Sam
On the afternoon of the accident, Ari’s ride home is late.
Ari squints at the curtains of water pouring down over the entrance’s overhang. “You don’t have to hang around,” he tells her. “I’ll get picked up soon.”
Ari nods down the main corridor. “There’s a spot at the back of the library where we can wait.”
“Lead the way.”
He smiles at her, and it lights up her whole heart.
How tall he’s grown this year, like a plant that has suddenly taken root.
When he passes through the hall at school now, eyes always flicker to him, but he always looks shyly down, as if he can’t bear the growing attention.
She has seen the way girls crane their necks and straighten their hair, the way boys either linger feverishly on his face or pick on him out of spite.
It prickles the envy in her heart, although she isn’t sure if it’s because she wants him to herself or because she wishes she were him.
What’s it like, to be so noticed? Why does she even care?
They head inside through the emptying corridors until they step past the double doors leading into the library.
Here, in a corner, is a tiny nook made by two adjoining shelves, a bit of carpet that ends against glass windows facing the empty visitor’s lot, the wet pavement outside stained with a carpet of leaves and rose petals.
“You come here often?” she asks him as he settles into the nook and pulls out a notebook.
He nods. “Lunch period.”
She scoots in beside him, and they sit together in silence.
From here, they get a view of rows of flat-roofed bungalows behind the jacarandas, all fading into the blue mist of rain.
Her eyes drift to his notebook and his elegant hands.
He’s drawing a picture of the closest car to them, sketching in a patch of dripping orange poppies growing by the tires with long, efficient strokes.
She didn’t know he could draw so well, and she adds it to her growing list of mysteries about him.
Maybe the strange black car that picks him up every day takes him to an art class?
“Ari,” she says. “You’re really good.”
He glances at her through his lashes, smiles, and looks back down. “Just an easy view to draw.”
He doesn’t sound like he wants to dwell on it, so she gets too shy to ask him about where he goes every afternoon. She just nods and says, “This is a good spot.”
“I’m good at finding hideouts.”
“You have other ones?”
“Sure.” She gets lost for a moment in his eyes. “I found one last week, down in the South Bay. There’s a secret beach there. You have to go through a tangle of bushes, but once you’re there, you’re by yourself.”
“You like being by yourself.”
“Don’t you?”
She doesn’t answer, because she’s not sure. She likes it only when she is the one choosing it. “Speaking of being alone,” she says. “Library’s closing soon. They’re going to kick us out if they see us here.”
“Ah,” Ari replies, glancing idly toward the entrance. “Maybe no one’ll notice.”
“You?” Sam laughs a little. “Not a chance. Everyone pays attention to you.”
She says it automatically, like a truth, but he smiles and looks away, his cheeks flushing, and she realizes with a start that it might have come off as flirting. Her heart jumps in panic, her own cheeks turn pink, and she starts to shake her head.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean—I wasn’t trying to make you uncomfortable.”
“It’s okay,” he says. “I didn’t mind.”
She looks back out at the rain. “It must be nice, to be noticed all the time.”
Ari turns to her. After a moment, he puts down his pencil and holds out his hand so that his palm faces up.
Sam stares at it. And as if she knows what to do, she instinctively presses her own palm down on his.
A shiver dances through her. She realizes that she’s never touched a boy’s hand before, but it’s too late to withdraw now.
And besides, he feels nice, his skin smooth and warm.
There’s something comforting in this touch, as if he knows her and she knows him, and they are the only two people in the world who understand each other.
Ari uses his other hand to trace a circle against the skin of her hand, then a dot in the center of it. The nape of her neck tingles with pleasure. She looks questioningly at him.
“It means perfection,” he says. “It means, I like you the way you are, Sam.”
She smiles, a lump in her throat, her heart tentatively unfurling, and commits to memory every exquisite detail of this moment—their faces tinted blue-gray by the storm light, the warmth of his palm, the feeling of his finger gliding against her hand—so that someday, she can pull the memory off the shelves in her mind and revisit it as if nothing has changed, as if they had a chance to go on like this forever.
When she finally arrives home later that afternoon, still giddy and lightheaded from Ari’s words, she sees two police officers standing outside her front door. She stops in her tracks. Her breath catches in her throat. The joy warming her stomach cools into dread.
“What’s happened?” she asks them. “Is my mom in trouble?”
One of the policemen just sighs and searches for the right words to say.
The official report states that Mandarin Palace Chinese Food’s kitchen had a gas leak from corroded piping that had been ignored for years.
A lit cigarette set off a blast that rocked the street.
It is all over the local news. Every newscast about it ends with a general public warning that “gas line maintenance is essential!”
At least her mother survived. There is nothing left of Hayes from the explosion.
Half of her mother’s body is covered in a lattice of burns, angry and red and weeping, that lace up her chin and down her thighs.
Even so, she left the hospital after only a week in order to avoid accruing more bills, spending the rest of her recovery time writhing restlessly at home, their apartment filled with the smell of singed flesh, aloe, honey, and oil diluted from egg yolk.
“What about your pain?” Sam asks. She can’t help hovering around her mother, worrying over the fearsome wounds. Her eyes are perpetually red from crying. “What about the hospital bills?”
“You don’t need to worry about that,” her mother says. She slaps her daughter’s arm in irritation. “Go fetch the yolk and put some on my wrist.”
At school, Sam drifts through her classes, barely touches her lunches, fades into herself.
Are you okay? Ari asks her in a letter.
The worry in his eyes is nearly unbearable to her, and she almost writes down everything to him in return, desperate to spill the pain in her chest onto the paper for him to see.
But at the last moment, she feels a panic at being so seen, a dread at centering herself.
It is not that she doesn’t think their problems deserve attention—only that her problems don’t.
They have never discussed anything personal in their letters before, have never asked each other for help.
And the fear of being the first to apply such a stress test to their bond, the thought of potentially losing her only friend by airing all her pain to him, is so potent that she can’t bring herself to do it.
So she only tells him that something happened to her mother. “But don’t worry,” she says immediately as they walk in the hall between classes. “Everything’s okay now.” And then she hurries away as the bell rings, unable to meet his eyes.
So their letters return to their usual topics, a sprawl of vague questions and random musings.
Did you watch that special on ABC about the teen who ran away from home, and have you ever read Watership Down and do you think it’s changed your opinion about rabbits, and what’s your favorite food in the world, and why do people have different palates, and what would you do with a billion dollars?
They talk about everything except what’s important, and as the letters go on, the unsaid digs deeper between their words, until Sam feels like she is writing bridges across a widening ravine.
Ari is careful not to ask again, but he does bring her little gifts.
A caramel he’d saved from the cafeteria.
A sketch of her profile illuminated by the sun.
A pretty rock, sapphire blue, worn smooth by the ocean.
Each thing feels like a quiet check-in. I’m thinking of you.
I hope you’re okay. I wish I could do more.
She keeps his sketch on a shelf of her desk at home, and puts the rock in her pocket, carrying it around like a good luck charm.
Her mother sits at the kitchen table early in the morning and late at night, filling out job applications online.
Sam sees her occasionally emerge from a neighbor’s apartment with a bucket of detergent and scrubbers, having cleaned a home for twenty bucks.
She applies for work in restaurants, motels, theaters, office buildings.
Her English isn’t good enough for the call center.
Her face is too scarred for the grocery register; she might frighten the customers.
Her injuries make her too slow at washing dishes in a kitchen.
Sam can always tell when the interviews don’t pan out.
She comes home from school and sees her mother already back, curled on the couch and staring blankly at the TV, face drawn and tired, ignoring Sam so wholly that it seems like she’s unaware Sam is there at all.
Sam’s stomach hurts all the time from worrying.
She tries to have dinner on the table for her mother when she’s too exhausted to cook, makes sure her mother eats something, endures her mother’s increasingly volatile temper, tells herself it’s not her mother’s fault that she forgets to tell Sam when she’s coming home late.
Sam looks around their neighborhood for jobs she can apply to, although her mother is vehemently against her taking on anything that might cut into her studies.