The Unexpected Everything

“That must have been cool,” I said. I was pretty sure I’d been to Colorado once—I had vague recollections of a white-water rafting trip from when I was little—but when I thought of the state, it was vague images culled from movies and magazines, of endless blue skies, snow-capped mountains, fields of green.

Clark shrugged as he ran his hand over Bertie’s head. “In some ways,” he said after a moment. He looked up at me and smiled quickly, a more genuine smile this time. “I got to run around in the woods a lot. That was pretty great, because that’s basically all you want to do when you’re eleven.” I must have looked skeptical at that, because Clark’s smile widened. “Well, if you’re me. But it also got a little lonely. My sister was the only other kid for fifty miles.”

“Is that . . . ,” I started, remembering something he’d said in the foyer, which now seemed like a million years ago and not earlier that night. “When you were homeschooled?”

“Yep,” he said. “Sixth grade onward.” I nodded, trying to get my head around that. I couldn’t imagine life without school—without my friends, without teachers, without all the daily drama that went along with it. “It really wasn’t so bad,” he said with a laugh, and I realized, startled, that he’d been able to see what I was thinking. “I got to read a lot. And I was basically done with high school by the time I was fourteen.”

“But . . .” I started to ask why anyone would want to do that, then paused when I realized I didn’t know the polite way to ask this question. “I mean, was there a reason you guys moved?”

Clark nodded. “My dad wanted some peace and quiet,” he said. “He wanted a place where he could focus on his work, uninterrupted.”

“What does he do?”

Clark’s smile faltered a little. “He’s an accountant,” he said. He looked down at Bertie and patted his head. “An accountant who wanted to be a novelist.” There was something in his voice that I recognized—a way of letting me know I was getting close to something tender, something he didn’t want to talk about. I was a little surprised—he hadn’t seemed to understand this when I’d tried to give him the same sign at the restaurant, and he was the one who’d been disappointed we hadn’t talked about things that were real. But I looked a little closer and saw the tightness in his smile, the way his forehead was creasing, and realized that everyone, no matter what they might want to think, has things they don’t want to talk about. So I nodded and let silence fall again. But it no longer felt oppressive and horrible, like it had before. Now it felt like a pause in a longer conversation.

? ? ?

“Did you ever have a dog?” Clark asked me after a few minutes of watching Bertie, both of us jumping at the slightest of movements. He seemed to be okay, as far as I could tell. He wasn’t drinking his water, but he also wasn’t moaning in pain or shaking violently. “Or . . . do you?”

I shook my head. “No on both counts.” I reached forward and scratched Bertie’s ears, and his tail gave a small, weak thump. “I always wanted one when I was little, but . . .” I stopped short. Even though this was just a small, simple fact, the act of saying it somehow felt scary, like I was dipping a toe into a pond I wasn’t really sure I wanted to go into. “My mom was allergic,” I said, all at once, like I was ripping off a Band-Aid.

Clark nodded, and I held my breath, wondering if he was going to ask a follow-up question, willing him to somehow know not to. “My parents are cat people,” he said, looking back down at the dog again as I let out my breath. “We always had at least three. And for some reason, they always seem to hate me.”

“That’s like my friend Bri’s cat,” I said, shaking my head. “In fact, the last time I slept over at her house . . .” I paused and looked over at Clark, wondering if I should go on. After all, maybe he’d just been making idle conversation, not wanting to share stories. Maybe he didn’t really want to hear about the unspeakable things Miss Cupcakes had done to my pillow. But he was looking at me, expectant, waiting. So I took a breath and told him the story.

? ? ?

“Okay, here’s what it says,” Clark said as he came back into the laundry room, carrying a thin silver laptop, his face lit with the glow from the screen. We’d spent the last fifteen minutes trying to get Bertie to drink, without success, and I was getting increasingly worried that he was going to get dehydrated. I saw that there was something on the front of Clark’s laptop—some kind of sticker—but before I could get a closer look, he was sitting next to me and holding the laptop out so that it was between us. “They say you can put fruit in the water, or ice cubes. . . .”

“Tried that,” I said, looking down at the bowl, where the ice cubes I’d put in there had long since melted.

“Or chicken broth works too,” he said, scrolling down the page. He looked at me and adjusted his glasses. “I know there’s no fruit in the kitchen, because I’m the one who buys the groceries.”

“Chicken soup?” I asked, looking over at the dog, who seemed to be moving his head as far away from the bowl as possible.

“Maybe.” Clark shut the laptop, then pulled it toward him before I could get a look at the sticker. “Want to check?”