How to Love

“You’re trespassing, you know,” I call, wandering across the scruffy expanse of dry, brown grass, Allie’s dad’s beloved lawn gone wild and weedy. It occurs to me, not for the first time, that things change whether you’re around to notice them or not.

“I know,” he says. “What are you doing here?”

“What am I doing here?” I sit down on the swing next to him just like we sat all those nights ago outside the party, rubber burning the backs of my thighs. “What are you doing here?”

Sawyer shrugs. “I was in the neighborhood. I don’t know. I feel like I never really …” He trails off, going quiet, one sneaker toeing the ground. “I think about her sometimes, you know?”

“Yeah,” I tell him, which is an understatement. “I do.”

“I thought about her a lot while I was gone.” He raises his head to look at me, like a challenge. “Thought about you, too.”

I ignore that last part, shaking my head a little as I gaze across the yard at the empty patio, the darkened windows filmed with grime. I grew up in this yard—Allie and I slept out here every summer, the two of us in a pup tent with a Coleman camping lantern and a radio, listening to the Top 40 countdown. In second grade I tumbled off these monkey bars and fractured both my wrists. “She’d be in college,” I tell him. “If she hadn’t … if she’d lived. We both would be, maybe.”

Sawyer nods slowly. “Maybe,” he agrees, eyes narrowing the slightest bit, like he’s trying to figure out how much of it I blame him for. I don’t know if it’s more or less than he thinks.

“She was gonna go to Barnard,” I continue. It feels a little bit like finding my voice to say it after all this time. “And I was going to come to New York after college, and we were going to get some fancy apartment by Central Park and dress up for regular life. She always said that, when we were younger—that we’d dress up for regular life.” I gaze down at my shorts and T-shirt, a loose-fitting Red Sox ringer Shelby brought back from school for me. “As you can see, I’ve really taken that sentiment to heart.”

Sawyer smiles. “For what it’s worth,” he says, dark eyebrows arcing, “I think you look arty.”

He bumps at my ankle, careful. After a moment I bump at his in return.

20

Before

“So,” Sawyer said out of nowhere, “did you ever finish your essay?”

“What?” I blinked at him. I was sitting at a back table, wrapping silverware into little white-cloth-napkin burritos, one leg tucked under me. It was almost Thanksgiving of junior year. Sawyer and I had edged around each other for weeks since the night on the piano bench, careful; I tracked his distant orbit from the corner of my eye. The restaurant rustled, steady, a current ferrying us through. “My essay?”

“The travel guide thing,” he elaborated. A gray undershirt peeked out from beneath the collar of his button- down. “For Northwestern.”

“Yeah, no, I know what you’re talking about.” I finished with the roll-ups, stacked the last of them into a wicker basket on the tabletop. “I just didn’t think you remembered that.”

“Well,” he said, shrugging, “I do.”

Imagine that. “It’s almost done,” I told him. In fact, I was halfway through my third draft of the stupid thing, sure there was something important I was leaving out. Ms. Bowen had looked at it, and so had my English teacher. Noelle, the snippy blond editor of the school paper, had read a copy and pronounced it satisfactory, which out of her mouth was actually a huge compliment—up to her standards, maybe. But not to mine. “Just fixing a few more things.”

“That’s cool. I still wanna see it.” He hesitated a minute, just standing there with his hands shoved in his pockets, watching me. “You got a break right now?” he asked. “I’m supposed to pick up some CDs from Animal.”

I felt my eyebrows rise. “Animal?”

“He’s my drummer.”

“Like in Muppet Babies?”

“Yeah, like in Muppet Babies.” Sawyer grinned. “Come on, come with me. We’ll stop and grab you a soda or something. Whatever the kids are drinking these days.”

“Absinthe, mostly,” I said, hesitating, not wanting to let on just how much I’d been hoping for an invitation like this one these past few weeks. Finally, taking a breath: “Sure, okay.” I stood up, untied my apron. “Just let me tell my dad I’m going.”

I poked my head into the cluttered office my father shared with Roger, papers stacked on the desktop and photos of both our families on the walls. “Can I take my break?” I asked. “It’s, like, super slow.”

He looked at me over the top of his computer monitor, reading glasses perched on the bridge of his nose. “Sure. Where you going?”

“Thanks,” I said, then, quickly: “I’m going to run some errands with Sawyer.”

“With Sawyer?” His eyebrows shot up so fast, I thought they might be in danger of springing off his head entirely.

“Yes.”

“All right,” he said, hesitating, a look on his face like maybe he wished there was a valid reason for him to say no. “Be careful.”

“Will do.”

“Did you lie this time?” Sawyer asked when I returned. He was holding my shoulder bag in one hand and his car keys in the other, leaning against the bar.

“No,” I told him, sort of surprised that he remembered. “I told the truth.”

This time of day there wasn’t a ton of traffic near the restaurant, just crappy antiques shops and cracked pavement. The engine hummed behind my knees. Sawyer flicked the button on the stereo, and the CD in the player clicked to life: Miles Davis, I recognized after a moment. Bitches Brew.

“I really like the stuff he did right before this,” I said, nodding at the radio as Sawyer glanced over his shoulder and merged. “Kind of Blue and all that. I mean, I know everybody really likes this album, it’s good, but if you ever see pictures of him from around this time they’re just so awful and sad. He’s dressed like Tina Turner all the time.”

Sawyer laughed. “Listen to you. I didn’t know you were into this stuff.”

I shrugged. “I wouldn’t say I’m into it, exactly. But you don’t live in my house for sixteen years without picking some of it up.”

“I guess not,” he said. “Anyway, my iPod’s floating around here someplace. Put on whatever you want.”

I nodded and looked around until I found it, settled on some old Solomon Burke. “Good?” I asked after a moment, as the horns started up.

“This works.” Sawyer was grinning. He tapped his fingers on the underside of the steering wheel as he drove. “Your dad introduced me to all this stuff, you know that? When he used to give me lessons.”

“I remember.” I used to sit in the kitchen and listen. “He was really bummed when Cade and I turned out to be tone-deaf.” I smiled. “Just one more in a long line of parental disappointments, I guess.”

“I don’t know about that.” He shook his head. “You guys are, like, the perfect children. Everybody knows how proud he is of you.”

I pulled one leg up onto the seat as we turned a corner, rested my chin on my knee. “Well, your dad is—”

Sawyer cut me off. “What if we don’t talk about my dad?”

“He’s proud of you,” I protested.

“He’s a dick.” Sawyer hit the brakes like punctuation, no arguments, and it occurred to me that for all our years and years of proximity, maybe I didn’t actually know what it was like to be a LeGrande.

“This is it,” he said a moment later, unbuckling his seat belt and scrubbing a hand through his wavy hair. We