48
AFTER A DELICIOUS dinner of lasagna, garlic bread, and salad, during which there were more tears and more fits of laughter than I could count, Robinson took my hand and led me to the back of the house.
“I wasn’t allowed to have girls in my room,” he said, “but I’m going to assume my parents are over that by now.” He pushed on a rather rickety door, but instead of opening into a bedroom, it led to a porch, with windows on all three sides. The painted wooden floor was scuffed and pitched; there was a wicker love seat along one wall and a double bed shoved against another. Guitars and amps were arranged in the corners, alongside neat stacks of CDs.
“This is your bedroom?” I asked, thinking of my dark closet of a room back home.
“It’s the old sleeping porch. This place was once a boardinghouse for TB patients,” Robinson said. “People with tuberculosis were supposed to sleep in fresh air, so there are rooms like this all over Asheville.”
“I love it,” I said, running my finger along the windowsill.
Robinson sank down onto the bed. “I slept on the floor out here for two weeks,” he said. “Staking my claim. Finally, they said it could be mine.”
I sat down next to him. The sheets were clean and the pillows freshly plumped; either someone had sneaked in to make the bed, or Robinson’s mother had kept up his room as if he’d only gone out for a walk. “Your parents are amazing. Why weren’t you with them—all along?” I asked.
Robinson frowned. “We went to Portland because of the experimental immunotherapy program with Dr. Suzuki. She’s the best there is, right? But my parents were living in this terrible motel and going to the hospital every day, and it was just awful. It was too hard on them. I said, ‘Please go home. This isn’t what I want. I don’t want you to see me go through this.’”
“And they just left?” I don’t know why it shocked me as it did, considering the way my own mother split town.
“They didn’t want to, believe me. But I made them. I said if things got really bad, obviously they could come back. But things didn’t get really bad—they got better. The immunotherapy was helping, and I got discharged from the hospital.”
“The same day as me,” I said, smiling at the memory of that perfect morning.
“Right. And I’d planned to come back here, but then there was the problem of you.”
“The problem?” I asked.
He smiled. “The problem of having a giant crush on you and you not knowing it,” he said. “But conveniently, my uncle had just moved close to your hometown. You were going to K-Falls, and I decided to follow you. I wanted to be with you.”
I flushed. “I’m glad you did. But still—I can’t believe they let you do it.”
“I told them I’d come back here in the fall. Do senior year at my old school. They understood—I wanted to pretend like I was normal, at a school where no one knew I had cancer. I was just a kid who got to study somewhere else for a while.” He smiled. “A semester abroad, in bucolic K-Falls.”
I snorted. “You’d better look up bucolic in the dictionary.”
“I don’t have to, because I have you,” Robinson said, rolling his eyes.
“Oh, right,” I said, nudging him with my foot. But his story still didn’t entirely make sense to me. “Why wouldn’t you ever talk about your family? Why were they such a huge secret?”
Robinson sighed. “I didn’t like talking about them because I felt so guilty. I knew it was selfish of me to be away from them. But I wanted to see things, Axi. I wanted to have a bigger life.” He reached up and twisted a strand of my hair around his fingers. “I wanted to fall in love.”
I nodded. It wasn’t totally insane, I guess. “But you, like, wrote them and stuff?”
“Of course,” he said. “They knew I was okay.”
“But what about this trip? How’d you explain that?”
He smiled. “I told them school was out—”
“Even though you weren’t in school anymore,” I interrupted.
“Well, they didn’t know that. And they weren’t going to check the calendar and see that there were three more weeks of classes I should have been in. I told them I was going to Camp Motorsport. It’s a summer camp for gearheads.” He paused thoughtfully. “It sounded pretty cool, actually …”
I rolled my eyes. “You’re crazy.”
“But you love me.”
I leaned over and kissed him on the side of his soft mouth. “I do.”
A blast of music came from the garage, where Robinson had said Jonathan was fixing up an old Buick into a custom racer.
“Did you know we’d come here, then?” I asked.
Robinson shook his head. “I thought we’d go back to Oregon first. But then …”
He didn’t finish the sentence, but I could fill it in. He’d started feeling sick. And he’d wanted to go home.
I understood that. I’d want to run to my mom, too, if I had one who was any use to me. If I knew what state she was living in.
I looked out the window then, and I saw all these floating lights. They were yellowish green, flashing on and off. “What are those?” I asked.
Robinson gaped at me. “Haven’t you ever seen a firefly before? A lightning bug?”
“A what? No! We don’t have them in Oregon.”
Robinson sat up and peered out at the lawn. “I had no idea you were so deprived. They’re the best bugs in the world because they can light their butts up. It’s how they find mates.”
“They’re beautiful,” I said.
Robinson reached up and brushed the hair from my face. “Not like you.”
“Don’t be corny.”
“I’m not. I’m dead serious.” He paused. “Dying serious, I should say.”
“No, you should not say that.”
Robinson sighed. “Oh, Axi, I’m tired,” he said. “Tell me a bedtime story.”
“Sing me a bedtime lullaby,” I said with a smile. “Like in Vegas.” I had every intention of giving in this time, but not that easily.
“Story,” he insisted.
“Song.”
“I’ll flip a coin,” he said.
“No! Don’t!” I yelped.
He looked at me strangely. “Why not?”
“Just don’t.”
“Okay, fine. Then you have to tell the story.”
We lay back on the bed. I took a deep breath and began. A fairy-tale beginning. “Once upon a time, there was a girl and a boy.”
“So far so good,” Robinson said. He rolled over so that his face was in my neck. “The girl was always bossing the boy around,” he said, his lips brushing my skin. “She kept telling him to eat better.”
“The girl had only the boy’s best interests at heart,” I retorted.
“Mmmm,” said Robinson. Already his voice was thick with sleep.
“She wanted to take care of him,” I whispered. “And to be taken care of by him.”
I paused, listening to the music coming from the garage. It was Bob Dylan, I thought, but I didn’t know the song.
“She knew how lucky they were,” I went on, “because they had found each other. She understood that sometimes people had to search for years to find what they wanted. Whereas some—the charmed few—just stumble upon it. Like children on a beach. Some come home with only rocks and broken shells, while others unearth a perfect sand dollar, fragile but beautiful.”
Robinson sighed. By now he was sleeping.
“And the girl understood something else—and maybe the boy did, too. Love was magical and infinite. But luck, in the end, was not.”
Out in the garage, Jonathan turned up the music, and Dylan’s nasal, sandpapery voice finally reached me clearly. “The future for me is already a thing of the past. You were my first love and you will be my last.”
I clenched my fists against my sides. I looked out the window for a star to wish on, but clouds had come in the evening. The only lights were those of the fireflies, turning on and off, on and off.