I'll Stop the World (75)

Noah came to stand beside him, scooping up a rock on his way and flinging it out across the water. Five skips. Damn. “You want to talk to me about it?”

Shawn quirked one side of his mouth. “You asking to be my girlfriend?”

Noah shoved his shoulder, sending Shawn hopping a few steps down the bank. “Seriously, dude, if there’s something on your mind, we can talk about it. She’s not your shrink; she’s your girlfriend. You can’t keep dating her just so you can use her for free therapy.”

“You’re not my shrink either.”

“No, but I am your friend. And I’m volunteering.”

Shawn was quiet for a minute. “I don’t know, dude. I’m kind of messed up.” He looked at Noah, wondering how much he could say. The only reason Lisa knew about his dad was because she’d witnessed some of it firsthand. But Gabe Rothman was great at charming people. It was why people were happy to invite him into their homes to install their lights and rewire their televisions. They didn’t know who he was, beneath the surface.

Maybe that’s why his mom had gone to a new town, leaving Shawn and his father and their whole life behind. Maybe no one here would have understood why she’d leave someone like Gabe. Maybe leaving them both was the only way she wouldn’t feel crazy.

There were some days when Shawn thought he understood what it must have been like for her. When there was nothing he wouldn’t do to get away.

Noah shrugged. “Everyone’s kind of messed up. But that’s what friends are for, right? To be there through the mess? Honestly, if you want to talk, we can talk.”

Shawn sighed. He spotted another good skipping stone on the bank, flat and smooth. He picked it up, hefting its weight in his hand. “Not yet,” he decided. “But thanks. Seriously.”

“Well, the offer stands.”

“Same for you.” Shawn turned the rock over and over in his hands. It really was perfect.

He tossed it out into the water and turned away before he could see it start to skip, walking up the bank toward Noah’s mom’s car. “C’mon. Let’s go home.”





Chapter Forty-Four


JUSTIN

A couple of hours after I leave Rose’s house and she obediently returns to her “grounding,” Noah’s car pulls into Mrs. Hanley’s driveway, with Rose in the passenger seat. It’s still weird to me how people will just disappear for hours in 1985, and you’ll have no idea what they’re doing until they resurface. Rose told me she’d talk to Noah when he got home, and now here they are. No text to say they’re on their way, no social media check-in with their location. Just there, then nothing, then here.

When they arrive, driving a station wagon with a bike rack strapped to the back as promised, Noah seems less than thrilled to see me standing in the driveway. He climbs out of the driver’s side and looks at me. “So I hear you stole Karl Derrin’s bike.”

Rose rolls her eyes, but I can’t help but notice how she seems happier in his presence. More relaxed. Like the sun coming out from behind a cloud. My stomach does a strange little flip. “Not exactly,” I say. “You okay taking it back?”

“Of course.”

As Noah loads the bike up onto the rack, he grins at Rose and says in a weirdly high-pitched voice, “I don’t wanna go that fast!”

Rose dissolves into giggles, then pitches her voice up several octaves, too. “Like a snake?”

I look from one to the other, totally lost as Rose doubles over in laughter, and Noah’s shoulders shake as he secures the bike to the rack with bright-orange straps. Briefly, he wraps the end of a strap around his own waist and makes a comically horrified expression, stretching his eyes and mouth wide, making them both laugh even harder.

Rose catches me staring at them in confusion, and manages to gasp out, “Noah’s sister, when his mom first got this rack—”

“She was eight,” Noah jumps in, lifting his glasses to wipe away tears.

“She asked what it was for, and Noah told her—”

“I said it was for bikes.”

“But she thought that meant while people were riding the bikes—”

“And that one person got tied to the rack, and then the rest would get tied on behind them—”

“And they’d all get pulled by the car like a train. She called it a bike snake.”

“And she got so scared that we were going to make her ride the bike snake—”

“Which you totally let her believe—”

“I mean, I was not going to be the one to kill the dream of the bike snake!”

By now they are laughing so hard it’s all I can do to follow their tag-team story. I wonder if they realize that they talk like two people sharing one voice. Like when one of them breathes in, it’s the other who breathes out.

Is she different, with him? Brighter, sharper, more vibrant?

Or is this who she is all the time when she’s not with me? Is relying on her to help me fix all my absurd problems . . . dimming her somehow?

I’m still stuck in my own head, wondering if I somehow make the people around me worse, when I hear Rose say something about me riding with the two of them, which I find moderately alarming, considering I am nowhere near fluent in this language of shared inside jokes that they speak.