All We Can Do Is Wait(13)
“So you should do it,” Kyle said, like it was settled.
Alexa sighed again. “It’s not that easy. My parents would freeeeak if I even vaguely mentioned the idea of not going right to college. It’s just, y’know, what we do. Or what all their friends’ kids have done.”
“Someone has to have, like, joined the army or moved to Hollywood or something.”
“Not that I can think of. All my parents’ friends’ kids are in Ivies or at these super-intense liberal arts colleges in the middle of the woods.”
Kyle rolled his eyes. “Well, fuck your parents’ friends’ kids. Why should they tell you what to do?”
“I know, I know,” Alexa replied, feeling an anxiety, but also a relief, for actually having this conversation with someone, finally. “It’s not like it would be illegal for me to put off college for a while. But it’d be hard. Because who knows what the hell my brother is going to do, and one of us has to be the good one. If I didn’t go to school, I don’t even know if my parents would, like, support me.”
“I’m sure they would eventually.”
Alexa frowned at Kyle’s misunderstanding. “I meant with money.”
“Ohhh,” Kyle said, nodding his head and turning back toward the register. “Well, then you’d be like the rest of us.”
“I guess so.”
Kyle started counting the bills in the drawer again, but then stopped. “Just come to New York,” he said. “There are poor people in New York you can help. You can help me. Build me a habitat! I’m humanity!”
Alexa smiled. “O.K. Sounds good.”
“And I need a little piece in my core, if you know what I mean . . .” Kyle continued, another of his awful and wonderful jokes—dirty without being gross, somehow.
“Oh Jesus,” Alexa groaned, and then they were both laughing.
This college thing was a relatively new and unformed thought, but it was a big, exciting, almost dangerous one. One Alexa relished in her mind the second she said it. She was, she knew, at least partly inspired by Kyle’s enviable rootlessness.
He was interesting, and people were interested in him. Because of his dewy good looks, yes, but also because there was something arrestingly knowing about him, like he’d lived many past lives. No, he wasn’t magic, but he seemed different from literally all the kids Alexa knew in her little world back home. “An old soul,” Alexa’s mother had called Kyle one night.
It was one of many nights when Kyle had dinner with the Elsings—he and Alexa having worked the early shift, blessed with an entire evening to enjoy themselves. During dinner, Kyle told a particularly funny, charming story, a comedy of errors about trying to score tickets to Hamilton on a New York visit the past spring. Alexa was laughing, as she always did, when she caught, out of the corner of her eye, her mother giving her a strange look—condescending, concerned, pitying. It snatched the laugh right out of Alexa’s throat, and she fell quiet for the rest of dinner.
Afterward, Alexa helped her mom with the dishes, Kyle and Jason off on “a walk” (this meant smoking a joint on the beach, and everyone, including Linda, probably, knew it). Alexa, feeling more emboldened that summer than she ever had before, asked her mother what that look had been about.
Linda feigned ignorance. “What was what about?”
“That look you gave me. While Kyle was talking about Hamilton.”
Linda sighed, rested the platter she was washing in the sink.
“It’s just . . . He’s a nice boy, Alexa. You know that. Your father and I think he’s wonderful. I just hope you’re not . . . investing too much in him,” Linda said, a little pointedly, handing Alexa the platter to dry.
“What do you mean?” Alexa asked, thinking she knew exactly what her mother meant.
“I just wouldn’t want to see you wasting your time on something that isn’t going to go anywhere.”
“What, should I be studying all summer instead of having fun? Did you have this same conversation with Jason?”
Linda flinched. “That’s not what I’m saying and you know it, Alexandra. It’s just that Kyle, he’s—”
“He’s my friend, Mom. That’s what Kyle is.”
Linda shrugged. Returned to the dishes. “I’m just trying to talk to you, Alexa. You don’t have to bite my head off.”
Kyle had told Alexa that he was gay shortly after they met, though Alexa had already guessed. There was, well, the way he was. But also, the younger employees at Grey’s talked, and someone there knew Kyle’s ex-boyfriend, Donnie, who went to UMass Dartmouth. From what Alexa could gather, and what little Kyle told her about him, Donnie was a bad guy, mean and manipulative. Alexa, of course, didn’t care that Kyle was gay. What bothered her was her mother’s assumption, and maybe other people’s assumption, that she was some sad girl pining after her gay bestie, like one of those girls who dated famous gay YouTubers before they came out, and then just had to try to gracefully step aside while the gay guys basked in all the attention. Alexa didn’t see herself as one of those girls. She didn’t like Kyle that way.
She liked him because they had fun together. Because Alexa could imagine herself visiting Kyle in New York in the future. On trips back from Africa or Indonesia or wherever she was living, building houses or digging wells. Alexa knew that however long it had been since they’d seen each other, she and Kyle would find their old rapport in an instant, that they’d share stories and ideas, and the same easy warmth of that summer would fill whatever room they were in.