“You think a lot of yourself, don’t you? Like, whatever anyone does, it’s got to be about you and Missy, blah, blah, blah,” I say, and it throws him off a little. His face turns red. “Maybe I just didn’t feel like talking to you.”
“What did I do?”
“You didn’t do anything. But you’re the only person I talk to, right? So when I don’t feel like talking … you’re the one I’m not talking to. It just works out that way.”
“Most of the time you can’t shut up,” Milo replies, but he’s referring to a time before my dad died. We stare at each other for a good minute and I’m stuck. I don’t know what to do about this. I had a plan and now I have Milo and he’s going to ask: “Where were you going?”
I shrug. “I just wanted out.”
“Then my timing is impeccable, because I just got out of the Star with Missy. They had a double feature tonight. The Blob followed by Night of the Living Dead. Awesome.” I bite the inside of my cheek because Milo and I probably would have gone to see those movies together if Missy were back in Pikesville, where she belongs. “I dropped her off at her grandparents’ and decided I was hungry and then I decided I’d ask you if you wanted to go to Chester’s with me.”
“Are you paying?”
Milo laughs. “Sure.”
“Is Missy okay with that? I mean, if you pay for me, does that make it a date?”
“Fuck off,” he says, but he’s smiling. I round the car and get into the passenger’s side. Milo gets into the front and a moment later, my house is behind us.
“So how are things with Missy?” I try to keep my voice neutral.
“She’s still very nice,” he says.
“Her boobs got really big, didn’t they?”
“Eddie—”
“What? They did.”
He pauses. “Yeah.”
“I wish mine were that big.”
“Yours are—” He stops before he can finish, and I burst out laughing and I say, I knew it, I knew it, you totally check me out all the time, and then he starts laughing, pointing one hand at me and driving with the other. “You totally set me up! I wasn’t thinking when I said that—”
“But mine are what? Please finish the sentence—”
“Just for that, you’re paying for the food.”
“Can’t,” I say. “I didn’t bring my wallet.”
“Very convenient.”
I settle back into the seat, smiling. I roll down the window and let the warm breeze fill the car, even though Milo has the air conditioner cranked. This is good. This feels good.
This is like before.
And then my heart does a complete 180 on the moment and it’s like it’s too good.
It’s too good.
How can things be so good they’re bad? That’s so stupid. And yet I feel this sadness encroaching, getting close. This isn’t good. This is the illusion of good. Outside of this sweet moment with Milo is Missy stealing my best friend away, is my father six feet under the ground, is my mother, who can’t stop wearing his housecoat, is Beth, who tonight decided she wants to take me to the mall so I can get my hair cut because I need a change because there hasn’t been enough change in my life right now.
And it’s so depressing.
I watch Branford drift past the window and I cry, which is embarrassing, but it’s not like I make a production out of it. Milo doesn’t even notice. I just sit beside him and hope my eyes don’t get all red and gross looking and then, when we pull up to Chester’s, I wipe at my face and get out of the car before he can take a good look at me.
Chester’s is a small-town dive, but no one would ever call it that to eighty-year-old Chester McClelland’s face. It’s a restaurant. It’s open twenty-four hours. It tastes like home, and home is greasy burgers and off-brand ketchup and fries that are so dry they turn to dust in your mouth.
The place is mostly empty. I recognize a few plaid shirts. Milo and I head for the booth at the very back. Our booth. I squeeze myself into the corner, against the wall. I like to make myself small in these booths, which haven’t changed in the seventeen years I’ve been alive. I loved their enormity, the way they dwarfed me when I was a kid, sitting next to my dad.…
Once I asked Milo if he could, would he go back to being, like, five or seven, and he looked at me like I was nuts and I tried to explain: it was simpler, right? It was. Don’t you ever want to go back to that? He didn’t get it and that was when I realized a fundamental difference between us. I don’t think Milo really worries about anything, doesn’t wish for simpler times, because everything with him is simple. Sometimes that makes being around him feel good. Other times, it makes me so jealous of him, I could puke.
I twist around in the seat, try to bring my knees up, and realize something terrible: I can’t make myself small in this booth anymore.
I don’t feel small in this booth anymore.
The late-shift waitress takes our order. Gina. I keep my face to the window and let Milo request the usual: French fries smothered in fake cheese. A huge basket to split between us. We never wait for the cheese to cool. It burns our tongues. We chase each fry with a swig of Coke.
“When was the last time we came here?” I ask after Gina sets the fries in front of us. I can’t remember when the last time we came here was.
Milo hesitates. “Before.”
“Don’t,” I say.
“Don’t what?” He reaches for a fry.
“Don’t divide me into before and after.”
“Well, it was—”
“May? It was May.”
“It wasn’t June,” he mutters.
When my dad killed himself.
“Then it must have been May.”
“So almost two months.”
“Two months,” he agrees.
I take a fry. The cheese scalds the back of my throat. It tastes different. I take a swig of Coke, swish it around in my mouth, and look around the place. It really is empty, dingy. Dirty.
I know it’s a dive, but I can’t remember it ever being this …
This.
“Beth wants to take me to the mall and get my hair cut,” I say suddenly, because I don’t want to think about how different Chester’s has become and when it got that way, and why I didn’t notice. “She said I need a fresh face. I thought she was going to suggest a chemical peel…”
Milo laughs and scarfs down more fries. “What’s the logic there? That there’s too much sadness tied to the way you look now?”
“Something like that.”
Actually, I think the real reason Beth is tired of it is because she knows I make faces at her from behind a curtain of hair. But then, I also heard her telling Mom that since we can’t afford to move to a new house where no one’s decided they wanted to kill themselves, we should consider changing the furniture around. So who knows. Who cares.
“How do you think I should get it done?” I pull my hair back. It’s long and brown and could do for a cut, but I’ll die before that happens on an outing with Beth. “Bleach it? Turn it blond? Curl it just a little? I can be Marilyn too.”
He stares. “Are you jealous of Missy or what?”
“I’m not fucking jealous of Missy Vinton.” I laugh a little. If you’re jealous of someone, you want what they have. I don’t want what she has.
But I think I hate her and I don’t even really know why.
Maybe I hate her because there’s nothing about her to really hate.
“Then why do you say shit like that to me?” he asks.
“I’m just teasing you,” I say. He keeps staring at me. Blankly. I can handle this place being different, but I don’t think I can handle Milo being different in this place. “Jesus. Lighten up.”
He raises his hands. “Maybe stop saying shit like that to me.”
“Touchy. Gonna do an old-fashioned long-distance thing? Send letters to Pikesville?”
“Fuck off,” he says.
“If I lived in Pikesville,” I tell him, “I’d kill myself.”
“Eddie.” Milo leans forward. “Where were you going tonight that you had to sneak out?”
“Why not ask me where I’m going tomorrow instead?”
“Where are you going tomorrow?”
“I have to go to Delaney,” I say. I pick up some fries, but my appetite has abandoned me. I force them into my mouth anyway. The cheese is already cooling, congealing. I swallow. “I have to pick up all of my dad’s stuff.”
“How are you getting down there?”
I pause. I still haven’t told Milo about Culler, but there isn’t a whole lot to tell and part of me likes keeping him a secret. I don’t know. But that part of me is not the reason I lie to him.
I say, “Beth will be driving me down.”
I wait for him to offer to take me because if he doesn’t that means two hours to Delaney in a car with Beth and however long it will take to organize and pack up all of my father’s things. Two hours back. He should want to save me from that. A fate worse than death.
“Oh,” he says.
He should be offering to take me.
“Two hours to Delaney in a car with Beth,” I say.
“That sucks.”
“She’ll have to go through his things with me.”
He should be offering to take me.
Offer to take me, Milo.
“And then two hours back…”
But he doesn’t.
But he knows I want him to, which makes it worse.
“Me and Missy,” he says awkwardly. “Tomorrow, we’re going—”
“Your tomorrow already sounds way more interesting than mine,” I interrupt. “So maybe stop talking about it.”
There are certain benefits to being best friends as long as we have—like how Milo understands my tone means I am so done with being here and talking to him and that right in this second, I don’t care if I ever talk to him again, which is not entirely true but—
