All Over the Map

19. Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Nineteen

Leila shows me up to her room. Mia and Gabe will take Arya’s bunk beds while Arya sleeps on the living room sofa, and Fereshteh won’t hear any arguments to the contrary. Leila leaves me there while she goes to help with the dishes.

I sit for a few minutes, trying to figure out Gabe’s words. I’m not sure that’s what I know.

I am driving myself crazy trying to squeeze every drop of meaning from it, but I remember the sharp stab of jealousy when Seth clicked better with Mia than me. I don’t want to do this to Mia. I won’t be one more friend jumping from her to Gabe. This stupid crush will go away when Gabe does, back to Boulder. Out of sight, out of mind. I just have to survive the rest of this trip.

I shove him out of my head and think about my own brother. I’ve found random bits and pieces, but I’m still not sure what I learned about myself from Seth. I send him a text before I can re-think it, explaining I’m with Leila.

If I had it to do over again, I would introduce myself and ask you to tell me your story and never ask about the donor. I’m sorry I made it weird.

He answers immediately.

If I had it to do over again, I would ask if I could come with you to meet Leila and ask you questions about yourself the whole way there. Maybe I can come up to Adobe this summer and we’ll try again?

It’s more forgiveness than I deserve, and I can’t find the words to say so, but I send him a gif of a surfer saying, “Totally.” He answers with a 100 emoji.

I examine Leila’s walls. Snowboarding posters cover most of one. On another, a bulletin board full of movie ticket and concert stubs, fortune cookie slips, and a couple of dried leaves hangs over her desk. I do this too, keep leaves from special places or special days.

Her walls are a calm gray, but a bright turquoise comforter covers her double bed, and when I lay on it, I discover a poster of Tom Holland smiling down at me from her ceiling. Nice.

“Hey,” Leila says, walking in. “Gabe and Mia are still watching the game with my dad, and that right there is why I can’t stand baseball. Takes forever and nothing happens.”

I sit up. “Mia will beat you up if she hears you.”

“Nah, I’ll take her boarding, and she’ll see the light. You snowboard, Colorado girl?” She settles cross-legged across from me on the bed. This is how a million of my best conversations with Mia have started too.

“No. Weird, right? But we live in the boring part of Colorado. It takes a few hours to get to the good resorts, so it’s not that easy.”

The conversation picks up speed from there and we spend a lot of time laughing and figuring out silly things we have in common. Like we both love lemon flavors, and we both broke the same wrist the same way—falling downstairs—when we were in sixth grade. We love the same music and movies.

“You have good taste. Like for instance, I love Tom Holland too,” I say, pointing up at the poster. But instead of fangirling, she looks like I just asked for her tragic backstory.

“What’s wrong?” I ask.

“I have a thing with crushes.” She looks down and plucks at the blanket. “That might be too soft a word for what it feels like. Unless we’re talking about feeling literally crushed. Like my feelings get so intense it pushes everything else out of my head and body.”

It feels vulnerable to admit that this might be the thing she and I have most in common. But I admit it anyway. “I crush kind of hard too.”

“I mean I’m obsessive.” Her voice is soft.

“Like . . . stalker obsessive?”

“Not like I’m going to hurt someone obsessive,” she says. “But if I like someone then my whole world narrows to that guy. And it goes on for a long time. Like a whole school year. Maybe two.”

I hesitate, not sure I want to tell her a truth not even Mia knows. But this rekindling of feelings for Gabe, feelings I thought he’d killed off forever ago, has grown so big the truth spills out anyway. “How about four years? How about if it’s your best friend’s brother, and you thought you were over it two years ago, and then you go on a road trip with him, and suddenly it’s all back, and you can’t even breathe when he touches you?”

“Oh, dang,” she says. “I didn’t know. That’s . . . wow.”

“Yeah.”

She’s quiet for a minute before she continues. “I had this crush my freshman year that was . . . it was intense. It kind of ate me up.” She offers a wobbly smile. “I went to therapy when I was a junior because I couldn’t let it go. I was fixated. My entire day revolved around this guy, Connor. I made sure our paths intersected at every possible point even though it made me late for math and history almost every day. I read deep meaning into everything he did, like if he picked one thing at lunch, it meant that he was trying to get my attention, but if he picked a different thing then it meant he liked this other girl instead.”

She flops back to stare at the ceiling. “I sound like a head case.”

“No.” Or maybe yes. But if she does, I was the same kind of head case. Maybe still am. She could be describing the whole first semester of my freshman year when Gabe and I were finally on the same campus. “What did your therapist say?”

“That a major reason people cling to crushes is because we sense the grief we’ll feel if we acknowledge that the relationship will never happen. Same reason people stay in relationships that aren’t working, I guess. We know how much it’s going to suck when we have that moment of acceptance, so we just don’t accept it. But crushes are illusions even though the feelings are real. So I weaned myself off Connor by starting a parasocial relationship with Tom Holland.”

I shoot her a questioning glance. “Parasocial?”

“Yeah. Psychology-speak for when someone is madly in love with a famous person who is unaware of their existence. Like my love for Tom Holland. It’s because you get all the rush of loving someone without risk of rejection. You can pretend it would all work out if only you met. So then my therapist helped me work through that. Tom and I are just friends now, but he got me through a really hard time.”

She says it all like it’s a big joke. Her tone is bright, but I feel a brittleness to it. Leila is sorry she said anything, I think.

I crawl over and flip to lie beside her, gazing up at Tom. “He’s pretty great,” I say. “Maybe I need Tom Holland therapy for my crush.”

She flips on her side to study me, and I do the same. “Does Gabe know how you feel?”

“He knows how I felt.”

“You told him?”

“Kind of.” My cheeks burn, and I’m about to push down the memory like I always do, but her eyes are fixed on mine, and I want to give her the same honesty she’s given me. “I fell madly in love with Gabe in seventh grade during a game of Mario Kart. Romantic, huh?”

She gives a soft laugh. “I think I was really smitten by a new pair of shoes Connor wore one day. They were purple Vans, and that was my favorite color, so I thought it was a sign. Not quite as dreamy as Mario Kart. What happened when you told him?”

“Ah, well. Prepare for more romance.” I sit up and lean against the wall. I need the security of having something behind my back if I’m about to expose my deepest innards. “Mia is the youngest of six and the only girl. When their brother Daniel was a senior, their parents went out of town for some medical conference. Daniel and Gabe threw a party, but Mia and I threatened to tell if they didn’t let us come.”

Leila sits up at this and rests her chin in her hand, listening. It’s how I sit when Mrs. Sandoval tells us stories about her crazy book research.

The memory of that afternoon comes back to me. I’m right back in Mia’s room, digging through her closet for the perfect outfit, the one that will make Gabe pay attention, because I have big plans for him at the party.

“We thought we were so cool because we were only freshmen, and it was only going to be upperclassmen. All the Sandoval boys are cute, and I felt like Gabe never paid attention to me because he always had other girls after him, distracting him. But I had home field advantage over the other girls. I belonged at the Sandovals; they didn’t. And I had a secret weapon.”

Leila’s eyebrow rises, and she leans forward. “What was it?”

I bust out jazz hands and announce, “A makeover.”

She grins. “Of course.”

“He was used to seeing me like a sister, like Mia. So I was going to show him that I’d grown up. Because the transformative power of lip gloss.”

She makes prayer hands and gives me a solemn nod.

“I practiced winged eyeliner for two hours. I wore new jeans and a crop top. I curled my hair and spritzed it with some of Mrs. Sandoval’s perfume.”

“What boy doesn’t want a girl who smells like his mother?”

“Yeah. It turns out I had no idea what I was doing. But at the time, I thought if I acted older, he’d see me as older. And that included drinking. Brother number three, Alex, was barely legal and wanted to be the cool brother so he bought their alcohol. Lots of cheap beer. And whiskey. So much whiskey.”

She winces. “First time drinking?”

I nod. “And last. I ended up in every room where Gabe was, doing shots in my cute outfit and seventeen layers of makeup. Didn’t work.”

“Didn’t see that coming,” she says with a twist of her lips.

“But the whiskey made me so braaaave,” I say in the loopy singsong voice Mia gets when she drinks too much. “He disappeared up to his room at some point, and I followed him. Big chance and all that.”

“Don’t do it, Freshman Kendall.”

“Too late. I did it. He was digging something out of his dresser, and I spun him around and threw my arms around his neck, and I said, ‘Kiss me, Gabe.’”

Another wince. “But he didn’t.”

“Not only did he not kiss me, when I decided to make it easier for him and kissed him instead, he pulled my arms away and scrubbed his mouth like he drank bad milk.”

“Oof.” Leila reaches out to squeeze my knees, like she wants me to know she’s not just there but there for me . It gives me the courage to tell her the worst part.

“I told him it was okay, Mia would be happy for us, but I wouldn’t tell her if he didn’t want me to because I hadn’t told anyone. And then he told me he knew I liked him, had known for a long time, and he was sick of me following him around and staring at him. He said to knock it off. Then he shoved me out of his room.” Quit staring at me. It’s creepy.

She leans forward and rests her forehead against mine for a second. “I’m so sorry.”

“Not your fault.”

She straightens. “No, I mean I’m mortified that I said anything when he was filming us. I thought I picked up a vibe. I suck.”

“Still not your fault. Don’t worry about it.”

“Okay.” Her expression grows troubled, and she hesitates, like she’s not sure of her next words. “I’m not trying to start anything, but are you sure there isn’t . . . something? You’re positive Gabe hasn’t changed his mind? Does he even know you like him again?”

I run the last couple of days through my head. “I don’t think so.”

“So is this proximity? Are you going to still feel that way when the trip ends? If not, this crush will be over when the road trip is over, and you’ll feel way better.”

I wish it were that simple. But I know the depth and shape of these feelings too well.

“Gabe drives me crazy,” I say. “But . . . I don’t know. Some things are different. Things he says and does. I don’t know if I’m seeing what I want to see, or if there really is a vibe. Normally, I’d talk all this stuff over with Mia, but she hates it when girls date her brothers, so I don’t know. I don’t know what to think.”

“Tell me what you’ve noticed. I promise to give you an objective opinion, not just say what you want to hear.”

The rest pours out. The stolen looks, the little comments, the touches. When I describe how he lifted me off the bench at the taco place, her eyebrow goes up, and when I describe him braiding my hair, both eyebrows do. I finish with his words to me on her deck and lean back against her headboard, exhausted. “What do you think?” I ask.

“If this were any other guy,” she says, “it would be a no-brainer. I’d say he’s clearly into you. That’s what I thought already before any of this context, just watching you two around each other. But the fact is, he kind of interjected himself on this trip in the big brother role for both of you. I wouldn’t think twice about him doing any of that with Mia. But . . .” she pauses like she’s turning it all over in her mind. “I think, yes, he’s feeling something for you. Something not brotherly. But . . . but I can’t swear to it.” She slumps. “Sorry. I’m failing my first big sister challenge. I want to give you an answer, but I’m not sure.”

“Honestly, it helps even saying this all out loud. I’ve never been able to do that before.” I feel disloyal to Mia, the same way I do for even liking Gabe at all. That’s not Mia’s fault, but it feels good to tell the truth to someone.

“I get it.” She leans back on her hands and sighs. I like having her here, just going through it with me, not trying to fix it. After a few moments, she straightens. “I know one thing I can do. How about a distraction?”

“Like letting me see the sperm donor’s profile?”

She blinks. “I was going to suggest painting our toenails, but sure. We can do that. Let me get it.”

“Is that okay?” I’m anxious about pushing this after the Seth mess.

“Yes, but Kendall . . . don’t get too excited.” She climbs from the bed and opens her desk drawer, rifling through it until she pulls out a piece of printer paper, folded in half. “There he is in all his glory.”

I take it and draw a deep breath.

Then I open it.