Nine

There’s no avoiding Gus at school the following Tuesday. I can almost feel it before it happens too, like an itch just under my skin that makes me nervous and twitchy. And since my intuition is seldom wrong, I’m on edge all day, suspicious of every corner, waiting for something to surprise me.

He finally catches me after school. By that time I’ve braced myself and I’m ready.

“Samson, please talk to me.”

I’m sitting on the steps that lead out the back doors of the school to the student parking lot, waiting on Landon and Meg so we can do our Donkey routine. I stand, hoisting my bag up over my shoulder. “What is there to say, exactly? You have a boyfriend. And it’s not me.”

Gus looks appropriately sheepish, and it’s so cute I almost want to pull him into my arms.

Almost.

“I do not like ze way zings ended. I zink if we go somewhere and talk—”

“Again, there’s nothing to talk about.”

“But if I can explain more about Gabriel—”

“Are you still in love with him?”

Gus blinks, then his face falls. “Oui.”

“Then there’s nothing to discuss.”

“If you would just listen to reason—”

“What reason?” I snap.

“Samson, please—”

“Is there a problem?” I feel a small hand slip into my own, and a warm shoulder pressing against mine. I turn my head and Jamie’s smiling up at me. It’s a beautiful, life-saving smile. I squeeze his hand and he turns to Gus, canting his head to the side. “My boyfriend and I need to get going, so unless this is important, perhaps you should move along.”

The look Jamie gives Gus is equal parts guts and pure will, and Gus is clearly as surprised as I am. He moves backward a bit, nearly losing his footing on the stairs.

“Boyfriend?” Gus asks, and for a second I actually pity him. He looks genuinely hurt.

“Oui,” Jamie says in a mocking tone. “He’s told you it’s over. Take the hint, Frenchie.”

Gus looks at me as if I can provide some sort of confirmation, so I jerk my head in the direction of the parking lot, telling him exactly where he can go. With a slight pout of his lips, he finally leaves, glancing behind himself at me once as he’s walking away.

As soon as he’s out of earshot, Jamie takes my face in his hands. “Are you okay?”

“Are you?” I ask incredulously. Somehow, the quiet artist saved my whole day by risking his own neck. “I can’t believe you did that. You’re my hero.”

Jamie strokes his thumbs across my cheeks and releases me. “I didn’t like how uncomfortable you looked.”

“He could have punched you or something.”

“Nah, look at me. I’m huge.” He makes a show of flexing nonexistent muscles in his skinny arms and I chuckle. “Besides, it would have been worth it.”

I can’t help myself. I melt a little at that. Okay, a lot. I feel like I could drip onto the sidewalk like a candle that’s been burning too long, warm and gooey.

Jamie studies me thoughtfully. “You didn’t come during lunch today.”

“Sorry,” I say, regretting skipping out on him even more than I did at lunch, when Meg was falling apart over finding flirty texts between Michael and another girl on his phone, and I was doing massive tear/snot cleanup in the girls’ restroom. “Meg had a crisis. Her boyfriend’s an asshole.”

Jamie gives me a small smile. “I understand that. I mean, Kit’s boyfriend is a major jerk and she’s always upset for one reason or another.”

I squint at him. “Kit’s a girl?”

“I’ve never told you about Kit?” Jamie asks, who looks as bewildered by that as I feel.

“No.” I reach out and take his hand, and he lets me. I can feel dried paint on his palm as our hands mold together. “You know, as much as I love watching you paint, maybe we should do something that requires an actual conversation.”

“What do you mean? Like—like a date or something?” Jamie asks, adorably hopeful.

“Exactly like a date.”

“Oh.”

“Well, if you’re not interested—”

“I’m interested!” he interjects, and I have to chuckle a little.

“How about Saturday?” I ask, and just as I do, Landon and Meg step out of the school, chattering their heads off at each other. They stop cold when they see me with Jamie, hands entwined. “I’ll pick you up at seven and we can, I don’t know, find something to do?”

Light laughter flutters from Jamie’s throat. “Sounds great.”

“Perfect.” I squeeze his hand one more time before dropping it. Over his shoulder, Landon and Meg are making faces at me, trying to get me to laugh. I shoot them a dirty look. “I’ll see you Saturday. Or tomorrow, I guess. If you don’t mind me bugging you in the art room during lunch.”

“Tomorrow,” Jamie agrees, and begins to walk away, but I hate to see him go. I call out after him.

“Hey, can I walk you home?”

Jamie turns. He points in the exact opposite direction of my house: the east end. It’s down the hill and literally on the other side of the town’s train tracks. “My house is that way.”

I point west. “I’m over there.”

Jamie ponders that. “Then why don’t I walk you? I don’t mind. And there’s somewhere I’d like to go, anyway.”

“Great idea, Jamie,” Meg says, insinuating herself into the conversation. “Sam can drive you home.”

I shoot her a look because I was doing just fine on my own, thank you very much. She covers her mouth with her hand and whisper-shouts at me, “We’ll see if this is the one the Goddess truly sent.”

I look at Landon, who shrugs as if to say, Maybe she’s not crazy. Go for it, and I turn back to Jamie.

“Okay, fair knight, lead the way.”

There’s something different about the way Jamie and I talk to each other now that we’re out of the school, the art room; now that we both aren’t distracted by watercolors and bird wings. Maybe it’s the fresh air, or the new light, or maybe it’s just the freedom, but we move from polite small talk to genuine conversation. Jamie, unlike I had first pegged him, doesn’t suffer from a lack of confidence even if he is quiet and reserved. He knows what he’s about. He’s got opinions and he’s not afraid of sharing them; he just doesn’t argue them aggressively like Landon, but he doesn’t make jokes to distract away from real conversation like Gus either.

Luckily, there’s not much we disagree about. Our biggest sticking point is that he says the Back to the Future series is better than Indiana Jones. I can’t let that slide.

“Come on,” I say. “Harrison Ford and Sean Connery in the same frame. Archaeology. Nazis. You can’t beat it.”

“Christopher Lloyd and Michael J. Fox,” Jamie counters. “Time travel. Punching the school bully in the face.”

He’s got a point there, but I sigh dramatically as if he’s completely hopeless. We’ve walked as far as the cemetery, and I’m about to ask him if it would be weird for him to cut through it when he points at the gate.

“Mind if we go through there?”

“You read my mind.”

But instead of going straight through the middle, like Meg and I usually do, Jamie veers off to the left, on a narrower and twisting path. He obviously knows where he’s going, so I just follow his lead. Then suddenly Jamie stops, looking down at one of the gravestones with an expression on his face that I can’t read. In front of him, a nearly perfect rectangle of grass is slightly greener and prettier than the grass surrounding it, and there is a plastic bird on each side, staked into the ground. They’re the kind with the wings that spin like propellers with the wind, like you see in some people’s yards. Several pots of silk flower arrangements are placed around the headstone. I read the name.

“James Fisher,” I say out loud.

Jamie nods. “My dad.”

I read the dates. The last number tells me that Jamie’s dad passed away only two years ago, and if I’m doing the math right, he was only forty-six.

“I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.”

“I didn’t tell you,” Jamie says.

“What happened?”

“Early-onset ALS,” Jamie said. I shake my head, unfamiliar. “It’s what Stephen Hawking has. However, Hawking’s developed rather slowly. My dad’s progressed quickly, far too quickly for treatments to do much good. No one knows why he got it; there’s no family history. No one knows why it happened so early and so quickly either. All we really know is that it was a lucky thing that my mom happens to be a nurse. Dad was able to live at home, and Mom made his last years as comfortable as she could for him.”

“That had to have been so hard,” I say dumbly, unsure of what else to say.

Jamie acknowledges that with a hum. “It was. But there’s a small bit of comfort in knowing that he’s not miserable and in pain anymore.”

“I’m sure,” I say. I look away from the stone and to Jamie. “You miss him.”

“Every day,” Jamie answers. “I miss having a dad, you know? Mom’s great, but there’s so much stuff that I wish my dad could be there for. Stupid stuff like making the honor roll, or finishing a difficult painting.”

“It’s not stupid stuff,” I say. “I understand. You want him to see what you’ve accomplished and be proud.”

“Yes,” Jamie agrees.

“I get it. My dad misses a lot in my life and I always wish he was there,” I say, then my words echo back to me and I cringe. “I’m sorry. That must have sounded really ungrateful and insensitive.”

“It didn’t,” Jamie says. His pale eyes study me, gaze gentle as can be. “Your dad is gone a lot then?”

“Yeah. It started when I was in eighth grade. That’s when he got famous.” I use air quotes around the word famous because Dad isn’t exactly someone who gets recognized on the street. He’s literary famous. I continue. “It was always something. Book tours. Meetings with agents and editors and publishers and awards ceremonies. Seems like he’s always got a few of those to attend.”

“Seems like he is deserving,” Jamie says. “My private art teacher made me read a few of his books. She said he was like a painter with words. She was right. He’s a genius. I actually painted a piece based on Backyards of the City.”

“Really? You didn’t tell me you’d read any of his stuff.”

“I didn’t want to seem like a stalker.”

I laugh. “Thanks, then.”

Jamie is thoughtful. “Eighth grade. I was in eighth grade when Dad died. Seems like that’s when everything’s changing and you figure so much out. It’s like the worst time to be without a father, however you’re without one.”

I nod, a lump in my throat making it nearly impossible to speak.

Jamie bends down and straightens the petals of a silk tulip. “I never got to tell my dad that I’m gay. I figure he had to know anyway, but I could never get the words out. He was so sick. It never seemed right to bring it up when he had so much else to worry about.”

“Would he have been upset?”

Jamie shakes his head. “Not at all.”

I reach down and take his hand into mine. Both our hands are bare and his fingers are like ice cubes. “You’re freezing.”

As if just now realizing it, Jamie shivers. “I guess I am. Are you sure you can drive me home?”

“Yeah, Mom will let me use the car,” I say. I squeeze his hand. “Thanks for taking me here, Jamie.”

Jamie looks into my eyes. “It’s weird, Sam, but I had a feeling you’d get it. Maybe even more than my friends do.” He looks away. “This will probably make me sound like a creeper, but there’s always been something about you. Kit would joke about how I should ask you out, probably because you’re one of, like, the only three gay people she knows. But I could never fight the feeling that she might be right. Every time I saw you I felt this strange pull. Like I just had to get to know you. Of course, I probably never would have had the guts to ask you out. If you hadn’t been seated at my table at Seven Sauces, I probably wouldn’t even have ever spoken to you.”

For a moment, I consider telling him about the spell, about how perhaps this isn’t all just coincidental that we finally spoke when we did. How I didn’t even know he existed, then I do this spell and suddenly he’s there at my table, and cute and talented and most likely all of the ten things I asked the Goddess for.

“Maybe it’s fate,” I say instead, smirking.

“Maybe,” he says with a laugh. “Well, whatever it was—fate or coincidence or gods conspiring—I’m thankful I finally got the chance to talk to you.”

I get chills when he says that, and it has nothing to do with the cold. “Me too.”

I thank him again when I drop him off at his house, a little two-story saltbox that could use a fresh coat of paint.

“So Saturday?” he asks.

“Saturday,” I say, and I’m already counting down the minutes. I almost kiss him before he gets out of the car, but I hold back for some reason. I guess because I feel like our first kiss should be a moment entirely unto itself. He gives my hand a good squeeze before he leaves, though, and I drive away happy, not thinking about Gus, not thinking about Landon, and not thinking about loneliness.

Landon desperately needs help with his Latin so we stay far longer than usual at the Donkey the next day. That’s just fine by me, and great for Meg, who had too much of her family over the weekend and is still moping about Michael. She fills Landon in, and all either of us can do is tell her it’ll be okay, even though with Michael nothing’s ever really going to be okay. But we’re tired of that argument. I just hope it makes her reconsider her hotel plans.

I’m on my third chai, feeling a little wired, and the sun is well on its way to setting when I hear a scratchy voice say to Ted, “Hey, Teddy. Wanna hit me up with something strong?”

I turn my head and catch a whiff of leather and some kind of cologne, which is far spicier than anything I’d wear myself but that doesn’t stop me from wanting to wrap myself around it and breathe it in. The bearer of that scent—and the scratchy voice—leans against the counter space next to me, and he turns and gives me a wink before yelling again at Ted.

“Espresso, Ted, or I’m gonna die!”

“Give me a minute, Travis. Geez. You’re not actually going to die from lack of caffeine.”

“Not willing to take the gamble,” the guy named Travis shoots back at him, and then does the weirdest thing. He sticks his tongue out, revealing a shiny bar through the middle of it, and clicks it against his top teeth. Then he turns back to me and clicks in my direction.

I look at Landon to see if he’s seeing this too, and he is. In fact, he’s staring at this dude like I’ve never seen Landon stare before. He looks well and truly stunned, but it’s in this completely worshipful way, and Landon is not the worshipping type.

Can’t say I blame him. Tongue-Ring Travis is like Billy Idol’s younger, hotter brother. The side of his head is shaved and long platinum-blond hair flops over it in this careless, deflated manner. He’s got about ten earrings in each ear, big hoops and gauges, and one of his high-arching eyebrows is scarred like he once had a ring there too but it got pulled out.

Judging from the looks of him, a bar brawl seems like it could be a common occurrence in his life. He’s part rock ’n’ roll, part greaser, and all trouble. And the craziest thing is, regardless of the piercings and the leather jacket and the chains he’s sporting, his face is . . . delicate. Blond scruff covers his jaw, but it’s no match for the fragile features of his face, or the big whiskey-colored eyes that radiate warmth even while he’s barking at Ted.

I theorize in that second that he was called “pretty” one too many times in his life, and the rebel-wear is his mode of overcompensation.

“Like tongue rings?”

Shit. While I’ve been psychoanalyzing, I’ve also been staring.

“Y-yes,” I manage to stammer out.

“I bet you do,” Travis purrs out in that scratchy voice, and scoots himself closer to me at the bar. Then his face is looming a mere centimeter from mine and he’s clicking said tongue ring at me again. “Take a picture, it’ll last longer.”

“All right, Ponyboy, here’s your coffee. Now stop harassing teenagers and find yourself another rumble.” Ted sets down a paper cup of espresso in front of Travis and holds out his hand, expecting payment.

“Very clever, Teddy. I’d almost be willing to bet that you read or something.”

To my utter shock, Ted’s face blossoms into a warm smile and he swipes the bill Travis holds out for him. “Not since high school.”

“You and me both, Sodapop. Later.”

Then Travis is gone and I can’t help but imagine a tornado of cologne and anarchy swirling in his wake, like a good-smelling, gorgeous Tasmanian Devil. I swivel around to Landon to ask what, exactly, just went down, but he’s already beaten me to the punch.

“Ted, that guy just now, was that . . . ?”

“Travis Blake,” Ted says, barely looking up as he wipes down the bar with a coffee-stained cloth. “Lead guitarist for Liquid.”

“I thought so. He’s . . .” Landon doesn’t finish his sentence, like he’s too overwhelmed by Travis Blake’s mere presence to think. Which is understandable.

“Yeah, he’s a force,” Ted replies. “Know his band?”

Landon nods. “Saw them at the Blue Gator last summer. They were amazing.”

Landon’s musical snobbery is even more deep-seated than mine, so if he’s complimenting this band, they must be good. And that explains why Landon looked at Travis like he was a celebrity, not just some hot dude in a leather jacket.

“Yeah. He’s in talks with a few labels, I think,” Ted says but annoyingly doesn’t elaborate, and then he’s off to refill sugar canisters or something equally lame.

“Metal?” I ask, assuming from Travis’s look that he’s into the hard stuff.

“No. It’s rock and it’s edgy, but more electronic. Like . . .” Landon pauses, struggling to put it into words. “Like if you took Muse’s guitar riffs and vocals, the Cure’s darkness, and Depeche Mode’s beats and put them all together in this glorious superband.”

“That sounds amazing.”

“It really is. We should go see them.”

We look at Meg.

“No. No way,” she says before I can even ask. “I’m not sneaking into some bar so that you guys can see that guy in his metal-whatever band. Besides, he was clearly straight. Gorgeous in that James Dean kind of way, but totally and completely straight.”

“Chill out,” I say. “Who said we’re even interested?”

“Please. There are puddles of drool on the floor,” Meg says, wrinkling her nose. “And you need to concentrate on Jamie, not some straight guy that’s probably nearing thirty.”

“Wow, don’t jump to any conclusions there, Meg. Besides, we don’t even know when they’re playing next.”

“Friday,” Landon says, and Meg and I whip our heads in his direction. He shrugs, sheepish. “They’re playing Friday at the Smiling Skull. I saw a flyer.”

“There’s no way we can get into the Smiling Skull,” I say, deflated. It’s a biker bar at worst and a total dive at best. And no matter what kind of fancy fake IDs Landon’s friends might be able to swing, there’s no way any of us could pull off looking twenty-one among that kind of crowd.

“No,” Landon sighs out, “there’s no way. Besides, Meg’s right. You have a date with Jamie this weekend, and he could be your Perfect Ten, so concentrate on that.”

I kind of pout and look to Meg for pity. “Landon just wants to keep the pretty rocker to himself,” I whine.

“Doesn’t make me any less right,” Meg says, her nose pointing in the air.

“Exactly, so just enjoy a cute sophomore and stop being so fickle,” Landon says, and finally closes his Latin book.

“I’m not being fickle. Travis was just . . . interesting, that’s all,” I say in defense. Then I picture Jamie, adorable Jamie, and poof! Travis is nothing but a distant memory. See? Totally not fickle. “Besides, it’s not exactly a hardship to concentrate on Jamie.”

“Or to, um, ‘watch him work,’” Landon says, air-quoting.

I roll my eyes and shove Landon so hard that he has to grab on to the counter to keep from falling off his stool.