The couple is projecting. They’re assuming that my situation is their situation, when it couldn’t be more different. Poppy and I don’t know each other, not really. Assuming we actually get home tomorrow, we’ll go our separate ways and never see each other again.
And that uncomfortable feeling tightening my lungs isn’t regret.
It’s heartburn.
“We’re Pat and Terry,” she says, and the only way I know she’s Pat and he’s Terry is that she looks at him when she says his name.
“Oliver,” I say, although I never call myself Oliver. My dad and grandpa would bark “Ollie” so much that it should soundlike a curse word to me. Everyone on every team I was ever on would call me Fletch or Fletcher, and that always felt more like me. But over the last few years, since I stopped playing, I haven’t felt likeanyname was mine. Fletch works on the field, but off?—
I don’t know who I am any more than Poppy did. How did she peg me so quickly? How did she know I’m struggling with my identity when I didn’t realize it until right now?
She called meOliver.
My chest does something weird. Expands? Contracts? I don’t know. Oliver is the kind of name that feels like it should be earned, something I definitely haven’t done. Oliver Twist was so innocent and kind in the face of cruelty, while I’ve always been seething under the surface while maintaining a cold front.
Somehow, everyone I’ve ever known has had a sense that I don’t deserve to share a name with a character like him.
Until Poppy.
Pat and Terry are fighting over bites of everything they eat, as if one bite will taste so different from the other. It’s so … weird. Too playful for people who’ve been married so long. My grandma died when I was little, so I don’t know what Granddad’s relationship with her was. My parents get along fine, but they’ve never been affectionate. They’ve definitely never teased each other like this.
I hate this. I hate sitting around, talking to people. My knee bounces under the table. I should leave. So why am I still sitting here? Why am I so curious? Why am I burning to know how they’ve been married so long and still like each other? Why am I filled with a need to know about the fight that was just the beginning?
Maybe it’s because I’ll never see these two again. Or maybe it’s because Poppy and her incessant prattle broke a setting in me.
Or maybe—just maybe—I’ve been dying to let someone in for years.
I drink the rest of my hot chocolate. It’s lukewarm now, but I drain it and set the mug down too hard.
“So, Pat, Terry,” I say. “How did you keep your fight from being the end?”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
POPPY
Should I call my mom?
Or should I key Oliver’s car?
Decisions, decisions.
(Even if it weren’t a rental, I would never do something destructive, but I can think it, okay?)
With my hands stuffed into my pockets, and my feet making acrump-crumpsound on the dry, frozen ground, I walk the empty streets. And I stew. How could he say that about my dad? Why would he assault all of the best memories of my childhood, just to fit the narrative that everyone who messes up must deserve to rot in prison?
Some people don’t want to change, my mom’s voice reminds me.
For so long, I was sure she was wrong.
Now I’ve seen too much to feel that way.
But I can still wish.
Too soon, the sidewalk ends, and it’s just me and the lonely, icy wind. The direction I’m headed is nothing but snow and open space, so I look both ways (unnecessary, but I am who I am) and cross the road. I’m a few steps from the other side when the packed snow beneath my foot gives way. Where I expected road beneath the snow, there’s a pothole. I pitch forward and my foot rolls.
I go down hard.
My palms slap the ground too late, stinging. Icy powder fills my nose and lungs when I gasp. I push up as fast as I can and scramble to stand, but my ankle is throbbing, and a shock of cold seeps through my jeans at the knees.
