Picture Us In The Light(59)

“No, I want an answer now. Do I act like I’m not? You think I’m not good to her?”

“You’re good to everyone.”

“Just less good to my girlfriend? Is that why you’re asking?”

“No, I just—you know. You guys are my best friends. I just want you to be happy.”

“You don’t think I am?”

“Harry, I’m sorry, okay? I shouldn’t have said anything.”

“Do you think I’d seem happier if I were with someone else?”

I force myself to swallow. “Like who?”

“Hypothetically.”

“I think—” I have an excuse ready, the way they argue sometimes, but it evaporates before I can get to it. I clear my throat. “It’s not my business. Forget it. As long as you guys are both happy.”

“Right.” He leans over and grabs the nearest box from the floor—my jeans—and stacks it roughly on top of a box of shirts. “Yeah, I mean, of course I’m happy. Hopefully I make her happy too.”

“Well, good. That’s good.”

“Right.” He propels himself off the bed. “I should get going. My parents will kill me if they find out I left.”

“Oh—” Shit. Shit, shit. “Right, yeah. Um—thanks for coming.”

I walk to the front door with him, my legs shaky. I’m desperate to keep him here, desperate to try to fix what I said. It isn’t even what I meant. Not completely, at least. But I can feel my face prickling with the heat of whatever words I wanted to say.

Or didn’t want to, I guess. Didn’t want to badly enough.



I text Regina to see if she can/will talk after Harry’s gone, right away, before I can descend into that hell of picking apart all the things it’s too late to unsay. Maybe—for multiple obvious reasons—she’s the last person I should talk to. But the only other person I want to talk to is the only one I can’t, so. Part of me doesn’t expect to hear back, but she calls a few minutes later.

“Don’t squatters have a lot of rights in California?” I say when I pick up. “Didn’t you tell me that once?”

“Packing isn’t going well, I take it? Harry told me he was going over to help.”

“Packing is not going well.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, well.” I sit on my empty desk. Harry’s boxes are lined neatly against my bed. I feel shaky still. “Thanks. Hey, look—I wanted to see—I know it’s not like I won’t see you again or anything, but are we cool?”

“Are we cool?”

“I know I kind of let you down with the paper tribute.”

“Oh.” There’s a pause. “It’s fine.”

“You sure?”

“I understand.”

“Do you? Because your voice kind of sounds like when you say I understand, you mean I understand you’re a shitty excuse for a friend.”

If my voice comes out too charged, shot through with desperation—I can’t lose both of them in one night—she doesn’t let on. “You’re like my brother, Danny. We’re always going to be fine.”

“All right.” I exhale. It’s not everything I wanted to ask her, obviously, not the whole story, but it’s not nothing, either. I’ll take it. “Thanks, Reg.”

“Do you ever go to San José? It’s actually a pretty great city.”

“Not the part we’re going to live.”

“Ah.”

We’re both quiet a moment. I wish I could ask her if she thinks I wrecked things with Harry. And I wish I could be honest about what I’m really asking her, if she’s forgiven me for how I treated Sandra. But I’m not brave enough. In Austin we used to go camping up in hill country with the other families, and one of the dads would build campfires and show us how fire suffocates and dies out when it can’t get oxygen. Your worst fears are like that; you can’t expose them to the air or they’ll flare out of control and consume you.

“Harry—I’m not supposed to tell you this,” she says. Oh, God. My heart skitters across my rib cage on his name. He told her, he’s finished with me. Then she says, “They said no, but Harry asked his parents if you could move in with him the rest of the year.”

I feel an instant relief, the kind that burns off, and then a more lingering comfort. You don’t ask that and then abandon the person altogether, right? Maybe there were a lot of ways he could’ve taken what I said to him tonight. “Really, he asked that? But they said no?”

“They didn’t think it was right to do that to your parents. They told him they would never be okay if someone else offered to take in their kids, basically. They’d be insulted. They had a gigantic fight over it. That’s why he’s grounded. Harry didn’t talk to them for like three days.”

My heart swells. “When was this?”

“As soon as you told us you were moving.”

I tap my fingers against my desk. I’m glad, in the moment, that we’re on the phone and she can’t see my expression. “I guess it shouldn’t surprise me, coming from him.”

“Right,” she says, and I can’t quite parse the tones in her voice.