She knew him. She was certain of it.
He nodded at her, walked over, and draped himself onto the bench. There was something unusual going on with one of his legs. He walked with a roll of his left hip, and the fabric of his jeans flapped around that leg.
She remembered his walk.
The boy released the clip on the leash. B-Cake zoomed over to Rabbit and Rabbit exploded into the air with an anxious yip.
The boy laughed, covering his mouth with his fist. “Poor puppy,” he said.
* * *
“Hey, do I remember you?” she asked.
“Me? I don’t know.”
“I’m pretty sure I do remember you,” she said. “From Boston. Two years ago. We met at a rooftop party when I was in ninth grade.”
“A party on whose rooftop?”
“I don’t know. A friend of my friend. It was cold and you let me wear your scarf. Remember?”
The boy shook his head. “I have a radically terrible memory. Sorry.” Then he took out his phone. “ ’Scuse me, I’ve got to make a call.”
* * *
“Hey, do I remember you?” Adelaide asked.
“Me?” he said. “I don’t know.”
“I’m pretty sure I do remember you,” she said. “From Boston.”
“I’ve never been to Boston,” he said.
* * *
“Hey, do I remember you?” Adelaide asked.
“Me? I don’t know.”
“I’m pretty sure I do remember you,” she said. “I’m
pretty sure, in fact, that you took my number at a party two years ago and
you never, ever texted me, is what I’m
pretty sure of. I’m
pretty sure you’re the kind of terrible human being who says
Give me your number
when he doesn’t actually want the number, and I’m
pretty sure that’s not the kind of human being I need to talk to ever again,
especially not right now, when Mikey Double L is off to Puerto Rico full of virtue and
my entire sense of myself is
quite frankly
on the verge of liquidation.”
“Okay then,” he said. “I don’t need to make conversation.”
* * *
“I’m pretty sure I do remember you,” Adelaide said. “From Boston. Two years ago. We met at a rooftop party.”
“Really?”
“You were writing in a notebook,” she explained. “We started talking.”
“What was I writing?”
Adelaide flushed. She
wanted to tell the boy the answer, and also, she
didn’t want to tell him.
“We talked about dinosaurs, I think, and which ones we’d like to turn into.”
“Velociraptor, obviously,” said the boy.
“That’s what you said, but you’re one hundred percent wrong,” said Adelaide. “Pterodactyl.”
“Oh, you’re right,” he said. “Pterodactyl is better. Flight is always better.”
“I used to have a fear of plesiosaurs,” she told him. “Do you know about plesiosaurs? They were like, giant naked turtles with sea-monster necks.”
He laughed.
“At the rooftop party, you gave me your scarf,” continued Adelaide. “A red and black one. You said I could use it but to give it back, because it wasn’t even yours, it was your cousin’s.”
“Was I wearing a terrible leather jacket? Like a trying-too-hard jacket?”
“Yes.”
“Then it was me,” he said. “But I can’t remember.”
“My ride was leaving and I gave the scarf back to you, and you ripped a page from your notebook. You gave me the page and you had written me a poem:
Cerulean dress and
wide eyes, like a lion.
A raging wave of disobedient hair.
She contains
contradictions.”
“I wrote you a poem?”
“You did.”
Adelaide was sad he didn’t remember. Maybe he gave poems to a lot of girls. Or maybe he just couldn’t be expected to recall a party from two and a half years ago, when they would both have been only fourteen.
“I think poems, sometimes,” she told him. “Often, actually. But I rarely write them down.”
“Do you still have the one I wrote you?” he asked.
It was in her wallet. “Maybe somewhere,” she told him.
Adelaide had asked people if they knew a boy of his description, a boy with a roll of his hip, a poet, a boy with soft-looking wrists and golden skin and bitten nails. She had looked for him again and again as she sat in coffeehouses, as she waited in line for a burrito. At parties or ramen places, she looked for his sweet, full mouth. She was holding on to the chance that something good might happen.
To Adelaide, the boy was a promise. He promised her that
happiness could still exist,
could still be hers.
And that promise seemed even more important once the bad stuff started happening with Toby.
Then the Buchwald family left Boston. They moved to Baltimore for Toby’s treatment. Adelaide had accepted that she’d never see the boy in the leather jacket, ever again.
Now here he was.
* * *
He picked up a tennis ball that was lying in the sand. “Birthday! Come here, boy.”
“She’s a girl,” Adelaide said.
“Come here, girl.”
B-Cake ignored him.
“She doesn’t fetch,” Adelaide told him. “I know that dog.”
The boy laughed. “Okay. I don’t need to throw if she’s not into it.” He sat down.
“Did you hurt your leg?” Adelaide asked.