BY THE time they drove home on Sunday, Kyle and Nadia were talked out and just held hands and stayed mostly quiet. They barely even listened to music. Kyle went over and over the weekend in his head, scanning for anything bad, anything that had gone wrong with him and Nadia. He came up blank. It was all good.
She liked Emily, Emily liked her. She liked the mini film fest and cried at the end of A Star Is Born. She liked walking the land with Grandpa Navarro and hearing about the various seasonal things he and the crew did to keep the farm running. She really liked Martie, and they ended up going over to Aunt Jenny and Uncle Mike’s for dinner on Saturday so they could hang out mostly with Martie. Nadia wasn’t scared off by Aunt Brenda, and when Uncle Mike tried to teach everyone a super-wrong version of the Shiggy, Nadia fixed it and let him post a video with her in it.
Every aunt and every uncle had at some point during the weekend found Kyle to tell him how much they liked Nadia, how they hoped she’d come back.
“So,” he said to Nadia now, “it was good, right?”
“Mm-hmm.”
He glanced at her. “Are you happy?”
“Yeah, I’m happy. Also so tired. I was really, like, concentrating on being likable. It’s a lot.” She squeezed his hand. “But yes, happy.”
“Me too.” He adjusted the visor to keep the sun out of his eyes. “I kind of don’t want to go back to real life.” He had to get back in the gym with the team for baseball conditioning, and his grades had taken a dive lately—partly because classes were hard and partly because all he wanted to do was be with Nadia. But he needed to catch up.
“We can detour to Vegas if you want,” she said. She let his hand go and wiggled her fingers. “Put a ring on it.”
His heart pounded, but he played along with her light tone. “I’m sure everyone in our families would be very very cool with that.”
“Definitely.”
On one stretch of highway, the wind blew big tumbleweeds across the lanes. Kyle took Nadia’s hand back into his. “I used to be scared of tumbleweeds,” he said. “We’d be on a road trip and there’d be a giant one coming toward the car and me and Megan and Taylor would be screaming, ‘You’re gonna hit it, Dad!’”
Nadia laughed, rubbed her thumb against his palm.
His dad would always say, “Don’t worry, it’s nothing.”
They’d get closer and closer to the tumbleweed and they couldn’t swerve and they couldn’t brake, not with the other cars around them on the road. And Megan and Taylor would be laughing about it and pretending to be scared, but Kyle really was. Then his dad would drive right through it and it would vanish into a cloud of fibers, no weight, no substance. It would just explode all around them like a special effect in a movie.
It got to where Megan and Taylor would get excited when they saw one coming, the bigger the better. But Kyle never did. Every time they were about to hit one, he thought, This time it’s going to hurt.
Except right now, with Nadia by his side, he didn’t feel that. Right now he felt bigger and more powerful than anything coming at him. And when a huge tumbleweed bounced on a collision course with his car, he stole a glance at Nadia, drove straight through it, and laughed.