You in Five Acts(16)

“Native, huh? Well, now I really like you.” I smiled, caught his eye, and then looked away. Liv had taught me that move, back in middle school. I think she read it in some stupid magazine. Still, it worked: when I looked back at Dave, he was smiling, too.

“And here I thought you just liked me for my Papa John’s commercial,” he said.

“Please,” I said, “No self-respecting New York girl eats Papa John’s.” Dave laughed. “OK—” I held up two more contenders. “If it’s not one of these, I think you should just steal someone else’s.”

“You’re amazing,” he said, pointing to the leather bomber jacket in my right hand. “Seriously, thank you, Joy.”

“No problem,” I said, throwing it to him. “Want to—”

Want to ride home together?

That’s what I was going to say. Buoyed by the caffeine, and the genuine smiles, and the banter, and the way the moonlight hit his eyelashes, and the way he said my name, I was going to take a leap unlike any I’d ever done in ballet. I was going to ask Dave Roth if I could walk him the five blocks from Liv’s building to the subway, and then ride with him twelve deliciously slow local stops on the 1 train, and then—well, I didn’t exactly know what then.

And I was never going to find out.

“You’re leaving?!” Liv cried from the doorway behind me, sounding more like Eunice Lee than she would ever want to know. I spun around to see her looking back and forth between us, confused, her amber-shadowed eyes at a druggy half-mast. You were standing just beyond her in the kitchen, with an expression on your face like you just got slapped; something must have happened with Dante, but I was too swept up in my quickly unraveling fantasy world to care.

“Yeah, I’ve got an early morning,” Dave said. “I would have come and said goodbye, but I didn’t want to, uh—” He looked at me and raised his eyebrows. “—interrupt you.”

“Oh, what, that?” Liv laughed dismissively. “That was nothing. And you are not leaving. I’ve barely gotten to talk to you!” She reached past me and grabbed for Dave’s hand, but I intercepted her, pulling her in like I was going for a hug.

“Speaking of talking,” I whispered, “Can I please talk to you for a minute?” I was expecting to get a familiar whiff of skunky smoke in her hair, but Liv didn’t smell like weed. Was she just wasted, I wondered, or had Dante given her something else?

“Sure!” She grinned at me dreamily and then turned back to Dave, who was still holding his jacket in one fist. “Why don’t you go wait with the boys and I’ll be right out,” she said.

“Deserter!” I heard Ethan yell from the kitchen.

Dave laughed. “Well,” he said slowly, “I guess one more beer won’t hurt.” He folded his jacket and shoved it on a high shelf next to a bottle of fabric softener. “So you don’t have to go fish next time,” he said, looking at me. Next time. Maybe—just maybe—I thought, there was hope for a walk home after all. Which only made me more pissed off that Liv had intervened.

“What the hell?” I demanded once the door was semi-closed (it couldn’t close all the way, on account of the coat avalanche Dave and I had caused).

“What?” Liv was either playing dumb or too out of it to follow. Either way, it annoyed me.

“You were the one who told me I should go for Dave, but then you’ve been the one hanging on him like a spider monkey all night,” I said. “And then, just when I’m actually having a moment with him, you break it up. So I’ll ask again, what the hell?”

“I wasn’t trying to break anything up,” she said, the words slow and slurry. “I just want everyone to have fuuuun.”

“I was having fun,” I hissed. “I was having fun with Dave. I just wasn’t having your kind of fun.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked, frowning a little.

She wasn’t lucid enough to debate me, so I didn’t bother sugarcoating it. “It means you’re f*cked up, Liv,” I said. “And it’s not cute. Bringing Dante here was a shady move. Did you even notice how uncomfortable it made Diego?”

Liv laughed derisively. “That’s so weird, Mom,” she said. “I thought you were in Puerto Rico with Tia Mari.”

“Fine, then, don’t listen to me,” I said. “But if you like Dave, just say it. Don’t use me to get what you want.”

“I’m just being a good hostess,” she said, still giggling, drawing out the last word like a child’s whine. It was hard to be mean to someone who was so clearly out of it, but I couldn’t help myself. The words were long overdue.

“No,” I said. “What you’re being right now is a bad friend.”

Liv’s face instantly crumpled; her moods were like quicksilver even when she wasn’t wasted. “You . . . think I’m a bad friend?” she asked.

“Not always,” I sighed. “Just—look, we can’t really talk when you’re like this, so I’m going to go home.” I shoved my arms into my coat sleeves, avoiding her eyes. I knew that leaving meant giving up my supposed “party goal,” but I wouldn’t have felt right flirting with Dave knowing Liv was such a mess, anyway.