to return to anyway? I wanted to go to law school. And then I wanted to get into Congress. And so on.”
Lucas’s phone buzzed before he could reply. “Oh. That’s cool. He just wrote you back.”
“He who?” Cleo asked. She was peering up and down the street, which looked nothing like the street she remembered from twenty years ago. There were espresso bars at every other storefront and impossibly hip clothiers and organic juice pop-ups and one store devoted entirely to essential oils. Georgie would love Seattle now, Cleo thought, and reminded herself to text her back. Which she already knew she would not.
“Matty,” Lucas said.
“Why would Matty be writing me back?”
“Oh, I wrote back to him writing you in the first place.”
Cleo stopped short, and a man with a handlebar mustache, a magenta vest, and rolled jeans, with an adorable yellow Labrador, nearly tripped over her.
“Why would you do that?” she nearly screeched. The man did a double take, and so she offered, “Sorry, not you. Him, my son.” So the man flashed her a peace sign and went on his way, and Cleo thought this was a very distinctly Seattle interaction. And it slayed her just a little bit in the best of ways. Maybe you couldn’t run away from where you came from as easily as she had thought.
“I didn’t, like, say that you loved him,” Lucas said. “I just said, ‘hey, thanks, nice to hear from you.’”
“It wouldn’t be such a bad thing for you to have a little romance in your life,” Gaby butted in.
“Where is this pizza place anyway?” Cleo barked. Nothing about this street looked familiar anymore. Back then, she and MaryAnne could have stomped down the avenue (in their Doc Martens, because in Seattle, even the semi-non-cool kids wore Docs) blindfolded and still found their way to Pagliacci’s. She spun around to the west, then the east, and was no better oriented.
“I can ask Oliver about him,” Gaby said. They were striding down the next block, simply to move from point A to point B. “Maybe he knows his deal.”
“Why would you ask Oliver about Matty? When would you ask Oliver about him?”
“Oh, we’re having dinner tonight. I figure, we fly out in the morning; why not?”
“Great,” Cleo said. “You both have dates tonight.”
“Mine is not a date,” Gaby protested, but Lucas said nothing, which made Cleo wonder if Lucas really knew what a date date was, and if so, how he did and when he’d been on one. Also, should she bring up the fact that Gaby was reading his texts on the phone and maybe he was technically cheating on someone back home? She wanted to raise a man who respected women but she didn’t want to be a mom who snooped on her kid. Though she’d read some studies that she should be snooping on her kid, so . . . This whole thing was getting out of hand. All she wanted right now was a fucking piece of pizza.
Before everything went south their senior year, she and MaryAnne used to split a Canadian bacon and pineapple pie. They’d trudge up the hill after school, on breaks from their homework and before going to MaryAnne’s (with the pool and the ping-pong table and the Pac-Man machine) and were at Pagliacci’s so often that the guys knew their order. They’d slurp their Diet Cokes until the ice rattled and pick the bacon off their slices and drop it on their tongues, nearly drinking in the grease. They’d talk about their own versions of ruling the world—it changed by the month. Sometimes it was through politics and sometimes it was through solving the hunger crisis in Africa or ending the Iraq War, and sometimes it was just making some boy who demeaned them feel small in a reciprocal way. Ruling the world could be both literal and metaphorical. This was before every T-shirt in the Gap screamed with quippy slogans like “This Girl Is on Fire” and “I Am My Own Future” and “#SquadGoals.” It was just them and their pizza and their aspirations.
Today, in the bright and welcoming Seattle sun, Cleo landed on the block that she was certain was the block. But where she expected to find her old pizzeria, she instead found a vegan bar.
“I don’t know.” She looked to Gaby and Lucas. “This was where it was.”
“Maybe it closed.” Lucas looked unfazed, like her introducing him to Pagliacci’s wasn’t about to be one of her seminal parenting