Chapter 7 Daisy #2
“Oh.” I blush again. Either I misread him and I was wrong, or I read him right, but he sensed it and pivoted quickly. In which
case, that’s kind of impressive. “Um, yeah. She’s a Holliday, too. Our dads were brothers.”
“Were? Pretty sure once you’re someone’s brother you don’t stop.”
“Well, my dad did stop. You know, being alive.”
“Oh, shit.” He puts his palm on his forehead. “I knew that. I just forgot for a second. Sorry. I’m a dickhead.”
“No, that’s okay. I mean, it’s not like I was wearing a sign.”
He shakes his head. “Nah, I should’ve remembered that. I knew that about Georgia. And you’re her sister. So, obviously.”
“I think the fact that I’m Georgia’s little sister has been well-established by this point.”
He turns to me, as if uncertain—and actually caring—what my tone is. As if the possibility that I could be annoyed with him
has finally crossed his mind. “Georgia who? Oh, you mean Daisy’s Sister?”
I roll my eyes again, but I can’t help smiling.
He smiles back, and then I hear it: that soft, low laugh. It is, I have to be honest with myself, an extremely sexy laugh.
Before he can say anything else, my phone pings. “Speak of the devil,” I say, opening up the text from Georgia. I sigh. “She can’t get here for half an hour. She’s supposed to pick me up. Maybe I’ll wander back to the kiosk and get a soda.”
“Want me to give you a lift? I was gonna head out anyway,” Mateo says, standing up and grabbing his tennis bag.
“Oh, I mean—” I pause, oddly nervous all of a sudden. Then I force myself to spit out: “Sure. Yeah. That would be great!”
Mateo drives an old Ford Focus with cords dangling out of the console (the Bluetooth doesn’t work, he explains) and sweaty
tennis gear thrown in the back. Getting into his car gives me a fluttery, nervous feeling. Sure, he’s one of Rhys’s best friends,
but I barely know him—it’s not like I often tag along with Georgia when she hangs with Rhys in Connecticut. Some obscure indie
rock comes out of the speakers when he starts the car, which just adds to the air of intimidation.
“I was gonna see if that record store in town is open,” he says as we drive along the winding back roads toward the other
side of the lake. “We walked by it Saturday but didn’t go in. Wanna come? Or I can drop you off first.”
“Oh!” I say awkwardly. He’s inviting me to hang out? I guess it makes sense. With Rhys in the city, he must be a little bored.
“You mean Record Time? Yeah, I think they’d be open. Sure, I’ll go. Nothing better to do,” I add with a shrug, because I don’t
want to seem eager.
I don’t know if I even am eager. I mean, Mateo is cute and, let’s face it, a little mysterious. But then, in the back of my mind, there’s Owen, and the rumor, and the kiss. Am I making too much of it, or is there something there? How am I supposed to know?
It gets quiet in the car, just the sound of a female singer whisper-whining the lyrics to something angry but also somehow
relaxing. “Who is this?” I ask.
“Cat Power,” he says. “You don’t know her?”
“Oh yeah, no, now I recognize it,” I lie.
He asked me to hang out but he’s not exactly the world’s most active conversationalist. So, I lean back in the passenger seat
and just let the trees whiz past our window as the music lulls me into a kind of trance.
We go to Record Time and I try not to seem like I’m just following Mateo around, but I don’t really know what to browse for.
He holds up a few dusty records and reads the back, then replaces them. We do this for about fifteen or twenty minutes and
then he just kind of shrugs.
“Not much I’m into here,” he says, and for some reason, I can’t help but feel insulted. Like he’s saying he finds all of Laurel
Lake—people included—lacking.
“Well, it is a small town,” I say defensively. “The variety of used records is going to be a bit limited.”
“It’s all good,” he says casually, mopping his hair out of his eyes. “Should we just wander around?”
I shrug. “Okay. There’s a vintage store that’s kind of cool,” I tell him.
He simply nods, and now it’s my turn to lead as we head out of the store and down the block toward Best Threads. And then it’s his turn to stand around while I browse racks of old band T-shirts. For someone apparently into music, he doesn’t seem to care for music paraphernalia.
“Nothing interesting for you here, either?” I ask him, trying to act casual. What will break this guy?
“Not really into clothes.”
“Okayyy. Should we just head ho—”
“But I could go for a milkshake. The food at the club sucks,” he adds.
Even though I only started working there today, and sort of agree with his broad assessment, I still find it a bit rude.
“There’s that diner on the corner.”
“Yeah,” he says.
So, we walk to the diner. On the way, I get a text from Georgia: where are you? and I text back that I’m hanging out with Mateo in town. She likes the message. That’s nice of you, she writes back.
What I don’t tell her is that this is the weirdest hangout I’ve ever been on. I can’t help but assume if Mateo had literally
anyone other than me to spend time with, he wouldn’t be bothering to trail around town with me acting all world-weary.
“Hang on,” I say as we walk past a mailbox. “I’m just going to drop something off.” I unzip my backpack and pull out my book.
The postcard to Owen goes fluttering out onto the sidewalk, and Mateo bends down to pick it up. “What’s this?”
I grab it from him hastily. “Nothing! Just a postcard for my friend.”
He raises an eyebrow. “You have a pen pal? That’s cute.”
I blush, partly wondering if he can psychically intuit my weird, uncertain, maybe-something-maybe-nothing Owen situation,
and partly because he sort of just called me cute.
At the diner, we sit at the counter; I get a strawberry milkshake, and he gets a chocolate hazelnut malt.
“My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard,” I say, sort of to no one.
If Owen were here, he’d probably respond with something like “my snack-like bod brings attractive prospects to my place of
residence,” and we would both try to outdo each other by butchering the phrase further.
But Mateo says nothing to this. I clear my throat and look at his order. “I didn’t know anyone drank malts,” I say, scrambling
for any semblance of conversation at this point. “Seems like an old-man order.”
Mateo nods and slurps. “They’re really good. My dad used to get these for me and him. Got me hooked young. Wanna try?”
I take a sip through his straw, which feels strangely intimate. “Oh wow. Super sweet, but decent. I can see why young Mateo
was influenced.”
He half grins and shakes his head. “I was influenced by everything my dad said and did. That was before I realized he was
a lying dick.”
“Oh.”
“I’m sure you’ve heard all about it. Everyone has.” He takes another long, contemplative slurp.
“Heard about what?” I drink my strawberry shake, having no idea what he’s talking about.
“My dad. The prison thing.”
“What!” I nearly choke on a chunk of strawberry.
“My whole town knows. It’s such a cliché. Like, do a real crime at least. Then I’d have some respect.”
“What did he do?” I ask, starting to sweat slightly. Have I just been casually hanging out with the son of an axe murderer?
“Embezzling, mostly. Boring white-collar crap,” he says with a shrug.
I nod, acting like I totally get it, while secretly processing the shock. Call me sheltered, but the only people I know who’ve
had altercations with the law are kids from my town who get caught driving after drinking a couple of beers.
I sneak a look at his profile. “That . . . sucks. I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
He nods again. “No worries. Nothing as bad as your dad thing. Did him dying really mess you up?”
Once again, I’m taken aback by the way he can flip from apathy to such an intense, personal question. But I roll with it,
happy to have something to talk about at least.
“To be honest, yeah, it did,” I tell him.
“My grades were destroyed the rest of that year. It was just so hard to feel motivated by anything, you know? And I hated that everybody pitied me. I know they meant well, but it made me feel like even when I was doing okay, I sort of had to pretend to be grieving, or, like, I had to be ashamed of the good days. And I was already ashamed of the bad days.” I stir the pink, frothy ice cream in my glass.
“Starting high school helped—I could start over. People still knew about it, but it became a thing of the past, not a thing of the present, if that makes sense.”
He nods. “It totally does, Daisy.” My eyebrows shoot upward. It’s the first time he’s called me by my actual name. “People
love to speculate,” he goes on, looking down into his glass. “But they can’t possibly get what’s going on inside you. And
they don’t have to know. You don’t owe them anything.”
“Yeah, that’s true.” I stare at him. I can tell he’s talking about me, but also about himself. I realize that I’ve been expecting
him to be more sociable, to act a certain way, but I really have no idea how he’s feeling or what he’s going through. Living
up here with a friend’s family for the summer when that friend isn’t even going to be around much says something about his
choices—or lack of them.
His malt is almost finished; he put it away fast, but that doesn’t surprise me. Tall, active guys built like him can eat about
a thousand calories a second. It does surprise me when he says, “These are on me.”
“You really don’t have to,” I say, but he throws a twenty on the counter.
“Yes, I do. You’re saving me from feeling like a total loser, and that is very much worth the cost of your milkshake.”
“You’re not a loser.”
At this, he simply shrugs. But then he turns to me and smiles, and it changes his face completely. “I guess I’m not so bad,
am I?”
My heart hammers in my chest. Because in this moment, with this hot older guy grinning at me like we’re in on some joke together, I can’t help but agree. He really isn’t so bad. In fact, maybe I’m starting to get him.