“Luther wanted to re-create the Abbey Road cover, so we found a couple of random dudes to round out the Beatles with us.” He smiled over at me. “Had lunch from some curry place, and then went shopping for some things for Roberta.”
“I feel like my day was a lot fancier, but you’re rounding the day out pretty well: those track pants are way nicer than my pajamas.”
He laughed, glancing down as if he hadn’t really noticed what he pulled on after dinner. The realization made me glow inside. For the first time all day, it didn’t occur to me to be self-conscious about what I was wearing; the only downside to our first day was my constant awareness that the department stores at the Coddingtown Mall in Santa Rosa clearly couldn’t compete with the fashion scene in London. In Guerneville, the things Mom bought for me felt edgy and modern; in London, I just felt frumpy.
Sam’s smile turned contemplative. “Can I ask you something?”
His cautious tone made me uneasy. “Sure.”
“Has your life been happy?”
God, what a loaded question. Of course I was happy, right? Mom and Nana were amazing. Charlie was the best friend I could imagine. I had everything I could possibly need.
Though maybe not everything I’d always wanted.
The thought made me feel supremely selfish.
When I didn’t immediately answer, he clarified, “I’ve been thinking about this all day. What you told me. I remember seeing your face plastered all over the cover of magazines down at the grocery store—People and whatever. Most of it wasn’t even about you, it was about your dad, and the affairs, and how your mom just . . . disappeared with you. But then I looked up Guerneville, and it seems like a really nice place and I thought, ‘Maybe they had a better life there.’ Like I did with Luther and Roberta.” He rolled to the side, propping his head on a hand, just like he did last night.
“Guerneville is nice but it’s not, like, nice,” I told him. “It’s funky and weird. There are maybe four thousand people who live there, and we all know each other.”
“That sounds enormous compared to the one thousand who live in Eden.”
I stared at him. Maybe his life had been just like mine, only on the complete other end of the country.
“So, have you been happy?” he asked again.
“Do you mean have I been happy in general or happy with my parents?”
His attention was unwavering. “Either, both.”
I chewed on my lip while I thought through it. Questions like this were such weird little provocations. I rarely thought about my life before, and I certainly tried not to feel sad about Dad. The entire world seemed to know him so much better than I did, anyway; I figured maybe when I was older, Nana wouldn’t mind so much letting me know him, too.
I’d been stupid in a lot of things—my crush on Charlie’s cousin from Hayward our freshman year, and the scores of letters I wrote him; loving Jesse but never having sex with him even though we both wanted to, simply because I never had any privacy; the early days of being so enamored with Jesse that I drifted from Charlie when she was dealing with her own family drama—but one thing I’d never done is disobeyed Nana and Mom when they asked me to be careful, to keep our seclusion a secret to protect me and Mom.
“It’s okay,” Sam said after a couple of minutes, “if you don’t want to talk about this.”
“I do.” I sat up, crossing my legs. “I just never have.”
While he waited for my words to come, Sam sat up too. He pulled up a blade of grass and drove it in and out of the lawn, like a tiny car winding around a complicated neighborhood.
I studied his downturned face, trying to memorize it. “Mom and Nana are great, but I won’t lie and say that it’s not hard to know that there’s this whole other world and life out there that I don’t get to know anything about.”
Sam nodded. “That makes sense.”
“I like Guerneville, but who’s to say I wouldn’t like LA better?” I peeked over at him, and my heart climbed a little higher in my chest. “Don’t laugh at this, okay?”
He glanced up at me, shaking his head. “I won’t.”
“Part of me really wants to be an actress.” I felt the sensation rise in