First & Then(39)

Ezra didn’t speak, so I went on, as much to fill the silence as to relieve some frustration. “Trying to sum yourself up on paper can be kind of demoralizing.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know … you have to boil yourself down into, like, bullet points. And unless you have awesome, college-relevant bullet points, you’re kind of screwed. It’d be so much easier if you had something that you’re good at that you could just show them. Like football, or dancing, or…” I shook my head. “Not to undercut all the work you’ve put into it or anything. I’m just saying, I wish I had spent more time on, like, cross-country running, or … plate-spinning, or something.”

“You spin plates?”

“Oh, I’m a plate-spinning wizard,” I said.

Ezra’s lips twitched.

“How come you never smile for real?” I asked.

“My teeth are crooked.”

“Are not.”

“Are so.” He flashed his teeth, and sure enough, the bottom front ones didn’t stand quite straight. “All the kids in elementary school made fun of me,” he said. “No one would serve me in restaurants. I had to wear a brown paper bag with two eyeholes cut out of it, and small children would run screaming at the sight of me.”

“Shut up.”

“It’s true.”

“Why don’t you ever smile?”

“I do.”

“Not when you win. You never smile when you’re playing. When Cas gets out there, it’s like he’s having the time of his life. But you never look happy.”

“I’m not Cas.”

I could feel my face flush. Sometimes I couldn’t help but talk about him. “But don’t you love it?”

“Football?”

“No, plate-spinning.”

Another twitch of his lips. “Yeah, I love football. I can’t say I have any strong feelings one way or the other about plate-spinning.”

“So why don’t you look happy when you play? You’re the best at it. You’d think you’d be the happiest guy in the world.”

“When you love something, you can’t be happy all the time, can you? Like, that’s why you love it. It makes you feel all kinds of things, not just happy. It can hurt, it can make you f*cking mad, but … it makes you feel something, you know?”

All at once I flashed on Cas kissing Molly McDowell in the home ec room. Had he ever loved something like that? I watched him throw the ball to Jordan, the afternoon light shining on his back, and was suddenly transported to when he had skinny shoulders and pale skin, and we’d walk to the pool together in elementary school. Those days when we were young enough to carry kickboards and wear those hideous neon goggles that left red rings around our eyes. It was before I begged my mom for bikinis, before time and two-a-days made Cas’s shoulders broad. When it was just he and I. There had to be an alternate universe out there where that feeling never went away. Where it was never him out there and me up here. Where he never went places that I couldn’t follow.

I realized Ezra was looking at me.

All he said was, “I think I’m gonna go back.”

“Okay.” I had no desire to leave. So I just turned back to the water. Ezra’s footsteps retreating got lost in the sound of the waves hitting the sand.





19


I threw my bag down inside the kitchen door that night and bellowed, “I’m home!”

My words were swallowed up in the depths of the house. The place felt empty. The lights were off. I was alone.

Or so I thought.

“Devon?” My mom appeared in the doorway. Her expression was serious, and it stopped me in my tracks on the way to the fridge in the pursuit of post–road trip snacks.

“What is it?”

“Come to Daddy’s office. We need to talk.”

Dad’s office was on the ground floor. It had a big picture window looking out over the backyard. I stared out into the darkness as my mom took a seat and my dad, already behind the desk, shuffled a few papers.

“What is it?” I asked again. A gnawing feeling was growing in my stomach. I tried to smile.

There had been a conversation like this before, in which they first proposed the idea of Foster coming to live with us. Only that time we were in the living room, and there were cookies, and something about my parents’ demeanor was vastly different. My mom was staring out the window now, her arms folded in front of her, her lips pursed. She looked … sad.

Dad spoke. “You know that when we agreed to take Foster, we did it on the assumption that this was a … a temporary situation. We’re Foster’s guardians, but his mom still has the legal right to decide what’s best for him, whether it be staying here or going back to live with her.”

All at once, the bottom of my stomach dropped out, and this awful, terrible rush of blood swelled from the back of my neck to my cheeks, up through the top of my head. Foster couldn’t go back there. Foster would implode there.

In an instant, in the tiniest head of the smallest pin, I was concentrated like Ezra. I was ready to fight for Foster.

And then my father spoke again. “We’ve been in contact with Elizabeth, and with Foster’s social worker, and”—he took a deep breath—“honey, Elizabeth’s surrendered her rights as Foster’s mother. She’s going to let us adopt him.”