I’d gotten the keyboard halfway out when someone rushed in to help.
“Hey, sorry.” I turned and Tyler was right beside me, lowering the thing to the ground. “I was waiting for you by your locker, but then I remembered you don’t go to your locker Monday mornings until second period, so then I came here—whatever, it’s stupid. Hi.”
I smiled. “Hi.”
His snare drum was against the wall, behind us, but he didn’t go for it. Instead he just stood there and brushed his bangs out of his eyes. He wore a vintage Eagles tee shirt with a zip-up hoodie over it, and he was standing so close I could smell his shampoo, this new peppermint one he’d started using. One of his drumsticks was in his back pocket and he turned the other between his fingers.
He was completely unrecognizable from the gawky boy I’d met in fourth grade. We’d only interacted because I’d tried to throw a kickball to Kristen and it had flown past her and smacked Tyler in the head. I’d felt so bad, I’d asked him to play with us, and then he started coming over after school.
“You weren’t online this weekend,” he said.
“My mom had a work emergency. She never got off the phone.”
“Oh.” Tyler shrugged. We usually IMed at least Friday or Saturday night, just blabbering on about stupid stuff, like Mr. Betts’s new toupee.
I thought he might say something else, but he just drummed on the side of the storage shelf, tapping out a quick rhythm. His cheeks were turning this splotchy pink color. They only did that when he was nervous.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, no.” He shrugged.
“Ty, say it.”
“I guess I just missed you?”
It was a question. He looked up and gave me this half smile, then started laughing. “Fine, I said it. I missed you, whatever. You’re my everything, Jess Flynn, it’s torture without you, blah blah blah. You happy now?”
“Extremely,” I said, and I felt the fire in my cheeks, all the blood rushing to my face at once. “I have that effect on people…”
He turned and grabbed the snare drum, carrying it in front of him as he walked out. He stopped right beside me, leaning in so his lips were just a few inches from my ear, and I could feel his breath on my neck. His freckles always disappeared during the winter, but when we were really close I could see the faint remnants of them along the bridge of his nose.
“You definitely have that effect on me.”
Only this time, when he said it, he didn’t laugh or make it a joke. His hazel eyes met mine and there was a moment when I was sure he would kiss me, right there, in the storage closet. Every inch of my body was suddenly awake waiting for him.
But then he turned and walked to the back of the room. He looked back twice, smiling at me over his shoulder. Something had changed. He wasn’t the same person who’d slept next to me that night in the treehouse, when we were eleven, scanning the trees with a flashlight, looking for bears (even though we both knew Swickley didn’t have any). The air between us was charged, and I noticed every time he brushed my shoulder or the back of my hand.
I set up the keyboard stand behind the clarinet section, feeling Tyler’s eyes on me the whole time. When I looked up his cheeks were still pink and splotchy. I kept running through the conversation. It was like I’d been possessed by someone older and more confident. I have that effect on people.
The sub pulled her gray hair back with a checkered scrunchie, then tapped the conductor’s baton against her music stand. A French horn player stopped halfway through her scale. The class was still only about half full.
“I’m Mrs. Kowalsky, your sub for the next few days. I know we don’t have a full band, and we’re missing almost all of the saxophones…” She glanced at Ajay Sethi, who looked particularly lonely surrounded by empty chairs. “But let’s do our best. Starting from the top.”
She rapped the baton against the stand again, then brought it up in front of her face.
Even after the first song began, the trumpets blaring the first notes of the Friends theme, our eyes kept finding each other. The whole period I was thinking of Tyler’s mouth, how red his lips got when he blushed. I kept wondering what it would be like to kiss him.
3
“We can’t risk Sara getting sick.” Lydia pushed a heaping pile of salad onto her plate. “I think I’ve sprayed every inch of this house with Lysol.”
Sara pushed her mashed potatoes around with her fork. She was still in her pajamas, even though it was after six o’clock. My dad always carried her downstairs for dinner, singing “Here she comes, Miss America…” the whole way.
“That seems kind of unlikely,” Sara said, “considering I see the same four people every day.”
“I had to move all the Reyes’s new furniture into storage,” my mom went on. “The new dining set, every lamp and table I bought for the living room. We were supposed to be putting the finishing touches on tomorrow, but Vicki’s sick, and I wasn’t about to risk it. We won’t be done for another two weeks. That’s if we’re lucky.”
My mom was one of Swickley’s most popular interior designers. Her business grew organically after she renovated our house. She’d spent a whole year huddled over fabric swatches and paint chips, a measuring tape glued to her hand. She was the one who’d chosen the gray Formica dining table we were eating at. She’d paired it with these asymmetrical chairs that look like someone hacked them in half with a machete. Our living room was painted pale turquoise, but even with the fuchsia carpeting and black media cabinet, it somehow all worked. When she insisted on pink walls in the kitchen we fought back with everything we had. I suggested five other options; Sara said it would feel like swimming in a bottle of Pepto-Bismol. It wasn’t until Amber and Kristen came to see it after school that I realized it wasn’t as horrible as we’d thought. Maybe it was even kind of…cool?
“I’m just hoping I don’t lose too much time,” my mom went on. “The kitchen renovation on Oakcrest is a complete disaster. There’s only one guy left on the crew. Everyone else called in sick. It took him six hours just to install the sink. I can’t even imagine what I’m going to have to deal with tomorrow.”
“Sounds rough,” I said. She was getting into that hyperfocused place where all she could do was talk about work. I turned to my dad, hoping he’d derail her, but he was cutting his steak with the precision of a neurosurgeon. He held up a tender piece, studying it on his fork before taking a bite.
In the past few years my dad’s conversational skills had shrunk to short phrases, as if it took too much effort to form any kind of imaginative or complicated thought. My mom addressed it without addressing it, saying that he was “under a lot of stress” and “having a hard time with Sara’s illness” or, my favorite, that he was “a man of few words.” It was a horrible masculine cliché, but the only time he seemed genuinely excited about anything was when he talked about the Swickley High varsity baseball team. He’d been the head coach since I was a kid. I’d formed all these theories about sports being a socially acceptable way for men to talk about their feelings, to scream and cry and rage against the world. I was certain that when he teared up after the team lost the championships last fall, it was really about losing control, and how he felt about everything our family was going through.