think she really meant it.
At the time, it had been the nicest thing anyone had ever said about me. I’d often wondered, since that day, if I really was pretty, but no one but my mother had ever bothered to corroborate her statement.
And now, here—
I was stunned.
“Oh,” was all I managed to say. My face felt like it had been set on fire.
“Yeah,” he said. I wasn’t looking at him anymore, but I could tell he was smiling. “Do you understand now?”
“Kind of,” I said.
And then we ordered pancakes.
11
Eleven
We spent the rest of our IHOP experience talking about nothing in particular. In fact, we changed gears so quickly from serious to superficial that I actually walked out the door wondering if I’d imagined the part where he told me I was beautiful.
I think it was my fault. I kind of froze. I’d pushed him so hard to give me a straight answer but the one I got wasn’t the one I was expecting and it threw me off-balance. I didn’t know what to do with it.
It made me feel vulnerable.
So we talked about movies. Things we’d seen; things we hadn’t. It was fine, but it was kind of boring. I think we were both relieved when we finally left IHOP behind, like we were trying to shake off something embarrassing.
“Do you know what time it is?” I asked him. We’d been walking in silence, side by side, heading in no particular direction.
He glanced at his watch and said, “Third period is almost over.”
I sighed. “I guess we should go back to school.”
“Yeah.”
“So much for ditching.”
He stopped walking and touched my arm. Said my name.
I looked up.
Ocean was quite a bit taller than me, and I’d never looked up at him like this before. I was standing in his shadow. We were on the sidewalk, facing each other, and there wasn’t much space between us.
He smelled really nice. My heart was being weird again.
But his eyes were worried. He opened his mouth to say something and then, very suddenly, changed his mind. Looked away.
“What is it?” I said.
He shook his head. Smiled at me out of the corner of his eye, but only briefly. “Nothing. Never mind.”
I could tell that something was bothering him, but his reluctance to share made me think I probably didn’t want to know what he was thinking. So I changed the subject.
“Hey, how long have you lived here?”
Unexpectedly, Ocean smiled. He seemed both pleased and surprised to be asked the question. “Forever,” he said. And then, “I mean, I moved here when I was, like, six, but yeah, basically forever.”
“Wow,” I said. I almost whispered the word. He’d described in a single sentence something I’d often dreamed about. “Must be nice to live in the same place for so long.”
We’d started walking again.
Ocean reached up, plucked a leaf from a tree we were passing, and spun it around in his hands. “It’s okay.” He shrugged. “Gets kind of boring, actually.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It sounds really nice. You probably know your neighbors, huh? And you get to go to school with all the same people.”
“Same people,” he said, nodding. “Yeah. But trust me, it gets old, fast. I’m dying to get the hell out of here.”
“Really?” I turned to look at him. “Why?”
He tossed the leaf, shoved his hands into his pockets. “There’s so much I want to do,” he said. “Things I want to see. I don’t want to get stuck here forever. I want to live in a big city. Travel.” He glanced at me. “I’ve never even left the country, you know?”
I smiled at him, kind of. “Not really,” I said. “I think I’ve traveled enough for the both of us. I’m ready to retire. Settle down. Get old.”
“You’re sixteen.”
“But in my heart I’m a seventy-five-year-old man.”
“Wow, I really hope not.”
“You know, when I was eight,” I said, “my parents tried to move back to Iran. They packed up all our shit and sold the house and just, took a leap.” I adjusted the backpack on my shoulders. Sighed. “Ultimately, it didn’t work out. We were too American. Too much had changed. But I lived in Iran for six months, bouncing between the city and the countryside. I went to this really fancy international school in Tehran for a while, and all my classmates were these horrible, spoiled, dipshit children of diplomats. I’d cry every day. Beg my mom to let me stay home. But then we spent some time farther north,