It wasn’t just the two of them either; that wouldn’t be fair. Cleo couldn’t go on the campaign trail and say, like, “I had no friends, which drove me to where I am today.” She did. She and MaryAnne both had friends beyond each other. They had the debate team and the kids on the school paper and in all the other clubs that they joined (though none of those kids had leaped to her defense in MaryAnne’s Facebook post). And Cleo played tennis, and her senior year was elected captain, though this was after her parents had died and she never knew if it was that people liked her or pitied her. She put it on her college applications regardless, so that was good. But all these people, all her friends, well, they weren’t much different from Georgie. They occupied a space in her life, but they didn’t take up space, which were two very different things.
She had a boyfriend her junior year, Matty Adderly. He’d also applied for the internship at the mayor’s office, but Cleo hadn’t sabotaged him. She knew he wouldn’t get it anyway. He was sweet and just the right amount of geeky to be completely devoted to her, but not smart enough to make her want to push it into a forever thing or that she worried he’d beat her out for the job. He also didn’t come from connected parents (his dad was an accountant; his mom stayed at home), unlike MaryAnne’s blue-blood stock who could call in favors and give her a leg up above the rest of them.
After Cleo’s parents’ accident, Matty tried to be there for her at every turn. Now Cleo could stand on the curb of her old street and stare at her old house and consider this kindness, how he wanted to bring her tea and help her move to her grandmother’s and offered to take notes in her classes when she had to miss school, but back then she felt like he was smothering her. She was used to the unadorned, naked affection of her parents, but she hadn’t adjusted—maybe still hadn’t really—to that from anyone else. Or perhaps it was that she didn’t want it from anyone else. If it couldn’t be her parents, maybe it should have been no one.
She dumped him in a study hall about three and a half weeks after the funeral. He was just too much. She didn’t want to be rescued. She was wise enough to see this in herself even at seventeen.
From the sidewalk in front of her old home, she stuffed her hands into her pockets and turned to Lucas.
“Do me a favor—look up Matty Adderly on Facebook. See if he’s said anything about me.” Cleo was surprised to feel something crest inside her, the notion that she might care if he had.
Lucas tapped away on his phone.
“Oh, by the way, I’m logged in as you.” He glanced up. “I don’t have an account, obviously. I don’t think anyone under thirty is on Facebook.” He said thirty as if it were a dirtier word than fuck, and Cleo felt very, very old.
“You shouldn’t be on Facebook in the first place,” Gaby said to Cleo. “They’ll mine everything you ever post, every page you ever search.”
“I’m not really on there. It’s a dummy account. For things like this.”
“Huh,” Lucas said. “I found him. Who is he?”
“I . . .” Cleo slid her sunglasses on. The sun had cut through the clouds, and in an instant Seattle was the crystal-clear version of a postcard you’d mail to relatives back east. “He was my boyfriend for a while. Here.”
Lucas looked up, surprised, eyebrows raised.
“What? You think your mom wasn’t hot enough to have a boyfriend?” Gaby said.
“Gaby . . . ,” Cleo interjected.
“I’ve been told repeatedly by both the media and my teachers that I wasn’t allowed to judge girls on their looks,” Lucas said. “‘Hot’ hadn’t entered my brain.”
“Hmm,” Gaby said.
“Fine, ‘hot’ does enter my brain because I’m fourteen and not blind. What do you want from me?” He paused. “But he wasn’t . . . ?” He trailed off, the words forming a question.
Cleo understood his implication. He wasn’t his dad. She knew she could give him his name, that with the internet, Lucas could probably track him down before she was done spelling it (though it was not a complicated name that required spelling), but she wasn’t up for that kind of trauma, and she didn’t want her son to be up for it either. Single parenthood was already so complicated. Dragging her past into it would only make it messier. She supposed that she had MaryAnne Newman to thank for Lucas’s curiosity. Curiosity that felt like it would lead only to heartbreak. Couldn’t Cleo want to protect him from that? She didn’t know if she was doing it right, handling it right, but she just wanted to try to protect him. That didn’t seem like it was the wrong thing.
“No, love, not him. I haven’t seen Matty since graduation.”
Lucas nodded, tapped on something on his phone. “Whatever. I just . . . I can’t imagine you with a boyfriend.”
“Why not?” Cleo yelped. She didn’t want to remain single forever. Or maybe she did. She didn’t necessarily want to get married, but a little companionship and a steady date to the movies and perhaps the hot new Italian joint might be nice. If Gaby could make eyes at Oliver Patel and get a text an hour later, why shouldn’t Cleo?
Lucas looked at her plainly, with no judgment. “Because for fourteen years, you never have.”
“Well, you didn’t get here by immaculate conception,” Gaby said, just before Cleo could explain the difficulties of dating as a single parent and senator.
“You’re disgusting,” Lucas retorted, then pulled up Matty’s profile.
It turned out that Matty Adderly was a mad programmer for Microsoft and had figured out Cleo’s thinly disguised alias on Facebook and already sent her a friend request and a message. In fact, he’d done it months ago, long before MaryAnne Newman ever blew this shit up.
Cleo, Lucas, and Gaby began their long ascent up the hill to Pagliacci’s, which, in Cleo’s memory, served the best slice of pizza she ever had. It was only eleven, but no one had eaten much of a breakfast, so a pizza brunch on a Sunday it was. Lucas read Matty’s note aloud.
Cleo-
I hope you don’t mind my reaching out. It has been twenty years, but I see you in the news all the time—and this morning I went down the rabbit hole of finding you on socials.
(Cleo interrupted Lucas here and said, “‘Socials’? Who says that?”
To which Lucas replied, “Everyone, Mom, everyone says that.”
And Gaby added, “Clee, I think you’re already doing it.”
And Cleo said, “Doing what?”
And Gaby replied, “That thing you do where you don’t give people a chance before they’ve had any chances in the first place.”
So Cleo stopped talking.)
Anyway, I’m still living in Seattle, which can be a little claustrophobic, but I don’t really see anyone from school much, so it’s less horrible than you’d think. (I don’t actually think it’s horrible, but I’m sure you do.) ☺
(Cleo couldn’t help herself and interjected again. “Did he actually use an emoji?”
“Yes, the smiley face with blushing cheeks,” Lucas said.
“Yikes,” Cleo replied.
“Give me a break—you sent me that one last week about scoring a goal in my game,” Lucas said. And then Cleo really did shut up because maybe she was judging Matty Adderly by standards to which she wouldn’t want to be judged either.)