The thought of Frank with someone else takes her hunger away.
She doesn’t taste the basil from the garden she helped her mom plant when she was little, or the lemonade. She doesn’t feel the breeze through the open kitchen door or hear the familiar wind chimes on the stoop because all throughout dinner, Maya thinks of Ruby. She’s thought of little else for the past few hours, ever since she saw the mix CD. She thinks she knows now why Frank didn’t kiss her.
“Sheila asked if there’s anything you need for your dorm,” her mom says. Sheila is a friend of hers who lives down the street.
“Not that I can think of.”
“Really? Do you want one of those shower things? A caddy?”
Maya shakes her head.
Her mom frowns. “I thought you’d be more excited about this. Living in the dorms, taking writing workshops. Isn’t this what you’ve always wanted?”
“Yeah . . .” Maya says. She takes a bite of her spaghetti and pesto.
Her mom peers at her from across the table. “I was thinking,” she says, “that it would be nice to have Frank over for dinner. I’d like to meet him.”
“I don’t know . . .” Maya swirls and unswirls her spaghetti.
“Is everything all right?”
“Not really.”
Her mom waits.
“I think he might have a girlfriend back in Hood River.”
“A girlfriend?”
“Either that or . . . he’s just not into me.”
“So you’re . . . just friends?”
Maya nods, and her mom’s confusion gives way to relief. She doesn’t like the idea of her daughter spending all that time with a stranger but sees how stricken Maya looks. “Aw, Muffin,” she says. “Being friends is better anyway. Friendships never have to end.”
Maya sighs.
“Just think—less than two weeks until you’re at BU. You worked so hard for this.”
Her mom is trying to help, Maya knows, but she doesn’t want to think about the move. She’s been looking forward to it for so long, dreaming of her future at college, but lately she’s begun to dread it.
“You’re going to meet so many new people,” her mom says. “You’ll forget all about him.”
So when do I get to meet this mystery man? Aubrey had asked Maya on the phone the night before Frank took her boating. She and Aubrey were supposed to hang out that night, but Maya had canceled, which was unusual for her. She’s usually the dependable one—but Frank had surprised her with movie tickets, and she couldn’t turn him down.
So when did Aubrey get to meet him? The question gave Maya pause. Her impression is Frank prefers to spend time with her alone, though he’s never actually said this. It was only then, with Aubrey waiting for her to say something, that Maya recognized her own reluctance to introduce the two of them. She hated to admit, even to herself, that it was because when Aubrey walks into a room, heads turn her way like flowers to the sun, and Maya realized that maybe she was the one—not Frank—who preferred spending time one-on-one.
Hello? Aubrey had said.
Now Maya tells herself she can’t be late tonight. She hasn’t been a good friend lately. She feels bad about this, but not as bad as she feels about Ruby. It will be good to talk to Aubrey: Aubrey’s good at figuring people out. If anyone can interpret his mixed signs—the gifts, the romantic yet weirdly platonic outings, the mix CD—it’s her.
At eight, Maya’s mom leaves for an overnight shift. Her schedule is complicated, cycling through days of concentrated work followed by days of rest. She usually winds up with one overnight shift a week, and on those nights, Maya sleeps at Aubrey’s house. She does this not because she’s afraid to be alone—she isn’t—or because it puts her mom at ease—though it does—but because she loves lounging with Aubrey in her room, talking and listening to music or watching movies, smoking pot when they have it, sneaking beers from her stepdad. As Maya packs up her toothbrush, an overnight shirt, and clean underwear, it occurs to her that tonight could be the last time she does this before moving to Boston.
She told Aubrey she’d be at her house at nine, but her mom left a little early, so Maya decides to bike over at eight. She straps on her helmet and is about to leave the house when a knock comes at the door. It’s after dark, so she stands on her tiptoes, peers through the peephole. A smile washes through her. A jolt of electricity. It’s him.
Frank smiles back as if he can see her, looking right into the fish-eye lens.
She opens the door beaming.
“Had to pick up some cough drops for my dad, so I was in the area . . .” He glances at the bike helmet she forgot she was wearing. “Were you headed out?”
“I was on my way to Aubrey’s—”
“That’s right! Totally forgot—”
“I don’t have to leave for, like, forty minutes. Want to come in?” She opens the door wider.
“I don’t want to make you late.”
“It’s fine.”
He glances down at the CVS bag in his hand. “Sure,” he says.
This is the first time he’s been inside her house. She leads him to the couch, noticing only after he’s walked across the carpet that there is dirt on his boots. She’ll have to clean it up before her mom comes home, but Maya doesn’t fault him for this—she should have told him about the no-shoes-in-the-house rule. He wears the same white T-shirt and dark jeans he wore earlier today, and when he sits beside her, she smells sun and earth and the kind of sweat that comes from hard work. He must have been working on his cabin.
He drapes an arm over the back of the couch so that he almost, but not quite, has his arm around her, and she wants to lean back into it, but the thought of Ruby stops her.
“So,” he says casually, “what’s up?” Whatever low mood he slipped into earlier has vanished. He smiles.
“Not much . . .” Maya says, but she doesn’t look at him.
His eyebrows tent at her tone.
She weighs asking him about the mix CD. Decides against it.
“Hey,” he says softly. “You all right?”
She should just tell him how she feels. The blood rushes to her face.
He takes her hands, turns her gently toward him. Looks into her eyes. “Talk to me,” he says.
“I really like hanging out with you, Frank. I like . . . you. Like maybe more than a friend.”
“God, it’s good to hear you say that.”
“Really?”
He looks like he might laugh, but his eyes are warm. “Don’t tell me you didn’t know.”
“Know what?”
“I mean . . . I spend all this time with you because there’s no one else I’d rather be with.”
Her eyes go wide, and her heart. She melts. She could do a cartwheel. “I feel the same way.”
He smiles, but the smile is sad, and Maya prepares to plummet back to earth. “I just wish you weren’t leaving,” he says. “I have to keep reminding myself, telling myself I shouldn’t get too close to you, that I’ll only get hurt. But then, every time we’re together, I just—”
She kisses him.
He’s surprised at first, lips parted mid-speech, but then he kisses her back. A long, deep kiss that answers, once and for all, how he feels about her. She doesn’t want to get hurt either, but why should either of them have to? She’d gladly bus back here every weekend. She wraps her arms around his neck.
Then she remembers Aubrey.
Maya pulls away but stays close, their foreheads touching. “Wish I didn’t have to go,” she says.
He pouts. “Maybe you could see Aubrey another night?”
She shakes her head.
“Why not?”
“She’s my best friend. I’ve been kind of ignoring her lately.”
“I bet she’d understand.”
Maya’s flattered by his persistence, then by the glimmer of resentment she sees. “I’m really sorry,” she says. “I can’t.”
“I understand. Guess you should probably get going, then.”
She glances at the clock; she still has ten minutes.
“There’s actually something I want to tell you,” he says.
She can’t tell from his tone if the news is good or bad, but there’s a weight to the words that evokes the same blend of glee and fear she’d felt on the boat.
“I finished my cabin,” he says.
She blinks at him. “That’s awesome.”
“Nothing in it yet, of course, and like I said, nothing fancy, but I worked on it a little each day and now it’s done.”
“Wow, already?”
A smile spreads across his face. He nods.
“I’d love to see it.”
“Would you?” He looks at her thoughtfully.
“Of course! I didn’t realize you were so close to being done.” Maya wonders when he’d had the time, between caring for his father and spending time with her.
“I’d like that,” he says. “You’d be the first to see it.”
“I’d be honored.”
“How’s tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow’s great.”
“You’ll probably want to wear sneakers. Only way to get there is down this abandoned road I found at the edge of my dad’s property when I was little.”
“Wow, sounds cool.”
“Yeah, well . . . wasn’t so cool at the time.” He sighs like a much older person.
Maya wants to know more but asks only with her eyes, and Frank looks at her as if trying to decide if he should tell her. Then he does. While he talks, he plays absently with something in his hand. The key to his cabin—Maya recognizes the serrated edges. The key seems to bring him comfort. She’s struck by his vulnerability as he opens up to her about something that happened when he was ten.
He says he was in the woods behind his parents’ house. He’d go back there whenever they were fighting, and they fought a lot in those days. Those woods went on for miles. One day he wandered onto an abandoned road. It was getting late, but he was curious and decided to follow it. The road was overgrown, disappearing for yards at a time beneath dead leaves and ferns and moss. Eventually it disappeared so completely that Frank couldn’t follow it a step farther—yet when he turned around, it wasn’t behind him either. He was lost. He was only ten, it was getting dark, and all around him, an endless sea of trees, like that dream where you’re underwater and can’t tell which way is up.
He doesn’t know how much time passed before he shouted and cried himself out. He only knows that it was dark, and he was clinging to patches of moonlight between branches when he finally fell quiet enough to hear the stream. The soothing, lifesaving gurgle of it—what a miracle it seemed when the sound led him not only to the stream but back to the road, which he followed expectantly.
He saw an old bridge and a clearing on the other side of the bridge and decided to cross over, thinking he might find something there. A cabin. Help. He entered the clearing but found only the barest remains of a home: a low concrete foundation being reclaimed by forest. Frank sat down on it, pulled his knees to his chest. He prayed that his parents would find him. But they didn’t. He waited all night, shivering with cold and with fear.
Then, sometime near dawn, he closed his eyes and imagined that there really were walls around him, and a ceiling above. A cozy fire. Something hot on the stove. He imagined it until he smelled the cooked meat and burning wood. He must have fallen asleep then, because he dreamed that the place was real, and for the first time in months, he felt safe. Safer than he’d ever felt at home. And in the morning, he wasn’t afraid anymore. He’d survived a night alone in the forest and dreamed up a home for himself. The home he promised himself he would build someday, there in the clearing on the other side of the bridge.
Knowing the story behind the cabin, knowing what it means to him, makes Maya want to see it even more. She says it would be an honor to be the first to see it. She feels for the child lost in the woods, clinging to the comfort of an imaginary home, as well as for the deep, caring man beside her, afraid of getting hurt. She admires him for turning his dream into a reality and for doing it without going to college.
“Left or right?” he asks.
The question catches her off guard. She looks out the car window at the dark street rolling past. She hadn’t been paying attention, and now they’re on Grove Street, passing Stoddard Ave. “Left,” she says. They’re almost to Aubrey’s house, a destination so familiar that Maya is embarrassed to realize that she’s allowed Frank to drive several blocks past her street. Now they’ll have to turn around, but he doesn’t seem to mind. He drives as if he has nowhere else to be.
Maya does, though. She forgot to keep an eye on the time. The clock on Frank’s dash flashes 12:00, so she reaches for her backpack to check the time on her phone, only to realize that she’s forgotten it. Not just her phone, but the whole backpack containing her pajamas and toothbrush. She can’t believe how absentminded she’s been. She tries to recall if she locked the door, but now that she thinks of it, she can’t remember leaving the house or getting into Frank’s car. “Do you know what time it is?” she asks.
Frank shakes his head. “Sorry.”
“Turn here. Fourth house on the right.”
Most of the windows on the street are dark. Maya has a sinking feeling. She knows, as Frank drops her off in front of Aubrey’s duplex, that the polite thing would be for her to introduce them. But she’s pretty sure she’s late. She’ll have to apologize, and if Frank’s there, it’ll be awkward. “I’m glad you stopped by tonight,” she says.
He leans across the console to kiss her. Just a peck, but it brings back the heat of his breath. It sends a shiver through her center.