Not Now, Not Ever

by Lily Anderson

  “I think it’s only Skinner’s Mudhole to its family,” he laughed. “I should have asked if you wanted to see the touristy Eugene. We’re like ten blocks up from downtown. And U of O is in the other direction. And you probably haven’t seen Hendricks Park or had a Voodoo doughnut or seen the duck statues—”

  “Hey.” I squeezed his hand. “You nervous?”

  He made a face at me. “You think?”

  “Me too,” I said. “So, point us toward gelato.”

  “That I can do.”

  We started to walk up the street and I paused. “Wait.”

  “Do I need to name more composers?”

  “No.” I touched his jaw and brought my lips to his for a brief, almost chaste kiss. “That helps with the nerves.”

  “It helps with some nerves and aggravates others,” he murmured.

  “Why didn’t we just find a tree house to make out in?”

  “Was that an option?”

  “It’s an option now.”

  He squeezed his eyes shut. “Let’s go get gelato before I chase down Harper’s car and make her take us back.”

  28

  The patio outside Jilly’s Gelato was small, only three round tables with wide blue umbrellas and a single string of white paper lanterns strung overhead, but we had it to ourselves. I hadn’t realized how quiet things were on campus. I was on sensory overload with the indistinct voices floating down the street from the crowded sushi restaurant and brewery up the block and a steady stream of cars coming and going. It was strange to see the world spinning while my whole brain had been wrapped around camp for two weeks.

  The cold iron of my chair bit into the backs of my thighs as I twisted to look up at the tall brick building beside us. “What is with this town and brick?”

  “No clue. The libraries are brick, too. It’s a real mason’s paradise here,” he said. I could smell dark chocolate and peanut butter on his breath as he huffed a laugh. “Wow. Is that the least interesting thing I’ve ever said?”

  “In seventeen years, you don’t think you’ve said anything worse than ‘mason’s paradise’?” I leaned toward him, my elbows braced against the table—manners be damned. “You never got super interested in World War Two or Pokémon or rare coins? I bet you know how much a Buffalo nickel is worth.”

  “Pokémon, yes. Coins, no.” He stabbed his spoon back into the large paper cup in front of him, hiding his eyes from me under his hair. “Fine. I’ve been more boring. But I don’t want to be boring tonight. Not with you.”

  I stuck my spoon between my teeth and clapped my hands together. “Dance, monkey, dance.”

  He stuck his arms out at angles, bobbing side to side in the worst robot dance I had ever seen. He looked like a broken marionette with his hair flopping around his forehead. I choked and covered my face with both hands as I laughed until I wheezed.

  He took a victorious bite of gelato. “You asked for it.”

  “I did,” I said, wiping at the corners of my eyes. “So, is this what you would be doing if you weren’t at camp for the month? Hanging out at Jilly’s, going to see Independence Day—a great movie, no matter how much your friend Harper sneers at it?”

  “Don’t mind her. I once heard her say that Goonies would have been better without Chunk,” he said.

  “So she’s a stone-cold monster?”

  “She has very pretentious taste.” He pulled a napkin out of his pocket and dabbed at the corners of his mouth, checking for chocolate stains. “If I weren’t at camp, I would have tried to see Independence Day, but my parents would have probably vetoed it. I have a nine-thirty curfew.”

  “Seriously?” I asked. I had an eleven o’clock curfew on weekends, but even then I got a lot of wiggle room in exchange for babysitting Ethan and volunteering at the theater. “You have to be home early so that you can get in all that genius school homework?”

  “You’re joking, but that’s real. My parents were always really dedicated to making sure my sisters and I were exposed to as much culture as possible. We all learned piano and French with tutors, like we were in a Victorian novel. But then I tested into the Messina and it got—I don’t know, ‘worse’ sounds really entitled—but, yeah, it got worse.” He rubbed his thumb over the lump of his wrist bone. “That’s why I’m at camp, actually. I didn’t get my grades up last year, so I’m sort of grounded. At Rayevich.”

  “Your parents shipped you off to win a college scholarship because they didn’t like your grades?”

  “Well, first they took my phone,” he said, drumming his fingers against the open weave of the metal tabletop. “And my laptop.”

  “Oh!” I said, the last piece of the puzzle finally locking together. I bumped our knees together. “That’s why you have the typewriter.”

  “I had to type my homework, so I started using it for spite. It was my grandpa’s and it was around and it was loud. But my parents adjusted to the noise and I got used to using it. And then they signed me up for camp. Messina students don’t have to test in, since we have the same entrance exam.”

  I couldn’t imagine my parents shipping me off if my grades slipped, even if it was just across town.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Don’t be.” He smiled at me sheepishly. “If I hadn’t flunked Economics of Globalization, I wouldn’t be here with you.”

  “And what good is global econ?” I asked, pushing through the flutter that had started up in my chest again. I blew a raspberry. “Financial structures. Pishposh.”

  “Enough of my crap,” he said with a huff. “What about you? What would you be doing if you were in Sacramento right now?”

  “Right now? I would probably be lacing up my shoes and getting ready for my run.” I pulled out my phone and opened my weather app. “Yeah. It’s eighty degrees now. I’d want to wait until later, but my stepmom gets nervous when I go out too late.”

  “How long have you been a runner?” he asked.

  “I’ve always liked running,” I said. “When I was a kid and we had to run the mile in PE, I was the person who was like ‘Hooray!’ while everyone else complained. But then my cousin got back from BMT…”

  His eyes scrunched before he guessed, “Bone marrow transplant?”

  “Basic military training,” I corrected, bracing as the truth started to seep out. “We’re an air force family. And my oldest cousin, Sid, came back and kept talking about all the different stuff you had to be able to do to survive boot camp. Run a mile and a half in less than twelve minutes. Do forty-five push-ups and fifty sit-ups.” I thought of Sid writing down the list of requirements on a piece of Aunt Bobbie’s fancy stationery and how I’d hidden it under my mattress for years. “I didn’t find out until way later that those were the guys’ requirements. Sid didn’t want me to slack just because I was a girl. Anyway, I always kept those numbers in the back of my head. I made sure that I could do them. I never really thought, I’m doing this for BMT. I wanted to know I could do it, so that if I decided to enlist, I’d be ready.”

  “Would you want to enlist?” he asked, digging back into his gelato. “If you’ve been training for it your whole life, why run away to Rayevich?”

  I twirled my plastic spoon in my mouth. The salted caramel gelato felt like cool heaven against the roof of my mouth. “Want isn’t the right word. I was born in a hospital on base and went home in a USAF onesie. It’s literally never not been on the table.” I couldn’t ignore the skin-crawling feeling of stepping back hard into my own problems. Ever Lawrence would never have spent her first date talking about the air force. But I also wasn’t going to let Ever take my first date from me.

  “And it’s not easy,” I said slowly, each word melting a little bit of the gelato on my tongue. “Making a choice that you know people will hate. My dad and stepmom have never been subtle about the fact that they don’t want me to enlist. They want me to stay closer to home, to do something with less risk, less moving. My dad kind of never forgave my mom for having to live
on different bases when they were married, especially since she settled in Colorado right after they divorced. She teaches engineering at the Air Force Academy.”

  He paused, midchew. “So she’s pretty invested in you joining up?”

  My brain replayed a dozen conversations with my mom, all at the same time, her voice flat with expectation—the ongoing countdown of how long I had left in Sacramento, the weighty comments about Colorado weather. Even the way she shook her head when she saw me, as though she could picture the regulation haircut waiting for me in the future.

  But she’d never tried to talk me into following Sid’s footsteps and becoming a pilot. Unlike Grandmother Lawrence, she’d never poked the soft spots of my stomach, pointing out everywhere BMT would firm up. To my mom, the future was an unspecified better place.

  “I think she wants us to live near each other,” I said. “I think she’d be pissed if I enlisted but didn’t go to the academy. And I love her, but we haven’t lived together since I was in kindergarten. College isn’t the time to play perfect daughter. I think she’d be disappointed if I tried.”

  The wrought iron chair legs screeched against the pavement as Brandon scooted closer to me, his eyes shiny with concern. “Who could be disappointed by you?”

  “My mom’s never really had to deal with the fact that I’m as much Beth’s daughter as I am hers. I have this whole other family that she’s never even met. And it’s not just that they’re white—they’re Minnesotans. They’re Midwest white. It’s like the direct opposite of my mom’s family. And that’s part of me now, too.”

  “So what? She doesn’t get to complain if she’s the one who left.”

  “But she left for the air force. That’s the trick. She didn’t leave because she didn’t want to be my mom. She left because she had to. So she gets to have her cake and eat it too. She gets to expect me to do things because she’s my mom, while also not knowing what my day-to-day life looks like. I don’t know if I’m…” My tongue seized on the word Lawrence; I remembered almost too late that it was the name Brandon thought was mine. “Enough of her daughter to be air force. To uphold the legacy.” I shrugged. “I don’t know if it’s better to be another name in my family history or to not exist in it at all.”

  “I think my parents expect me to start a legacy,” he said with a frown. “My sisters didn’t care about academia enough. They were fine going to community college. And then I tested into the Messina and suddenly my parents had the chance to have a kid on the track to Ivy League…” He reached over and stole a spoonful of my gelato. He smiled dreamily as he tasted it. “But I just want to do math for a living. It’s what I’m best at.”

  My spoon froze halfway to his cup. “Really?”

  “I told you that I was the student counsel treasurer, didn’t I? The administrators picked me because I had the highest math scores of the freshman class.”

  “Brag.” I laughed. “So why does it matter where you go to school? Are they doing more math at Harvard than they do at state schools?”

  “I guess not. But then my parents throw out words like underachiever and potential—”

  “And it feels like you’re not running fast enough to catch up with your destiny,” I finished for him. I thought of Isaiah warning me to talk like a civilian, and Beth burying my USAF Academy packet in the recycle bin. My stomach clenched.

  “Yes,” he said with a sigh. “Exactly.”

  “So why did you tell Meg and Hari that you didn’t know what you wanted to major in?” I asked, dipping into his cup. I’d never been giddy about sharing before, but this felt oddly personal. An invitation to disregard germs and personal space.

  “There’s no math in the Melee,” he said. “It wouldn’t instill a lot of confidence in the team if they knew that the thing I’m actually best at won’t help them move forward in the skirmishes. Advanced math doesn’t work well in a lightning-round scenario. Too many long equations. The Melee rounds would be endless. Or more endless, I guess.” His leg stretched out, his ankle resting against mine. “The other night, when you said that you wanted something that was just yours, I thought about statistics. That’s mine. The probability of things, of life. It’s like religion condensed down into percentages. If you put in everything you know, you get the most likely outcome. It sucks that it’s so boring to other people. There’s nothing sexy about math.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Try saying all of that again, but in French.”

  His cheeks went strawberry milkshake pink. “L’autre soir, quand tu as dit que tu vouliez quelque chose qui était à toi—”

  I cut him off in a searing, gelato flavored, heart pounding, possibly not cool to do in front of a dining establishment kiss. Deep in the recesses of my Gabaroche genes, there must have been a latent hunger that could only be awakened by French. Who knew?

  I heard a sound in the back of my throat that I didn’t consciously conjure, somewhere between a sigh of satiated hunger and a moan of pornographic proportions. I considered being humiliated by this, pulling back to explain that I definitely hadn’t meant to make loud yummy sounds into his mouth. But Brandon’s hands went into my hair and he gave a gentle growl in response, which maybe later I would find silly—once goose bumps weren’t raised on my skin and my brain wasn’t mentally trying to punch me in the face for not staying on campus and rolling around in the pumpkin. Rolling around sounded kind of perfect, and I really doubted that Jilly’s Gelato would allow for anything even vaguely horizontal. Even a severe right angle would probably be grounds to shoo us away.

  “Fudge?”

  Brandon yanked away from me so hard that I almost lost a filling from the force of the decompression.

  “Crumbs?” he squawked.

  There was a girl standing alone on the curb, her hands hidden in the pockets of a denim jacket. She couldn’t have been much older than the counselors at camp. Her face was angular, and her thick black hair was shaved close to her scalp on one side and flopped into her eye on the other.

  “What the shit, Fudge?” she asked.

  My hand curled into a fist and I looked over at Brandon, unsure if I’d just been thrown the strangest racial slur of my life.

  “She means me.” His shoulders went concave with a sigh. He raised a hand at the girl. “Hey, Crumbs.”

  She raised an eyebrow at him. Of all things, it was her eyebrows I finally recognized. Those black calligraphy strokes as wide as my thumb. She was a shorter, slighter, more feminine version of Brandon.

  “You have a sister named Crumbs?” I asked under my breath.

  “I have a sister named Jen who makes everyone call her Crumbs,” he whispered back.

  “And she calls you Fudge—why?”

  “Did you ever read Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing?” he asked. When I nodded, he said, “My oldest sister thought I looked like Fudge when I was a baby. I didn’t eat a turtle—”

  “It was a tadpole,” Crumbs interrupted. “And it was going to be Abby’s best friend. She cried for days.”

  Brandon scrunched his face toward his sister. “What are you doing down here?”

  “I’m catching my baby brother running away from smarty school.” Where Brandon’s voice was woolly, hers rode the line toward raspy. It was like ice cubes rubbing together. “And sucking face with a very pretty girl.”

  He brushed his hair back into his eyes with the heels of his hands and spoke rapid, furious French at her. I sat on my hands to keep still as she threw a stream of French back at him. It was fascinating, but from Brandon’s deepening frown and his sister’s lifting chin, I got the feeling that the conversation wasn’t going well. I took a bite of gelato as Brandon threw himself to his feet and switched back to English.

  “You can’t make me go with you,” he snarled.

  “Um, go where?” I asked.

  “Anywhere,” Brandon huffed.

  Crumbs looked at him with blasé pity. I knew that look. It was how I looked at Isaiah when he said something particularl
y stupid, or when Ethan threatened to tattle on me.

  “I can call Dad,” she said. “And he can cart you back to Rayevich. Or I can take you back and you can say, ‘Thank you, Crumbs. I love you so much more than Abby and Darcy.’”

  “We have a ride,” he said. He cut his eyes at me and then back to Crumbs. His tone disintegrated into ragged sincerity. “S’il vous plaît ne pas.”

  She ignored him, swooping forward with her arm outstretched to me. “Sorry, pretty girl. Any chance you have a younger brother?”

  I awkwardly shook her hand. Her hand was smaller than mine, but her grip was viselike. “I do, actually.”

  “Then you’ll understand that I have to stuff mine into my car and drive him back to genius camp before he gets into even deeper shit than he’s already in. Are you a smarty-smart-pants too?”

  I nodded. There was no point in lying. I wasn’t going to let Brandon get dragged back to camp and go to the movies by myself.

  “Great,” Crumbs said. She jerked her head toward Brandon’s abandoned cup of peanut butter cup gelato. “Hand me that ice cream and we’ll be off.”

  *

  The back of Crumbs’s car was much more cramped than Harper and Cornell’s Prius and smelled faintly of cigarettes and fake cotton air freshener. The fabric on the roof was peeling in places, undoubtedly leaving bits of fluff in my hair. The radio was turned down low, letting in a distant rattle of drumbeats.

  “I’m so sorry,” Brandon said in a choked whisper, passing my phone back to me after borrowing it to text Harper that we wouldn’t be needing a ride back. He stuffed a list of phone numbers back into his wallet. “This is truly fucking humiliating.”

  “It’s okay,” I whispered back. “I know like three different kinds of self-defense. If I didn’t want to go with you, I could have taken her down. It seemed like shitty etiquette to roundhouse your big sister.”

  He almost smiled. “Not this sister.”

  “You can passive aggressively whisper all you want,” Crumbs said, tapping her fingers on the steering wheel. “I’m so not going to be responsible for you flunking out of another super expensive institution. It’s getting embarrassing how much money Mom and Dad are spending on your education. Have I mentioned that I have two jobs?”