Emmy & Oliver - Robin Benway Page 0,26
No one’s called me that name since I’ve been back, is all. It kind of startled me. Sorry.”
I was still looking at him. His hair was falling over his forehead again and I had a sudden urge to push it back, run my fingers across his skin and ease the worry away. “You don’t have to apologize,” I said quietly. “I get it. I mean, I don’t really get it, but I just wondered if you would feel better if I called you something else, that’s all.”
Oliver sighed a little, picking up a chip and shaking it between his fingers before popping it into his mouth. “You’re right, these are good,” he said, then grabbed a few more. I ate some, too, then took a sip of my juice. I think we were both waiting for someone to say something, anything.
“When we first moved,” Oliver said, his eyes watching as pelicans flew over our heads in a wavy line that swooped up and down over the rooftops, “my dad said that he had always wanted to call me Colin, but my mom was the one who insisted on Oliver. So he asked if it would be okay if I started using that name instead. And I just wanted to make him happy, because y’know, he was my dad and he seemed so upset that my mom was gone, so I said yeah. And it stuck.” Oliver shrugged as he balled up a napkin in his fist. “I guess I’m just not used to hearing Oliver. I thought Oliver disappeared with my mom, only it turns out that both of those things were never really gone, soooo . . .” He looked at me and smiled. “I’m really fucked up, in case that wasn’t clear.”
I took a page from Drew’s playbook and gave Oliver some space to think. Then he took a sip of his green smoothie. “Oh my God,” he spat, wincing. “I’m fucked up, but not as much as this smoothie. You drink these things on purpose?”
I giggled and bit my straw. “It’s good for you!” I insisted. “It’s green!”
He pushed it toward me, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand. “Here, have some extra health. My treat.”
I couldn’t tell if he actually hated it or if he was just lightening the mood, but I didn’t protest.
Oliver laughed a little, then reached for his burrito. “You’re sure this is good?” he asked before taking a bite. “Because that smoothie ruined your credibility.”
“See for yourself,” I told him, then took a huge bite out of mine. Lettuce and cheese spilled out and I arched an eyebrow at Oliver, who laughed and took a bite of his own.
“Okay,” he said after a minute of chewing. “Credibility restored. And now I get to ask you a question.”
“Hit it,” I said.
“How come you don’t want your parents to know that you surf?”
“Because they’re crazy overprotective,” I said, reaching for a napkin. “They don’t want me to do anything dangerous or something where I might get hurt.”
“Why?”
That was the question I didn’t want him to ask. But he had been honest with me, so I decided to be honest with him.
“After you went missing,” I said carefully, wiping my mouth and trying to look anywhere but at Oliver, “everyone was so scared. All the parents went on lockdown mode, especially mine and, I don’t know, they haven’t really stopped. I think it was hard on them, you know? The kid next door, one day he’s there and the next day he’s gone. And I’m their only kid and they just wanted to protect me.”
“Do you ever think about telling them you come here?”
“Sometimes,” I admitted. “But at the same time, it’s nice having it just for myself. Like, no one tells me when to surf or how to do it or whether or not it’s good enough. I can just . . . do it.” I blushed a tiny bit at the phrase. “No one’s grading me or making me take the AP Surfing test, you know?”
Oliver laughed at that. He had a tiny bit of guacamole in the corner of his mouth, which looked endearing instead of gross. A second later, though, he wiped it away. “AP Surfing,” he repeated. “That would be cool.”
“There’s a surf team at school,” I said. “But I need parental permission and there’s lots of fees and I’d have be at the beach by five forty-five every morning and I haven’t really figured out how to