How to Love

I blinked. I was not expecting that from him. I wasn’t expecting to ever talk about it, much less for him to be the one to bring it up. I am not long for this world, I’d told him that day outside the restaurant, although lately graduation felt like it would be here any minute now. I checked the mailbox every day for an envelope from Northwestern. “Girls from Michigan, clearly.”

“I’m serious.”

Well.

“I don’t know,” I said carefully, choosing my words with all the caution of seventeen years spent listening for clues. “It’s not like I’d ever expect you to be, like … It’s not like I’m asking you for anything.”

Sawyer’s face flickered, unreadable. He wasn’t looking at me. “Ouch.”

“No, no, I didn’t mean it that way,” I said, backpedaling. “I mean, I know you could be, like… faithful, I mean. If you wanted to. I just … wouldn’t think you’d want to, is the thing. Besides,” I ventured finally, when he still refused to answer, “this is all completely theoretical. If I get in. The magical if.”

He shrugged, looked out at the ocean. The waves were coming quicker now: Soon we were going to need to move. “You’ll get in.”

* * *

He was right. I got in.

Sawyer had picked me up at school, and I grabbed the mail from the box when we got to my front door, slow and rambling. He had his fingers hooked into the belt loops on the back of my jeans as I pulled out the bills, a TV Guide.

And.

A big envelope. From Northwestern.

“Oh,” I said, more like a sigh. I sat down on the steps, a handful of catalogs and envelopes fanning out onto the porch. “Oh my God.”

“Big is good, right?” he asked, sitting down beside me, although he had to know it was—after all, he’d applied and been accepted to college the year before. But he was still wearing his sunglasses, and I couldn’t see his face. “Big means they want you?”

“Big means they want me.”

“Of course they want you. They’d be idiots not to.”

Congratulations, the letter said.

The storm door creaked open; Soledad stood at the screen wearing a pale pink tank top, all tan skin and freckled arms. “How was your test?” she wanted to know, then: “Hey, Sawyer.”

“Good,” I said, turning around and looking up at her. I held out the letter. “I got into Northwestern.”

Soledad’s face bloomed open, a wide, delighted grin. “Reena!” she cried, hurrying outside and throwing her arms around my shoulders. “Oh, Reena, sweetheart, that’s wonderful!”

God in his golden heaven, I wanted to go. I wanted that writing program, I wanted to study abroad—to own a pair of corduroy pants and read fat Russian novels in coffee shops and tromp down the street in yellow snow boots all frozen winter long. I wanted to be someone totally different. I wanted to see places I’d never been. I’d wanted all those things for as long as I could remember, but I’d wanted Sawyer for even longer than that, and now that I had him and the choice sat before me, it didn’t feel as easy as it once had. I thought of Ms. Bowen, of all the hard work we’d put in so I could graduate early. A lot of kids don’t want to miss their senior year.

Sawyer hung out at my house late that night. The two of us sat on the floor of my bedroom until almost eleven, door wide open per Soledad’s instructions, playing an epic game of rummy: He was the only one who’d ever managed to learn Allie’s convoluted set of rules. I ran downstairs to get us more ice cream out of the freezer, tossing a giddy “Don’t cheat!” over my shoulder, and came back five minutes later with a pint of Super Fudge Chunk in my hand to find him not where I’d left him on the carpet, but standing at my desk with his ankles crossed casually, reading my college application essay.

“Um,” I said, staring at him and trying not to feel as irrationally caught out as I did, as exposed and weirdly spied on. After all, I’d always told him I’d let him read it eventually. “Where’d you get that?”

“Was on top of the pile,” Sawyer said, nodding at the truly explosive mess on the desktop: textbooks and test papers, an email from South Florida Living asking me to come in and talk to them about that internship. He didn’t look guilty at all. He was smiling. “This is really good, Reena.”

“Yeah?” I asked, some of the shrillness seeping out of me. I knew it was pretty good, objectively—after all, it had gotten me into Northwestern—but it was different to hear Sawyer say it. I set the ice cream down on the dresser. “You think so?”

Sawyer nodded and sat down on my bed; instinctively, I glanced out into the hallway, but my father and Soledad were both still downstairs. “How come you never let me read it before now?” he asked.

“Dunno,” I said, sitting down beside him. Brushing two of his fingers with two of mine on top of the quilt. “Felt shy, I guess.”

Sawyer smiled. “You don’t have to be so shy all the time,” he said. “It’s just me.” Then, a beat later: “You’re really gonna go to all these places, huh?”

I looked up at him, surprised. There was something about the way he said it that made me think he was just wrapping his brain around it for the first time, the fact that I was really going to leave at the end of the summer. “That’s the plan,” I said quietly.

He nodded again, sinking back into the pillows. He slept over so much my sheets had started to smell like him. “Maybe I need to get out of here, too,” he said after a moment.

I raised my eyebrows, reaching for the ice cream. Vague as it was, it was the first time I’d heard him talk about anything resembling a plan. “I mean,” I said, leaning off the bed to grab our spoons out of the empty bowls on the carpet, “I hear Chicago’s a good music town.”

“Oh, yeah?” I looked over and Sawyer was grinning, broad and open. I felt something like hope expanding like a yellow balloon deep inside my chest. “Well,” he said, clinking his spoon with mine like maybe we were deciding on something together. “Maybe I’ll need to check it out.”

43

After

It takes us half an hour to get downstairs, Hannah dressed and fed and into the playpen in the dining room, right next to the kitchen door. “I’m going to make you breakfast,” Sawyer decides, heading for the fridge.

I shake my head. “I’m not really hungry.”

He makes a face. “You didn’t eat last night, because you were upset, which is fine. But today is a new day. Thus, eggs.” He grins at me, and I sit down, content to be taken care of for a few minutes. Content to let him do it.

The doorbell chimes. “It’s probably Shelby,” I tell him, standing up. Her mom is a nurse at the hospital, and there are a slew of messages on my cell. The phone in the kitchen begins to ring. “Can you get that?” I ask Sawyer over my shoulder.

I hurry into the living room and swing the door open without checking the peephole, realizing my idiocy one second too late. It’s not Shelby coming to see me, this sunny summer morning: It’s Aaron. There is one second in which I think, shit.

“Hey!” I say brightly, taking a step back to let him a foot or so into the house, but no more. He’s freshly scrubbed and wearing a T-shirt with the marina’s logo on it, ships sailing off to sea.

“Hey,” he says. “I heard about your dad.”

“He’s okay, we think,” I tell him. “I’m going to go by the hospital in a bit.”

“Want some company?” he asks. “We could grab breakfast real quick.”

I’m trying to decide how to answer that when Sawyer’s voice reverberates through the living room, all noisy and cheerful. “Is that Shelby? Invite her in! I’ll make her some eggs.”

Damnit.