Unscripted - Nicole Kronzer Page 0,79

have this tendency to make literary references no one gets, I swallowed it down. Then I shook my head. I didn’t want to have to hide part of who I was, just to make sure someone liked me. Another thing I wasn’t going to do anymore. So, I took a deep breath. “Have you read Of Mice and Men—”

“Oh yeah,” he cut in. “Who is that guy. Curley? I always thought that was so gross. The glove thing, right?”

I stopped walking and nearly tackled him. “Yes!” I shouted, much too loud.

He laughed and wrinkled his forehead at me, probably a little confused at my reaction.

“I always thought it was gross, too,” I amended in a more normal volume.

As we were stopped, I pulled his hand up and held it with both of mine so I could take a closer look. “Your hand, however, is not soft. Not super rough, but definitely not creepy-Curley-soft.”

“It’s summers here,” he said, sliding his other thumb under his backpack strap. “My hands are much softer during the school year. All that paper-writin’.”

“But here you get calluses from all that ax-swingin’,” I joked.

He nodded, and his eyes crinkled when he grinned.

The way he was looking at me made it hard for me to breathe suddenly, so I returned his hand to my side and pulled him forward. A few steps later, I called out, “Rock cairn!” and pointed at a small stack of flat rocks.

For a quarter second, he looked like he had no idea what I was talking about, but he quickly recovered. “Good! Seem visible enough?”

I nodded.

“Great.” He cleared his throat. “There should be another at the next crossroads.”

I nodded again, my heart beating a bass drum in my chest.

“You know, I started to tell you this on our last hike, but the subject got changed,” Jesse said. “Ricky and Murph and I are from Minnesota, too. A bunch of people from our troop come here every summer.”

I whacked him in the chest with my free hand. “Shut up! Where in Minnesota?” I asked.

Laughing, he clutched his chest where I had whacked him. “St. Louis Park. It’s west of—”

Now I pushed his shoulder. “I know where St. Louis Park is! How have we not talked about this yet? I live in South Minneapolis!”

“Really?”

“We’re practically neighbors,” I said, swinging our hands between us, “especially if one of us has a car.”

“Do you?”

“Well, no.”

He laughed. “Thank goodness I do then. I’d hate for us not to be neighbors.”

I drew in a warm, buoyant breath. He had a car. We practically lived in the same town. I was trying hard not to look too far down the proverbial road, but . . .

“My sister drove it in high school,” Jesse continued, “but she’s going to college in New York, so she doesn’t need it.”

“Just an older sister?”

He nodded. “Micky. For Michaela. But don’t ever call her that.”

I smirked. Then I met his eye for a second. “Jesse and Micky. I like it.”

“She’s at art school. People say she’s really good.” He shrugged. “She’s just my big sister who dyes her hair a different color every week and who always got paint everywhere growing up.” He smiled again, and I broke apart a little inside.

I coughed, trying to pull it together. “Parents?”

He nodded again. “Two moms. Micky and I are both adopted.”

“Oh!” I exclaimed. “I am, too, on one side. Will and I each have one bio parent and one adoptive parent.”

Jesse nodded and then frowned. “How . . . how does that work?”

“My biological father died before I was born.”

Jesse raised an eyebrow.

“After Mom got pregnant with me, before I was born,” I clarified.

“Back firmly in the realm of science.” He smiled.

The wind started to pick up, whooshing around in the treetops. “What about you?” I asked, “Know your biological parents?”

Jesse shook his head. “Naw. And not interested. Parents are the people who raise you. Not the people who give you chromosomes.”

“Totally. Sometimes I wonder about my biological father, but I love my dad. I can’t imagine a different one.”

He made a sympathetic sound. “I feel that way now. But early on in high school, I suddenly got really sad about being adopted. Angry, for a while,” Jesse confessed. “My moms are white and Micky is biracial—African American and white, but she can pass for white. Or sort of ethnically ambiguous.” Jesse pulled a smooth, flat rock out of his pocket—probably one Ricky gave him—and moved it through his fingers. “It’s not always easy being a brown-skinned