My brain screams, You are a lying liar.
I ignore it.
“Okay, I’m sure you get this a lot, and I don’t want to be that person. But I’m totally going to be that person. Have you met any, like, celebrities?” Nash asks, leaning forward in his seat.
“Not to brag, but I went to the Academy Awards last year,” I say with a hair flip.
“No way,” Nash says.
I nod. “Way.”
“That’s so cool,” he says.
“It’s great at first. But you can’t skip through the boring parts when you’re sitting in the audience.”
“Ouch.”
“It’ll be cool when my parents finally win. But also kind of scary. They’ve been working toward their Academy Award for, like, literally my entire life. If they win—when they win—what happens next? Will it be enough?”
Of course, it’s a question without an answer.
Nash takes a long sip of his coffee and Alanis Morissette transitions into a pitchy Jason Mraz.
“I’m jealous of you, you know.” I say this so softly I’m not sure Nash hears me at first.
He looks up at me from the brim of the flat white.
“Why?”
“You have people,” I say.
“So do you,” Nash says.
“I don’t have anyone’s embarrassing diaper pictures or falling off bikes or classroom inside jokes. I don’t have history, not with anyone.”
Nash shrugs.
“You’re lucky,” I say.
“Yeah,” Nash says. “History is relative, though, right? Like someday you’ll look back fondly on your first and only winter formal, in which you lasted approximately thirty minutes before ditching for a chai latte. This’ll be history.”
If my life were a novel, I’d totally kiss him right now.
Instead, I lean back in my chair and listen to the music. Nash’s phone vibrates again on the table, once, twice, three times in a row. Molly, Molly, Molly. He scans through the messages, blushes, rolls his eyes, and then stuffs his phone into his pocket. In that order.
I don’t know what to say next, so I check my own silenced phone. There are a million Molly texts too, ranging from the calm where are you? to the panicked where are you?!?!? to omg please don’t hate me please don’t hate me please—
I lock my phone and toss it in my purse.
We’re quiet through the next few sets, enjoying the mash-up of singer-songwriter and bluegrass music. It occurs to me in this moment that I’ve never had a friend like Nash, not in my entire life. Nash the person, not Nash the pixels. Nash doesn’t make me feel like I need to have something to say all the time. This friendship isn’t based on words.
I can just sit back and listen to the music.
We sit until the lights dim and the music has faded into tomorrow. I need to make a playlist of acoustic covers from tonight and carry it in my pocket. Songs that will remind me of winding up in a coffee shop in lace sleeves and red lipstick, of Nash and Halle in real life, of the most perfect chai latte in the entire world.
* * *
I wake up in the passenger seat of the Prius, Nash shaking my shoulders.
“Halle,” Nash says.
I jump. “What the—?”
“You fell asleep as I was giving my grand moonlight tour of Westport. Can’t say I’m not a little bit offended, but you’re forgiven,” Nash says.
I yawn. “Time?”
“Like, quarter to seven.”
“In the morning?”
I rub my eyes—mascara flaking off from the night before—and blink some moisture back into my sticky contacts. I wipe the drool from the corner of my mouth—oh my God. I try to orient myself. It is tomorrow morning, and I am in Nash’s car. Why am I still in Nash’s car? It’s still dark outside and we’re parked in a spot overlooking the ocean. Ice-gray waves crash against the shore, and not going to lie, my breath catches in my throat when I see that we’re at a beach.
I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen the ocean.
I’m kind of in this half-awake ocean trance, until I catch my reflection in the rearview mirror and see the residue from my once-perfect red lips smudged around my mouth. Instinct—and embarrassment—makes me swipe the back of my hand over my mouth, which admittedly does little to fix the situation.
Nash pops open the center console and hands me a napkin.
I take it, wordless. What do I even say, seriously? Sputter one of my many questions? Why didn’t we go home last night? Why are we at the beach, in December, at dawn? Why do you still look so perfect and I’m, like, a zombie with a half-melted face?
“My parents think I’m at Molly’s,” Nash says. “But I really didn’t want to go to Molly’s.”
It’s tomorrow. I didn’t come home last night.
I reach for my phone. “Oh my God, Gramps.” I’m going to be grounded until graduation. At least.
“I texted Ollie. You’re at Molly’s too.”
Ollie is going to give me so much shit.
“Where are we?” I ask.
“The beach,” Nash says.
I roll my eyes. “Thanks.”
Nash laughs. “We’re still in Westport. Sherwood Island, technically.”
“Okay. But why—?”
“Give it, like”—he glances at the dashboard clock—“thirteen more minutes.”
“That is specific,” I say.
“Well, sunrises are kind of like that, you know,” Nash says.
That escalated quickly. With the word sunrise, my heart does this weird thing in my chest, like it’s constricting with all its might so it doesn’t explode. I try to decode Nash, his expression, his body language. He can hear my heart, I’m sure of it.
“I haven’t been here in a while, actually,” Nash says, looking toward the ocean. “We used to come here when I was little. Every summer solstice, I’d fall asleep in my bed and wake up at the beach. Nick would try to drag me out of bed. That’s the part I remember the most. But it was also peanut butter banana sandwiches my mom packed in a Goofy cooler and watching the sunrise, the four of us. Together.”
Every time Nash opens up to me, I’m a confusing mix of elation and guilt.
“I love that,” I say.
“Yeah,” Nash says. “It’s one of the few memories of us that I know is mine, so I try to get down here whenever I can. To remember. Molly and I sometimes still make the solstice trip. My mom tried, for a while, but I think it hurts her being here just as much as it helps me. I don’t know if that makes sense.”
“It does,” I say.
“Thanks for being here,” Nash says.
“I mean, it’s not like I had much of a choice,” I say.
Literally, I don’t know why I speak most of the time.
Nash just laughs. “Shut up.”
Before long, the sky is illuminated in iridescent shades of orange and it’s the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. Like, there are no words. I don’t even think to take a photo with my phone because Instagram is not going to do this sky justice.
How do we spend every day sleeping through this sky?
Nash shifts so he’s facing me better, one shoulder pressing against the back of the seat. His smile is so big and I am a puddle. He looks at me like … like I don’t even know, and I lose my words. Something has shifted, though, I can tell. He looks at me from behind his glasses, like he’s trying to form the right words to say next. I adjust in my seat, mimicking his sideways position, ignoring the lace sleeve scratching against my skin, but his eyes don’t move from mine.