“Did she ever get to play?”
I nodded. “Many times. The lead always had some vocal problems.”
“Not the kind of thing you want to have when your name’s in lights.”
“Bad for her. Good for my mom.”
“Did you see those performances?”
“Yes, I saw her perform. She was amazing,” I said, remembering some of my happiest moments from when I was a kid. My mom was a moth to the flame of the stage—she adored it. It was her home and her love, and she shared it freely with me. And here I was, sharing some of that with a girl I was starting to feel things for. I’m not even sure I was completely admitting those feelings to myself yet; that’s why I let her keep visiting.
“Do you have a favorite song from 42nd Street?”
“Title song. Hands down.”
“Can you put it on?”
I nodded.
She stretched across to the computer, shifting closer, and I didn’t move. I stayed stock-still, careful to not assume, not get too close, not do anything inappropriate. Keep it on this safe level. She clicked over to the new tune. The familiar opening notes sounded, and we sat in my office, quietly, listening to show tunes, as deal making and negotiating and business transpired in nearby offices. But not this office. Not for those few minutes on a Wednesday afternoon.
When the song ended, she stood up to go. “’Bye, Noah.”
It was the first time she’d used my first name. The way it sounded on her lips stripped off another layer of risk.
Chapter Fourteen
Kennedy
“Want to go out tonight with me and Holly?” Amanda whispers as our philosophy teacher drones on about Descartes. “After the game,” she adds, because it’s Friday and we have our game against Livingston Prep this afternoon.
I shake my head. “Can’t. I’m helping Lane with a project. A school project.”
Fine, she knows I’m friends with a guy named Lane and that he goes to another school, but she doesn’t know where I met him. Because I don’t gab about seeing a shrink. If I tell my friends that I see one, then I’ll have to explain about my parents too—about why they really split. I don’t want Amanda to know about my mom’s habits. I don’t want anyone to know why their marriage ended.
“A school project?”
“Yeah. In history,” I lie, and my stomach ties itself in a knot. While I don’t want to tell her the truth about therapy and shrinks and my parents, I do want to tell her about Lane, what he said last night, and how he touched my cheek, and how we walked arm in arm. I want to ask her what it means, because I honestly don’t know. I’ve only had one boyfriend, and everything else I’ve ever known isn’t normal.
As our teacher continues on about Descartes’s connection to Spinoza, I decide to go for it, whispering, “I think Lane might like me.”
Amanda squeals under her breath. “Of course he does! You guys hang out all the time. No boy is going to hang out with a girl as much as you guys do unless he likes her too.”
“Really?” I ask as the bell rings, and we stand and gather books and bags.
She nods emphatically and it strikes me as funny, for a second, that in some ways I know so very little about boys, despite having loved a man. I’d never truly dated someone my age.
“I bet he’s waiting for you to make the first move. That’s why he hangs out with you so much. He’s totally into you, but maybe he’s shy or something. So you should make the first move tonight.”
“You’re sure? I mean, you’ve never met him.”
“So? Boys are boys.”
“What about men? Are men men?”
She laughs. “Of course. Just bigger boys. They want more sex.”
I laugh lightly, wondering if that’s what Noah wanted from me, as we file out of the classroom into the hallway. Amanda reaches her hands up to her head, readjusting her dark-blond hair from a proper ponytail, high and bouncy on her head as the school rulebook dictates as the permissible height and style of ponytails, into a doubled-over messy one. Like a missile zeroing in, the headmistress barks at her. “Amanda, you are still inside the school’s halls. Proper ponytail now.”
Amanda shifts back to the cheerleader look, then gives the headmistress a penitent look before we continue on to our lockers. Amanda swivels the combination on hers and yanks her locker open. It is stuffed to the gills with books and papers and magazines and even newspapers. Amanda is old school and still likes to read the print newspaper because she wants to study journalism in college. A section from the New York Times falls to the floor, so I pick it up and hand it to her.
“Oh, dude. You should read that,” she says, tipping her forehead to the black-and-white pages in my hand. “There’s this article in the Style section about this couple who just got married. And get this. They met in their kids’ kindergarten class.”
I hold up a hand. “Wait. Their kindergarten class?”
She nods several times. “Yep. They were married to other people, obviously. But they met at some kindergarten open house, like when the parents go to see all the artwork and projects and stuff the kids are doing. And they hit it off and then started having an affair.”
I scrunch up my nose in disgust.
“Seriously. What is wrong with parents today? I feel like everyone’s parents are having affairs,” she says, then lists the names of several classmates whose parents’ marriages ended in the last few years. Then she leans in to whisper. “Now, I think my dad is fooling around.”