The Hazel Wood (The Hazel Wood #1)(39)

“Signs like a Polaroid stuck in a book. Or a crow delivering a letter. Unless you have a better plan?” He gave the patented weapons-down smile that shouldn’t have worked on me but kinda did. It almost made me forget that flash of black in his eyes.

Anyway, he was right. That was the best plan we had.

By the time we got on the road, evening was coming down. Sitting in the passenger seat looking out at a sea of brake lights on one side, headlights on the other, felt like an outtake from my life with Ella. We never left town at opportune times. It was always at odd moments, when Ella’s latest job opportunity melted away like fairy gold, or the bad luck threw us one curve too many. Before dinner on a Tuesday. In the middle of the night, after a cigarette Ella swore she’d tamped out ignited a motel-room fire. I propped my temple against the cool of the glass.

“So. Wanna play a car game?”

I snorted. Ella and I had exhausted every car game known to man, and invented a dozen more.

“What? Come on, humor a New York kid. Driving anywhere is like a weird vacation for me.”

He did hold the steering wheel funny, I’d noticed. At ten and two, but in this super-self-conscious way, like he was holding up a confusing shirt.

“Yeah, alright. What do you want to play?”

I expected him to say Geography or the license-plate alphabet game, but he didn’t.

“Let’s play Memory Palace.”

I looked at him. “You made that up.”

“No, my mom did. I’ll go first, so I can teach you.” He cleared his throat. “Okay, the first item in my memory palace is a … map of Amsterdam. Because Amsterdam is where I lost my, um, my virginity in a public park.” He laughed self-consciously, like he was already rethinking his brag. “So, A is for Amsterdam. Now you say mine, then do a B, with a memory attached.”

Did he do it on a bench? Under a bush? Just out in the middle of the grass? I bet it was in a gazebo. I’d pictured Finch having sex with some long-legged Dutch girl five different ways before I realized I was taking way too long to answer.

“Okay. A is for a map of Amsterdam, because that’s where you lost your v-card.” I put air quotes around the phrase with my voice. “And B is for … Beloved, because I read it when my mom and I lived in Vermont.”

“Okay. A is for a map of Amsterdam because that’s where I lost my … v-card, and I’m already regretting picking that one, B is for Beloved, because you read it when you lived in Vermont, and C is for, let’s see, C is for crickets, because they scared the shit out of me when I was little.”

I didn’t make fun of him for that. Crickets were creepy. I named the three items in our memory palace, and paused. “Okay, D is for driving, because that’s what I’ve spent most of my life doing.”

“Nope. Has to be a thing. Like an object you can pick up.”

“Fine,” I muttered. “D is for Dazed and Confused, because I watched it in a motel room once.”

“A movie? Because you remember watching it?”

“Yeah,” I said defensively. “It’s a thing, and I remember it.”

“Fine, fine.” After listing A through D, Finch smiled. “And E is for eggs benedict, because it’s what my mom makes me when I’m sick. Made.”

For a moment, we both held our breath. Then his eyes flicked to the neck of my sweatshirt, where the top of my tattoo crawled toward my collarbone. “You’re up for F. F is for flower, right? I’ve always wanted to ask about it.”

I touched the inked blossom self-consciously, remembering the look on Ella’s face when I came home with it. A lost look, an anger I couldn’t place. I’d felt ashamed without ever knowing why. “Yeah. Maybe when we get to T.”

I did F, H, and J (falafel because Ella liked it, honey because I liked it, Jane Eyre because I’d read it in Tempe). Finch did G, I, and K (gingerbread because his mom used to make gingerbread mansions, icicles because freshman year he wrote an entire fantasy novel about a warhorse named Icicle, and Kit Kats because once his family lived on them for a day, when their car broke down in a snowstorm).

It was my turn again. L. I rapped out everything in our memory palace, feeling a goofy sense of satisfaction when I got it right. “Okay. L. L is for…”

“Don’t say a food because you’ve eaten it or a book because you’ve read it,” Finch said. “Give me, like, a real memory.”

I felt a flush of irritation, colored with shame. “Are you saying I’m playing your car game wrong?”

“No! I just … I thought I could get to know you this way. Like maybe you’d share something about your past. Your family.”

He said it lightly, without emphasis, but I knew what he wanted.

“You remember I’ve never met her, right?” I asked hotly. “Like, ever? Althea figures not at all into my life, and my mom hasn’t talked to her in sixteen years.”

“What about when you were little? Where you grew up? What do you remember about that?”

His eyes were on the traffic ahead, but his voice held a sharp, acquisitive note. Like he was collecting findings on me for a book. It would’ve pissed me off anyway, but what made it worse was his certainty. That everyone’s mind was flush with memories they could toss off casually. Half the shit I thought had happened to me happened in books. Or to Ella, in one of her stories about her early single-mom days, trying to make ends meet.