Then
Ruby tapped her teeth with her fingernail. ‘I’m not sure,’ she said. ‘Maybe a whale?’
‘A whale? Why the hell would you want to be a whale?’
‘Because they get to swim around all day and eat stuff and no one ever messes with them.’
‘Sharks,’ Ethan pointed out. ‘Sharks might mess with you.’
‘Not if I was a really huge whale. I wouldn’t even feel it if they tried.’
Ethan turned and looked over at her. Her face was in profile, and he could see the curl of her eyelashes in the moonlight. She tapped her teeth again with her fingernail. ‘Or maybe a seagull,’ she said. ‘It would be nice to be able to fly, and they get to hang out at the beach all day.’
‘Do you always do that when you’re thinking?’ he asked.
She looked at him. ‘Do what?’
‘Tap your teeth with your fingernail.’
‘I don’t do that!’ She looked mortified.
‘You do it all the time!’ he said, laughing. ‘You’re like a little woodpecker over there. Maybe that’s your real spirit animal.’
‘God, how embarrassing,’ she muttered.
‘Nah, I think it’s cute.’ The truth was, he thought everything she did was cute. She could probably turn around and spit on him right now and he’d think it was adorable. He reached out and took her hand in his. ‘So do you always go parking in your dad’s developments, or is this a new thing?’ They were lying on the hood of his car looking up at the blanket of stars above. She’d sat in the passenger seat on the ride over, telling him to take a left and then then second right, and now they were high up at the top of a half-built development that, according to the sign outside the gate, promised to be Beechfield’s first ever English-style hamlet. There was a show home at the bottom of the hill – complete with faux-thatched roof – but the rest of the land was peppered with cranes and diggers, sitting like hulking, sleeping dinosaurs. He’d left the radio on when he’d parked the car – fuck the battery, he could always get a jump – and Van Morrison was now singing softly about a ballerina in the background, the crickets chirping noisily along from the tall grass nearby.
‘What can I say? I’ve got a thing for MDF and shoddy workmanship,’ she said with a laugh.
‘Kinky!’
‘Actually, I’ve always just come here on my own before. In high school, I liked driving around at night. I’d just go around and around in circles, listening to music and being all angsty or whatever, and I’d usually end up parked in one of my dad’s developments scribbling shitty poetry in my journal.’ She shot him a sideways glance. ‘I was pretty cool back then, in case you couldn’t tell. Pretty popular.’
‘I think it sounds cool,’ he said. ‘I love that you write poetry.’
‘Used to write,’ she pointed out. ‘I haven’t done it in years. Too mortifying.’
‘Well, you should start again. I bet you’re really good.’
‘I promise you, I’m not. It’s completely embarrassing to read the stuff I used to write. I was so melodramatic.’
‘We’re all our own worst critics,’ he said, propping himself up on his elbows and looking at her. ‘That doesn’t mean we should stop trying to create things.’
She wriggled up onto her elbows now, too, and their faces were so close they were almost touching. ‘What kind of stuff do you want to create?’
‘I don’t know. I like fucking around with computers and stuff, and I’ve always loved art.’ He glanced away for a minute and then looked back at her. ‘There’s not one specific thing I want to create, I guess. I just want to be creating.’ He tucked his shoulder up to his ear in a sort of half shrug and he looked so vulnerable and earnest in that moment, like a little boy not quite able to tack down the edges of a dream he’d had. She leaned across and kissed him.
‘You’re adorable,’ she said. ‘You know that, right?’
‘I was going for handsome and manly, but I’ll take it.’
‘What were you like in high school? I’m guessing you weren’t sitting at home alone reading The Bell Jar like me.’
He wrinkled his nose. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I played sports, dicked around with Charlie and everybody down at the pit, smoked a fair amount of weed. The usual stuff, I guess.’
‘So you were, like, popular.’ She said this as a statement rather than a question, and a slightly irritated one at that.
He laughed and gave her a playful shove on the shoulder. ‘What, is this The Breakfast Club now or something?’
‘Well, if it was, you’d totally be Emilio Estevez. The handsome jock with a heart of gold.’
‘Nah. If I was anyone, it was Judd Nelson. Cutting class and smoking under the bleachers before practice.’
‘Oh, of course!’ she said, smiling now. ‘You were so cool you didn’t even have to try to be cool.’
‘Whatever. So I guess you were Molly Ringwald, right? I can totally see you being a preppy little goody two-shoes. I bet the teachers loved you.’
She leaned back on her elbows and looked up at the sky. ‘Not really. I was more of an Ally Sheedy type, all black clothes and attitude. Let’s put it this way: I spent a lot of time listening to Tori Amos. Like, a lot.’ She looked over at him. ‘I had a lot of anger as a kid,’ she said with a little smile.
‘About anything in particular?’
‘The usual.’ Her voice had a clipped edge to it and she turned her body away from him. It was obvious that there was no room for follow-up. ‘So now you know the dirty truth. I was a weird nerd in high school.’
‘I always liked girls like you when I was in school, actually,’ he said.
She let out a derisory little snort.
‘I’m serious! I had a massive crush on a girl who sounds a lot like how you were.’
‘Oh yeah? What was she called?’
‘Lily,’ he said. ‘She used to stomp around the halls in these massive Doc Martens with her headphones on. I remember she always used to carry this book around with her – the Collected Poetry of Anne Sexton.’
‘I love Anne Sexton,’ she said.
‘Why am I not surprised? Anyway, I got the book out of the library once, and my plan was that I’d casually leave it out on my desk so she could see it, and then when she did, I’d strike up a conversation with her and she’d fall madly in love with me once she saw what a cultured, sensitive bastard I was.’
‘And did it work?’
He shook his head. ‘She took one look at it and snarled at me. Actually snarled!’
‘She probably thought you were making fun of her. That’s what I would have thought. She probably thought that the only reason a guy like you, a popular guy’ – she wiggled her eyebrows – ‘would leave her favorite book on his desk would be to make fun of her.’
‘That’s a pretty dim worldview,’ he said.
‘That’s high school.’
‘Well, she basically scarred me for life. I mean, she literally drove me into the arms of Courtney Albertini.’
‘Wait, the Courtney Albertini who’s now one of the New England Patriots cheerleaders? I saw her poster in the mall the other day. She has her own calendar!’
He nodded gravely. ‘It was a very difficult time.’
She rolled over and started punching him in the chest. ‘You are such a jerk!’ she tried to say, but she was laughing too hard to get the words out.
‘I don’t believe this!’ he said. ‘I tell you about my darkest moment of adolescent pain, and you abuse me! Abuse!’ he shouted. ‘Abuse!’
‘Shut up!’ she yelled.
He grabbed her wrists and pulled her down onto him. ‘Just imagine, a Judd like me getting together with an Ally like you. We’re like the Montagues and the Capulets.’
‘Or J. Lo and Ben Affleck.’
‘Julia Roberts and that country singer – what was his name again?’
‘Lyle Lovett!’ she said. ‘Please tell me I’m not Lyle in this.’
‘You could never be Lyle,’ he said. ‘I’ve heard you sing.’ He pulled the blanket over their heads. It was pitch black, the moon and the stars locked outside, and their breath soon turned the air fuggy and hot. The hood was still warm from the engine. In the background, the late-night DJ was playing Fleetwood Mac, and the crickets had finally fallen silent. ‘I like you,’ he whispered to her.
‘I like you, too,’ she whispered back. ‘Kind of a lot.’
‘Looks like we’re both in trouble.’