How to Love

I had never seen him in Allie’s kitchen before. I had never seen him slide a casual arm around her shoulders, one hand sifting through her wispy hair. Seeing it now felt slow and painful, like a muscle tearing. I had no earthly clue where I should look.

In the end it didn’t matter, because already he was leading her away without even trying; he just stepped back and she followed, like a magnet or a high-frequency sound. “Get a drink and come down to the basement,” she called to me, distracted. “We’re gonna play flip cup in a minute.”

And then she was gone.

I stood there for a second. I tried to look very, very calm. Finally I slipped past the two girls at the counter, out the sliding door, and across the covered patio, avoiding the bright patch thrown by the floodlight affixed to the back of the house. I made straight for the swing set, wet from this afternoon’s rainstorm, the air still so humid it felt like breathing spiderwebs.

I sat.

I wasn’t shy, exactly. That’s never what it was. I just didn’t know how to do this, is all, the clang and chatter of high school. And more than that, I didn’t particularly want to learn. My whole life Cade had teased me for my total inability to handle more than one or two friends at a time; ten minutes in Allie’s crowded kitchen left me feeling like some wild animal dropped into a completely foreign habitat, a tiger in the tundra or a penguin in the woods. I wasn’t unpopular, exactly. I was just … unequipped.

It was one thing when I had Allie around to help fight my wars, I thought as I sat there. She could do all the talking when I was feeling tongue-tied, vocalize feelings on behalf of both of us: Reena and I thought that movie was stupid. Reena and I would love to go. Lately, though, not only did it feel like she didn’t have the time or patience to parse my silences, but on top of that she’d taken the person I wanted most in the entire world.

It was my own fault, I thought again, swinging slowly back and forth without much of a long-term plan. I didn’t know how to open up to people. I didn’t know how to be the kind of person who did. I couldn’t figure out how Allie—

“What are you doing?”

Sawyer sidled across the damp, hissing grass, hands in his pockets. I hadn’t seen him coming. He’d edged around the floodlight, too.

“Um.” I groped around for plausible deniability and, finding none, had to settle for the truth. “Hiding.”

Sawyer raised his eyebrows, paused against the slide. He was barefoot and casual-looking, like someone who just lived in his body sort of carelessly, all muscle and bone. “From anything in particular?”

Everyone, as a matter of fact, but it didn’t feel like the kind of thing I could say to Sawyer LeGrande. “That,” I began instead, stalling, “is a very good question.”

“Well.” Sawyer sat down on the swing next to me and rocked back and forth a little, long legs planted, just normal, like we did this all the time. “You suck at hiding, because I found you in, like, one second.”

“Were you looking?” I blurted, and then, before he could answer: “I wasn’t so much doing it as a game.”

Sawyer considered that. “No,” he said eventually. “I guess not.” He swung for another minute, quiet. We’d never been alone like this before. “This isn’t really your scene, huh?” he asked.

“What’s that?” I asked, just this side of defensive. I felt my spine straighten up, a reflex: He’d hit a little close to the artery. My fingertips curled tightly around the edge of the swing. “People having a good time?”

Sawyer laughed like he thought I was clever, like I might have a secret to share. “That’s not what I mean. Bunch of slacker types screwing around. I don’t know. Lauren Werner.”

That got my attention, as if he hadn’t had it already. I squinted a bit, trying to gauge the expression on his face. It was frustratingly dark out here; fine for brooding, sure, but for all the world I wanted to pull him into the light and just … look. “I thought you and Lauren Werner were friends.”

Sawyer shrugged. “We are, I guess. But she’s … I mean …” He stopped. It looked like he was thinking about it, like he hadn’t totally decided how much he wanted to reveal. “You know.”

“I really, really do,” I told him, and the way I said it cracked him up again. I grinned. I tried to remember the last time I’d made him laugh—a long time ago, definitely, back when we were still little kids running around with my brother, playing tag in the grove behind his house. It used to take them forever to catch me back then. I’d freeze and go quiet among the trees.

We sat there for another minute, swinging. I could hear the frogs calling out above my head. Inside Allie’s house something crashed to the floor, followed by a spray of laughter. I winced.

“You ever wish you were still, like, eight years old?” Sawyer asked suddenly.

I blinked at him, startled: It felt like he could open up my head and see inside. I took a beat to recover, slid my feet out of my clogs and rubbed them cautiously through the cool, damp grass. “Nah.” It felt weirdly dangerous to look at him, like staring at the surface of the sun. “I only ever wish I was old enough to leave.”

Sawyer didn’t answer for what felt like an eternity. Finally I glanced up and found him looking back. Something weird and new and personal charged between us in the darkness, a gaze too long to be an accident. Another moment passed before he grinned. “For what it’s worth,” he said, and here he bumped the hard knob of my bare ankle with his own, gentle, “I think you look arty.”

“I don’t—” I started, but then there was Allie crossing the lawn, a dark swath through the pool of light Sawyer and I had both avoided so carefully, like a stage actress finding her mark.

“There you are!” she called brightly—so pretty even in jeans and a tank top, curves and curly hair. Of course he would have chosen her. “My two favorites.”

“Here we are,” Sawyer agreed, eyes on me for a single beat longer before turning his attention to Allie. “Reena was hiding.”

“That’s ’cause she’s mad at me,” Allie said, subtle as a border collie, reaching for the chain link and giving my swing a little shake. She smelled like malt lemonade and her mother’s perfume.

Sawyer cocked his head to the side. “I don’t know about that,” he told her, getting to his feet. “I’ll see you inside.” He glanced at me one more time, quick. “Later, Reena.”

“What were you guys talking about?” she asked when Sawyer was gone, taking his place on the swing set and winding around in a circle so the chain twisted up, then letting herself go in a dizzy rush. “You and the boy king.”

“Nothing,” I told her, shrugging. I slid my shoes back onto my feet a little urgently, as if I might possibly need to run someplace in the immediate future. “He just wanted to know what I was doing out here.”

Allie looked at me sideways, face screwing up a bit, like she didn’t quite trust me to tell her the truth. “What were you doing out here?” she asked.

“Seriously?” I gaped, a hot little flare of annoyance inside my chest. “I mean— seriously?”

Allie blinked, her gray eyes wide and innocent—her I don’t know how that stuff got in my purse expression, normally reserved for her parents and shopping mall security guards. I didn’t like her turning that look on me. “What?”

“You totally blindsided me with those people in there!” I couldn’t get a foothold with her lately. It felt like I was hanging on by my nails. “I came over to watch TV and eat pizza or something, not play flip cup with a bunch of strangers.”

“They’re not strangers,” she corrected sharply. Heat lightning flickered in the distance, there and gone again. “They’re all from school. And I knew you wouldn’t come if I told you Lauren was going to be here, so—”

“Yeah,” I interrupted. She wasn’t listening to me. “I know. That’s my point.”

“Well, where does that leave me?” Allie asked, huffing a little. “They’re my friends, too, Reena. I like them. They’re not, like, bad, shady people. They’re nice.”

“I never said they weren’t nice,” I argued. “I never even said they’re the reason you totally dropped off the face of the earth this whole summer, which—”

“I told you I’m sorry!” Her voice rose a little, almost whining. “If you could quit making it so hard for me to include you—”

“Maybe I don’t want to be included in this stuff, Al! I hate this stuff! I just want to do normal stuff, like always—”