How to Love

“—and you came to the restaurant and found me.”

Sawyer nods like all the breath has gone out of him. The rain is slipping down the back of my neck. “So,” he says eventually, eyes on the other side of the courtyard; Get the hell lost, he told her, and she did. “Now you know.”

Now I know.

For a long time neither of us says anything, rain spritzing down on the pavement. I think of Sawyer carrying that secret across the country. I think of Allie dying before she ever got to live. I cry for a while, sitting there on the glider, remembering the purple ribbon I didn’t wear in the weeks after the accident, like no pretty length of grosgrain would stretch around whatever it was I’d lost. Sawyer’s arm is warm and damp against mine. “What was the fight about?” I ask him finally.

“You.” Just like that, no hesitation at all: Sawyer lifts his head to look at me, his expression wry and heartbroken and honest. “We were fighting about you.”

“Me?” My stomach lands somewhere around my shoes. I can’t believe this was true the entire time we were together. I can’t believe he hasn’t told me this until now. “Why?”

“She said you were in love with me.”

There’s a sound, this quiet gasping whimper, and it takes me a minute to realize it’s coming from my mouth. “What?” I manage. “She said—what?”

Sawyer shrugs. “You heard me,” he says quietly, a simple matter-of-factness in his manner that leaves no doubt in my mind he’s telling the truth. “She said you were in love with me even though you’d never admit it, and you had been for a long time, and she thought—” He shakes his head. “She thought I loved you back.”

“What?” I say again, just the one word on repeat like a CD that’s gotten stuck. My first reaction is this totally irrational embarrassment on behalf of my fifteen-year-old self, although—what with our kid being big enough to walk and talk—it’s probably a little late to feel humiliated at the idea of Sawyer knowing I had a crush on him back then. Still, knowing that Allie sold me out like that, used my most private feelings for some kind of messed-up emotional currency in a drunk fight with her boyfriend—that stings. For the hundred thousandth time I wish she hadn’t crashed her car and disappeared forever, if only so I could tell her what a bitch move that was.

Then again: I betrayed her, too. I think of the very first time Sawyer ever kissed me, on the hood of the Jeep outside the ice cream place on the very last night of Allie’s life. There’s no limit to the ways that we managed to fail each other as best friends, Allie and I. It makes me feel so colossally sad.

“For what it’s worth, I don’t think she meant to hurt you,” Sawyer says now, watching my face as if he’s trying to read hieroglyphics carved there. “I think she was just … upset.” He shrugs one more time, honest and regretful. “And anyway, it’s not like she was wrong.”

I stare at him. I blink. “Meaning … ?”

“Are you kidding?” Sawyer looks at me like I’m deranged, like we’re still on two totally different sides of the river. “Why do you think I came looking for you that night, Reena? To see if it was true. I left my drunk girlfriend with her car keys and I came and I found you, do you understand that? Why the hell would I ever have done that if I didn’t care whether or not it was true?”

“Uh-uh.” I shake my head stubbornly, refusing to believe it. “You never paid one speck of attention to me before—”

“No, you never paid one speck of attention!” Sawyer’s voice rises. “You were so worried about making sure I never knew you felt one way or the other about me so that you wouldn’t have to be embarrassed or vulnerable or whatever—” He stops and gets up off the glider. Turns around to look me in the eye. “Well, guess what, Reena? I never knew you felt one way or the other about me.” He shrugs a little, elegant shoulders just barely moving. It’s the saddest thing I’ve ever seen him do. “So I guess you won.”

We gaze at each other for a moment, the rain still hissing steadily all around us and my heart beating fast like moth wings, so small and whisper-quiet inside my chest. I know it’s my move here, that Sawyer’s told me the worst and most honest thing he can think of. I remember the fight I had with Allie that night at the party: You want to win this fight, Reena? It doesn’t feel like I’ve won anything at all.

“It means woodcutter,” I tell him finally, wiping either rain or tears off my face with the back of one cold, damp hand. I don’t know why it suddenly feels like it matters.

Sawyer physically startles at the sound of my voice. He looks at me, blinking. “Huh?” he asks.

“Your name,” I manage after a moment. “One who saws.”

It’s not what he was hoping for; the sag of his body makes that much unmistakably clear. Still, Sawyer musters a smile. “Makes sense, I guess,” is all he tells me. Offers a hand to pull me to my feet.

46

Before

I dropped Sawyer at home after our miserable night in South Beach, drove back to my house, and beelined directly into the downstairs bathroom. I threw up everything I’d eaten all day.

Everything.

I sat on the tile for a long time after that, head against the wall, waiting for my stomach to settle, for my breath to stop coming so quick. I sobbed for a while, feeling pathetic. I thought my insides were actually in revolt. In the morning, Soledad brought me toast and tea and sat at the edge of the mattress reading novels in Spanish, thumb stroking absently along the arch of my foot while she listened to me try not to cry.

“What happened?” she asked once, around lunchtime. I shrugged into the pillows on the bed.

I felt better by dinner, thought of calling him, decided against it.

I sat awake in bed till the sun came up.

* * *

The morning after that, I got sick again. Then a day of nothing.

Then again the day after that.

(That was when I started to freak.)

* * *

I drove all the way to a Walgreens in Pompano Beach to buy a pregnancy test, went over to Shelby’s to take it. I curled my arms around my knees on the carpet-covered lid of the toilet. Shelby sat cross-legged on the floor.

“Just look at it for me, okay?” I told her, watching the second hand creep along the face of my watch— slowly, slowly. I couldn’t get over the notion that this absolutely could not be happening to me. I almost wasn’t even nervous, that’s how sure I was that it wasn’t real. We’d been careful, hadn’t we? I’d made sure we were careful. “Just … look.”

“I’m looking,” she said, peering at the stick and frowning. She was wearing denim cutoffs and a T-shirt with the Mario Bros. on it. “But it’s not—it’s not doing anything yet.”

“How is it not doing anything?” I demanded, leaning forward to grab it out of her hand. “It’s got to be —”

Shelby pulled it back, looked more closely; she glanced again at the picture on the back of the box. “Reena,” she said then, and she looked so sorry. I closed my eyes so I wouldn’t have to see.

47

After

There are complications following my father’s surgery, bleeding that requires a second operation. We spend a week’s worth of days and nights in that waiting room, Cade and Soledad and I, taking shifts, going home for showers, making dinners out of Diet Coke and Fritos from the vending machines. Shelby’s mom leaves casseroles