How to Love

in her mouth and one into mine for good measure. “I like Aaron,” she says, swallowing. “I think he’s good for you.”

“No shit,” I say, then, “Shit. Sorry. Just, you know, you and everybody else.”

“Ah.” She doesn’t say anything after that. The silence hangs suspended, a drop of blood in a bowl of milk. I wait, though, patient, and finally Soledad sighs. “Reena, about Sawyer.”

Right away I don’t like where we’re heading. “Sol, please, I don’t want to—”

“I know there is a certain kind of … romance in him being here. Like a movie. But I just need you to remember what the last few years have been like, all right?” Soledad has moved on to onions now. Her thin, graceful hands chop and dice. “For everyone. For your father.”

“For my father?” I blink at her.

Soledad works steadily, the efficient sound of steel on wood. “It’s been hard on everyone, is what I’m saying. And we all might have done things differently, and—” Her face softens and she is looking at me with compassion, which is why I am so surprised when she says, “Please just think this time, sweetheart.”

I just stand there for a moment, dumb like an ox. Then my eyes widen. “Are you fucking kidding me?” I ask quietly, and I am sure she’s going to scold me for my dirty mouth, but instead she just puts the knife down on the counter and shakes her dark, beautiful head.

“No, Serena,” she answers calmly. “I’m fucking not.”

* * *

I’ve gotta go.

I don’t know where—Shelby’s, maybe, if she’ll even talk to me, or the highway, or in my car right off a cliff —but out of this house is the first step. I pluck Hannah from her playpen and am rooting around in the couch cushions for my keys when the doorbell rings, and when Roger and Lydia come inside, Sawyer is right behind them.

Wearing a tie.

I stare for a minute, like the baby does when she’s trying to make sense of something she’s never seen before. I laugh one short, hysterical laugh.

“What happened?” he asks, before hello.

“Nothing.” I lie as a reflex. “Hi.”

Sawyer isn’t satisfied. He nods at the keys in my hand. “Where are you going?”

Roger and Lydia are looking at me expectantly; Soledad is coming through the kitchen door. “Nowhere,” I say, and it’s final, like the sound of something slamming. I put the keys back down and follow them inside.

34

Before

I was walking to school one sunny April morning, totally lost in my own brain, trying to untangle a particularly stubborn knot in my headphones and planning the article I was going to pitch Noelle that afternoon, about teen travel tours for summer. When a horn honked behind me, I jumped like crazy, iPod skittering to the sidewalk. I whirled around, spooked, and there was Sawyer’s Jeep parked at the curb.

“Did it break?” he called from the driver’s seat. He’d pulled over a half block from my house, right along my usual route. He was wearing sunglasses, but even from over here I could see that he was laughing. Sawyer had a really excellent laugh.

I scooped the iPod up off the ground and examined it for permanent damage, but other than a couple of scratches it seemed okay. “No harm done,” I called back, shaking my head as I made my way over to the driver’s side door. “Did I just walk right past you?” I asked, embarrassed.

“Uh-huh.” Sawyer reached a hand out and kissed me through the open window, warm morning sun gleaming off the chrome on the Jeep. He was wearing a faded blue T-shirt that looked like it had been washed a million times, as if it might pull apart like cotton candy if you tugged on it even a little. “You,” he pronounced, fingers laced through mine and squeezing, “are tightly wound.”

“I am not!” I protested, holding up the headphones and shifting my weight a bit to accommodate my backpack. I had to bend at a weird angle to lean inside the Jeep. “I was concentrating.”

“Clearly.” Sawyer laughed again, his face tipped close enough to mine that our noses brushed together when he moved. I could feel sweat starting to prickle pleasantly on the back of my neck. “So here’s the thing,” he said, this quiet confidential voice like he was going to tell me something really exciting but I had to promise to keep it just between the two of us. “I woke up thinking about waffles.”

I snorted. “Is that a code word?” I asked, teasing.

Sawyer raised his eyebrows. “Do you want it to be?”

I shrugged and got a little closer, nudging the sunglasses down the bridge of his nose with one finger. Inside the car it smelled like him. “Maybe,” I admitted.

“Maybe.” Sawyer tilted his chin in my direction, brushing a row of kisses along my bottom lip. He smiled and I could feel it in my teeth. “Get in and find out.”

God, I wanted to. My stomach swooped sideways with the force of how much, but: “I can’t,” I told him, shaking my head. I exhaled a little, like breaking a spell. “I have homeroom in, like, fifteen minutes.”

“So?” Sawyer asked. His mouth followed mine as I pulled away, still grinning. “Skip it.”

I laughed, straightening up all the way and wiping my suddenly clammy hands on the back of my jeans. I was still holding my iPod. “I can’t just skip it,” I said—lamely, sure, but I really couldn’t. I had a quiz on the first half of Anna Karenina and an appointment with Ms. Bowen to talk about internships for the summer, plus the newspaper meeting and a lab report to turn in. I needed to get to school—and soon, actually, if I didn’t want to be totally late. “I can’t.”

Sawyer, apparently, was in no hurry at all. “Sure you can,” he promised easily. “Here, I’ll show you. Just get in the car, and then I’ll hit the gas, and then boom: waffles.”

I wrinkled my nose, bright sun and the headphones tangled up in my fingers, worse than they had been to start with. “Just like that, huh?” I asked.

“Just like that,” he agreed.

I didn’t doubt that for him it was exactly that simple: When Sawyer wanted to do something, he did it. End of story. He didn’t stop to think about everything that could possibly go wrong. I wondered what it was like to be that kind of person—the kind that wasn’t always worried about what might happen, about what people might think or every disaster that could potentially befall him a dozen steps down the road. He just … acted.

I thought again of my internship meeting and the newspaper article I’d been so psyched to pitch barely five minutes ago, but I could feel my resolve weakening the longer I stood there and looked at Sawyer’s face. Even after dating a full month, it was thrilling to have him show up like this, knowing that he’d been thinking about me enough to come and seek me out. That he thought I could be the kind of person who just acted, too.

“You’re a bad influence,” I said finally, feeling a guilty, delighted smile spread across my face as the idea of spending a full, secret day off with Sawyer started to firm up in my mind. I glanced over my shoulder, then down at my feet, so he wouldn’t see how excited I was. “I mean it.”

Sawyer nodded ruefully. “I know,” he said. For a minute it looked like maybe he felt legitimately bad about that, like he thought he was dragging me down in some way. Then he grinned like the Fourth of freaking July. “Get in.”

* * *

It turned out waffles did actually mean waffles. We went to a trashy Denny’s on Federal Highway and ordered big plates of them covered in whipped cream and blueberries, a giant side of bacon between us. Sawyer’s warm knee pressed into mine under the table. We sat there half the morning surrounded by a bunch of senior citizens, a couple of moms with noisy kids in a sticky-looking booth by the window. Cheesy Michael Bolton music piped in through the speakers. Being here at such a weird time felt like vacation, like we were a lot further from home than just fifteen minutes: It was as if this was some great trick we were pulling off together, him and me against the world. I knew that was stupid—it was cutting school, not bank robbery or international intelligence