The Map from Here to There Page 3

  “So,” I said, straining. “Where are we off to, maestro?”

  Why did I just call him that? I mean, he was orchestrating the date, sure. But honestly, self, at least try to act normal.

  “Well, the original plan was Arpeggio’s,” Max said, “Then the drive-in, to see Ghostbusters. Only movie I could find that’s set in New York. But you’ve seen it before anyway, right?”

  Arpeggio’s for Italy, Ghostbusters for Manhattan. Both our summers in one night—who thinks of that? I looked over at Max, at his profile while he watched the road. He glanced over, a lopsided smile—puzzled about why I hadn’t responded to his simple question. Because sometimes, Max, you are literally a bit breathtaking.

  “It’s one of my dad’s favorites,” I managed. “He got emotional about the reboot, obviously.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh yeah. Sitting with his two daughters, watching women bust ghosts? Dan Hancock Kryptonite. As soon as the theme song played, he was a goner.”

  “I guess that doesn’t surprise me. His column’s pretty sentimental sometimes.” My dad was one of the few old-school newspaper writers hanging on to his weekly column. It made him what he called a “Z-list” local celebrity. Since his headshot was featured, he was occasionally stopped at brunch by readers with a kind word. Or a less than kind word, especially as his columns had become more blatantly political.

  “Yeah, he’s such a kidder usually, but when it comes to me and Cam …” I raised my eyebrows. “He’ll openly cry at graduation.”

  Max considered this. “Come to think of it, I bet my mom will, too. She’s normally good at compartmentalizing. But ceremony really gets her.”

  He pulled into the parking lot near the Little League fields and Riddle Park, the spot where a couple of food trucks often congregated, including Oakhurst favorite Pagano’s Italian To-Go.

  “Perfect,” I decided, though Max looked a bit reluctant.

  “Some first date, eh?” he joked. “Cheap food from an idling vehicle. You’re welcome.”

  “Hey, food trucks serve some of the best cooking in the world—Tessa’s always saying that. And I love cheap. I prefer cheap.”

  He grinned, quick and sly—a sight I’d missed terribly all summer. “I’m, uh, not sure how to take that, as the person you’ve chosen as your boyfriend.”

  We ate Italian subs messily at a picnic bench, napkins like drop cloths in front of us. Sharp red wine vinaigrette and salty salami. We split a sparkling water, and my heart fluttered each time I put my lips to the bottle where his had been.

  “So,” I said, during a brief lull. It was a weird spot, being old friends in a new context. What did most people reuniting in August discuss? “How was your summer?”

  Max laughed, immediately in on the joke. “Um, not bad! Saw a bit of the world, learned a lot.”

  “Sounds lovely.”

  “Mm-hmm.” He reached for the bottle. “It was. But I started going out with my dream girl, and I didn’t get to see her at all.”

  I blanched, losing control of this comedy bit. Heat filled my cheeks, and I struggled to connect with my brain’s language center. “Dream girl”—it should have been cheesy, but he said it with a lilt. Not a joke, exactly, but not serious.

  “Well, hope you two can pick back up,” I managed.

  He nodded solemnly. “I’m working on it. Plying her with cheap food.”

  “Do you miss Italy yet?”

  “I miss Liam and everyone,” he said. Max’s summer coinquilino—roommate—was a Welsh rugby player, burly and soft-spoken and excellent at Latin. They’d gone from trepidation to good mates in mere days. “And I really miss the antiquity.”

  He said it so earnestly, like he yearned for columned cathedrals and palazzi, for bricks cracked with age. I didn’t say a word, but I also couldn’t suppress my oh, Max face—a closed-mouth smile that betrayed my adoration for this total nerd. He must have noticed because he added, “I’m serious! Most of Oakhurst was built in the past fifty, seventy-five years. Rome was founded in 753 BC. Before Christ!”

  “I know you’re serious.” And now I definitely couldn’t quash the smile.

  He laughed, too, fidgeting with his watch. I hadn’t even realized how much I missed the full effect of him, the physicality. His laced fingers, his habit of jamming rolled shirtsleeves farther up his forearms. The way he leaned back in a chair when he knew he was right, arms crossed like an arrogant young professor.

  “What about you?” Max asked. “You miss New York?”

  There it was, the perfect segue to college plans, but I couldn’t fathom launching into why I’d changed my mind about film school. It would ruin our dynamic before we’d even reestablished it. “I do. The energy of it, the food, the art.”

  My first week in Manhattan had been hard—so hard. The search for subway entrances, the beautiful but disorienting Village streets, the unmoving summer heat that made the city feel like a sewer grate. In my first workshop, my classmates—especially some know-it-all named Maeve Zaher—eviscerated my spec script, and I barely made it to the bathroom before crying. I missed my friends and Max like physical pain. At night, struggling to fall asleep, I chocked the week up to an expensive lesson: screen writing and big cities weren’t for me.

  But I couldn’t go home—not when it cost so much money, not when my grandmother had been so proud. So I did a gut job on my script, editing it as mercilessly as it had been criticized. Because why not? It didn’t matter. To my surprise, the instructor heralded my revision as the strongest in the room and, to my greater surprise, Maeve Zaher strode up to me after class and asked if I wanted to work together over coffee—the first of many. I met people I liked, friends who wanted to debate the merits of classic sitcoms, of laugh tracks, of voice-overs. And then, New York buzzed electric—late nights spilling into the streets, shared appetizers at the cheapest diners we could find. Working on scenes, trying to get lottery Broadway tickets. Walking the same streets as so many renowned writers. It felt like being part of something, this long history mapped out behind us. Waiting for us to add to the story.

  “Janie …?” Max said, calling me back to earth.

  I laughed at myself. “Sorry! Yes. Hi.”

  His eyes narrowed, the briefest study of me. Wondering where I’d gone. This week, I promised myself. I’d tell him.

  “So, does Ryan know you’re home?” I asked.

  “Yeah. He stopped over to say hey, but promised he wouldn’t tell anyone. So I’d say there’s a fifty-fifty chance that everyone already knows.”

  Maybe some people inch closer, but for the next hour, Max and I millimetered closer—true last year, emotionally, and true physically now. I adjusted my position, getting comfortable, but wound up grazing his leg with mine. He leaned in at one point, but he was reaching for a napkin.

  Last time I kissed Max—the first and only time I’d ever kissed him—I flew on pure moxie, unstoppable. Now I’d had three months to sit with reality: I’d only ever really kissed one other boy, and that was two years ago. Could you forget how? Had I ever really known?

  We stayed until Tessa texted, wondering if I was on my way. As Max and I gathered up our trash, my nerves sang with the particular anticipation of a pending surprise. “They’re going to flip out when they see you.”

  And when they saw us, together. I bit a groove into my lower lip as Max drove and wished for a week of alone time with him, figuring out togetherness in the same zip code. Our friends had rooted for us all last year, and I loved them for it. But I dreaded the attention, the expectation—their eyes like spotlights on a relationship I didn’t want to perform. Max parked on Tessa’s street, the driveway already full of cars, and I wiped my palms on my dress.

  “They’re out back,” I told him.

  The McMahon house was the kind of fancy that included landscape lights on a stone path, which we followed toward the pool. Our friends’ laughter floated above the tall wooden fence—Kayleigh telling a work story to guffaws and Wh
ats?! Outside the gate, Max turned to me. “Ready?”

  It was rhetorical, I knew. Was I ready to make our entrance as Max and Paige, Couple? I hadn’t even kissed him yet, and this would be our last minute alone for the next few hours. He was watching my face closely enough to see my hesitation.

  Of all the places I’d imagined kissing Max Watson again, “a dimly lit side-yard with our friends nearby” was not in the Top 100. I’d envisioned that cinematic passion, frantic mouths—the way we’d kissed the first time.

  But instead, I looked up at a boy who was being so careful, reading me slowly. His hand on my cheek—the whir of my heart, almost pained by anticipation. He leaned down most of the way and paused. Giving me a beat—letting me choose, and I did.

  I’d been worried about remembering how to do this. But that wasn’t relevant, as it turned out. I’d never kissed anyone like this, like Max right now—familiar but entirely surprising. I gripped his shirt to steady myself, relaxing once he got an arm around me.

  When we pulled away, dazed, I bit both my lips, shy after such intensity. Sure, we’d flirted from afar all summer. But I had almost a year of friendship muscle memory, and being so obviously into Max felt a bit embarrassing, a side of me he didn’t know.

  “Okay,” I said, smiling. “Ready.”

  Max blinked at me, then nodded back up to the car. “Well, now I think we should definitely ditch these guys.”

  I laughed and opened the gate.

  Our friends were bunched around the patio table, hands reaching into snack bowls. Laurel with a white captain’s hat over her waist-length box braids and Tessa on her lap, wearing yellow water wings. Morgan lounged in a purple halter suit and green capris, an homage to fellow lily-pale redhead Ariel. Kayleigh was luminous in a long seafoam-green wig. Malcolm and Josiah were pirates in tricorn hats, and Ryan made a shorter, broader Gilligan in a red polo. A few of Laurel’s friends who hadn’t left for college yet sat together, in everything from foam lobster pincers to some kind of anime costume.

  “I’m guessing we missed a theme here,” Max whispered.

  Before I could apologize for blanking on that part, Morgan spotted us. “Hey, there you are! … Oh my God! Wait! What?”

  “I brought a plus-one,” I said. “Hope that’s okay.”

  Every head snapped in our direction, where Max stood with a hand in his pocket, casual as could be. Our friends became a flurry of arms and shrieks. Tessa got there first, nearly plowing Max over.

  Considering that she was my best friend and he was my boyfriend, Tessa and Max’s friendship didn’t really have much to do with me. They had taken to each other right away during a shared lunch period, bonding over snobby music tastes and dry humor. While I spent my June scampering between purple-flagged buildings in New York, Max and Tessa carried on, at record shops and lunches they sent selfies of. I liked the idea of them together at home, even when I felt vaguely sick with missing them.

  “Interesting,” I said as Tessa pulled away from him. She had her blond curls in a low ponytail, a style she’d taken up this summer. “I recall no such greeting when I got home from New York.”

  “Well, that wasn’t a surprise!” Tessa huffed. Morgan squeezed him with a side hug.

  “Pasta did you good, Max-O,” Kayleigh said, sizing him up. She’d highlighted her cheeks with a mermaid palette, reflecting like a prism on her golden brown skin.

  Max pretended to doff his cap, but I could feel him go squirmy. Even with all that confidence, he sometimes faltered under the attention of my adoring friends.

  “Excuse me,” Laurel said, hands on her hips. The pose showcased the temporary tattoos Tessa had ordered: glittery boats on Laurel’s dark brown arms, sailing toward an anchor and a pinup mermaid. “It’s my party and I’m last in line?”

  Max gave her a good solid hug. “Came home early to see you off.”

  “Yeah,” she said, laughing. “Just me, I bet.”

  Max greeted Laurel’s friends and Malcolm, a friend of his since elementary school. I knew Malcolm through QuizBowl, and was pleased that he’d started hanging out with our friends this summer, bringing his boyfriend, Josiah, into the mix, too.

  Laurel’s gaze slid from Max down to me, then back. “This is wild. Like that very satisfying moment in Concentration.”

  We must have looked confused, because she laughed. “You know, the card game? Trying to remember where all the cards are so you can match them? I finally got the pair together!”

  “But no costumes?” Ryan chided. “Boo.”

  He swung an arm around Max’s neck anyway, drawing him into the fray. After everyone was settled in back around the table, Tessa stood up. She cleared her throat and raised her glass—a girl Gatsby, presiding over the festivities.

  “To Laurel King and her reign at Northwestern, which begins tomorrow. You will …” She paused, searching Laurel’s face for the right word. “Dazzle them.”

  The apples of Laurel’s cheeks went rounder because, well, Tessa was proclaiming this from firsthand experience. I’d never seen Tessa so grandiose, baring her heart. When she looked around, she seemed briefly surprised that the rest of us were still there. “To Laurel!”

  I was close enough to hear Laurel whisper, “Thanks, baby,” and I flushed at the grown-upness of it. Max had called me Janie almost as long as he’d known me, a reference to the shyer, eldest Bennet sister. I could never imagine him calling me “baby”—it was … sexy, or something, in a way I couldn’t imagine Max seeing me.

  Shortly after, Ryan cannonballed into the water, and Tessa, never to be outsplashed in her own pool, followed behind. Everyone else eased in, but Max and I sat near the shallow end, our bare feet pale in the water. Last year, he’d nudged me back toward swimming, an attempt to help with what had become a full-blown drowning phobia after Aaron’s death, and it didn’t go well. I’d needed to jump back in on my own. But when I did, I wore Max’s belief in me like wings.

  He leaned back, one arm stretched behind me, and I moved close, my right leg warm against his left.

  “Hey.” His eyelids looked heavy, jet lag catching up with him.

  “Hi.” I nodded to the other side of the pool. “Happy to be back with this bunch?”

  “Happy.” The way he looked at me when he said it—with a sigh and the slightest smile. Being together was like sharing a docking station, finally able to rest and refuel. “But feeling a little underdressed. I mean, Kayleigh ordered a wig for this?”

  “Oh no. She’s had that for years. Sixth-grade Halloween, I think?” Kayleigh had collected illustrations of Black mermaids since childhood—something her mom started and her aunts continued. They swam in their framed kingdom above her desk, near Kayleigh’s rainbow of volleyball ribbons and a Polish-style paper chandelier her babcia made. “Mermaids are a thing with her.”

  Max smiled, unsurprised to hear it. “My life had so much less whimsy before I met you all.”

  “You were missing out.”

  He looked over and said, seriously, “I really, really was.”

  How to explain why I kissed Max Watson, for the third time ever, in full view of our closest friends? I don’t know. I couldn’t not.

  Brake, I warned myself. Slow it down. Hadn’t I seen how love could pulverize someone? Didn’t I still have to tell him what next year might have in store? Instead, I rested my hand on his chest, electricity conducting up my arm.

  My heart blew through the red like a girl in a convertible, already gone.

  CHAPTER THREE

  In the morning, I woke up to a text from Max, inviting me over for breakfast, and I pressed my smiling, ridiculous face into a pillow. We didn’t need excuses to hang out anymore; no studying or QuizBowl or plans with our friends.

  Outside Max’s front door, I swept a hand over my shirt, dismayed at wrinkles from the drive over, and took a deep breath before I knocked. The fanciness of his house wasn’t in size—it appeared, at street view, to be a cheery bungalow. But the inside felt grander, wi
th dark wood floors and sharp lines of white molding on every edge.

  Max swung the door open. “Morning.”

  “Morning.” I stepped inside to coffee and cinnamon, savory spices and maple. “Wow, smells great in here.”

  “Ah, yes. The aroma of every food item available in central Indiana.”

  “Oh, stop,” his mom called from the kitchen. “It’s only three things.”

  “Fighting jet lag with burritos,” Max said. He ushered me in, where Dr. Watson stood at the stove in slippers and sleek workout wear. She’d once told me to call her Julie, but it sounded too casual even in my mind. “Ms. Watson” sounded disrespectful to her MD, but “Dr. Watson” too formal.

  “Ah, sweetie.” She stepped away to give me a good squeeze, something she’d done even the first time we met. “So nice to have you here.”

  I liked Max’s mom so much that I often went quiet around her. A funny, warm pediatrician who raised my favorite human being during her dozen years of school and residency? It was a lot. Sometimes, around her, my inner monologue spat out only: Please like me, please like me.

  “I’m very glad to be here,” I said, because that seemed polite and demure. And then my stomach chose to groan, miserably and loud. My hands shot to my waist. “Um, clearly. Sorry.”

  They both laughed, with eyes scrunched and wide, mirror-image smiles. Subtracting their shared features, I imagined Max’s dad must be tall with that same dark-roast brown hair. Max stood a head above everyone in his Oakhurst family—his mom, Ryan, Ryan’s sister and parents, all caramel blonds. I never asked about Max’s dad, who wasn’t much of a presence after Max’s mom got pregnant in college. But I wondered sometimes.

  “Sit, sit!” she told me. “I’ve got eggs, chorizo, and roasted veggies for the burritos, and there are a few types of cheese.”

  “Can you tell she missed me?” Max asked, nudging my elbow.