Georgie, All Along (73)

But there’s nothing there, and I’m not all that surprised, not after all this time.

It doesn’t feel good or bad. Hollow, maybe.

“‘LPF,’” she reads, interrupting my thoughts. “What’s the P for?”

“I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours.”

“No deal. What is it, Peter or something? That’s nothing compared to mine.”

I shake my head. “No. It’s Pascal.”

She blinks at me. “Pascal?”

“Yup.”

“What is that, French?”

I shrug. “I don’t know. It’s my dad’s name.”

She blinks again, and then she hoots a laugh, loud enough that she’s got to slap a hand over her mouth.

“Your dad’s name is Pas- cal?” she says after she quiets herself, emphasizing the syllables all wrong. Sure, it’s not that common a name, but I never saw anything particularly funny about it. Maybe I’m missing something, though; it’s not like I’ve got any sense of humor when it comes to my dad.

“Pas! Cal!” she repeats, bending to laugh again. It’s so funny watching her laugh that I eventually join in, too. I think again of what I said to her before we came out here. I want to do it because everyone else did.

That’s how I feel when Georgie laughs: the purest sort of peer pressure.

She wipes her eyes as she straightens herself, shaking her head and catching her breath. “Okay, okay!” she says, a relenting note in her voice. “For that, I’ll tell you mine.”

I make my face mock serious, cross my arms. “Let’s have it.”

“I realize this is a lot to ask after Passsssss-cal”—she giggles again—“but please, try not to laugh.”

“I won’t.”

She sighs. “It’s . . . Moonbeam.”

I clear my throat. My promise not to laugh might as well be the one I made about running if anyone found us out here.

“Don’t you dare,” she warns, but I can’t say anything; I’m too busy biting down on the inside of my cheek.

“Obviously it’s not a family name. Unless you count that my family is extremely chaotic. Anyway, I was born on a night of a full moon. My mom said the sky was so clear that her hospital room was all lit up with silver light while she held me. She said it was something she’d always want to remember.”

Any urge I had to laugh fades. That’s about the nicest reason I ever heard to give someone an embarrassing name. It’s so much nicer than me getting Pascal, a shoved-in reminder of a man I never understood and who never understood me, probably not even on the day I was born.

“It suits you,” I say.

She scoffs. “I’m sure it does. My teachers used to give me tons of shit about it. Not the sort of name that gets people to take you seriously.”

“That isn’t what I mean. Anyhow the teachers here weren’t any good.” I know that’s painting with too broad a brush, but that’s all right, as long as it makes Georgie feel better. “It suits you because you’re like that. Bright and rare. A little mysterious. That’s you, Mulcahy.”

She does pretty much what that name of hers says she was meant to do. She beams at me.

Then she comes back to our pile of spray paint cans, picking each one up until she finds the one I got on clearance. She doesn’t wait for me to ask her what’s next. She goes right back up to that rock and—as though it’s the most natural thing in the world—she sprays a big pink heart around our initials.

“There,” she says, as if she’s finally fixed it, finally figured it out.

Georgie Mulcahy, making her mark on me.





Chapter 17


Georgie


“Are y’all gonna get married?”

I nearly slice the tip of my finger off at the last word of Bel’s blurted question, my face immediately flushing.

I press my lips into an annoyed, flat line and blink meaningfully across the marble island at Bel. Who brings up marriage when someone’s slicing an onion!

Rude, if you ask me.

“Are you?” she repeats.

I point the knife at her. “Why aren’t you grating?”

She sighs heavily from her perch on one of the stylish breakfast bar stools that were delivered to her house yesterday and picks up the triangle of parmesan I’ve assigned her to. Even this small interruption has my concentration all discombobulated, because, as the green beans in the pasta dish once proved, I’m no chef. My eyeballs superglue themselves back to the cookbook I borrowed from Levi’s kitchen this morning, because I’m so concerned about staying on the proper step for this vegetarian lasagna. Freezes well, it says, which is why I picked it.

Dice the onion into quarter-inch pieces, I read, and weakly reassure myself that I’m capable of this.

It’s a mistake, maybe, to have picked meal prep for today’s very important distraction activity for Bel, who, as of today, is two weeks from her due date and also on her first official day of maternity leave. For the last few days, I’ve sensed her anxiety ratcheting up—every time we texted or were together, she’d talked almost fanatically about work, about meetings that had gotten off track or projects she couldn’t trust to anyone else, and I’m certain she’s regretting not working right up until she goes into labor. I can tell, too, that Harry’s noticed her intensity about it; two nights ago, when I was over here labeling the last few newly organized boxes in the junk room—thanks to me, it’s a storage room now, with plenty of available space for the Peloton Annabel ordered at three a.m. two nights ago—I’d seen, for the first time, them snap at each other. Harry had curtly asked how long it’d been since Bel had gotten up from her chair to stretch, and Bel had rolled her eyes and told him—in a tone I’d never heard her use with him—to mind his own business.