Carter
“Oh,” I say, stunned to see that it’s Maggie Spear standing outside my front door and not some random delivery person.
“Hi,” she says.
“What, uh . . . ?”
“I could have just called, I know. But I wanted to tell you something in person. If that’s all right. You haven’t talked to
Layla yet, have you?”
“Well, no, but I will in . . .” I look down at my phone—5:19. “Eleven minutes.”
“Whoa,” Maggie says. “Okay, I’ll be quick.”
As confused as I am by this turn of events, I’m also delighted. It’s hard not to feel delighted when I’m near Maggie. “Do
you want to come inside?” I ask.
“Oh. Sure.” She slowly steps over the threshold.
Maggie Spear is in my house.
Even though she’s of course been here before, probably many times, which is confirmed when Mom comes out of the kitchen.
“Oh my! Maggie!”
“Hi, Mrs. Cohen,” she says, taking off her sneakers without being asked. “Er, Wendy.”
“Yes. Please call me Wendy, you know that. How are you, sweetheart?” She wraps Maggie in a hug. “I’m surprised to see you.”
“I am too,” I explain. “She just came to tell me something. So it’s not like we’re . . . Yeah.”
“Fine with me,” Mom says, hands in the air. “As long as it’s what you both want, it’s not my place to butt my big head in.”
“Your head’s not big, Mom.”
“Thank you, Carter. Do you want to stay for dinner, Maggie?”
“Oh, no. Thanks, Wendy.” Underneath her coat, Maggie’s wearing a dark green jumpsuit. It’s cool as hell. “That’s sweet, but . . .
I won’t be here long.”
“We’re having quesadillas,” Mom says, walking back into the kitchen.
Maggie and I stare at each other for a few awkward seconds, during which I remember that my FaceTime with Layla is imminent.
I’d been incredibly nervous, but then Maggie came and distracted me from all that. Now I feel jittery all over again.
“I should probably go up to my room to start setting up for the call,” I say. “But you can . . . you know . . .” I point upstairs.
“Come with you?” Maggie says.
“Only if you want to.”
“For the call?”
“Well, yeah, or just talk to me for the next five minutes while I’m setting up and making sure my room looks presentable.
But actually, if you’re down to stay, I wouldn’t mind the moral support.” It would also make me feel like less of a creep.
Like, Look, Layla! This girl doesn’t think I’m an asshole, so you shouldn’t either!
“Stay for the call?” Maggie asks again, as if I’ve asked her if she’d care to dissect a cat.
“Or not, if that weirds you out. I’m just really nervous.”
“No, of course, yeah.”
“Either way, I really do need to go upstairs.”
“Okay,” Maggie says. “Yeah, I’ll follow you up there.”
“Okay. Great.”
I lead the way, Maggie right behind. I bet she’s having memories of coming up here with me before. I furrow my brow, like
maybe I can activate some of my own deeply buried memories, creak open some trapdoor wedged between my brain folds, some secret
entrance into past incarnations of myself.
Nope.
We step into my bedroom. I’d already started cleaning it so Layla wouldn’t get background glimpses of me being a mess of a
person.
“Sweet banana peel,” Maggie says, pointing below my desk.
Dammit, missed that.
“That’s supposed to be there,” I say. “For good luck.”
“And good fragrance.”
“Exactly.” I pick it up and shoot it like a basketball across the room toward my wire wastebasket. I miss.
“Nice one,” Maggie says, taking a cross-legged seat on my bed, real casual, like it’s something she’s done dozens of times
before. She shrugs off her winter coat as she’s looking around my room, and I can tell she’s having Feelings. Perhaps regret
for coming here.
I’m having Feelings too. Maggie looks real good in that jumpsuit. Like the world’s hottest auto mechanic.
“So, yeah,” I say, drumming on my thighs like a dweeb. “I guess there’s not much else to really do before the call. What did
you want to talk about?”
“Right.” Maggie looks down, and I notice there’s a red-hooded E.T. on each of her socks. So cool. She also has some kind of sparkly lip gloss on. I remember it from Shana’s party. Makes it hard to stop staring at her lips.
“Is it about Layla?” I ask.
“Not really,” Maggie’s mouth says. “Kind of.”
“Oh god. Is there something else assholey I did that I should be apologizing for? I’d prefer not to do more than one call
with her, you know? Get it all apologized for at once.”
“Ha, right. No. There’s nothing else you did to Layla. That I know of.”
“Okay, good.”
“Yeah.”
I glance at my phone—5:28. “So . . . ?”
“So . . . Okay.” Maggie pets my blue comforter like it’s an animal. She’s almost zookeeper-like in that jumpsuit, come to
think of it. World’s hottest zookeeper. “So you heard about the Layla breakup from yourself, right?”
“Right.”
“And yourself heard about it from m—”
My phone vibrates in my hand, like a bomb is about to explode.
Layla. One minute early.
“It’s her!” I shout, embarrassingly loud. “You’re gonna stay for this, right?”
“Uh . . .” Maggie says.
“You have to! Please stay.”
“Okay, okay, I’ll stay!”
“Great! Thank you. So I’m going to pick up now, okay?”
“You got this.”
“Do I?”
“I think so?”
“Wait, there’s a chance I don’t got this?”
“No, no, you do, you do!”
The phone keeps buzzing. I’m so confused.
“I have to do this, right?” I ask. “Layla might be the key!”
“Okay! Yeah! Sure!”
I accept the call, and Layla Banerjee fills the screen.
She’s wearing a light blue workout top, her thick black hair in a ponytail. She is just as hot on FaceTime as she is on her
grid. But, similar to Chord, she’s, like, adult hot. Which instantly makes me even more anxious than I already was.
“Hi!” she says.
“Hi, Layla,” I say.
“Oh my gosh, you look . . . exactly how I remember you looking.”
“Well, yeah. That’s kind of my thing.”
She smiles, with warmth and pity. “Right. Of course. Sorry.”
“It’s okay. My friend Maggie is here too,” I blurt out, turning the phone toward her. “Just so you know. Maybe you know her?
Maggie Sp—”
“Hi, Layla!” Maggie says, her voice more high-pitched than I’ve ever heard it. “You probably wouldn’t know me because we went
to school so many years apart. But hi!”
“Nice to meet you, Maggie,” Layla says. “I actually have someone here with me too.” She pulls a furry head into frame, all
floppy ears and sad eyes. “This is Chester. He’s my roommate till we find him a home, aren’t you, boy?” Her voice goes even
higher than Maggie’s just did. “You’re such a very good boy too. The very best boy.”
Chester barks right into the phone.
“You and your family wouldn’t happen to be on the lookout for a dog, would you, Carter?”
“Uh . . .” I’m not connecting with this dog the way I did with Peaches. And I don’t even understand how adopting Chester would
be logistically possible. Would Layla drive him across the country?
“His name is kind of like yours, actually! Chester . . . Carter . . . Could be a sign.”
“Oh, funny.” I exchange a quick look with Maggie, who vehemently shakes her head while trying not to laugh. “Yeah. No, I don’t
think my family wants that. Right now. Unfortunately. But definitely a cute dog. Very cute. Very good. Good boy.”
“He is a good boy.” Layla rubs her nose against Chester’s one last time before sitting up and shifting the view back to just
her. “So, look, Carter, I’m sorry I didn’t respond sooner. You sent that first message, and I saw it, but I thought maybe
it was someone impersonating you or something, and I just let it be. But then you wrote back again and I realized it probably
was you, and I’d been leaving you hanging for so long. I felt bad. I’m sorry.”
“Oh.” I’m shocked that somehow she’s the one apologizing to me. “That’s completely fine. Like, beyond fine. I mean, the whole
reason I wanted to talk actually was to apologize to you.”
“To me?” Layla says. “Oh god. That’s very sweet, Carter.”
“Of course. I heard that stuff with us, years ago . . . ended with me being kind of a dick. And I’m sorry about that.”
“Well, apology accepted. And not even necessary. You’ve gone through enough over the past years without having to worry about
that too. We had our thing, it ended, I was kind of annoyed, and I got over it. It’s seriously all good.”
“Oh. Okay.” Kind of annoyed. That’s like how I feel after I lose a race I know I should’ve won in Mario Kart. I can’t believe apologizing was this easy. I look over to Maggie, and she seems pretty surprised too. “That’s great. Thanks,
Layla.”
“Of course! And, if you don’t mind me asking—are you doing okay otherwise? Do the doctors . . . you know . . .”
“Think I’ll ever age again?”
“Right, yeah,” Layla says, smiling sheepishly. “I guess that’s what I was going for.”
“They have no idea. But, I mean, I feel hopeful.” I shoot Maggie a smile like Maybe this very conversation is going to help me age! but she still has that shell-shocked expression on her face and doesn’t smile back.
“I’m glad,” Layla says.
“Yep.” I nod. We sit in a few excruciating seconds of FaceTime silence. “So I guess—”
“You know, Carter. This is an embarrassing story, but . . .”
“I love embarrassing stories,” I say, wondering what the hell she’s about to say.
“Okay.” Layla smiles big. Her teeth are so white. “When we were in second grade, Ms. Berkovich’s class, we were in the same
reading group. Do you remember that?”
“Kinda, yeah.”
“So, there was this one day—remember I said this was embarrassing—when I was, well . . . picking my nose when I thought no one was watching. But Ollie Fusco-White saw, and he was loudly like, ‘Ew! Gross! Nose-picker, nose-picker! Layla’s a nose-picker!’ And the rest of our group was also horrified, so they joined in, and I was, like, collapsing into myself as I prepared for it to spread to the whole class.
I saw this new future identity unfolding before me.
But then you were like, ‘So what? I pick my nose all the time.’ And then you started picking your nose right there in front of everyone. ”