You Have a Match(65)

“Turns out making menudo is a hell of a lot easier than making war,” he says. “Also, Mickey was kicking my ass.”

“Eh, you held your own.”

I shift some of the dinner on my plate, easing into the bench, recognizing this moment for what it is—not a chance to confront Leo, but a chance to have the kind of conversation we had before I let my stupid feelings get in the way. Maybe the last one we’ll get in a long while.

Except Leo leans in with one of those stupidly compelling grins of his, one where he’s so excited about something that he’s a little bit out of his own body, and the thought of keeping my distance is shot to hell.

“But she’s gone way beyond dishes now,” he tells me. “Like—she tells me all the stories behind how she learned them from her aunts, the ones here, and the ones in Manila, too. And tons of stuff about her family. Like how her grandma’s convinced that if you leave rice on a plate it means you won’t ever get married. Or how her aunts think when someone drops something in the kitchen it means someone’s coming to visit.”

He’s at an infectious level of “information dump,” the kind that pulls me in with its own force.

“The way Finn and I took care of kitchen duty, we should be expecting a lot of visitors.”

He laughs, pulling out his phone and opening it up to an infinitely long thread.

“Her younger cousins have been putting her in random WhatsApp groups to prank her all summer. They ambushed me last week and put me in one, too. Now they’re all spamming us with K-pop links and Disney lip dubs they’re making on some app.”

“Well that’s ridiculously precious.”

“Eh, it’s all fun and games until they swore up and down they were teaching me how to say ‘good morning’ in Tagalog and I ended up telling Mickey to ‘go eat shit.’”

Even in the depths of my possibly bottomless self-pity, that gets a laugh out of me.

Leo knocks his shoulder into mine, another reminder of how fast we’ve filled up the air between us. “Yeah, yeah, kumain ng tae.”

“I would, but my mouth’s already full,” I say, tilting my head at the plate I’m eating from so sloppily that several curious birds have flitted their way over. Carefully, I ask, “Do you think it’s helped at all? I mean … with the not knowing?”

Leo considers the question, staring down at my half-eaten plate.

“In some ways, kind of? I mean, who even knows if my parents came from anywhere near where her family is, but … it’s nice to learn about anyway.”

There’s a beat, then, that I know isn’t the end of the thought, but the thought taking a new shape. I watch it in his face the same way I always have, wishing I could take it for granted. Wishing I knew if there would be a chance to watch it again.

“It’s weird to think … in some other life … Carla and I would be living there. Like there’s some alternate version of us who do. You know?”

I almost laugh. My alternate version is a few hundred yards away, no doubt busting gum chewers in the rec room and fuming over what I said earlier. Leo catches the ghost of it on my face, and his head dips as if he’s thinking the same thing.

“The test, though—I’m kind of relieved I didn’t find anybody,” he admits. “I don’t know if I was really thinking about what might happen if I did. What it might dig up.”

I nudge some dirt on the ground with the heel of my shoe. “I hope what happened with me and Savvy wasn’t what scared you off.”

That hope is dashed when Leo answers without hesitation.

“That’s just it, though. It’s different. This thing with your parents—they must have known you’d find out eventually. This whole mess is more on them than on you.” He shakes his head. “But with me—if these people are even still out there—they set the terms. Nobody ever lied to anybody about it. Which means there’s a chance if I did find them, I’d be digging up something they’re not prepared to handle. Something I’m not prepared to handle.”

I’m not really sure what to say, or if there’s anything to say. We both know he’s right. But it makes me ache for him anyway, knowing Leo well enough to understand that the decision is less about protecting himself and more about protecting other people.

And if there’s anything I’ve learned in the last week, it’s that we all have a lot more to protect than we think.

“I’m letting it go for now.” Leo says the words more to the ground than to me. It’s clear he’s been thinking about this a lot more than he let on, and the decision isn’t easy for him. But he looks up at me with fresh resolve and says, “I want to focus more on the future. On this school in New York. It’s kind of opened this door where I can learn more about cooking, but also about my background. It’s not what I was trying to do, but maybe—maybe I was meant to feel like this so it could lead me here. Maybe…”

I nod, compelled by the possibility at the end of that maybe, by the weight of it. He’s always been so driven, always thrown his whole self into his ideas. And I’ve always been the first one to jump with him. It’s weird to think I won’t get to anymore. No matter what happens between us, something is definitively ending—his future is thousands of miles away, and mine’s still mired in high school and big decisions and the mess I left in the parking lot earlier today.