The Anatomical Shape of a Heart(24)

“Why you’re doing it.”

His brows lowered, and for a moment his eyes were shadowed so deeply by his dark lashes, they disappeared, and he was a faceless ghoul with empty, dark sockets. Then he turned his head and pretended to smile. “It’s not important.”

“Just something you do for kicks?”

“No, not that.”

“Daddy issues?”

Jack snorted. “If he ever finds out, I’ll have some issues, all right, because he’ll disown me.” His upswept hair was wilting in the steam rising from our teacups. He pushed a lock of it out of his eyes. “My dad lives for work. Family comes—well, not even second. My mom’s pretty high up there, but I’m probably tenth. And if I ever publicly embarrassed him, he’d send me away somewhere before I could open my mouth to apologize. Military school or Russia, probably. Not even kidding.”

“To be fair, the stuff you’re doing would probably land you in jail, so you wouldn’t have to worry about being sent away.”

“Good point. If I get busted, will you smuggle a sharpened HB inside a cake for me?”

“Maybe if you’d stop vandalizing, you wouldn’t have to shiv your way out of San Quentin with a pencil.”

He rubbed his cheek against his shoulder, and his face came close enough to mine that I could smell his lemony hair wax and the mint of the tea on his breath. I barely heard his whispered reply beneath the sound of footsteps racing toward our table.

“I can’t.”

Before I could ask him why, the table exploded.

11

Plates and dishes slid, hummus splattered, and Jack’s pot of Japanese green tea tipped over and splashed across my face and his shirt. It wasn’t hot anymore, but that didn’t stop me from crying out in shock as if I’d been scalded. With soccer-mom swiftness, Jack’s arm shot out in front of me like a shield, but the damage was already done.

“Oh, God! I’m so sorry!”

I wiped tea off my face and looked up to see a girl squatting beside me to help straighten the table. She was thin and small, but not as short as me, and she had asymmetrically cut hair that was black on the short side and streaked with purple and pink on the fringed, longer side.

“My toe caught on the reed mat,” she explained in a tiny, high voice that didn’t match her wild hair. “I’m such a klutz.”

“It’s okay,” Jack said in strained voice, using his shielding arm to push our plates back from the edge of the table before they dumped in our laps.

“My cousin Trevor lives on the next block—you know, the one in college? Anyway, I saw your hair through the window when I was walking past. I couldn’t believe it was you, but it was and—excuse me.”

She leaned over me to hug Jack’s neck.

“Uh, Beatrix,” he said, clearing his throat. “This is my friend Sierra.”

“Hi there,” she said to me, putting her hand on my shoulder to steady herself as she sat back on her heels. Was she drunk or something? She smelled funny. “He’s being modest. We’re more than friends.” She bit her bottom lip and grinned at Jack.

A positively horrified look crossed his face. He moved his mouth as if he were going to say something but couldn’t force the words out.

“Hey, it’s cool,” she said. “We’re not together or anything. Jackson doesn’t do the couple thing, as I’m sure you know. Do you go to his school or something?”

“No.”

Someone tapped on the window. A silhouette of a man.

“Shoot, I’ve got to go. Hey, you guys wanna come hang with us? We’re going to a party in Rincon Hill.”

“No, thanks,” Jack said testily.

She shrugged and stood. “Give me a ring sometime. Maybe you and Andy and I can hang at his mom’s place. God! I almost tripped again—you guys need to do something about this mat,” she said to the waitress who had rushed up the stairs with kitchen towels to clean our table. “See ya, Jackson!”

We helped Star clean up the table. Jack apologized to her and later to me on the way back to the Inner Sunset. Our connecting bus was crazy full, and we had to stand. But once we’d gotten a seat together on the N train, we talked a little.

“Thanks for being cool about Sierra,” he said quietly.

“One freak-out a day is my limit, and I’d already used it up at the anatomy lab.”

“Oh, good.”

“But while we’re on the subject, are you and Sierra…?”

He looked me in the eyes and said very seriously, “Absolutely not. Sierra and I are just friends. That’s all we ever really were. Well…” He shook his head and glanced out the darkened window. “It’s complicated. Or it was. But now it’s simple, and we’re friends.”

“Okay.”

“Okay?” he repeated, brows drawn together.

I pulled a wet tea leaf out of his hair and smiled weakly. “Okay.”

After I returned his wallet, we exchanged phone numbers and email addresses and work schedules. I thanked him for not making fun of me outside the anatomy lab. He thanked me again for not freaking out about getting splashed with tea. When we got to my stop, I wouldn’t let him walk me home. I can take care of myself, first of all. And second, no one had ever walked me home. Not even Howard Hooper. (And that’s not some veiled reference to sex, because Howard and I had plenty of that—well, maybe not plenty, exactly, but some. And anyway, it was 100 percent in his car … and 100 percent disappointing.)