The Way You Make Me Feel(71)

“This is going to be the best surprise!” Hamlet exclaimed, slapping his hands on the steering wheel happily. “Rose kind of hates you right now, though. Just FYI.”

“I’m counting on it.” The thought of being stuck in that stuffy truck bickering with Rose filled me with the most intense relief. I found myself missing the weirdest stuff lately.

And, like with Hamlet, I knew the first thing I needed to do when I saw her was apologize.

We were quiet for a few seconds, long enough for the car to be filled with a huge elephant. His love confession and my non-reciprocation. I chewed my lip down to bits trying to decide if this was the right time to bring it up.

Hamlet’s phone buzzed with a barrage of texts. THANK GOD! I picked it up gratefully. “Rose is freaking out.”

“Ignore it,” he said, speeding up again.

“You got it, Bryan Mills.”

“Who’s that?”

“You know, Liam Neeson’s character from the Taken movies?”

He shook his head and turned on the radio. Loud.

The rest of the drive was quick—there was no traffic, and we found a parking spot in a secret lot that Hamlet knew about. I found this competence very attractive.

Taking a few trails off the main path shaded by ancient live oak trees, I could hear and smell the trucks before we arrived. They were parked in a giant lot bordered by the gnarled old trees and gently sloping hills of brush. As we got closer, my nerves finally caught up with me and I was filled with trepidation.

When I saw the KoBra, I took a deep breath. Here we go.





CHAPTER 34

Rose stared at me, frowning.

For normal friends, it would have been a moment ripe for a hug. But I was me and she was Rose. So we stood there awkwardly without speaking. I punched her arm. “Hi.”

She punched my arm back. Hard. “Hi.”

“Sorry for leaving you,” I said, the words whooshing out of me. And I was surprised by how easy and natural it was. Words that usually had to be yanked out of my insides with a crowbar.

Her delicate chin quivered. I was mortified. Seeing Rose cry would be like breaking the seventh seal to bring on the apocalypse or something.

“We can talk about that later,” she said, her voice steady. Before I could answer, I spotted my dad in the doorway of the truck. What! What was he doing here? The happiness that flooded me in that moment almost knocked me off my feet. Never had I been happier to see that lucky Dodgers cap.

I looked over at Rose and she smiled. “Surprise!”

“Adrian?” Hamlet exclaimed from behind me.

But my dad kept it cool. He leaned against the truck’s doorframe and crossed his arms—the birthday tattoo visible on his forearm. “Well, well, well.”

Looking at my dad in his truck—a culmination of decades of blood, sweat, and tears—the e-mails I’d read yesterday flashed through my mind, paired with the strongest memories of my childhood.

The day my mom left, the feeling of her hair pressed against my face and the wetness of her tears immediately forgotten when my dad scooped me up in his arms and took me down to this very park we were standing in. Putting me on the little train that traversed through creeks, horse stables, and trees. The worst day turned into a magical one.

My first day of kindergarten, the first time I’d been truly apart from my dad and left with strangers. He let me wear his old Bone Thugs-N-Harmony T-shirt, tied into a knot at the waist, and the animal charm bracelet my mom had mailed me for good luck. When I wouldn’t stop crying, he stayed parked outside the school, within view of the window all day—missing his first day at a new job and getting fired.

Being picked up from a sleepover in fifth grade when all the girls circled around me and asked me why my dad was so young and was he really my brother and where were my real parents. My dad pounded on the front door of Lily Callihan-Wang’s house so hard that the entire family woke up. He bought me a McDonald’s hot fudge sundae on the midnight drive home and we sang along to TLC’s “No Scrubs.”

My dad’s expression as he sat in the doctor’s office with me as I got a shot for a bacterial infection, wailing. Not being able to tell if it was his palm that was sweaty or mine as he grasped my hand, so tight.

My dad’s expression, again, as he read the instructions on the back of a tampon box out loud to me as I lay curled up in fetal position on my bed, torn between laughter and tears.

And his expression, now. I realized right then—how disappointed you could be when you were all in with someone. When you cared so deeply. How your heart could break, so precisely and quickly.

But I’d always known that. Ever since my mom left my dad, left us. And everything since then had been an attempt to keep myself so far away from all that. Anything real, anything difficult to hold on to.

As I stood there surrounded by three people who had the ability to do just that—crack my chest open to all the disappointment and difficulty and grief—I knew I still wanted it. The risk of the bad stuff was so worth the good stuff. People who would be there for you even when you messed up and behaved like a little jerk? They were the good stuff.

My fear that my dad would move on without me, with Kody or whoever else, seemed so absurd then.

It was hard to keep the emotion out of my voice. “I’m back.”

“I see,” Pai said, cool and distant.