Come Find Me(36)

She holds up one finger, takes a bite, closing her eyes. As if the fate of the universe can hold on for just one moment. One simple moment where the only thing either of us is thinking about is the state of the world’s best pizza.

She starts to laugh then. “Nolan,” she says as I’m gathering my things. “I don’t know how to say this, but I think it is.”

“What?” I’m already mapping the course home. She pushes the half-eaten slice my way.

“The world’s best pizza. I’m not lying—it’s really good.” She’s really laughing, and it makes me pause. It’s the first time I’ve heard her laugh.

I take a bite to humor her, feel the warmth, the flavor, the grease in my mouth. “Oh shit,” I say around the bite, and she laughs. I can feel my eyes bugging out of my head. I change my mind, finishing the slice.

“We should come back here one day,” she says, “just, one day.”

“Yeah,” I say as she grabs the to-go box. “Let me know, though, if it’s as good reheated.”

She shakes her head. “Come on, you already know the answer to that.”





Joe is sitting at the kitchen table when Nolan drops me off, much like when I got home from school. I wonder if he’s moved at all since then, except I see a beer there instead of a soda, so…

“I come bearing dinner,” I say, the rest of the pizza still lukewarm in the box.

“I thought you were studying at the library?” he says, half question, half accusation.

“We took a dinner break,” I say, sliding the box onto the table. I open the top, contort my hands into the best impersonation of a magician revealing her tricks. “Ta-da,” I say.

Joe picks up a slice halfheartedly, not realizing he’s in the presence of the self-proclaimed World’s Best Pizza. He takes a bite, puts it down. Takes one more, then chases it with a beer. I frown. I make a note to tell Nolan: Not as good. The subject is unaffected.

I get myself a paper plate from the pantry, to join him.

    “Who was that, Kennedy?” he asks as I sit down across from him.

“Nolan, I told you.”

“I’m just wondering if…you know.”

I raise an eyebrow. I do know. He wants to know if this Nolan is my boyfriend. As in, have I broken his no boys rule officially. “He’s just a friend of mine, Joe. I am allowed to have friends, right?”

He nods, and I take a slice from the box. I scrunch my nose, chewing carefully. It’s missing something, outside the restaurant. It’s not just the heat. It’s something else, and I can’t put my finger on it.

Joe puts the bottle down, spinning it on the table, not meeting my eye. “The call that came in earlier,” he says, “it was the Realtor.”

I stop chewing. Wondering if they told Joe I’ve been messing around with the house. That I’m spooking the prospective buyers.

“There’s an offer,” he says.

“What?” I say around a bite. Not possible. No one would want to live there. “Who wants to live in that house? You don’t even want to live in that house, Joe, and it belongs to us.”

He shakes his head. “From what I understand, they want to take it back to its roots.” He spreads his hands out, as if this is something that should clarify everything. It doesn’t.

“What does that mean, take it back to its roots?”

“Turn it back into a working farm. I guess.”

“And how does one do that, exactly?”

He takes a deep breath. “They just want the land, Kennedy.”

    The acreage, stretching from the road to the fence to Freedom Battleground State Park. It’s what drew my mother to it in the first place. That, and the fact that we’d never had land before, growing up closer to a city. She said it would be good for us, the space, the air. The house, quirky and charming, was full of history, which she loved. But she’d given me and Elliot control over the paint, the furniture, deciding what each room would be used for. That first summer, we painted it ourselves, steamed the carpets, hung the porch swing, dug the garden. Before the start of the school year, Will showed up with flowers—the kind ready to plant—and helped us transfer them to the side yard himself, the knees of his khaki pants covered in soil afterward. It was the first time we met him, the first time he’d asked Mom to dinner. It worked; they left us there to finish the garden ourselves.

“And what will happen to the rest of it?”

He doesn’t say. He doesn’t have to. They intend to level it. Take it all down. “No,” I say.

“Kennedy.”

“Joe. No. It’s my house. I say no.” We hadn’t built it from the ground up, but it felt like we had brought it to life. I picture Elliot with white paint on his knuckles, dirt under his nails, his eyes unfocused, his cheeks flushed red from the sun. So different from the Elliot I was used to seeing. I think maybe that’s what Mom meant, when she said it was good for us. In the middle of that summer, it did really feel like a house could change us.

“It’s not that simple—”

“Except it is.” It’s mine—in my name, but in Joe’s trust.

He raises his eyes to mine, and he looks immeasurably sad. Worse than the first day I was here, when he cleared out the TV room, pulling furniture out into the hall to make room for me, while I watched. “Kennedy, who do you think is paying for Elliot’s lawyer?”