How to Love

downstairs.”

“Mmm,” he said, not moving. “No, you don’t.”

“I really do. My father is going to come looking for me.” I grinned. “With his shotgun.”

“Your father doesn’t own a shotgun.”

“Sure he does. He uses it on guys who try to make out with me in closets.”

“Duly noted.” Sawyer grinned back, and moved on. “Biggest pet peeve?”

I sighed, crouched down again so we were at eye level. “People who mispronounce the word nuclear.”

He laughed. “English nerd.”

“Favorite book?”

“The Sound and the Fury.”

“You’re lying.”

“I’m not completely illiterate, you know.”

“No, of course not.” I blushed. “I just thought you were going to say, like—”

“Catcher in the Rye?”

“Well,” I said, embarrassed. “Yes, actually.”

Sawyer leaned toward me. “I’m not that predictable. First kiss?”

“Elliot Baxter, at the eighth-grade dance. What did you really pick up from your drummer that day?”

Sawyer frowned. “Okay,” he said suddenly, up off the carpet, attempting to climb over me and out the closet door. “You’re right. Time to go back downstairs.”

“Yeah, that’s what I thought.” I dropped Allie’s sweatshirt and let him pull me out with him, slightly dizzy. We stood up in the light of my bedroom, sudden and bright. “Painkillers, right?”

“I—” Sawyer raised his eyebrows, surprised, and I knew I wasn’t wrong. “What makes you think that?” he asked.

I shrugged. “I have eyeballs,” I told him. Also, I had Google. “I’m not dumb.”

“I never thought you were.” He didn’t apologize, or try to deny it. Instead he wrapped both arms around my shoulders and squeezed, friendly and familiar. “I don’t do it a lot,” he promised. “Every once in a while.”

How often is that? I wanted to ask him. I thought of Lauren Werner and long nights at the Prime Meridian, of the intervention shows Shelby liked to watch. From what I’d seen in movies and on TV, Sawyer didn’t seem like an addict—someone who sweated all the time and stole his parents’ DVD player. Still, here were such huge swaths of his life I didn’t know anything about—whole paragraphs blacked out of wartime letters, movies modified to fit this screen. Who are you? I wanted to demand, but instead I only nodded, tucking this piece of information, and everything it might mean, into the back of my head for further consideration and trying to ignore the sinking sensation in my stomach. I needed him not to be too good to be true.

“Oh Jesus,” I said then, catching a glimpse of my hair in the mirror above the dresser, photos and jewelry box and deodorant scattered across the surface. Forty-five minutes’ worth of Soledad’s careful handiwork was completely and totally undone. “See what you did?”

He watched as I repaired the worst of the damage, kissed me on the forehead, and smiled. “You’re pretty cute.”

I stuck my tongue out at him. “All right, you drug-addled hair-wrecker. Let’s go.”

“Right behind you, you language-obsessed intellectual elitist.”

I waited five more minutes after Sawyer went downstairs, snuck down as unobtrusively as I could manage. He wasn’t a secret, I told myself, dirty or otherwise, but this was Cade’s day, and I was happy. The last thing I needed was another grave, disappointed look from my father, the nagging feeling of something not right behind my ribs.

I grabbed a slice of wedding cake, made my way through the yard. Carin grabbed my arm as I passed by. “Reena,” she said curiously, an expression on her face like I’d changed inexplicably in the thirty minutes since she’d last seen my face. “What happened to the photos?”

33

After

Fighting with Shelby makes me totally miserable. I keep going to text her—for all kinds of different reasons, stupid regular stuff, to let her know that Center Stage is on cable or to complain about the new Taylor Swift song lodging itself deep inside my brain—before realizing we aren’t speaking and flinging my phone back onto the couch. I sulk. I remember this feeling from the year before Allie died, the weird emptiness of not having a best friend to tell things to. How it’s lonelier than any breakup could ever be.

We work the same busy dinner shift at Antonia’s one night, two big eight-tops and a party back in the banquet room. I catch her by the wrist by the bar during what’s as close to a lull as we’re going to get, my fingers curling around the half dozen bracelets she’s wearing. “Shelby,” I start, then completely fail to follow it up in any kind of meaningful way.

Shelby raises her eyebrows, an armful of napkins and a look on her face like whatever I have to say, it better be good. “What?” she asks shortly.

I hesitate. I want to ask her how her week’s going; I want to get the latest Hipster Cara updates. I want to tell her I’m sorry, that I feel like one of those horrible girls who can’t make friendships work with other girls, that I miss her a crap ton and I didn’t mean to screw with her brother and I’ll do anything she wants to make it up to her. I want to fix this in the worst, stupidest way, but I don’t know how to do it, and in the end I just shake my head. “Forget it,” I say, chickening out at the last possible second. “Never mind.”

“Okay.” Shelby rolls her eyes at me like she both expected this and finds it colossally lame. “Have it your way, Reena,” she says finally, and after a second I let go of her arm.

* * *

The week creeps along. I’m restless and edgy; Hannah and I cruise the highway for hours every night. “You’re wasting gas,” Cade points out, but I just shrug, handing my credit card over to the pale, skinny attendant like a crack addict looking for a fix. The road rumbles under my feet: keep going, keep going, keep going.

I drive.

Five o’clock on Sunday and Soledad is cooking; the kitchen smells delicious, a big pot of yellow rice simmering on the stove and the counter strewn with ingredients I know she pulled from memory. Soledad never makes anything from a book. “Are you going to be around for dinner?” she asks as I pull a bottle of water from the fridge. “The LeGrandes are coming over.”

I tense. “Why?”

“What do you mean, why?” she asks, looking at me oddly. “To eat.”

“No, I know.” It was an idiotic question. Roger and Lydia still come to dinner from time to time, though usually Hannah and I do our best to scoot out the back door before they get here—it’s always seemed cleaner to do it that way, and it’s not as if anyone’s ever encouraged us to stay. I have no earthly clue what they talk about.

“Are you not seeing Aaron this weekend?” Soledad asks me now, her expression all practiced-casual as she pulls a covered dish out of the oven, and I do my best to match it in return. He’s left a couple of messages on my cell phone since I broke up with him. So far, I haven’t called him back.

“Um, nope,” I say, fussing a little with the magnetic letters on the fridge. REENA, I spell, red and green and yellow. HOME. “We’re taking kind of a breather. Can I help?”

“Here, keep stirring this. It’s sticking.” She moves so I can have the stove to myself, a whiff of lilacs and vanilla as she passes by. “What do you mean, ‘a breather’?”

“Hmm?” I ask, stalling, banging the wooden spoon around in the pot with more force than is strictly called for. “I don’t know. Just, like, some time apart.”

“Really? That’s too bad.” Soledad throws some cherry tomatoes into her wooden salad bowl, then sticks one