Or maybe it’s a little bit of both.
“There’s a party this weekend,” he says, lightly tapping my knee. “Saturday night. You should come.”
My heart speeds, but it’s not all excitement. Of course I’m happy that he asked me—that he wants to see me again even after I declined to go back to his house. He still likes me even though the only thing we did was sit in a frozen yogurt shop and talk.
But parties are off-limits—unless my mother knows the parents and knows that one of them will be there. It’s always been like that, and it was never an issue with Mitchell because he never wanted to go to any of the unsupervised ones in the first place.
“Yeah,” I say. “Sure. Maybe.”
I’m sitting as close to him as I can without sitting on him, and I feel him deflate. Just a bit, but his body sags, the same way it did when I told him I couldn’t go to his house. I hate disappointing him, especially since I want to go more than he knows.
“It’s just… my parents. But I’ll figure something out, okay?”
“Okay,” he says, and I try not to think about how I might have to disappoint him no matter how much I try not to.
I wonder what Booker and I look like to other people. As if we go together? Like we should call each other boyfriend and girlfriend? I slip my hand into his and watch my deep brown skin disappear beneath the smooth dark brown of his fingers.
“Tell me how you got your name,” I say, hoping the subject change will boost the mood.
“You really want to hear this?”
“You’re the only person I know with a more confusing name than mine.”
He laughs. “All right. So it was a big fight between my parents. My old man wanted to name me something like Jonathan or Matthew, but Mom wasn’t having it. Said she wanted to give me a special name. Something that’d set me apart.”
Booker rolls his eyes, but I say, “Keep going.”
“I mean, that’s it, right? Like Booker T. Washington.” He shrugs. “People love it.”
“But why Booker?”
He hesitates, and I hope I haven’t pushed him too far. Maybe he doesn’t want to talk about his mother.
I squeeze his hand. “It’s okay. We don’t have to—”
“She liked that he put education first. She said she knew the minute she was pregnant with me that someday I’d ‘effect some real change.’ Her words, not mine.” Booker smiles a little. “And that was that. Imagine, having a baby named Booker.”
“I bet you were a cute baby.”
He grins now. “I was all right.”
The train whirs along the tracks, and I think how strange it is to feel comfortable with someone new. And how it is stranger to have someone else in my social circle besides Laz. Mitchell was there for a good while, but I haven’t seen him outside of school for months now. Do two people even count as a social circle? Well, it’s a triangle now.
“It was worth it,” I say when we are one stop from mine.
Booker looks at me. “What?”
“Sneaking out to meet you. It was worth it.”
“Yeah?” he says.
“Yeah.”
I hold tight to his hand, trying not to think about how I probably won’t be able to see him many more times.
Not once my parents find out he’s been in juvenile detention.
I WAKE UP PARCHED AT ONE IN THE MORNING.
I’ve kept a glass of water next to my bed every night since fourth grade, but I forgot this evening. I felt like I was floating when I walked into the apartment. I’d spent the last ten minutes before curfew kissing Booker on the next block over. All I wanted was to fall into bed so I could close my eyes—to relive his lips pressing hungrily against mine, his fingers grazing the small of my back.
I tiptoe down the hall to the kitchen and start to creep across the room to the cabinet when I see a shadow at the table. I recognize it’s Aunt Carlene and stop myself from screaming. Just barely.
“Girl, you are jumpy,” she says, her voice calm. I’m light on my feet, but I guess she heard me coming.
I flip on the light. “Sorry. Most people don’t sit here in the dark in the middle of the night.”
She smiles and sips from the mug in front of her. I wonder what’s in it, but I don’t look.
I fill a glass with water and linger near the table. It’s late and I have school tomorrow, but this is the first time I’ve been alone with my aunt since she arrived. And I’m not actually that sleepy now that I’m up. I can’t stop thinking about Booker. But maybe she wants to be alone. She was sitting in the dark.
“Have a seat,” she says, which should make me feel weird since this is my kitchen, not hers—but it doesn’t.
I sit.
She’s wearing a bathrobe that looked white in the dark but turns out to be powder blue under the bright kitchen lights. The elbows of it are particularly worn, like she’s spent a long time leaning on them. She smells faintly of cigarettes, and by now I’m guessing my mom has asked her to smoke down the street and not in front of the salon.
“Are you always so skittish, or is it just because I’m here?”
I pause. “I don’t know.”
“This apartment is too big,” she says. “Easy to sneak up on people. Did you know your mom and I shared a room when we were growing up? And we had no proper dining room, just a kitchen, where we all squeezed in to eat. This place is probably twice the size of our old home.”
I’ve never thought of our apartment as too big—more like just right for us. It’s three bedrooms, and there’s a full bathroom in my parents’ room plus one in the hallway, a proper dining room and large living room, and a kitchen big enough for all of us to comfortably eat in. There’s a decent-size mudroom in the back, off the kitchen, and a rooftop deck that we don’t use as much as we should. My parents did a pretty big remodel when they bought the building, and we moved up here about a year after the shop opened all those years ago.
“You shared a room with Mom?” Seeing the two of them with each other now, I can’t imagine that was ever peaceful.
She shrugs. “I wasn’t around a whole lot when we were your age.”
I nod, thinking of what my mother told me but not wanting to let on how much I know.
I wish I could walk into my mother’s room as easily as she came into mine the other night. Just spill everything about Booker—everything I know, that is—and trust that she’d believe the guy I like is a good guy, even with a past she’d call “undesirable.”
I feel Aunt Carlene staring at me, and when I look over, she’s squinting. Like she’s trying to see deep into my soul. “You’re not really here.”
“What?” I blink at her.
She taps a finger against her temple. “Your mind. It’s somewhere else.”
It’s with Booker, but I can’t tell her that. Booker isn’t supposed to exist. Not without my parents knowing about him.
She doesn’t give up. “I know that look. You’re thinking about someone.”
I don’t know how she’s read me so well when she barely knows me, but it freaks me out. I shake my head. “I’m just tired. Ready for school to be out.”