Teddy’s face softens. “I know.”
“Actually, you’re the one who sort of helped me realize that. And you were right. I’ve always put my parents on a pedestal, and I’ve worked really hard to make them proud. But they’re not here anymore.” My voice cracks on this, and I stare at the pie on my plate. “They haven’t been for a long time.”
He clears his throat but doesn’t say anything.
“I don’t want to let them down. But I also can’t spend my whole life chasing after them. And I think the main thing they’d want is just for me to be happy,” I say firmly, as much for myself as for Teddy. But I know it’s true. It’s all anyone wants for me, and I feel a surge of good fortune at the thought, and even more than that, a sense of peace.
Because it’s what I want too.
I lift my eyes to meet Teddy’s. “I think your idea is wonderful,” I say, packing as much as I can into that last word. “And I’d love to help out with it here and there.”
“But you don’t want to run it with us.”
“No.” I shake my head. “I don’t think I do.”
Teddy sits back hard in his chair, as if absorbing a great impact. He looks more than just disappointed. He looks crushed, and a cold, heavy dread settles in my chest. All along I thought it was the money that would send us careening down different paths. But maybe it’s this.
You pick one thing, and your life goes one way.
You pick something else, and it’s completely different.
This thing he’s about to do: I believe in it. But I’ve spent a lot of years trying to do the right thing for the wrong reasons. Now I want to try doing the right thing for me.
Still, it feels like I’m turning down more than just an opportunity to help launch a nonprofit. It’s almost as if I’m losing something else too.
Even if that something is just a possibility.
Even if that possibility isn’t even a very likely one.
He’s still watching me from across the table, and after a moment he nods: once, then again. When he smiles, it doesn’t quite make it up to his eyes, but I can tell he’s trying. “Well,” he says, picking up his fork again. “Maybe one day.”
“Maybe one day.”
He lifts an eyebrow. “After you’ve learned to play the guitar.”
“And a few other things,” I say, thinking again of what Aunt Sofia told Leo that night so long ago, when he asked what my other word might be.
That, she said, is up to Alice.
For the first time in a long time I feel electric with the possibilities. And this time, when the question arrives, I’m ready for it.
“Like what?” Teddy asks, and I grin at him.
“I guess we’ll have to see.”
On the way out, Teddy leaves a neat stack of hundred-dollar bills on the table for our waitress.
“I did promise,” he says, his spirits clearly lifted by the prospect of seeing her face when she finds it. We linger in the vestibule, peering through the small window above the door, and watch her mouth fall open as she discovers the enormous tip.
He grins as we walk outside again. “You sure you don’t want to be a part of that?”
“I do,” I say, trying not to sound defensive. “Just not officially.”
“Sorry,” he says, relenting. “I know. You can do however much you want. Really. I’ll have a pipeline of money ready just for you, so you can hand it out whenever you feel like it. I promise.”
“Thanks,” I say. “I’ve always wanted a pipeline of money.”
He laughs. “I get that a lot these days.”
We’re still standing beneath the glow of lights from the diner, neither of us moving. Teddy’s apartment is in one direction and the soup kitchen is in the other.
“I should get going,” I say, glancing at my watch. “Will you be at school tomorrow, or are you still boycotting?”
“Nah, I’ll be there,” he says. “I figure I better finish up just in case I change my mind about this whole college thing at some point.”
I can tell he’s humoring me, but it makes me feel better anyway. “Maybe one day,” I say, taking a few steps in the opposite direction. But he doesn’t move.
I turn around and wave goodbye. Still nothing.
“I’ll walk with you,” he says, jogging to catch up with me. It’s nearly dark out now, with only a low scribble of orange left in the sky. If I don’t leave soon I’m going to be late for my shift, but I stand there for a second anyway.
“You don’t have to. Really.”
“It’s a nice night,” he says, already moving past me so that I have no choice but to follow him. The streets are still busy at this hour, filled with couples holding hands and children running ahead of their parents and groups of friends going out for the evening.
“I walk here by myself all the time, you know.”
Teddy looks amused. “I know. I’m just being a gentleman.”
“Yeah, but I’m fine on my own, so you don’t have to be so…”
“What?”
“Overbearing.”
He laughs. “I am not.”
“You are. You were doing this in San Francisco too. You started acting like a mother hen the moment…”
“What?”
I frown at him. “The moment you saw me cry.” As we pass beneath a streetlamp, his face flickers in the shadows. “And I get it. I fell apart. But that doesn’t mean you need to treat me like I’m this fragile—”
He holds up his hands. “Whoa,” he says. “That’s what you think?”
“Well, what am I supposed to think? You spent the rest of the trip following me around like…”
“A mother hen?” he suggests with a smile.
I ignore this. “It obviously freaked you out enough to make you go AWOL the moment we got back—”
“I told you I was at the library,” he says distractedly, glancing over at the stores lining the street, then he raises a finger. “Hold on a second, okay? I’ll be right back.”
“What?” I say, surprised, but he’s already gone, jogging over to the bank on the corner, where he disappears inside the ATM vestibule. Alone on the sidewalk I lift my hands like Can you believe this guy? But of course nobody’s paying attention, so I just wait there until he returns, tucking his wallet into the back pocket of his jeans.
“Sorry,” he says, then without any sort of explanation he just picks up where we left off. “I didn’t go AWOL. All that stuff this afternoon? Those binders you guys refused to even open? That took a lot of work. That’s what I was doing. It had nothing to do with you.”
There’s a slight hitch in his step as he says this, as if he’s about to stop walking, but then he ducks his head and keeps going, his jaw set.
This is the part where I’m supposed to let it go. To tell him it’s fine. To give him the benefit of the doubt. But for some reason I can’t. Not yet.
“I don’t believe you,” I say quietly. “I think you got scared. You say that you want me to be honest with you, that you don’t just want to be the guy who cheers me up, but then you see me crumble like that, you get one glimpse of the real me, and—”
“Don’t say that,” he says in a low voice. “It’s insulting.”
I glance over at him, startled. “What is?”
“You can’t act like I don’t know the real you. We’ve been friends for nine years. And yeah, I know you’ve been through a lot, and I know you don’t talk about it very often, but that doesn’t mean I don’t know you. I know you better than you think.”
“Then you should know not to treat me like I’m breakable.” The words have a bite to them that I didn’t intend, but I’m frustrated and annoyed and a little bit angry, the way I only ever seem to get around Teddy.
He shakes his head. “I don’t—”
“You do,” I say. “And you of all people should know how much I hate that.”
He frowns. “Why me of all people?”
Because, I want to say. We’ve bo
th been through things that should’ve broken us.
Because we both survived them.
“Never mind,” I say, walking faster. “It’s just—”
Once more, he holds up a finger, and I stop midsentence.
“Just a minute,” he says, dashing off in the direction of a drugstore. I let out an indignant sigh, realizing I’m definitely going to be late now, then spend the next seven minutes kicking absently at a mailbox and stewing over our interrupted conversation.
When Teddy returns he has a white plastic bag dangling from one hand, and he swings it in circles as we start walking again, turning left at an intersection and heading up a road lined with trees and houses and the occasional streetlight.
“That’s not it,” he says, as if he didn’t just disappear without any sort of explanation, and it takes me a moment to remember exactly what’s not it. We’re nearly at the soup kitchen now, and my anger is starting to subside, replaced by something more desperate. The truth is, I hate fighting with Teddy. All I want is for things between us to be normal again. The way they were before the lottery. Before the kiss. Before all of it.
“I didn’t get scared,” he says. “I just had work to do.”
“At the library,” I say, rolling my eyes. “Yeah, you mentioned that.”
He stops again. “Well, it’s true.”
I can see the church just up the street, its spire a navy shadow against the purple sky. There’s a line of people along the side of the building waiting for the soup kitchen to open for the night. I’m too far away to make out any of the regulars, but I can see someone cup their hand and light a cigarette, the red dot rising and falling in the surrounding dark.
“I’m late,” I say to Teddy, but when I look up at him I realize I’ve finally managed to barrel right through all his good-natured patience. At long last he looks annoyed with me too.
“If it felt like I’ve been avoiding you since we got back,” he says through gritted teeth, “that’s probably because I was.”
I fold my arms across my chest. “O-kay.”
“But it’s not what you think. I was just trying not to put any pressure on you, okay?”
“About what?”
He groans, impatient. “About Stanford. Or…not Stanford.”
“What?” I ask, confused.
“I mean, we saw what happened with Max and Leo, and I know it came from a good place—I know Max just wanted them to be together—but sometimes it shouldn’t matter what you want, you know?” He says this so aggressively that it’s hard to tell whether he’s angry with me or Max. “It’s what the other person wants. And yeah, I can admit now that I’m glad you won’t be all the way out in California next year. Because being that far away from you for the next four years would be…I don’t even know. Kind of unbearable, I guess. But I was just trying to make sure you had the space to figure that out on your own, so I’m sorry if that—”
“Teddy,” I say, and he stops, blinking at me.
“Yeah?”
“Thank you. I think that’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever yelled at me.”
In spite of himself, he laughs.
“Being that far away from you would’ve been kind of unbearable too.”
“It wasn’t just that, though,” he says, his voice softer now. “And it wasn’t just about the library or the nonprofit. I had work to do for myself too.”
“You keep saying that, but I have no idea what—”
“It means,” he says, a little impatiently, “that I don’t think you’re breakable. But your heart is.”
“What?” I ask, not expecting this. I stare at him. “What are you talking about?”
“Look,” he says. “I’m…well, I’m me. I screw things up. That’s what I do. And I’m reckless with people. I don’t mean to be, but I am.”
I nod, though I still have no idea where he’s going with this.
“But with you, it’s different. I mean, even putting aside the whole friendship thing—which is a big thing to put aside—you’ve gotten pretty banged up, you know?”
“No,” I say promptly. “I have no clue what you’re—”
“You’ve been through a lot,” he says, then before I can protest again he hurries on. “You have. It’s pretty hard to deny. And I didn’t want to be just another thing that hurt you. I didn’t ever want to be someone who does that to you.”
Does what? I want to ask, though I’m too afraid—not because I know what the answer will be but because I know what I want it to be.
A car turns up the street, the headlights sweeping across Teddy’s face. “So that’s why I didn’t mention it, what happened that morning after the lottery,” he says, and I think he means the kiss, but everything is so jumbled right now it’s hard to tell for sure. “But then we had that fight and I felt even worse, because the whole point was not to hurt you, and somehow I ended up hurting you even more.”
“Teddy—”
“And then, yeah, I saw you cry in San Francisco. But it was a good thing, actually, because I got to see how strong you are. You let me in. That’s not the same thing as crumbling. Not at all.”
I stare at him, unable to think of a response.
“And it didn’t scare me,” he says with a smile. “It was just the opposite. I’ve always known how much you had to deal with, how awful it must have been. But being there with you…” He sucks in a breath, then shakes his head. “I can’t even imagine how hard that had to be. How hard it must still be.”
There’s a certain tension that comes over me whenever anyone talks about my parents, an automatic stiffening in my neck and back, and it happens now as I stare at the cracked sidewalk. There on the pavement, my shadow overlaps with Teddy’s, and for a second it almost looks like we’re holding hands.
“So,” he says with a note of finality, as if he’s now explained everything. “I realized I had some work to do.”
“Why do you keep saying that?” I ask without looking at him. “What’s that even supposed to mean?”
“Al,” he says, and when he reaches out and puts a hand on my shoulder, all the tension goes draining right out of me.
“What?” I ask, and my voice wobbles.
“I know I’m probably not saying this very well….”
Without meaning to, I begin to laugh, because this is such a dramatic understatement of what’s happening right now. But then I immediately feel terrible, because Teddy looks so serious, and for an awkward moment we both simply stare at each other. There’s an undercurrent of something new between us, and though I’m not sure what it is, I can feel it all the same. It’s making my heart thunder in my chest, making my hands shake, making every inch of me feel like putty.
“I have to go,” I say quietly, but I don’t move. His eyes have me pinned in place. To leave right now would be like walking out of a movie before the end. Like skipping the punch line of a particularly good joke. Like stepping away from a jigsaw puzzle when there are only a few pieces left to snap into place.
Instead I force myself to look up at him.
“I had a lot of work to do because of you,” he repeats, more insistently this time, like it’s a message that’s not coming through, a signal I’m not quite picking up. “You’re the best person I know. And I knew I needed to…I wanted to be better too. Or at least do something better. Do you understand what I’m trying to say?”
I laugh and wipe away a tear that I didn’t realize was there until it was halfway down my cheek. “Not even a little bit.”
And then he kisses me.
Just like that.
He steps forward, and he leans down, and he kisses me.
It’s not like the kiss after the lottery; it’s not hasty or impulsive. This is a kiss that’s been in the works for months now, maybe even years. It’s something more durable, more lasting. It’s those last few puzzle pieces clicking into place.
His hands are in my hair, on my neck and my back, and his lips are moving against mine with a kind of u
rgency, and all at once I understand what he’s been trying to say, and I stand on my tiptoes, and put my arms around him, and kiss him back.
“Teddy,” I say a little breathlessly when we finally break apart. We’re still clinging to each other, his hand twisted in my jacket, my palms pressed against his shoulder blades.
He tips his head down to look at me. “Yeah?”
“You know you didn’t have to invest millions of dollars and come up with a whole business plan just to kiss me, right?”
He grins. “I didn’t?”
“I’m not that hard to win over.”
“Yes, you are,” he says, then he kisses me again. It’s the kind of kiss you could vanish inside, the kind you could lose hours to, days even, and it feels like we do; it feels like we’ve been there forever, twined together like that, the rest of the world falling away, when the bag from the drugstore slips out of Teddy’s grasp.
We both jump aside as the contents clatter to the sidewalk, and I stoop to gather them up again, my head spinning. Everything still feels off-kilter, which means it takes me a second to understand what I’m looking at.
“Why’d you buy so much deodorant?” I ask, grabbing one of them just before it can roll onto the grass. “You don’t smell that bad.”
“Thanks for that,” Teddy says, laughing as he reaches for a package of dental floss. “But they’re not actually for me.”
I straighten up again, staring at him. “Wait.”
“Yeah,” he says with a smile. On the sidewalk there are toothbrushes and tiny bottles of mouthwash, a few boxes of Band-Aids, and even a couple pairs of socks. “I’ll bring more next time, but I was just excited to get started.”
“How did you know…”
He shrugs. “You’re always talking about what sorts of things they need here.”
“You were listening?” I ask with such astonishment that he laughs. But I can’t believe it. I stare at the toiletries littered across the sidewalk. All this time, I’ve been underestimating him. All this time, I just assumed he wasn’t paying attention.
Windfall Page 27
