How to Love

were sitting in front of a little gray bungalow in dire need of a guest spot on a home improvement show: The porch sagged, one of the front windows was cracked, and the lawn was all but dead. Soledad would have had an aneurysm just looking at it, and I was pretty sure Lydia LeGrande wouldn’t have been particularly impressed, either. “You wanna just wait here?”

“Oh,” I said. I wondered briefly which one of us embarrassed him, Animal or me, or if maybe I’d just pushed him too far again. “Yeah, sure.”

“The house is pretty grody,” Sawyer said by way of explanation, shaking his head. “It’s a bunch of guys that live here, so … I don’t know, I don’t want to, like, appall you or anything.”

“No, it’s fine. I’ll be here.”

I leaned my head back to listen to the music and, to my credit, managed to wait until about thirty seconds after he had disappeared inside the house—the front door was unlocked, and he strolled right in—before conducting a more thorough investigation of the contents of the Jeep. I twisted around to have a look at the backseat: A faded blue sweatshirt and an old issue of Rolling Stone were crumpled together on the floor, but other than that, he’d cleaned up. Allie’s mix CD was gone. A couple of bar tabs sat beneath some coins in the well between the two front seats, and—oh God, that’s what you get for being so nosy— there were two condoms tucked in the compartment where you’re supposed to keep your toll money. I could feel myself blushing, even though there was no one else in the Jeep. Jesus. Shelby would get a kick out of that one, I knew.

“Hey,” Sawyer said, and I jumped as he opened the door. “Ready to go?”

“Sure. Where are the CDs?”

“CDs?” He looked at me blankly.

“Yeah,” I said. “You said you were getting—”

“Oh, right, right.” Sawyer nodded. “He didn’t have them.”

“Oh.” He was lying, clearly. I thought of bar fights and shady characters, wondered what kind of run I’d just taken part in.

“He’s sort of a space case,” he continued as we pulled out onto the main road. “Animal, I mean. His real name is Peter. But you can’t be in a rock-and-roll band with a name like Peter.”

“Sure you can,” I countered. “What about Pete Townshend?”

“Okay, well—”

“Pete Seeger.”

“Yeah, but—”

“Peter, Paul and Mary.”

“Peter, Paul and Mary were not a rock-and-roll band!”

“But they sang about drugs.” I was enjoying myself. “So if your argument is that people named Peter are too uptight for drug-type singing, then Peter of Peter, Paul and Mary clearly illustrates otherwise.”

“You know, I think I liked you better when you didn’t talk.” Sawyer was laughing. “You want a milkshake or something? Baskin-Robbins is on the way back.”

“Nah. Just a soda is fine.”

“Your call,” he said, switching lanes and executing a particularly skilled parallel park outside a Chinese grocery on A1A. I hopped out onto the sidewalk, the sun warm and reassuring on my skin.

“Oh!” I said happily, once we were inside. Sunrise Grocery was just a glorified convenience store, but there was always some kind of unusual produce stacked on the stand near the door—I’d written a column about it for the paper, actually, and something called an Ugli fruit. “They have pomegranates.”

“Pomegranates?” Sawyer tossed a pack of gum on the counter and began rooting around in his back pocket for his wallet. “You want one?”

I paused, retrieved a bottle of Coke from the refrigerated case near the door. “Yes, actually.”

Sawyer laughed. “So get one. Get me one, too, actually. I’ve never had one before.”

“You’ve never had a pomegranate?” I asked, setting the pair of softball-size fruits on the counter.

“Nope.”

“And you’ve lived here your whole life?”

“Longer than you, even.”

“That makes me feel sad for you.”

“Cue the violins,” he agreed. He dropped his change into the “leave a penny” basket and handed me the plastic bag. “Here,” he said. “Peace offering.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Are we fighting?”

“I don’t know,” he said, holding the door open. We crossed the sidewalk to the Jeep and climbed inside. “You tell me.”

I thought about it for a second, about the night in the restaurant and how he’d totally shut down on me as soon as I said Allie’s name. “No,” I said after a minute. I reached into the grocery bag and fumbled around until I produced one fat pomegranate. “I think we’re good.” Then, taking a deep breath and cracking it open with my thumbnails: “Do you miss her?”

Sawyer hadn’t been expecting that from me, that was for sure. I hadn’t been expecting it, either—normally I was the one who didn’t want to talk about painful stuff—but it felt like one of us had to say it. I looked up and watched six different expressions play over Sawyer’s face: surprise, sorrow, something I thought looked a lot like guilt. Finally he settled on mild irritation. “Of course I do,” he said, in a voice like on second thought maybe we were fighting after all. “Seriously, what kind of question is that?”

I shrugged, defensive. “Well, I know—”

“We were in a fight when it happened,” Sawyer interrupted roughly. “So.” He shrugged once, all shoulders like he hadn’t wanted to admit that and was annoyed I’d gotten it out of him. He didn’t look at me as he put the car in drive. “Take from that what you will.”

I blinked. “Fighting about what?” I blurted before I could stop myself. For all the mental energy I’d spent on the idea of Sawyer and Allie together, I’d never pictured them arguing. I thought of the night he’d kissed me, the sense I’d gotten like there was something he’d wanted to say and hadn’t. “I mean, not that it’s any of my business, I just—”

“Whatever.” Sawyer shook his head, decisive. “It’s not important. Talking about it doesn’t change anything.” A beat later, though, as if maybe he’d reconsidered: “Do you miss her?”

“I—” I broke off, tried to think how to explain it. This was my best friend since preschool we were talking about: the girl whose snack and math homework I’d shared since before I had memorized my own phone number, who’d buried her cold, annoying little feet underneath me during a thousand different movie nights and showed me how to use a tampon. She’d grown up in my kitchen, she was my shadow self—or, more likely, I was hers—and now she was gone forever. I wondered again how much Allie had told him about why she and I had stopped being friends.

“Yeah,” I said to him finally. “Yeah, I miss her a lot.”

Sawyer nodded, visibly uncomfortable. Talking about it doesn’t change anything, he’d said; normally I would have agreed wholeheartedly, but there was something about Allie that was different. It seemed to me she was sitting in the car with us, flesh and blood and her feet up on the back-seat, complaining about the radio. I wondered how it was possible that Sawyer didn’t feel that way, too.

I was working up the guts to push him a little bit further when he pulled over suddenly, the Jeep grinding to an abrupt stop on the side of the road. We were still four or five blocks away from the restaurant.

“What are you doing?” I asked, a little shrill.

He laughed and shrugged and just like that we were normal again, like he didn’t like the trajectory of the conversation and had decided to bend it to his will. “I’m going to eat my damn pomegranate.”

“You’re out of your mind,” I said, but I dug into the bag again and handed it over. I felt Allie slip out through the back door, leaving Sawyer and me alone in the car again, just the two of us.

“Possibly,” he agreed. “How do I eat this?”

“Just bust it open and eat the seeds.”

I watched carefully as he did it, was relieved when he smiled a moment later. “Tastes like fruit punch.” He ate thoughtfully for a moment, then: “So how come you don’t have a boyfriend?”

I almost choked. “What?”