finn
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The next Saturday came up cold and stayed that way, the kind of morning where the grass crunches for the first hour and the sky lacks all color. The yard was ankle-deep in October. We’d been promising Peanut his pile for two weeks, and the leaves had done their part, and now it was down to labor.
I’d told Jesse it would be fun. I’d lied. It was work, and he’d known that, and he’d come anyway, at nine, in a jacket too thin for the weather and my spare gloves, and he raked the way he did everything, like he was changing the world.
Peanut was under house arrest behind the screen door. He had his nose pressed to the mesh, fogging a circle in it, releasing one small tragic sound every couple of minutes in case we’d forgotten him. House rule: no pile privileges until there was a pile.
“Your technique is wrong,” Jesse informed me, around ten.
“My technique built this franchise.”
“You’re flipping them. You want to drag.”
“Drag your leaves. These are my leaves.”
He dragged. I flipped. The pile grew in the middle of the yard on both our systems, and we didn’t talk for stretches, but the silence was the kind.
I’d gotten good at this. A whole season of good at it.
There were questions I’d been carrying since the start, since ten years ago, and I’d learned to put them to bed the way you set down a sleeping child.
He had his back to me when he said it. “Viv’s closing the tour in New York.” A rake stroke. “December. Last show ever, apparently.”
“No way.” I straightened up. “At her old place? Your bar?”
“Neon Nights.” He kept raking. “She’s holding a table.”
“For?”
The rake stopped. “Two,” he said to the leaves.
Something in his voice made me look at him properly. Something that was almost…guilty. “When did she ask?”
“Yester—” He glanced at his own hand. He’d pushed it into his jacket pocket, and I watched him look down at it like it belonged to someone he didn’t trust before taking it back out. “Saturday,” he said.
Saturday.
Two buzzes against a desk while I was mostly asleep in his bed. His arm coming over me like a second blanket. Who was that? Nobody. Viv says hi.
I stood there holding a rake in a cold yard. He didn’t believe we’d last.
It wasn’t the trip. The trip was the best idea anyone had had all year, his bar and his people and a chance to be alone and fill out his missing decade with the door finally propped open, and I’d have said yes before he finished the sentence, and he knew that.
That was the part that landed wrong. He knew that, and he’d sat alone with it since Saturday anyway, working out whether there would be an us in December, doing it in his own head, in the dark, with me asleep a foot away.
Just like he’d decided for us both that our friendship couldn’t survive the distance.
“Finn,” he said.
I laid the rake down. “Nobody,” I said. “Viv says hi.”
He didn’t pretend not to understand. That’s one thing about Jesse; he’ll dodge you all day, but he won’t insult you.
“You’ve had this in your pocket for a week,” I said.
“You’ve been walking around with a whole future of ours in there, deciding about it by yourself.
And I know what that looks like, Jes. I’ve seen it before.
Last time, I watched it through my bedroom window.
Your dad’s car went down the street, and you were in it deciding about us by yourself, and I stood there with my hand up like an idiot, and then I spent months finding out what you’d decided one unanswered message at a time. ”
My voice had climbed. I brought it back down, and bringing it down cost more than the climb.
“So I need to ask you something, and I need your hands out of your pockets when you answer it.”
He took his hands out of his pockets.
“Why did we grow apart?”
The yard was very quiet. Even Peanut had stopped his campaign at the door. Jesse looked at me for a long time, and his hands hung open at his sides, empty, nothing to hold and nothing to work at, and I watched him decide not to reach for anything.
“There was nothing wrong with the desk,” he said.
“What?”
“When we were kids. The storms. There were no structural issues. There was never anything wrong with any desk or any ceiling or any building I’ve ever inspected in my life.
” He let out a breath through his nose that wanted to be a laugh, but it came out hollow.
“I was under the desk because I was scared, and you sat on the floor and counted the miles out loud until I wasn’t, and I never said thank you, because saying thank you would have meant saying I was scared, and I have never once in my life managed to say that about anything. ”
I didn’t move, but something in my stomach unspooled, the ice melting a little.
“You want to know why. Okay. Here’s why.
I figured out what you were to me the year we turned twelve.
I didn’t have a word for it, but I had the whole thing already built, and then Dad got the job, and I sat in that car and understood I was going to have to feel it from a distance forever.
And every message you sent proved how far away you were.
Every single one was a mile marker. So I typed answers.
Finny, I typed answers for months. I typed them at lunch and at night and on the bus, long ones, and then, after a while, I began deleting them, because sending them meant keeping something I’d already lost, and I didn’t know how to lose slowly. I only knew how to cut off.”
“You still do it,” I heard myself say. “The dots. They come up, and they die, and something short arrives instead. I’ve watched it for weeks.”
“I know,” he said. “I know you have.”
He looked down at the leaves between us.
“I’m in love with you,” he said to the leaves, and then he made himself lift his head and give it to me straight, and his voice didn’t perform it, didn’t decorate it, just carried it across the yard like a box he’d been holding too long.
“I’m in love with you, Finny. I’ve been in love with you since before I knew boys were allowed to be in love with boys.
There’s never been anyone else. Ten years, and there’s never been anyone else, not in any way that counts, and I need you to understand what that actually means about me, because it isn’t romantic.
It’s obsessive and intense. It’s a lot. It’s a lot to be on the other end of. ”
“Jesse.”
“I’m not done.” His hands stayed open. I watched them stay open.
“You should hear the rest before you look at me like that. I’m not…
reliable, Finn. I’m not like you. I don’t go around searching for my happily ever after because it already slipped out of my reach.
I don’t believe in destiny. Stars don’t align.
And at the end of the day, I’ll hurt you somehow, or I’ll disappear, or I’ll bore you to death.
Or, worst of all, I won’t do any of those things.
I’ll just be there, changing while you change.
And we’ll go on changing until the day we wake up next to each other, and neither of us knows the person we’re sleeping next to. And then I’ll lose you.”
“We’re the ones who put the stars where we want them,” I whispered, remembering the day in his bedroom that no longer existed. I would have shouted it, but my voice had lost all its power. “You won’t lose me.”
“You can’t know that.”
And the thing is, he was right.
So I went down there. Into it. I’d spent all fall refusing to, setting the question down like something sleeping, and now I picked it up and let it take me under, standing in my own yard with my breath showing.
I let myself see it his way. The morning he was so sure of.
Some gray future light, a bedroom I couldn’t picture, and a man beside me with Jesse’s hands and none of Jesse in them, a stranger wearing his face.
I made myself stay in it. I made myself see the other ones too, the ones he’d listed.
The phone that goes quiet again, and me, thirty instead of thirteen, checking it with the same stupid loyal thumb.
The slow one, the boring one, two people at a table with nothing left to argue about, not even a ghost runner.
I stood in that cold water and touched every one of them, all the endings he’d been living in since he was twelve, and I understood something I hadn’t let myself understand before, which is that he wasn’t making them up.
Any of them could happen. People changed.
Things ended. He wasn’t wrong about that.
He was just wrong about where we were standing.
Because I came back up, and my lungs took in October, and the world was still there.
All of it. The pile we’d built with two bad techniques, and the dog fogging the screen door, and the house full of people who’d rearranged their entire autumn to make me happy.
The man in front of me, wearing my spare gloves, with his ears going red, who had just spilled ten years across a yard because I’d asked him to.
There was so much. That was the finding, down there in the dark.
Not that the endings weren’t real. That everything else was real too, and there was so much more of it.
“You’re right,” I said. “I can’t know it. So here’s what I can do instead.”
He watched me.
“You won’t hurt me. Maybe you think you will, but I trust you more than you trust yourself.
You never hurt me because you wanted to see me cry, Jesse.
And I’m not going to promise you we won’t change.
We will. I’ll prove it. You fell for a kid who could name every star on your ceiling.
I can’t anymore. Half of them are gone. It was my whole personality, and it packed up and left sometime in high school, and I didn’t even notice the day it went.
” I took a step toward him. “Did you stop?”
His jaw worked. “No.”
“No. You loved me straight across a change and never even noticed it. You’ve already done the thing you’re afraid of.
You’ve been doing it for years, and you didn’t even know me.
” Another step. “And if your morning ever comes, if I really do wake up next to a stranger with your face, then I’ll do my favorite thing in the world twice.
I’ll introduce myself. I met you once already, and it was the best thing that ever happened to me, and I’d stand in line for it again. ”
He made a sound then, one syllable of a laugh with all the wiring exposed. A laugh that was a sob that was an explosion of relief.
“You’ve been betting on the ending for your whole life,” I said.
“That’s all that map is. It’s a betting slip.
And the worst part is, you always win, because things always end.
One way or the other, it’ll have to end.
So I want to make the other bet. Not forever.
I’m not asking you to promise me forever.
Only… Only our best. That’s the whole wager. We put in our best, and we find out.”
I was close enough now to see that his eyes had gone glassy, and his eyebrows creased in surprise or some distant frustration that tears would blur his vision. I was close enough that our breaths misted and mixed between us.
“Ten-year-olds have a technology for this,” I said, and I held up my little finger.
I thought he’d laugh. He didn’t laugh. He looked at my hand like I’d pulled something out of the ground, and for a second, I was sure I’d broken him, that I’d finally found the one dumb move too many. His whole face did something enormous over two inches of finger.
Then he closed the gap.
He did it slowly, the way you reach for something balanced on an edge. His pinky hooked mine, cold and sure, and he pulled our hands up between us and pressed his mouth to my knuckles and kept it there with his eyes shut.
“How long have you wanted to do that?” I asked, because his face had already told me the answer was older than I could imagine.
“A while,” he said into my hand.
“Deal?”
“Deal,” Jesse said, and his voice cracked on the single syllable, one small word needing to hold the weight of such a promise. He laughed at himself for it, wet and hoarse, and I laughed too, and neither of us let go. “Finny, I love you,” he said, finding his voice again.
“I love you too, Jes,” I said. “I really do.”
When he blinked, those glimmering tears rolled down his cheeks.
“You’re beautiful when you cry,” I whispered, echoing his words back to him.
“I’ll cry more often,” he replied.
And I took the last step that separated us, pulling him into my arms. “Don’t you dare.” My mouth found his, and I kissed him like it was the first time. I kissed him softly, lovingly, while the cool wind rustled the leaves behind us.
“Somebody earned his pile,” Jesse said after a moment.
Peanut came out of the house as soon as I pushed the door.
He crossed the grass in four strides, went airborne at the edge, and vanished.
The whole pile took him. Weeks of October closed over one dog, and for a heartbeat, the yard was still, and then he came up out of it, up through the leaves into the cold bright morning, wearing half our work and grinning the way only dogs and idiots in love know how.
The leaves he’d thrown were coming down around all three of us, taking their time, and we stood there hooked at the little finger and let them land where they wanted.