Friends Like These(8)

Now I kept blinking at Finch as though that might make him disappear. Keith had probably sniffed out that we were up to something and brought along Finch as a human shield. What a disaster.

Derrick appeared then, sheepish at the back of the living room, where he’d evidently been squirreled away this entire time. He ran an exasperated hand over his brown hair, longer now and shaggier, but in an appealing way. I was always surprised by how good Derrick looked these days, so much better than he had in college. He’d come into his own over the years.

“I told them not to do it,” Derrick said, sounding very much like the disapproving literature professor he was. He pushed his tortoise-framed glasses up the bridge of his nose. “They wouldn’t listen to me.”

No one ever listened to Derrick.

“Where’s your car, Derrick?” Jonathan’s brow pinched angrily as he looked toward the driveway. “And how did you guys get in? You didn’t break a window or something, did you?”

“We parked up the road and walked back. And break a window, seriously?” Keith looked wounded.

“No need to break and enter anyway when we had these.” Finch dangled a set of keys in the air. His other hand was hooked around the molding above the living room entryway as he stretched his long body forward, tattooed bicep flexing. On purpose, no doubt. “You shouldn’t leave ’em under the mat.” As usual, he was leaning into his southern drawl. “Down in Arkansas that’s an open invitation to come on inside. Right, Derrick?”

“I literally have no idea what you’re talking about, Finch,” Derrick said. “It was your dumb idea to come in, and Keith’s idiotic decision to go along with it.”

“Aw, Keith has to listen to me. You know that, Derrick,” Finch said. “Because without me, there is no him. Right, Keith?”

“Absolutely,” Keith said, as if he couldn’t have cared less how much Finch demeaned him. He probably wasn’t even listening. For all I knew, he was high out of his mind at that very moment. Actually, he definitely was. “Come on, Steph.” Keith stepped closer to me. “Even you thought it was a little funny. You’re smiling on the inside.”

“I am not,” I said, softening despite myself when Keith wrapped an arm around my waist and kissed me on the cheek.

Keith had that effect on people— all people. Men, women, gay, straight, or anything else. Being even briefly in the center of his attention was like staring into the setting sun. You couldn’t pull your eyes away, even after they began to burn.

I could still remember the night freshman year Keith had come to find me in the library, dragging me out to his studio to see a painting.

“Please,” he had begged. “I just finished the first in the series. And it’s amazing.” He got down on his paint-splattered knees in front of my desk, deep in the library stacks. The same desk I worked at every night, so everyone always knew exactly where to come find me. And come they did. Something I must have secretly enjoyed— because I could have moved around to avoid being found. “You need to see it.”

“Me, or someone? Because if you just want someone to say it’s great, we can skip the hike over there,” I said. “It’s great, Keith. I’m sure it is.”

“No, you. You, specifically, need to see it,” he said, his eyes dancing. “It’ll be worth it. I promise.”

Begrudgingly I’d gone with him, heading across the dark campus to his art studio at nearly midnight. And there, set up in his studio under a spotlight, was a huge canvas, a painting of me as a little girl, facing a vast and roiling sea. I’d told my friends the story about my parents not watching— consumed as they both were grading term papers on the beach— as three-year-old me ran right out into the waves and almost drowned. To me, the story explained everything anyone needed to know about my family— the subtle heartbreak of benign neglect. Most people didn’t get it. But Keith had— it was all right there in that painting.

“It’s beautiful,” I said, my throat seizing. And it was, the bright blue and white electrifying around the small figure. The little me.

Keith was smiling as he looked at the painting. “I’m going to do one for everyone. A family of origin series. Hopefully, the other ones live up.” He wrapped an arm around me as we stared at the painting, my feet floating above the floor. “You know, just because your parents don’t have feelings, that doesn’t mean you can’t.”

“I feel things,” I said quietly, still staring at the painting.

“I mean for another living, breathing person,” Keith said. “You can let yourself do that. There’s still time to be whoever you want to be.”

My throat had felt too tight to object. Keith was the only person who’d ever seen my perfection for what it was: a locked and lonely box. He was the only one who ever called me out on anything.

It was dangerously easy to get swept up in Keith’s huge, wild heart, even when you were just his friend. Poor Alice had never stood a chance. But that hadn’t stopped me from judging her, had it? Love, of all trivial things, I’d thought. All those times I’d told Alice to grow up and get over Keith, to stop being such a drama queen. Yes, I’d been trying to help, but in retrospect it seemed so callous. What had I known about anything back then? What did I know now?