He looked at me. Smiled softly. “For real.”
I put my hand against his cheek. “Me, too.” And I kissed him. I think I messed up his nice-guy look a little, running my hands through his hair until it stuck up, and rumpling his shirt. And I think he probably did the same to me.
When we finally broke apart, we were both smiling.
“But you’re going to leave,” I said, suddenly panicked. “You’re going to go home with your mom. I won’t see you again.”
Lucas shook his head. “My mom wants to invest in the carnival. I told her I was really happy while I was here. That this was the only place I was ever happy while I was with Walter.” He smiled, and it lit up the night. “She said I could stay, and your dad would teach me how to run a fair. If you don’t mind.”
I pulled him toward me for a kiss. “As long as I don’t have to save you from the dunk tank again.”
Lucas laughed.
I snuggled into his arms as the last of the fireworks faded, and high above, Mephit flapped across the sky, his wings silhouetted against the moon.
When I spot him at the other end of the grocery aisle, I freeze.
It’s not that I don’t want to see him. In fact, all summer I’ve been hoping to run into him. Looking at him now—in his same old khakis and a pale-blue button-down, his flips-flops worn thin at the heels, and his hair a bit longer than it was when I’d last spent an entire period of Spanish class staring at it—it’s hard to believe it’s been only six weeks.
It feels like it’s been forever.
Lately, I’ve been daydreaming about running into him, imagining elaborate scenarios where he walks by while I’m at the beach with friends, and we decide to go for a stroll by the lake to catch up, or where he’ll wander into the sandwich shop in town just as I’m telling a particularly great joke, and everyone at the table will be laughing at my dazzling wit as he casually drops by the table to say hello.
But now I’ve just finished work, which means I’m a total mess. There’s a big purple splotch near the bottom of my white camp T-shirt, from someone’s Popsicle, and a grass stain on my shoulder from where Andrew Mitchell knocked me over during an unusually aggressive game of red rover this afternoon. I have dirt on my knees, and duct tape on my sandals where the strap broke while I was chasing Henry Ascher during duck, duck, goose. I’m sweaty and sunburned and exhausted, not to mention that I’m still wearing the name tag I made in arts and crafts, which says “Annie” in such uneven, blocky lettering that it looks like it belongs to one of the kids.
But still, when I see Griffin Reilly at the end of the aisle, I can’t quite bring myself to walk away.
He’s examining a bag of candy, and while I watch, he turns it over in his hands, gripping it like a basketball, then pivots and sends it arcing toward his cart, which is a good six feet away. It clangs off the side, rattling the metal caging before falling to the floor with a thwack.
“Nice shot,” I say, walking over, and he grins a little as he leans to grab it. I hold out my hands. “Let me try.”
Without saying anything, he scoops up the bag and then, in one fluid motion, tosses it in my direction. I manage to catch it, but just barely. Without hesitating, I lift my arms, poised to shoot, but he shakes his head.
“Too close.”
I take a few steps back, feeling nervous beneath his steady, gray-eyed gaze. This time, the bag goes sailing through the air, landing square in the center of the cart, and I turn back to him with a triumphant look.
He nods. “Not bad.”
“I’m better with an actual basketball.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Actually, no,” I admit. “I’m kind of terrible. But I’m great with those mini ones.”
“Pop-A-Shot?”
“Exactly,” I say. “I’m insanely good at Pop-A-Shot.”
“And not very modest,” he points out, entirely straight-faced.
“Well,” I say with a shrug, “it’s hard to be modest when you’re as good as I am.”
He stretches out an arm, leaning against a shelf full of brightly packaged cookies. “Sounds like something to see,” he says, not quite looking at me. He has this way of ducking his head when he’s talking to you so that it’s hard to tell what he’s thinking. It’s maddening and intriguing and confusing all at once. In Spanish, I used to ask him questions just to watch him turn around, his pale eyes skipping from my forehead to my desk, never exactly meeting my gaze, and I would try to guess whether he liked me or was afraid of me or something else entirely.
For months and months, that’s all there was between us: questions about verb conjugations and past perfect tenses, holas and muchas graciases and adioses. We didn’t have any friends in common; it was hard to know if we had anything in common at all. It was a big school, and this was the first time I’d come across him, sitting there in Señor Mandelbaum’s third-period Spanish class. But right away I wanted more of him.
He didn’t make it easy. There was something oddly cagey and way too direct about him all at the same time. He was mostly quiet and overly polite, but then he could also be honest to a startling degree. I’d once asked him if there was something in my eye, and he turned around, looked at me carefully, and then shrugged.
“Yeah,” he said. “Eye goop.”
But the thing about Griffin was that he was also sort of jaw-droppingly beautiful. He had messy brown hair and a square jaw and those gorgeous gray-blue eyes, and with his ridiculous height—he was a good foot taller than me, his legs always jammed against the bottom of his desk in class—he could’ve passed for a surfer or a skier, some kind of impossibly rugged and dashing figure from a movie.
Except, for some reason, he managed to ruin it by wearing the same outfit pretty much every single day: khaki pants and a light-blue button-down shirt, a strange uniform of sorts that made him look like a Boy Scout or a Bible salesman or someone who worked in the world’s most boring office.
Still, it wasn’t enough to keep the girls from staring at him during lunch, which was the only other time I ever saw him. He generally kept to himself, eating with his headphones in, his eyes focused on his phone, which made it hard to tell whether he was just really good at ignoring the attention or he simply never noticed it.
There was something magnetic about him. Whenever I saw him, I had the completely unfamiliar urge to take him by the shoulders, plunk him down in a chair, and make him open up to me. He was a mystery that—for reasons I didn’t quite understand—I felt desperate to solve. But there was only so much you could learn about someone in stilted Spanish. I was anxious for more time with him. And I wanted it to be in English.
Now, Griffin’s eyes drift past me to the checkout lines, and I can’t tell if he’s running late or getting bored. But something about seeing him here, out of context—away from the familiar backdrop of the high school—makes me momentarily brave.
“Have you ever been to Hal’s?” I ask, before I can think better of it.
“That bar on McKinley?”
“It’s an arcade too. Maybe we should…” I pause for a second, hoping he’ll pick up the thread, but he doesn’t. He only scuffs his flip-flop against the shiny linoleum floor, and the thought hangs there between us, awkward and unfinished.
I’ve never done this before, whatever it is I’m trying to do here. I’ve never attempted to make the first move. And now I can’t help feeling a pang of regret about all the times I’ve been the one to hesitate in this situation: staring too long at a text about hanging out, clearing my throat after the suggestion of a movie, pausing at the more formal invitation to a school dance. I wish now that I could take them back, all those extra seconds. Because this—this horrifying pause, this awful silence—is brutal.