My lungs are too tight, and suddenly there’s not enough air in here. In one swift movement, I get to my feet.
“Excuse me for a moment,” I say before escaping into the kitchen.
* * *
I revel in my solitude for a few minutes, trying to figure out how this day went from Neil McNair winning valedictorian to defending romance novels to my parents. The laughter from the dining room is dimmed, but I can still hear it.
“Rowan?” My mom’s voice.
I turn from where I’ve been staring out the window at our backyard. My mom whips off her glasses, wipes the lenses on her sweater. Her hair is in the same kind of bun as mine, though hers looks professional-author sloppy somehow. It’s probably the pair of pencils sticking out of it.
“This can’t be the same boy you’ve been competing with for four years,” she says, motioning to the dining room. “Because he’s very nice. Very polite.”
“Same boy.” I lean against the kitchen counter. “And he is. Shockingly so.”
She gives me a warm smile and cups my shoulder. “Rowan Luisa Roth. Are you sure you’re doing okay? I know this last day must have been rough.”
Rowan Luisa. My middle name belonged to her father’s mother, a grandmother who lived and died in Mexico before I was born.
I only notice my mother’s accent on occasion, when she pronounces certain words or when she gets a paper cut or stubs a toe, mutters “Dios mío” so fast, I used to think it was all one word. When she’s reading aloud to herself—instructions, a recipe, counting—she does it in Spanish. Once I pointed it out to her, just because I thought it was interesting and I love hearing my mom speak Spanish. She wasn’t even aware of it, and I was so worried that now that she knew she was doing it, she’d stop. Fortunately, she never did.
“I… don’t know.”
I’ve always been able to be honest with my parents. I even told my mom when I lost my virginity. Romance novels made me so eager to talk about it.
The thing is, I’m afraid.
Afraid of saying I want what they have.
Afraid they’ll dismiss it as a hobby.
Afraid that if they read my work, they’ll tell me I’m not good enough.
Afraid they’ll tell me I’ll never make it.
Her hand brushes my cheek. “Endings are so hard,” she says, and then laughs at the double meaning. “I should know. We spent all day trying to get ours just right.”
“Yours are always perfect.” And I mean it. I was my parents’ first reader, their first fan. “Did you ever—” I break off, wondering how to phrase this. “Did you ever have people who looked down on you and Dad for writing children’s books?”
She gives me this look over her glasses, as if to say, obviously. “All the time. We told you what his parents said when the third Riley book hit the New York Times list, right?” When I shake my head, she continues: “His father asked when we were going to start writing real books.”
“Grandpa does only read World War II novels.”
“And that’s fine. Not my cup of tea, but I understand why he enjoys them. We’ve always loved writing for kids. They’re so full of hope and wonder, and everything feels big and new and exciting. And we love meeting the kids who read our books. Even if they’re not kids anymore,” she says with a nod toward the dining room.
“Have you ever thought…?” I chew the inside of my cheek. “What Grandpa said about your books. That’s—that’s sort of how I feel sometimes.”
“About romance novels? I’d never argue that they’re not real books, Rowan. We each have our preferences. We can agree to disagree.”
I try to keep my heart from sinking. It’s not progress, not exactly, but at least it doesn’t feel like a step backward. It’s going to have to be enough until I meet Delilah.
“Speaking of romance,” my mom says. “Is there something going on between you and Neil?”
My hands fly to my mouth, and I’m sure there’s an expression of abject horror on my face. “Oh my God, Mom, no, no, no, no, no. No.”
“Sorry, I didn’t quite catch that.”
I roll my eyes. “No. We teamed up for the game. Completely platonically.”
But my mind trips over the way he said the kiddush, the sound of those words I knew so well in a voice I thought I did. My fingers tingle at the memory of sitting on his bed, touching his shoulder. An unusual moment of physical contact between us. Then the pointillism of freckles across his face and down his neck, the dots that wrap around his fingers and crawl up his arms. And his arms—the way they look in that T-shirt.
It’s probably just that I’m really into arms.
“Well. I hope you enjoy the rest of your game,” my mom says with a smirk before she heads back into the dining room.
HOWL CLUES
A place you can buy Nirvana’s first album
A place that’s red from floor to ceiling
A place you can find Chiroptera
A rainbow crosswalk
Ice cream fit for Sasquatch
The big guy at the center of the universe
Something local, organic, and sustainable
A floppy disk
A coffee cup with someone else’s name (or your own name, wildly misspelled)
A car with a parking ticket
A view from up high
The best pizza in the city (your choice)
A tourist doing something a local would be ashamed of doing
An umbrella (we all know real Seattleites don’t use them)
A tribute to the mysterious Mr. Cooper
7:03 p.m.
“EATING CREAM CHEESE straight out of the tub,” Neil says with a shake of his head as we drive down Fremont Avenue. “You barbarian.”
“No one has manners when they’re eating alone,” I say as I pull into a parking spot. “I’m sure you have plenty of terrible habits.”
“I’m actually quite sophisticated. I put things on plates before I eat them. You’ve heard of them, yeah? Plates? See also: bowls.”
Toward the end of dinner, we strategized: the Fremont Troll (the big guy at the center of the universe) and then a view from up high. When I suggested Gas Works Park, made famous by the paintball scene in 10 Things I Hate about You, he scoffed. “Is that really the best view in Seattle?” he asked. “It’s a view of Seattle,” I said. “It doesn’t need to be the best one.”
Fremont is busy on Friday nights. It’s not dark yet, and voices spill from bars and restaurants. Next week, during the summer solstice, Fremont will celebrate with a parade and a naked bike ride. The troll, which is nearly twenty feet tall, has a hand wrapped around an actual Volkswagen Beetle and a hubcap for an eye.
I check the time on my car’s dash for about the tenth time in the past minute. Delilah Park’s signing is in an hour, and I am now officially panicking.
She’ll be elegant, of course, like she is in all her photos. And kind. I’m sure she’ll be kind. I’ve met my parents’ author friends, but it’s not quite the same. Delilah is someone I discovered for myself, not someone my parents have over for late-night drinks whenever they’re in town. Horrified, I realized I forgot to swap my stained dress for something clean. I pray it’ll be dark in the bookstore. I don’t want to sit in the front row, but I don’t want to sit in the very back, either. What do normal people do when they go to events alone? Maybe I’ll leave my backpack on the seat next to me, pretend I’m saving it for someone.
“You have somewhere else to be?” Neil asks as we search for parking. “You keep looking at the clock.”
“Yes. I mean, no. I just—there’s something I want to do at eight.”
“Oh. Okay. Were you… planning on telling me?”
“Yes. Now.”
Even after his mini romance-novel spiel at dinner, this signing is something I have to experience on my own. If he’s there, I won’t feel like I can fully be myself, though I’m unsure who that person is, the one who’s able to love what she loves without shame.<
br />
“Okay,” he says slowly. “Where is it?”
“Greenwood. It’ll only take ten minutes to get there, and I’ll only be gone about an hour. And we’re already so far ahead,” I say, aware I sound like I’m trying to defend it. “We can meet back up and finish the game then. Unless you think you’ll be too tired?”
“I’m in it for the long haul.”
“Good. Me too.”
A bit of an awkward silence follows. I have to change the subject before I dissolve in a puddle of nerves.
“You and your sister seemed close.”
“We are,” he says before biting back a smile. “Except for the six months I convinced her she was an alien when she was eight.”
“What?” I sputter, laughing.
“She’s left-handed, and the rest of our family is right-handed, and she’s the only one who has an outie belly button, so I convinced her that meant she was an alien. She was so freaked out about it, and she was determined to try to get home to her home planet, which I told her was called Blorgon Seven. Every so often, I’ll ask her how things are going on Blorgon Seven.”
I can tell there’s genuine affection there. That he’s a good brother, though as an only child, I’ve never been able to completely understand the depths of sibling relationships. It tugs at my heart in more ways than one.
“Your poor sister.”
“And you, with your parents—you’re close,” he says, more a statement than a question.
I nod. “That was nice, what you said to them. Thank you.”
“I figured I was wrong. They are too,” he says. “But really, your parents are pretty cool. You’re lucky.”
His words feel weighty. I know I’m lucky. I really do. And I love my parents, but I don’t know how to make them understand what I want when they don’t understand what I love.
“Thank you” is all I can manage. “Again.” Politeness with Neil McNair. That’s new.
We find a parking spot a ten-minute walk from the troll. I lock my car while Neil mimes stretching, like he’s getting ready for a big race. He raises his arms skyward, his T-shirt riding up and exposing a sliver of his stomach. He’s wearing a simple brown belt, and the navy band of his boxers peeks out above his jeans.
My face grows warm. The command to look away gets lost between the part of my brain that makes good choices and the part that doesn’t. It’s as though Neil McNair’s stomach somehow does not compute in my mind. Obviously he has a stomach, and naturally it’s covered with freckles.…
Objectively, it’s an attractive stomach. That’s all this is—an appreciation of the male form. His shoulders, his arms, his stomach.
And the ring of freckles around his navel.
And the reddish hair directly beneath it that disappears into his boxers.
His arms flop back down, as does the hem of his shirt, safely concealing his stomach from view. He meets my eyes before I can avert my gaze, and one corner of his mouth quirks up.
Oh no, no, no. Does he think I was staring?
“I haven’t had a Shabbat dinner in a while,” he says, and I’m relieved because Judaism is something I can talk about. Reasons I was staring at Neil’s freckled stomach, not so much. “Thank you for that. Really. What you said, about that teacher you had…” He shakes his head. “I’ve had too many experiences like that to count. People tell you to lighten up, that you’re overreacting. Or they seem that way at first, and then it’s one ‘joke’ after another and you start wondering if you really are lesser because of it. That’s why I stopped telling people, and with my last name… no one assumed.” We fall in step, passing a frame shop and a gluten-free bakery. “But the holidays are hard. Every year, I think they won’t be, and then they are.”
“Don’t you love when people call it the holidays, or a holiday party, but everything’s red and green and there’s a fucking Santa?” I say. “It’s like they think calling it ‘holiday’ makes them automatically inclusive, but they don’t want to put in the actual work of inclusion.”
“Yes!” He nearly shouts this, so loudly that a family leaving a Thai restaurant stares at us. Neil’s laughing a little, but not because it’s funny. “I had a teacher straight-up tell me I couldn’t participate in an Easter-egg hunt, even though I wanted to.”
“When people learn I’m Jewish, I swear sometimes they nod, like, ‘Yep, makes sense.’ I’ve… been told I look very Jewish.”
“I had a friend in elementary school who stopped coming over to my house,” he says, his voice low. “This kid Jake. When I asked him about it, he told me his parents wouldn’t let him. I came home crying to my mom about it because I didn’t understand, and she called his dad. When she got off the phone… I’d never seen her look like that. And some part of me just knew, before she even said it, why he wasn’t allowed over anymore.”
He just keeps breaking my heart.
“That is fucking terrible.” I scan our surroundings before uttering the next part. “Earlier, when I overheard Savannah at the safe zone. She said I obviously didn’t need the Howl money. And then—and then she tapped her nose.” At this, I do the same with mine, realizing I’m drawing attention to it and wondering if Neil thinks it’s too bumpy or too big for my face, the way I used to. He stops abruptly, his eyebrows slashed.
“Are you serious?” A loud exhale. “The fuck, Rowan. That’s messed up. That’s so messed up. I’m sorry.”
His reaction helps me relax a little. Like I could be justified in how I felt about it because I wasn’t alone in thinking it was shitty, but… my reaction was enough, wasn’t it? If I felt like crap about it, that was enough.
Neil steps forward and grazes my forearm with a couple fingertips, a small gesture to match his expression of empathy. The way he touches me, it’s soft and tentative. It’s the way I touched him back in his room, on his bed. “I’m sorry,” he repeats, his eyes not leaving mine, and there’s something so foreign about those words combined with his fingertips on my skin that I have to look away, which makes him drop his hand.
“People think it’s harmless. They think it’s funny. That’s why they do it,” I say, trying to ignore the strange shiver where he touched my arm. Must be static electricity. “And sure. I guess it’s harmless until something bad happens. It’s harmless, and then there are security guards at your synagogue because someone called in a bomb threat. It’s harmless, and you’re terrified to get out of bed Saturday morning and go to services.”
“Did that—” he asks in a quiet voice.
“Right before my bat mitzvah.”
The police found the guy who did it. It had been a prank, apparently. I’m not sure what happened to him, if he went to jail or if a cop simply patted his shoulder and asked him not to do it again, the way they do when white men do something atrocious. But I was so scared, I wailed and begged my parents not to make me go to synagogue for weeks afterward. And eventually we stopped going altogether, except on holidays.
That fear took something I loved away from me.
Obviously not harmless.
Neil and I are both a little breathless. His cheeks are flushed, like this conversation has been a physical effort as much as an emotional one. We fall in step again.
“But it’s weird sometimes, with my last name, and then with the hair and the freckles, the assumption is that I’m fully Irish. I pass as non-Jewish until someone learns I’m Jewish, and then they refer to it all the time. People here go out of their way to try to make you feel comfortable, and by doing that, they sometimes alienate you even more. Some of them mean well, but others…”
Yes. Exactly that. “When you learn about the Holocaust, you assume anti-Semitism is something historical. But… it’s really not.”
“When did you learn about it?” he asks. I have to think for a moment. “My mom told me after what happened with Jake.”
“As a class, we learned about it in fourth grade. But I already knew about it at that point. The thing is…” I trail off, searching my me
mory, but only one devastating answer comes to mind. “I can’t remember ever learning about it. I’m sure my parents told me at some point, but I can’t recall ever not knowing.”
I wish I could remember. I want to know if I cried. I want to know what questions I asked, what questions they couldn’t possibly answer.
“We’re going to fucking destroy Savannah, okay?” Neil says.
His casual use of profanity is a mix of amusing and something else I can’t quite name. He’s serious. He’s enraged on my behalf, out for revenge. Like we really are allies in more than the game.
This conversation makes me regret, just a little, that we weren’t friends. Kylie Lerner, Cameron Pereira, and Belle Greenberg ran in different circles, but I wanted Jewish friends so badly. I was convinced they’d understand me on this deep level that no one else could. I’m not blameless—I never made an effort to know him on a level beyond competitor. I messed up, treating him as a rival when he could have been so much more than that. What would we be now, if I hadn’t sought revenge after that essay contest, if he hadn’t retaliated?
That alternate timeline sounds so, so lovely.
“I almost—” I start, and then I catch myself.
He stops walking. “What?”
“I—I don’t know. I almost wish we could have talked about this kind of thing earlier,” I say quickly, all in one breath, before I can regret it. Fuck it, we’ve already shared plenty tonight. “I’ve never had anyone to talk to about it.”
The few moments he waits before responding are torture.
“Me too,” he says quietly.
* * *
We take our photo of the troll—with the troll, Neil insists, handing his phone to a tourist. I’m positive I’m scowling, but when we peek at the picture afterward, I’m surprised to find us both smiling. A little awkwardly, sure, but it’s a step above the Most Likely to Succeed photo.
“We don’t have time to go to Gas Works before your thing,” Neil says as we head back to my car. “We should do the zoo first.”
Today Tonight Tomorrow Page 15
