By Your Side(26)

“We can pack up all our things—well, your things—wait behind that pillar down by the parking garage and as soon as they pass by, sneak out.”

He tilted his head at me.

“What?”

“You’re going to sneak out of here when people show up?”

“What else am I going to do? Sit here and wait for them to find me? Then I’d have to explain everything. They’d call my parents. I’d have to wait for them to show up and explain everything again. That would take forever. I’m starving.”

He laughed. A sound I still wasn’t used to. “Food is definitely top priority.”

“Higher than the top,” I said. “Oh! Have you ever had cronuts?”

“Cronuts? No.”

“It’s a croissant and donut combined. They are the best things in the world. I’m going to buy you a cronut when we get out of here. Oh no . . .”

“What?”

“We don’t have any money. How are we going to buy anything without money?” I thought for a moment. “I have money at my house. It’s only, like, five minutes from here. We’ll hitchhike to my house, get money, and go eat.”

“Hitchhike?”

“Or we can borrow the phone at the gas station and have Lisa pick us up. That’s what we’ll do. Or we can beg for money. Like hold up a sign on the street corner. That’s a good idea too.”

“Sounds like a plan,” he said.

I stood and stretched again. “We’ll figure something out. We will be eating food at the earliest possible time tomorrow.” And then I’d see what price I was going to have to pay for this weekend. I crossed my fingers that my parents just figured we were snowed in and I had no way to get ahold of them. If for even a second they were worried, I’d have a lot of explaining to do, and I wanted to do that explaining on a full stomach.

These thoughts took my mood down several notches. “I’m going to get a drink.” I waited for him to say something about how he didn’t need to know my every move, but he didn’t. Maybe he was used to having another person around at this point.

I took a long drink of water, then went to the bathroom and brushed my teeth. My hair was a mess, my face was completely makeup-free now, and sure enough, I had a zit forming on my chin. But it didn’t matter to me at all. I was relaxed around Dax. He’d become a friend. As much as he didn’t want one, he now had one in me. His tough guy act wouldn’t work on me anymore.

I went back to the main room to see it empty. Where had he gone? I may have been in the habit of giving him my play-by-play, but he obviously wasn’t yet. Maybe he was in the bathroom.

His book lay abandoned on the chair—Hamlet. I picked it up and flipped it open to the page he’d left off on and read a few lines. I’d never read Hamlet before. When I went to shut it, I saw what he’d been using for a bookmark. An envelope—addressed, stamped, and ready to be sent. But it was obvious it had been ready for a while, its edges bent, a fold down the middle. I read who it was supposed to go to—Susanna Miller. His mom? An aunt, maybe? Who was Dax afraid to reach out to?

I shut the book and placed it back on the chair, then went to the checkout desk. Why didn’t the librarians have a secret food stash somewhere? I started going through the drawers behind the counter when I found a big bag of the little toys they must’ve used to refill Mother Goose’s basket. I lifted the sealed bag and tried to see it from all angles; maybe there was candy in there. I tucked the entire thing under my arm and went upstairs.

In the break room I turned on a movie, opened the plastic bag, and began looking through it.

Dax arrived half an hour later, and I was laid out on the couch with his sleeping bag spread over me. He held up his Frisbee in the launcher and shot. It hit the side of my head because I was too lazy to free my arms and stop it.

“Ouch,” I said with a laugh.

“Sorry, I was aiming for your shoulder.”

“So your aim’s not perfect after all.”

He stood by the arm of the couch closest to my feet and waited for me to scoot over.

“But I’m comfortable,” I joked, and just as I was about to sit up to give him room, he picked up my feet and sat on the cushion beneath them, letting my legs fall onto his lap.

Despite my earlier declaration to myself that we were going to be friends, I was surprised by the gesture. I hadn’t thought he was quite caught up with my future plans yet. Maybe he was.

“What’s all that?” he asked, pointing to the layer of individually wrapped toys spread across the coffee table.

“Not candy. That’s what it is. Don’t librarians know that kids like candy?”

He smiled.

I reached over to the table and picked up one of the items that was not candy. It was a black bracelet made of thread. “Give me your wrist.”

“What?”

I held up my hand and eventually he placed his in my palm. Then I tied the bracelet onto his wrist. “There. Now you have a memento of our time in the library.”

“You expect me to wear this?”

“Yes. Forever.”

His eyes scanned the table until they stopped on something that he plucked from the pile. A bracelet like the one he wore but hot pink. He held out his hand.

“Pink? No way. Find me a black one too.”