As if he can hear my thoughts, he sits fully up, crossing his legs and leaning over a little, tracing Pandy’s fur like I am.
“How old is your sister?”
My throat knots, so tight and painful that I don’t know how I’ll get words through. Somehow, I say, “Twelve.”
“Yeah? I’ve got a brother who’s twelve.”
“Really?” I look up, and his gaze holds mine, his lips quirking in a small approximation of a smile. His eye today is shades of deep blue-purple, like petals of a poison flower. As we look at each other, I notice it’s slightly squinted. “Does it hurt?” I whisper.
“Nah.”
He tries to open the eye wider, but his mouth tightens, so I can tell he’s lying. For a heartbeat, I think I’ll run my fingers softly over his cheekbone… I don’t know why, but I feel like this when I’m near him—this guy I hardly know.
“How’d it happen?” My throat tightens on those words, so they’re soft and kind of raspy.
He smiles again, but this time it’s a thin line. “It’s not important.”
“I think it’s important.”
“But it isn’t.”
I narrow my eyes slightly. “What if it’s important to me?”
“It isn’t.”
I frown. “How do you know?”
“Because I know things.” He’s still smiling, only with the corners of his mouth. His eyes are somber.
“You don’t know me.”
“No?” he murmurs.
“Not even a little bit.”
He lies back again, folding his arms behind his head. He’s wearing a thin, white T-shirt, so I can see his biceps and his forearms in great detail. I can see the blueish veins beneath his soft skin. He looks like Michelangelo’s carved marble.
If this were a snapshot, I would think he’s beautiful—a study in ruined beauty, maybe, with his eye the way it is. But I’m living this moment. I can feel things swimming in the air between us. His eyes shut, and I think he needs to sleep.
“Are you a nice guy?” I ask him, impulsively. “Or an asshole?”
His lips curve—and this time, the smile is decadent.
“That’s a game we play, my friends and I—nice guy or asshole. My friend Sheree thinks you’re an asshole. I think it’s too hard to tell.” I smile, even though my heart is beating so wildly that I feel like I might die right here beside him.
He opens his eyes, peering at me with a notch between his brows. “You think I’ll be honest?”
I look down at my nails. “People almost never are. One time I read about something called radical honesty. It was in a magazine of my dad’s, and this man, he tried to tell everybody the whole truth, all the time.”
“That sounds…terrible.”
I nod. “And interaction is performative by nature, so I think it’s never possible to be completely honest. There’s always the echo of the other person influencing your ‘truth.’ Even if they’re like you are right now—just lying there. Your face or mannerisms will give feedback to what I’m saying. And I’ll feel compelled to bend my truth to you.”
I stop to grab a quick breath, my face burning as I realize I’m rambling.
“Um, so anyway, I don’t think you’ll be honest,” I manage. “But I’m asking so I’ll get a chance to try to read you. If you don’t ask at all, then you can be sure you’ll never know.”
I’m so flummoxed, I’m sweating. Under my bra, along my hairline. If my skin were paler, I’d be sporting a bright red blush. But it isn’t, and I’m grateful for that.
“Nice guy or asshole.” He repeats it slowly, like he’s tasting every word. “Lots of polarity there.” And now he’s smirking. Smirking, and he’s so right here that it makes me feel ill.
“You could do percentages.”
“Oh, like ninety percent asshole, ten percent good guy?” He grins, like it’s the funniest thing he’s ever heard.
I wonder if I’m blushing hard enough now for it to show. “Yes. So…” I blink quickly, urging him to answer.
He laughs. “I don’t know. You said you don’t expect me to be honest, but I feel some pressure to be at least sort of honest.”
His eyes on my eyes, pulling my soul up into my throat, where it gets stuck so I can’t breathe. I smile and grab a tiny breath. When I was little, my mom had a parakeet. One time I held it, and its little heart beat just like mine is beating right now. “Try to be as honest as you can.”
He sits up again, biting the inside of his cheek and then his lower lip. He runs a hand back into his hair. Tired eyes, his dreamy smile—a snapshot that I save in my head.
“I’d say at least sixty percent asshole. Maybe more like seventy.” His teeth on his lip again, that luscious lower lip. His brows are thoughtful. “Maybe sixty-five. No…that puts the good at thirty-five percent. But maybe thirty-five is right. I think thirty’s not enough, maybe. I’m more like thirty-five percent good guy.”
“I’d like it to be sixty-forty, at least,” he tells me. “But I think it’s really sixty-five bad guy/thirty-five good guy.”
“Why is that?”
“Why…what?” He blinks, and I can feel his whole attention on me, like an anvil I’d love to be crushed by.
“Why are those your numbers?”
He smiles, fleeting. “I don’t know. I’m not sure it’s a choice. What do you think?”
“I say of course it’s a choice.”
“Is it, though?” He’s frowning again.
“We do have free will. I mean, at least somewhat,” I offer. “Or our illusion of free will is compelling enough that I think we’re safe to call it that.”
“Is it?”
“What?”
“Compelling?”
“I think so.”
“So we choose who we are. Is that it?” He tilts his head, and now he’s all professor—but a nice professor. One who cares about your answers, one who wants to understand you. There’s this moment where he seems a thousand years older than me. Which makes no sense because if any one of us is so old, it’s me…isn’t it? Is he lying awake at night as I am, thinking of ways to tell his dying loved one to contact him from the stars? My sister probably won’t be here by winter, and it’s made me feel at least nine hundred years old. My heart weighs twelve tons all the time, and there is nothing I can do to change that.
“Maybe we don’t choose. But…I think we do—somewhat.” My voice wobbles. I swallow. “We don’t get to decide everything. Maybe not even a lot of things. But the parts we get to decide, those are the parts that are important. And so if I get to choose, I want to be a certain kind of person.”
“What kind?” His eyes tell me I can fall in if I want to.
“A good one. Someone who does the right thing, even if it’s hard.” I think of my mom pulling so far back from Becca. “Maybe especially if it’s hard. I think it matters even more then.”
There are tears in my eyes again, turning all this sunlight into prisms. I blink and a tear falls down my cheek, but I’m not really embarrassed. Maybe because none of this feels quite real.