Chapter 30 Mae
“Your turn,” she says when they get back to their compartment after dinner. They’re in Utah now, and the sky is soft and pale, the mountains turning to silhouettes all around them. Hugo’s forehead is pressed to the window, where below them a narrow river runs placidly alongside the tracks.
He turns around in surprise. “Really?”
“Really.”
“But I thought you didn’t want me to be part of it.”
She studies him for a moment, the brown eyes and the dark hair, the way his mouth is twisted so that only one dimple shows.
The collar of his shirt is messed up, and for some reason this makes her heart swell.
She leans across to fix it, their faces close, her fingers brushing his neck, and then—unable to help herself—she gives him a quick kiss before sitting back again.
“I changed my mind,” she tells him.
His mouth twists in the other direction. “But why?”
“I don’t know. I guess I want to hear your answers.”
This isn’t exactly true, but it’s not exactly untrue either. And it makes him smile. “Well, Mr. Bernstein will be a tough act to follow,” he says. “Same with that teacher—June? She nearly had me in tears.”
“Nearly?” Mae asks, and Hugo reaches out to grab her around the waist, laughing as he pulls her down onto the seat with him.
She’s balanced awkwardly, half on his lap and half wedged beside him, but it doesn’t matter because he’s already kissing her, this time with a kind of desperate intensity.
When—after a few minutes—they break apart, both breathing heavily, he leans forward and kisses her one last time on the tip of her nose.
“So,” he says, shifting over so she can sit beside him, the two of them shoulder to shoulder on a seat meant for one. “Twenty-one hours to San Francisco.”
Mae feels the air go whistling right out of her. Suddenly that doesn’t seem like very much at all. “And then another sixteen till I leave for LA,” she says.
“And then another twenty-four till I go back to England.”
She puts her head on his shoulder, and he rests his chin on the top of her head. “It’s not enough.”
“No,” he says, his voice heavy, “it isn’t.”
She looks past him to where the last few wispy clouds are laced with gold.
Utah and then Nevada and then California.
She’s hardly thought about the fact that she’ll be starting college next week, that all she has to do is cross a few more states and head south along the coast and then she’s there, in the place where she’ll be spending the next four years.
“Your world is going to get so big,” Nana told her before she left, and Mae marvels at how much it already has, with Hugo here beside her and the enormous western sky rolled out ahead of them.
They spent the whole day doing interviews, and now her head is filled with stories, all of them buzzing madly.
She can’t wait to piece them together, all these lives that have intersected as they wind their way across the country for different reasons.
She was lying about Hugo, though.
It’s not that she’s changed her mind about interviewing him. She still doesn’t think he belongs in the film. It’s something else. Something more important than that.
It came to her earlier, when he was sitting on the other side of the table in the café car, his face nervous as he waited for the answer to a question he hadn’t even really been able to formulate.
Mae realized that no matter what happens over the course of these next twenty-one hours on a train and then sixteen hours in San Francisco, they’ll have to say goodbye at the end of it.
And she’s going to miss him.
It doesn’t seem like a big enough word, but it’s all there is: she’ll miss him. Already, and improbably, it feels like a hole has started to open in her chest. So she decided she wants to take something with her. If she can’t keep all of him, she at least wants to try capturing a tiny piece.
“How does this work, then?” Hugo asks, noticing her eyes are on the camera, which is sitting on the shelf beside the opposite seat. “Do I get the same questions as everyone else? Or do I get special ones because I’m so—”
“Annoying?” she asks with a grin.
He bumps his shoulder against hers. “I was going to say charming. But sure.”
“You get the same ones as everyone else.”
“You know,” he says, “if I were interviewing you—”
“Which you’re not.”
“—I’d never ask you the standard questions.”
“What would you ask?”
He thinks about this. “I’d ask you the best advice your nana ever gave you.”
“She said I should try to meet a cute boy on the train,” she says, and Hugo lets out a laugh.
“Did she really?” he asks, incredulous.
Mae nods.
“Well, she sounds extremely clever. I’d definitely want to hear more about her. And your parents too.”
“What about them?”
“What they’re like, how they met, what it was like growing up with two dads.”
She’s about to say what she always says to this question: It was lucky. The luckiest thing in the world. Because my dads are the greatest.
In the hallway, a door opens and voices call out to each other.
But in here it’s quiet, just the sound of their breathing and the roar of the train underneath it all.
They could be anywhere and nowhere, but they’ve somehow found themselves here, and she’s suddenly grateful for it, all of it, for the extra ticket and the way it brought them together despite everything, the bigness of the world and the unlikeliness of a moment like this.
Hugo is watching her with a look of such warmth that she’s reminded of Priyanka’s words. It’s like the sun, she said, in that it makes everything brighter and happier.
Mae knows her line too: You can get burnt by it.
But right now it doesn’t feel that way to her. Not at all.
She gives Hugo a rueful smile. “It was hard sometimes.”
“I’m sure.”
“Not because of them. They’re the best. But it’s a small town, and I was the only kid with gay parents.” She shrugs. “People can be jerks, you know?”
“I do, actually,” Hugo says, his face serious. “Though you seem pretty well equipped to handle that sort of thing.”
“Maybe,” she says. “But it can still sting. I remember one time my dad came to pick me up at school, and the new secretary wouldn’t let me leave with him because we don’t have the same last name.
It was awful. It didn’t matter that it’s my middle name, or that we look exactly alike, or that he’d picked me up a million times before.
She wouldn’t budge, so we just had to sit there in her office, both of us stewing, until Pop came to get us.
” She shakes her head. “Another time, I was at the playground with Pop and some kid came up and said he heard he’s not my ‘real’ dad.
As if biology is the only thing that counts. ”
“What did you do?” Hugo asks, his eyes big.
“I punched him in the stomach,” she says with a grin. “I was only six. But still. Not always as calm, cool, and collected as I probably should’ve been.”
“It can be hard to ignore that stuff.”
She nods. “Did you guys get teased a lot at school?”
“Not so much there. It helped that there were six of us. But you should see the comments section on my mum’s blog.” He whistles and shakes his head. “If you’ve ever wondered where the racist, sexist, antigrammar crowd likes to spend their time, look no further.”
“That’s horrible,” Mae says, alarmed, but he only shrugs.
“Mum’s not too fussed about them anymore, and neither are we. Not that I wouldn’t mind punching some of them in the stomach. But it’s easier to ignore than in real life.”
“Yeah, but they’re still out there.”
“They’re still out there,” he agrees, burying his nose in her shoulder. She takes one of his hands and begins to trace the lines of his palm, and she feels a rush of pleasure when he flips it over, capturing her hand inside his own.
“What about the blog?” she asks. “Do you read it?”
He laughs. “Not if I can help it.”
“I liked the one about how you and Alfie—”
“What,” he says with a groan, “you read it?”
“I mean, I wouldn’t say I’m a regular or anything, but I had to do my homework on you.”
He shakes his head, but one of his dimples has appeared, so she can tell he’s amused. “Which one was it? Alfie and I got up to a lot of trouble when we were little.”
“The story about you guys running away to London.”
“Right,” Hugo says, folding his arms across his chest. “That was Alfie’s idea.”
She was expecting him to laugh, but instead he looks somber.
“What?” she says, and he sighs.
“They rang me earlier, when you were doing interviews. Alfie told the others about the email from the university, and they were all planning to go plead my case tomorrow. Even George.”
“Wow,” she says, smiling at this. “That’s really cool of them.”
“I told them not to do it.”
She nods. “I figured.”
“I don’t want them to risk their own scholarships,” he says, rubbing his eyes. “And honestly, I can’t have them fight my battles. Not anymore.”
“I agree,” Mae says, looking at him carefully. “That’s why I think you should fight your own.”
“A letter won’t do anything,” he says in a tone impatient enough to signal he doesn’t want to argue with her. “I know you think this is a hangover, but it’s not. The truth is, I was drunk before. And now I’ve sobered up.”
“Right, but—”
“It wouldn’t have worked.” He stands abruptly, leaving Mae alone in the seat.
“I haven’t talked to my parents or done any research or even checked my bank account.
And now the council thinks I don’t want to be there, and I’m worried Alfie and the others will still go and talk to them and screw up their own scholarships, and the whole thing is just—”
“Hugo.”
He presses his lips together, his eyes darting. “It was a stupid idea.”
“Sometimes those can be good for you,” Mae says, smiling as she thinks of Nana. But Hugo’s mouth is still a straight line. “So, what…you’re just gonna go home at the end of this?”
“Yes,” he says, sitting down again in the opposite chair. “I’m just going home at the end of this.”
They stare at each other, neither quite satisfied. A tense silence hangs between them until, finally, Hugo points to the camera.
“We’ve lost the plot a bit with this interview, haven’t we?” he asks, his voice full of effort. When she doesn’t say anything, he leans forward, drumming his hands on the little table. “Shall I ask you about something less controversial?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know,” he says, cracking a grin. “Ex-boyfriends?”
Mae gives him a look.
“As assistant director, my job is to get the most thorough interview possible.”
“Wasn’t I supposed to be interviewing you?”
“Are you really not going to tell me?”
“Honestly,” she says, “there’s not much to tell. I was dating someone over the summer, but it wasn’t anything serious. It wasn’t anything like—”
She stops, embarrassed. But Hugo’s face lights up so quickly and so brightly that she can’t help smiling too.
“There were a few others before that,” she continues, still distracted by the high beam of his gaze. “But none of them meant anything. I guess maybe they did at the time, but not anymore. They were just fun.”
He raises his eyebrows. “And this?”
“This is no fun at all,” she says. It’s intended as a joke, but Hugo gives her a pained look, and it takes a few seconds for the meaning to settle over Mae too.
This is no fun at all, she realizes, because it’s about to come to an end.