“Mostly she’s scared of you,” Finny says.
“Scared of me?”
“You intimidate her.”
“Whatever.”
“I’m serious,” he says.
“Okay. You’re serious,” I say. We sit in silence the rest of the drive home. After Finny pulls into the driveway, he turns off the engine and we stare straight ahead.
“Are you mad at me?” I ask.
“No, I’m not,” he says. I can’t think of anything else to say, at least not anything I should say, so I don’t. I take out the food and hand Finny’s to him. “Thanks,” he says. His profile is handsome in the dashboard light. I want so much to lean over and lay my head on his shoulder. When we were kids, I could have.
“I don’t hate Sylvie,” I say finally. “I don’t know her, you’re right. But that means I don’t know if she’d like museums.” Finny shrugs, but it isn’t a dismissive shrug. “I bet if she knew me she’d see what a dork I am and wouldn’t be scared of me,” I offer. “Does she know that I got dumped by Jamie?”
“I told her,” he says. He looks over at me. “I didn’t give her any details though,” he adds quickly.
“Does she know about us?” I ask. Finny shakes his head and looks out the window again. “What are you going to tell her when she comes home?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” he says, and then, “you’re not a dork.” I eat my burger before it gets cold. Finny eats all of his fries first, then starts on the burger. I leave half of mine behind and wrap it in the foil before dropping it back in the bag. Curled up in my seat facing Finny, I watch him eat in the half light. The radio is playing quietly. It would be kinda romantic if we were together.
“So,” Finny says, “what are we doing tomorrow?”
71
We are sitting together by the lake. The sky is slowly darkening and the fireworks will start soon. Mom and Aunt Angelina are nearby, but they are not sitting with us. They leave us alone these days, and I pretend not to know why and Finny doesn’t seem to notice at all.
“They should start now,” I say. “It’s dark enough.”
“They will soon,” he says, and then we hear a pop, and the sky lights up.
I lean back, so that when I look up I can watch him and pretend to look at the sky. His chin is tilted up, a smile curling the corners of his mouth gently up. He reaches up and brushes a lock of his hair out of his eyes.
At moments like this, it amazes me that the words don’t come tumbling out of me. I can feel them in my mouth like three smooth pebbles. I can feel them there when I swallow and when I breathe.
His eyebrows raise slightly and I wonder what it was in the sky that surprised him, but I cannot look away.
Is it possible that the last six years were real, and not a dream as they feel to me now? I think that if I concentrated, I could make those memories vanish. I could close my eyes and believe that we have never been apart. I could invent a new past to remember.
I see myself sitting on the bleachers at Finny’s soccer game. He looks up at me and I wave. We are fifteen.
“Autumn?” I open my eyes and he is looking at me. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” I say. “I’m just tired.”
“Do you want to go?”
“No, no.” I smile at him. “Don’t worry about me.” I rip my eyes from him and look at the sky.
72
When Finny’s car pulls up, I am sitting on the front steps waiting. They are early. Finny honks and I stand up. It is night, and it is warm. I run down the long lawn to him.
When I get there, Jack is getting out of the front seat and moving to the back.
“Oh no,” I say. “I can sit in the back.”
“No,” he says, “ladies up front.” It’s our longest exchange ever. I sit down and close the door.
“Jack likes to pretend that he’s a gentleman,” Finny says. “But don’t be fooled.”
“Finn, how am I supposed to make a good impression on your friend if you talk about me like that?”
“I didn’t say you had to like each other,” he says. What he did say—to me at least—was it bothered him that his two best friends hardly knew each other. He just wanted us to go to one movie together, just one. I had been ready to protest, but when he called me his best friend, I was too pleased. I’m not sure if Jack was hard to convince.
“Let’s get along just to spite him,” I say. Jack laughs. This might be okay.
I don’t want to see the spy movie or the comedy with crude humor, so the boys convince me to agree to the horror flick. In the first fifteen minutes, the girl opens a closet door and a dressmaker’s dummy falls out. I scream and cover my eyes. Jack and Finny both laugh, but Finny also asks if I’m going to be okay. I nod and hunch down in my seat.
An hour later, we are at the climax. The girl opens another door and sees her boyfriend hanging from the rafters. She screams and the camera zooms in for a close-up of his face. I flinch and turn my head to the side. My forehead nudges into Finny’s shoulder. More screams, and I flinch again.
“You okay?” Finny whispers. I nod, and my forehead rubs against him. He pulls away from me. Mortified, I quickly lift my head and look back at the screen.
And I feel Finny put his arm around my shoulders.
Kind of. Mostly it’s just on the back of my seat and sort of touching me, just barely. But his fingers are definitely on my shoulder and at the next scary part he gently presses them into me.
“I’m okay,” I whisper. Jack looks over at us.
Afterward, as Finny is starting the car, Jack says, “Hey, do you guys want to get drunk tonight?”
“Yes,” I say. Finny shrugs.
“If you guys want to,” he says.
“Where would we get it from though?” I ask.
“My brother works at the liquor store on Rock Road,” Jack says.
“Are you serious?” I look at Finny. “Is that where you always got your stuff?”
“Yeah,” Jack says. Finny shrugs again.
***
We sit in the parked car with the windows down and get drunk behind our mothers’ houses. The boys got a liter of Coke, poured a third out, and filled the rest up with whiskey. They are sitting in the front passing it back and forth. I’m stretched out in the backseat with a six-pack of something pink with tropical flowers on it. Finny picked it out for me. He said I would like it. I wonder if it’s what Sylvie drinks.