, panic and anger. “Oh, thank God. Where in the hell are you?”

I jumped off the hood of that Jeep so fast that I just about took Sawyer’s head off, squeezing my eyes shut as I tried to figure out what to say: I’d lied to my father for the first time in my entire life and I was caught. How was that even possible?

I was still trying to come up with an answer when he pushed on: “Are you with Allie?” he demanded.

I curled my free hand into a fist, felt my nails dig into my palm. Sawyer was watching me carefully. I fumbled around for something plausible, finally had to settle for the truth. “No,” I admitted. “No, I’m not.”

“Thank God,” he said again, then, to whomever was in the room with him, Soledad or Cade: “She’s okay. I’ve got her.”

“What?” I said sharply. Suddenly I was very, very afraid. “What’s going on?”

“Reena,” he said, and I knew I’d never forget this as long as I lived, the neon lights of the ice cream place in the near distance, the curious expression on Sawyer LeGrande’s pretty face, and the tiny shards of glass embedded in the asphalt, like something fragile and bright had only just exploded there. “I have to tell you something bad.”

11

After

I don’t see Sawyer for the rest of my Sunday brunch shift, although he might as well be breathing down my neck the whole time the way everybody’s talking about him—like he’s some visiting movie star and not a degenerate who up and abandoned everybody who ever gave half a damn. The regulars are delighted to see him. The waitresses can’t get over his hair. He’s been traveling this whole time, Finch tells me in the kitchen, rambling around the country like a tumbleweed or Jack Kerouac, with no particular destination in mind.

“Traveling,” I repeat slowly, the colossal unfairness of it hitting me with a force so physical I actually grab the edge of the prep table until I steady out. I feel like my insides have been excavated, like I’m some screwed-up ghost version of myself. “How nice for him.”

By five fifteen, all I want to do is go home and curl into a ball under the covers, but right after I punch my card I turn around and he’s there in the doorway of the office, rubbing at the stubble on his cheek.

“Jesus Christ,” I say, louder than I mean to. “You scared the shit out of me.”

“Sorry,” Sawyer says, in a voice like he’s actually not. He slouches casually against the jamb. For the first time since he turned up, I let myself stare at him for longer than a second, more than a quick, hungry glance out of the corner of my eye: He’s broader than he was when he left here. The hair on his arms is bleached pale from