Chapter 6
Noelle
ONE YEAR LATER
“Ishouldn’t be this nervous seeing a friend.”
“A friend, huh?” Mom brushes blush onto my cheeks. She insisted on helping me get ready for dinner with Leif tonight.
Butterflies dance in my stomach. “He is just a friend. We haven’t talked in a year. I don’t think you can be friends with someone you’ve only seen a handful of times, let alone more than friends.”
“You don’t go on dates with friends, Noelle!”
“Mom. It’s not a date.” I’m really trying hard to remember that. “We haven’t even exchanged phone numbers.”
Over the living room speaker, Nat King Cole’s The Christmas Song comes on. Mom closes her eyes, inhaling happily. It’s one of her favorites.
“He has our landline,” she argues.
“That’s just because Dad’s friends with his grandfather. You know, I knew I should have called one of my high school friends to help me get ready.”
Mom picks a lipstick from my cosmetic bag on the coffee table. “Didn’t you say they all have babies?”
I sigh. “They do.” All my friends from high school are either married or married with kids.
Meanwhile I’m single by choice right now.
Kind of. Until recent developments, work dried up after that last show, so I had to get a job with a catering company to pay the rent.
Between work and the auditions, I’m too tired to think about dating.
“Maybe you might be less tired if you didn’t stay up all night reading mystery novels like an old lady,” my roommate keeps telling me.
“Hey did you read the latest Lacey Piper novel?” I ask Mom now.
“Oh my gosh, yes!” Mom says as she brushes on eyeshadow. We chat for a bit about our latest reads. I know my roommate’s right. I could be more social. But mystery novels are how I relax and destress. Besides, I don’t want to meet anyone new. And now with my big show, I really won’t have time.
“Press your lips together,” Mom says. She hands me the mirror.
She did an amazing job.
“You could have had a great career as a makeup artist,” I joke.
Mom smiles, and I cringe inwardly for suggesting it, since it’s acting-adjacent.
Mom was once an actor, like me. She stopped when they moved here from Burlington.
Then she got pregnant with my brother Dan.
She never went back to work because of Dad’s erratic hours at work.
But I know that’s not the whole story. No one dreams about giving up their dreams, do they?
“That would have been nice,” she says, taking my joke seriously. “But we never had much of a theater scene here in Quince Valley.”
I don’t mention that there are other places to do makeup.
“I wish there had been a theater here at all,” I tell Mom now. Maybe then you wouldn’t have had to give it all up.
And maybe then I wouldn’t have put so much pressure on myself to succeed.
My thoughts must be evident on my face, because Mom smiles at me, her expression a little bittersweet. “Would you have stayed in town if we had a theater here?”
I answer her question with my own. “Would you have acted if we did?”
I picture Mom’s yearbook photos, which I looked at every night as a teenager, especially on nights when she seemed exhausted or lonely when Dad was out of town.
There was a quote next to a photo of Mom playing Juliet, right under where it said MOST LIKELY TO BE A brOADWAY STAR “You only get one life! Make a wish and make it count.”
Mom smiles. “Oh honey. That was an old dream.”
Would I have stayed in Quince Valley if I could have been a performer here? Before last year, the answer would have been absolutely not. My goal had always been to go all the way. I owed it to my mom and myself to do that. But I’ve found myself missing home lately, at least a little.
Leif’s face flashes in my mind. It’s ridiculous—he doesn’t even live here.
I miss Quince Valley sometimes only because I miss going into the shops and people remembering my name.
Getting a flat tire and having literally fifteen people stop and insist they fix it for you instead of having to wait for help.
But it was the feel of him last year on that balcony too, how close he stood to me, how genuine his smile was. How it felt like the happiest reunion, even though the night I met him capped off one of the worst days of my life. I’m just conflating the feelings of him with being home.
“I was always going to go to New York,” I tell Mom.
Mom smiles. “I actually find that reassuring. Means I was always going to lose you to the big city. And I couldn’t be more proud.”
Mom beams and I give her a huge hug.
“Thanks,” I say, my chest tight.
The sharp trill of the landline rings in the kitchen. I jump up. “I’ll get it.”
But the ringing cuts short.
Shit. Dad and my older brother Dan, a video game designer, are playing some action game that Dan’s company just released in Dad’s man cave. There’s a phone extension in there, too, and if my dad picks up…
I sprint for the kitchen, but as I pass by their door, I hear a falsely deep voice booming, “What exactly are your intentions with my daughter?”
I freeze, my stomach dropping.
“Dan, get the hell off the phone!”
I may be 28 years old, but whenever we’re home, Dan and I still have the dynamic we did when we were teenagers.
When I pick up the extension in the kitchen I put on my best angry sister voice. “Dan!”
“Uh, I—” the voice on the other end of the line stutters.
My older brother reverts to his regular voice. “Sorry man, just messing with you.”
“DAN!”
He hangs up.
“Hello?” I say the word tentatively even though I know who it is.
“Hey.”
My heart patters in my chest. It’s not just Dan. All of this is making me feel like a teenager again.
I grin as Leif’s voice sends a shimmer of warmth over me. I need to grow up, but for the moment, I sink into the feel of him.
“Sorry about my brother,” I say. “I don’t think he matured past fifteen. It’s some kind of condition.”
Leif laughs and the sound makes me close my eyes and lean back against the wall.
“Well, my grandfather’s 83 and he snort-laughed when he heard me say, ‘I’m sorry Mr. Pritchard, sir’,” Leif says.
“Okay, I would have loved to hear that too.”
“Well, I just called to say I’m leaving my Grandpa’s place now. I’ll be there in five.”
“See you soon.”
After he hangs up, I stand there a moment, my back to the kitchen wall, the receiver cradled against my chest. Then the sounds of the action game grow louder, and Dan appears, wearing one of two Santa hats mom stuck on our heads when she picked us up at the airport yesterday.
Dan waggles his brows at me as he heads for the fridge. “How’s your boyfriend?”
I roll my eyes, hanging up the phone. “He’s a friend.”
“You get Mom to help you put makeup on for all your friend hangouts?”
I scowl, grabbing the beer he’s pulled out of the fridge from his hand. I crack it and take a sip.
“Never seen someone need liquid courage to hang out with a friend either.”
“Shut up.” I hand him back the beer.
“You’re welcome.”
“Thank you.”
“It’s okay to be interested in someone new, you know,” Dan says with uncharacteristic seriousness. “From what I hear he’s better than that dipshit Patrick.”
I laugh. “The bar is low.”
Dan hands me the beer again, but I shake my head. “Not good form to show up tipsy to a date.” At his look, I glare. “Friend date. But even if we were more than that, it’s not like there’s any future for us. Our lives have us attached to the opposite sides of the country.”
“Nothing wrong with an occasional hookup.”
I roll my eyes. “What a very dude thing to say.”
But I consider his words. Could that be Leif and me?
That seal’s already been broken. But last year felt different than just meeting up with an old hookup.
We hung out a few more times after that first night at his grandmother’s book club.
Coffee one afternoon, a trip to the market the next day, even though he confessed he’d already been.
Each time felt magical, but slightly awkward too. We ended each visit with an awkward hug.
“I feel like we’re in a weird space that’s more than friends but more than hookups, too. But also not even that.”
Dan pulls a cheese plate out of the fridge that Mom said was not to be touched until tomorrow.
I take it from him and put it back.
“You don’t have to figure it all out ahead of time, you know,” Dan says, pulling it out again. “Nerd.”
The doorbell rings and Dan grins. “Hark! What’s that I hear?”
Shit. Five minutes goes fast. “Don’t you dare!”
After a two-second wrestling match, Dan tosses me aside and beats me to the door. “Hey—” he says.
I run up behind him, a little breathless.
My heart flies into my throat.
I told myself I was building him up in my memory, but I wasn’t. Not at all. Leif is so tall, and handsome in that fur-lined coat he must keep here since he can’t need it in California.
Those deep brown eyes practically stab me in the heart.
“Wait,” Dan says, “Do you work at NASA?”
“I do,” Leif says. He shakes my brother’s hand, but his eyes dart quickly back to me.
For a moment, under his gaze, I can’t breathe. Then I register what Dan said. “You do?”
“Yeah. I’m interning,” Leif says. “Also, hey, Noelle.”
Hearing him say my name makes me all warm inside. “Leif. You look…warm.” I cringe.
But Leif grins. “I am. Sort of. It’s freezing out here.”
I go to move, but Dan’s staring at Leif like an overgrown fanboy. My brother’s a huge nerd, and not in the way Leif is. Besides his video game stuff, he follows all these science blogs. He must have seen Leif on some news article or blog. “Hey, uh, do you want to come in?” he asks.
“No,” I say to Dan. “My jacket’s right here.” I grab it from the hook behind the door and pull it on while practically jumping into my boots. I brush past my brother and take Leif’s arm.
“Wait!” Dan calls.
I grimace.
But he just looks at Leif and says, “That study on botany at zero gravity was fucking awesome.” Then he smiles at me and says, “Have a good time.”
I’m so stunned, all I can do is laugh.