rumbled through the bones in my head and chest. “For what?”
“Making this happen,” I said.
“I didn’t do anything.”
“You made the lake house happen.” I said. “You knew I wanted it, and you made it happen. You got Mari lined up, and she lined up Avani.”
“Y-yeah—I mean, I thought it’d be funny—like you were helping me, but meanwhile I’d help you—”
We were in the back seat of his car, surrounded by the darkness of the forest. “Well okay, now let’s think: I’ve gotta pay you back. What can I do for you?”
He shook his head. “I don’t need anything.”
“Do you need someone to build you a rocket to Mars?”
“Well, yes, but I wouldn’t trust one that you made.”
We laughed, and I made fun of him for being nerdy, but right at the moment when he might’ve gotten offended, I switched tacks, rubbing his chest, and asked him to tell me all about it. To be honest, I got bored when he gave me the details of his Mars Club projects, but I liked his arm around me; I liked the sound of his voice. I didn’t understand people like him, who cared about things other than who was friends with whom, and who was in and who was out, and, essentially, who was popular. To me, high school was the entire world. Listening to him talk about his plans for the future, a coldness crept across my back.
“What’s going to happen to me, Dave?”
“Huh? What do you mean?”
“Like, am I shallow?”
“Nooooooooooo, of course not.”
“Dave!” I pushed him away. “You think I’m shallow.”
“Well . . . you’re interested in different things from me.”
“Yes, shallow things.”
“You’re the one who keeps saying the word.”
We talked then, about me and him, and he reassured me that I wasn’t shallow, but he couldn’t really explain why that word didn’t fit. He said I was kind, that I saw into people’s souls and cared about their true selves. But I wasn’t sure that was true. He said I was smart too, and that definitely didn’t seem true. But what came across was that he really, really liked me. That to him I was the combination of every good thing in the world.
“You know”—he gulped—“if, uhh, if I could choose between going to Mars and, uhh, this thing with you? I’d choose—”
“Don’t say it! You’d choose me? Bullshit!”
“No.” He blinked. “I would. . . . I really would. . . .”
Something in his voice left me feeling warmer and happier and more excited than I usually did, which meant that when he dropped me off, I was for the first time completely sure that I wanted to be with him.
14
THAT NIGHT, WHEN I WALKED into the apartment, my mom was in the kitchen, listening to the Bollywood radio station. She works nights, so on her days off she usually doesn’t sleep well, and she’s always happy to stay up with me.
“You’re home!” she said. “Should I heat some water?”
We drank tea at the kitchen counter. She asked how my life was going, and I mentioned something funny that Mari had said in class earlier.
“You and this girl, you’ve grown very close.”
I laughed. “Mom. You’re so bad at this.”
“Well, I am only saying that I like this new girl. She seems . . . studious.”
“Avani was studious.”
“No, she wasn’t.”
“Mom, it’s true.”
“A girl like that doesn’t have good grades. Have you actually seen her grade reports? How do you know she wasn’t exaggerating about them?”
“Mommmmm,” I said, feeling like a kid again.
My mom has a way of asking questions where she circles around back onto things you think she’s forgotten about. She picks and picks and picks, without ever revealing her true thoughts. That’s what she did about Mari. There wasn’t much light in the kitchen, just the dim glow of the table lamp, and my mom’s round face took on a strange and sickly color in the darkness.
And although I knew how to stonewall her—deny, deny, deny, as many times as you need to—I couldn’t help this time, in the intimacy of our twin cups of tea with their many lumps of sugar, giving out little hints about my love life that she then jumped upon and pursued.
So I told her, very guardedly, with lots of stumbling and pauses, that I’d kind of started seeing “my friend . . . a guy friend—Dave—remember . . . I told you about Dave?”
She took it with her usual blank face, but a few seconds later she gave me a hug and