All We Can Do Is Wait(24)

“You alone?”

“Huh?” Skyler asked, stepping up a stair to get some distance from him.

“Sorry, sorry,” the guy said. “That sounded really fuckin’ creepy. I just meant, like, did your friends ditch you?” He smiled, his teeth surprisingly white and gleaming.

“Uh, no, not exactly. I’m here with my sister. Kate Vong? Do you know her?”

The boy thought for a second, then shook his head. “I do not remember.”

“Well. That’s my sister!”

The boy nodded. “And what’s your name?”

“Skyler,” she said, over the din of the party.

“Like Miley?” the boy asked, looking confused.

“No, not Cyrus, Skyler. Like, uh, Sky.”

“Oh, Skyler!” the boy said. “Like in Good Will Hunting.”

Skyler shrugged. “I haven’t seen it.”

The boy pretended to be taken aback and then leaned in, closer than before. “Well, I guess that’ll have to be our first movie date then.”

It was a bad line—was it really even a line?—but something about this boy’s shiny white teeth, his freckles, and Skyler’s utter aloneness at the party made her not care. So when he leaned in even closer and said, “Well, listen, my name is Danny, and I know this is kinda lame, and I swear I’m not trying anything, but would you want to talk upstairs? It’s so loud down here,” Skyler agreed to go with him.

They walked up the stairs and past the closed door with the light on. “I think that one’s, uh, in use,” Danny said with a little smile, keeping things feeling breezy, casual. They found another room, dark with the door open, and when Danny turned on the light it appeared to be a child’s bedroom, full of little gold sports trophies, with bunk beds in a corner.

“A kid lives here?” Skyler said.

“Well, he did. But I’m not a kid anymore.”

Skyler turned to him, mortified. “Oh my God, this is your house?”

Danny smiled, nodded. “Yeah. It’s kinda busted, I know. But, hey, it’s home. Half the time, anyway. I mostly live with my dad.”

“I’m sorry,” Skyler said. “I didn’t know.”

“Hey, it’s O.K.,” Danny said. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

He seemed easygoing, which relaxed Skyler, and soon they were both sitting on the bottom bunk, leaning on their elbows, introducing more of themselves to each other.

“My mom left when I was a kid,” Skyler told him at one point. “She was, like, this grunge girl in the ’90s or whatever. She went to Seattle and then came back with the two of us. We were just babies, and she basically dumped us on my grandparents—well, my grandma and my step-grandfather—and then a few years later she disappeared.”

“That’s rough.” Danny sighed. “And I thought my parents’ divorce was bad.”

“I’m sure it was! I didn’t mean . . .”

Danny turned to her, looking kind and handsome in the dim light of the bedroom. “I know you didn’t. Man, you’re so . . . polite.”

Skyler grimaced. “Is that an Asian joke?”

Danny’s eyes widened. “No! No, not at all.”

She smiled. “Just kidding.”

Danny laughed and leaned back onto his elbows, this time a little closer to Skyler.

“So you came here with your sister?”

“Yeah, Kate. I mean, she’s my sister but she’s kinda also like . . . an aunt or something. Maybe even a mom. She’s only two years older than me, but she basically raised me. Back when my mom and my grandparents were fighting all the time, before my mom left. Kate, like, protected me from all that.”

Danny nodded. “That’s cool, that’s cool.”

Skyler felt dumb. Like she’d been talking too much, about way too much personal stuff. They were supposed to be talking about, like, school and music and Netflix shows. Not her family trauma. “Sorry, I—” she started, but before she could finish, Danny leaned over and kissed her. She was startled, and pulled back.

“Is this O.K.?” he asked, his brown eyes peering into hers. Skyler froze for a second but then nodded her head. “Yeah, yeah, it’s O.K.,” she whispered, and they were kissing again. And then Danny was getting up to turn off the light, and then, a little while later, they were having sex. It wasn’t Skyler’s first time, but it almost felt like it was, in the comfort of Danny’s childhood bedroom, Danny seeming so kind and quiet, with just a little bit of mischievousness—or was it danger—about him.

Even though Kate insisted to Skyler that Danny was an asshole and best avoided, that he had a reputation for fucking with girls’ heads and possibly worse, Skyler quickly started dating him, fooling around with him up in her cluttered room on many afternoons after school when Kate had practice or a club meeting or whatever it was she was always so busy doing.

At first, Danny had been sweet, and generous. He was the youngest of a big Irish Catholic family, and was very into his Irishness. He gave Skyler a Claddagh ring, told her to wear it with the heart facing toward her, so people would know she belonged to someone. That word, “belong,” so chilling later, then seemed romantic and old-fashioned, like Skyler finally had a place in the world that had nothing to do with Kate, or her grandparents, or her mother, who they thought was maybe living in California somewhere. (They’d gotten a postcard at Christmas when Skyler was thirteen, a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge on it. Her mother had written, “You girls would love it here,” but there was no invitation to come visit, or any indication that that was even where she lived.)