“I told you. Mama found out about our kissing.” My voice is calm, even. I wish I could say the same about my quivering insides. “I don’t know how she found out. Uncle Pan must’ve called her. So she decided to replace you with Taran as my practice boyfriend. Taran, for his own reasons, agreed.”
“And you just went along with it?” he asks incredulously.
I stare. “Well, yeah. What else could I have done?”
“You could’ve told her no.”
I blink. And then blink again. “Since when is no a feasible answer with my mother?”
“Since always. You just have to be willing to say it.”
Seriously? I can’t tell if he’s being stubborn or deliberately obtuse. “Listen, I get that there’s a different standard for guys in our culture. I also get that your mom hasn’t been around in a few years. But you have to see how ridiculous that stance is. You know what my mother’s like.”
“I do. Which is why I think you’re not giving her enough credit. She’s way more reasonable than you assume.”
I love sharing Mama with Mat. I love that someone outside of our family gets to benefit from her affection and warmth. I love that she was there to ease his suffering, if only a bit.
What I don’t love: that Mat now believes he understands my mother better than I do.
“She sent you to the deli,” I say, my voice low and controlled. “She knew I was there with Taran. She knew it would hurt your feelings to see us. But she did it anyway, because she wanted to drive us apart.”
“Wrong,” he counters. “She didn’t want to tell me. I insisted.”
I wrinkle my forehead.
“Really,” he says. “She even warned me that I might not like what I see but not to jump to any conclusions.”
My mind’s spinning. I don’t understand. What is Mama’s goal here? Whose side is she on? “Did she ask you about kissing me?”
He shakes his head. “I think she started to, but she cut herself off. I’m not sure why. Maybe she wanted to come to an understanding with you first?”
Ha. This is where he’s completely off base. Mama’s never come to an understanding with me, ever. The normal course of our interaction is that she dictates and I follow.
“So you want me to refuse to date Taran,” I recap dully. “Why? I really don’t think she’ll buy that we’re fake-dating anymore.”
“I don’t want to fake-date,” he says, his eyes glittering. “I want to date for real.”
Oh. Oh. These are the words I’d been waiting for. The ones that would’ve sent me straight into bliss, if they’d been uttered twelve hours earlier. But now, they feel more like fish sauce rubbed in my wounds.
“I can’t ask my parents if we can date for real,” I say regretfully. “They’ll never agree.”
“Why not? You just need to try.”
But I’m no longer hearing him. An image seizes me with startling clarity, and I lean forward, drumming my fingers on the dashboard.
When Papa was twelve years old, he snuck a cigarette from an older boy’s pouch. He got violently ill after he smoked it, he explained to us. So ill that he swore off cigarettes from that day forward.
“What if we admitted that we kissed but only because we were curious?” I ask excitedly. “And then we decided it wasn’t for us. Because first kisses are awful. Everybody knows that. We realized, the moment our lips touched, that we saw each other as brother and sister. Still, I want to keep dating you because I’m comfortable with you.” My fingers drum faster. “What do you think? This could work. I think she might actually buy it.”
He hasn’t so much as blinked. “And then what?”
“Then we get to date. We’ll be able to spend time together.”
“Sneaking kisses when we can?”
I flush. “No. We don’t sneak kisses. That’s what got us in trouble in the first place. I’ve already lost Mama’s trust once. I won’t do it again.”
He opens the door and gets out of the car, even though we’re in the middle of our conversation. Even though he said he doesn’t like to fight in public. It’s as though his feelings, his thoughts, are so big that they can no longer be contained by the Jeep.
I hop out of the car, too, walking around the bumper to meet him.
“You want us to lie,” he says.
“It’s not lying—”
“Pretending? Practicing? It all amounts to the same thing.” His lips are parallel chopsticks. His eyes,