The People We Keep(47)
I think about the nail mark in my foot and how you can barely see it, but it’s still there and always will be.
“Then, with you, all of a sudden, it just felt right,” he says. “It feels like being with you is the best thing I can do.”
I wipe his cheeks and kiss them and kiss his nose and smooth his hair off his forehead, because I don’t know what to say. I don’t want him to hurt anymore.
“Millie, my ex,” Adam says, “she left because she needed more. She said I was weird about sex. Closed off to her. I just—It never stopped feeling wrong. And I couldn’t tell her. I couldn’t make myself say the words, you know?”
I nod, because I can’t say any words. I will never be able to tell him how old I am. There’s no point we’ll come to where he’s so in love and happy that it won’t matter. There isn’t a far-off day when I’m really nineteen and this will be a funny story. He won’t ever see what we just did as being any better than what his stepmom made him do, even though he’s given me things I didn’t know enough to want before.
“I don’t blame Millie for leaving.” His face looks a little funny when he says it, a softness in his eyes, and I think maybe he does blame her some, even though he doesn’t want to. “Now, with you, I realize that it’s better she left. She needed someone who could be honest with her about who they are, and I couldn’t be. Not with her. With you—it’s like you accept me and I don’t even have to ask you to. I don’t have to defend myself. Millie always came out of the gate with something that was wrong with me. You can’t be yourself in defense mode. You know?”
And I wish I didn’t know. I wish I didn’t have anything to defend. So here’s what I decide: Nothing before this matters. It all starts now so I can give Adam everything.
* * *
I wake up to Adam leaning on his elbow, watching me sleep, and it makes me smile. I’m all of a sudden a person who gets to be loved so much that even when I’m sleeping someone is interested in me. He brushes the hair out of my face and says, “Hey there,” and gives me a kiss I feel all the way to my toes. The fact that we have to get up and go to work seems cruel.
We do pre-coffee coffee, get dressed, and shuffle out of the apartment. It feels like everything is fake, but in a good way. Like better than real. Happily ever after and kind of like a dream and then I get to work and Adam stands in line for his post-coffee coffee and I’m behind the counter and I feel this longing for him. I want everyone else to fade to black so it can just be me and Adam in his apartment and that’s all there is in the world.
When Adam gets his coffee and has to leave, I miss him. Like actually feel that tug in my chest, even though I know I’ll see him tonight. It’s Wednesday, so we’re ordering pizza from The Nines and watching 90210. I love the way we have different days for different things. But even knowing what I’m looking forward to doesn’t stop the tightness in my chest when I watch him walk out the door.
— Chapter 23 —
I remember Mark Conrad telling Matty how to chalk his license. I didn’t listen too carefully, because it was Mark Conrad, and he always had plans for ways to get booze, or get into a nightclub in Buffalo, or score weed from some guy who knows some guy who knows his cousin, but none of it ever actually happened. Mark always wussed out and blamed it on circumstance, like his cousin was scared straight, or they don’t sell the right colored pencils to chalk a license in Little River, or that nightclub was lame anyway. But I remember the basics of what he said—how you had to have white, black, and red colored pencils, and use a twisted-up piece of paper towel to blend things. Thankfully, since I’m only trying to be nineteen, I don’t have to worry about the UNDER 21 label on my license. For that, Mark claimed to have some cut and splice trick with special tape and melting the outside plastic, but I doubt it was something he’d actually tried.
When Bodie is outside smoking, I call out, “Break!” to Carly, swipe Bodie’s leather pencil case from the messenger bag he leaves on a hook in the kitchen, and run upstairs to the storage room.
The light sucks. I have to lean over a box of coffee stirrers to work on a shelf by the window and it puts me at this weird angle where it’s hard to keep my hand steady. But I don’t have to change much—just shape the eight in 1978 to a five on the birthday and issued dates, white out the J for junior license, and then I’m nineteen. When I start working on it, the stuff about the blending and the paper towel makes sense. I focus really small, the way I do when I’m putting on eyeliner, thinking about where I want the pencil to go, and then my hand just does it, one tiny speck at a time. I feel so lucky that as sloppy as Bodie is, he’s kind of anal about his art supplies. All his pencils are perfectly sharpened.
Bodie is in the kitchen when I get back. I’m not expecting him to be. He usually takes the world’s longest smoke breaks. He sees me holding his pencil case.
Sometimes my brain thinks faster than I even know it can, because I say, “Bodie, you must have dropped this. I found it on the floor under one of the tables.”
“Shit, Pilgrim,” he says, “you’re a lifesaver. That’s like my soul right there.” And then I feel awful, because the way Bodie feels about his pencils is totally the way I felt about my guitar.