“Do you know what you’re going to sing?” I asked.
Sam leaned his cheek on his outstretched arm and drew lazy circles on the back of my neck. “I don’t know. You sprang it on me suddenly. And I was a bit preoccupied with being ostracized for the last few days. I guess I will sing—something. I may suck.”
“I don’t think you will suck. What were you singing in the shower?”
He was unself-conscious as he answered, both endearing and unusual for him. I was beginning to realize that music was the only skin he was truly comfortable in. “Something new. Maybe something new. Well…maybe something.”
I got onto the interstate; this time of day, the road was lonely and we had the lanes to ourselves. “A baby song?”
“A baby song. More like a fetal song. I don’t think it’s even got legs yet. Wait, I think I’m getting babies confused with tadpoles.”
I struggled to think of what it was that developed first on babies and failed utterly to manage it in a timely enough manner for a comeback. So I just said, “About me?”
“They’re all about you,” Sam said.
“No pressure.”
“Not for you. You get to just float along through life being Grace and I’m the one who has to run to keep up creatively and lyrically with the ways you change. You’re not a fixed target, you know.”
I frowned. I thought of myself as frustratingly unchangeable.
“I know what you’re thinking. But you’re right here, aren’t you?” Sam asked, using his free hand to point a finger into the fuzzy seat of the car. “You fought to be with me instead of letting yourself get grounded for a week. That’s the stuff entire albums are based on.”
He didn’t even know the half of it. I was awash with some multicolored emotion that was guilt and self-pity and uncertainty and nerves all rolled into one. I didn’t know what was worse: not telling him about still being grounded and the growing sickness inside me, or telling him. I did know this one thing: I wouldn’t be able to untell either thing. And I didn’t want to ruin this day for him. His one perfect birthday day. Maybe tonight. Maybe tomorrow.
I was more complex than I’d thought. I still didn’t see how it would be album fodder, though I appreciated the idea that I had, in fact, done something that impressed Sam, who knew me better than I did. I changed the subject, a little. “What will you name your album?”
“Well, I’m not doing an album today. I’m doing a demo.”
I waved off the clarification. “When you do an album, what will it be called?”
“Self-titled,” Sam said.
“I hate those.”
“Broken Toys.”
I shook my head. “That sounds like a band name.”
He pinched a tiny bit of my skin, just hard enough for me to squeal and say ow. “Chasing Grace.”
“Nothing with my name in it,” I said sternly.
“Well, you’re just making this impossible. Paper Memories?”
I considered. “Why? Oh, the birds. It seems weird that I never knew about those birds in your room.”
“I haven’t made any since I met you for real,” Sam reminded me. “The newest one is from the summer before last. All of my new cranes are at the store or in your room. That room is like a museum.”
“Not anymore,” I said, glancing over at him. He looked pale and wintery in this morning light. I changed lanes just to change lanes.
“True enough,” he admitted. He sat back from me, pulling his hand from behind my head; he ran his fingers along the plastic divider in the air vent in front of him instead. I had missed his fingers. He said, not looking at me, “What sort of guy do you think your parents expect you to marry? Someone better than me?”
I scoffed. “Who cares what they think?” I realized, too late, what he had said, and by then, I didn’t know what to say about it. I didn’t know if he really meant it, or what. It wasn’t like he’d actually asked me to marry him. It wasn’t the same thing. I didn’t know how it made me feel.
Sam swallowed and flicked the air vent open and shut, open and shut. “I wonder what would’ve happened if you hadn’t met me. If you went on to finish high school and got that scholarship to be a math whiz at wherever it is that math geniuses go. And met some extremely charming, successful, and funny brain major.”
Of all the things I found puzzling about Sam, this one was always the most puzzling: his sudden, self-deprecating mood swings. I’d heard Dad talk Mom out of her funks, though, and the content of them was similar enough to Sam’s for me to recognize them as the same species. Was this what it meant to be creative?
“Don’t be stupid,” I told him. “I don’t go around wondering what would’ve happened if you’d pulled some other girl out of the snow.”
“You don’t? That’s sort of relieving.” He turned up the heat and rested his wrists on the vents. The sun was already cooking both of us through the windshield, but Sam was like a cat—he was never too hot. “It’s hard to get used to this idea of being a boy forever. I actually get to grow up. It makes me think I should get another job.”
“Another one? You mean, other than the bookstore?”
“I don’t know exactly how the finances of the house work. I know there is some money in the bank, and I see that it’s making interest, and there are occasional payments into it from some fund or something, and the deductions come out for the bills, but I don’t really know the details. I don’t want to use up that money, so…”
“Why don’t you talk to someone at the bank? I’m sure they’d be able to look at the statements and work it all out with you.”
“I don’t want to talk to anybody about it until I’m sure that B—” Sam stopped. Not just a pause. A full stop, the sort of stop that is better than a period. He looked out the window.
It took me a minute to work out what he’d been about to say. Beck. He didn’t want to talk to anybody about it until he was sure that Beck was really not shifting back. Sam’s fingertips were white on the dashboard where he had them pressed above the vents, and his shoulders were drawn up stiffly by his ears.
“Sam,” I said, glancing at him as much as I dared while still keeping my eyes on the road. “Are you okay?”
Sam drew his hands into his lap, hard fists resting on top of each other. “Why did he have to make those new wolves, Grace?” he asked, finally. “It makes it that much harder. We were doing okay.”
“He couldn’t have known about you,” I said, glancing at him. He was running a slow finger down his nose from his forehead and back again. I looked for an exit; somewhere to pull over. “He thought that”—and now I was the one who couldn’t finish my sentence the way I’d meant to: it was your last year.
“But Cole—I don’t know what to do about Cole,” Sam confessed. “I just feel like there is something about him I should be getting, and I’m not. And if you saw his eyes, Grace. Oh, God, if you saw his eyes, you’d know there was something really wrong with him. There’s something broken in there. And the other two, and Olivia, and I want you to go to college, and I need to—someone has to—I don’t know what’s expected of me, but it feels so huge. I don’t know how much of it is what Beck would’ve wanted me to do and how much of it is what I expect myself to do. I’m just…” His voice faded off, and I didn’t know how to comfort him.