Sobered by this thought, Sam decides it’s best to step away from the computer, and technology at large. What the situation calls for is Sam being visible, and friendly, and waving to passing customers who might be on the fence about stopping in. There’s a large photo of his grandparents right across from the door: his grandmother, who started the place, is sitting on his grandfather’s lap just in front of the register, obviously laughing. Sam inherited her sharp cheekbones and aquiline nose, not to mention his grandfather’s athletic build and dark, unruly hair;any time he stands in front of the photo, someone passing comments on the resemblance.
So that’s Sam’s best move right now: being present. Generally reminding everyone that this is a family place, one that has been here for generations, and they don’t need to take their advice from some snotty douchebag on the internet who’s proven he can’t be trusted.
As if to punctuate this thought, the bell on the front door goes off. From the direction of the walk-in, he hears Joey yell, “Can someone grab that? I’m halfway through refilling the mac salad,” and Sam jumps up, energized.
“I got it,” he calls back, already hurrying towards the front. He’s glancing around as he walks towards the counter, mostly trying to make sure he doesn’t bump into anyone who might also have answered Joey’s summons, so he only takes in the vague shape of someone standing in front of the register. He starts talking as he approaches, the patter so familiar as to be second nature: “Hi there, welcome to Silverman’s! What can I get for?—”
“Jesus Christ.” The voice is shocked and so obviously strained that it pulls Sam’s focus back to center at once. His gaze wrenches forward to the waiting customer and…
… freezes, just like the rest of him, as he realizes exactly who he’s looking at.
Jake Thompson, of all people, is staring back at him from the other side of the counter.
TWO
THEN: SEPTEMBER, FOURTEEN YEARS AGO
The tech booth in the Horseshoe Heights High School auditorium was small, cramped, and poorly lit. It was about the only part of the building that was. Since starting classes there a month before, Sam had discovered that nearly everything about his new school looked like it had been ordered out of a catalog called “Fancy Furnishings for Rich Educators.” The classrooms, the teachers, and the students themselves all seemed to gleam as though polished to a high shine.
Even the manual for the light board, when Sam finally found it in the back of a filing cabinet, looked as though it had been well-maintained. Some previous member of the student stage crew had taken the time to tab the relevant pages, and Sam, flipping through them, was impressed and amazed to realize that not a single tab had a rude drawing on it. Not one.
All of this was atypical of Sam’s experience of schools, which was both vast and unfortunate. By age sixteen, Sam had been enrolled as a student in six different area districts, moved around as his parents’ medical careers dictated. The moves had slowed down somewhat after David and Mara both finished their residencies and had the triplets, but HHHS was still Sam’ssecond high school. His first one, not to mention both middle and all three elementary schools, had taught him a lot.
Most of what they’d taught him was that he was a weirdo and a loser who was never going to fit in anywhere. At sixteen, it felt like hard truth.
So when his parents had cracked a bottle of champagne and told him that they were moving to glitzy, expensive Horseshoe Heights, Sam had come up with a plan. He hadn’t managed to make friends in far less hoity-toity school districts than this one, so he obviously couldn’t rely on the strength of his personality alone. He’d just…try to be a little cooler, that was all. A little more dangerous, enough to balance out the ways people seemed to find him boring. It wouldn’t be lying, exactly. It was more of a Fake-It-’Til-You-Make-It situation, at least in concept.
In practice, however, itwaslying. This was because full-on, flat-out lying turned out to be the only waytomake himself look cool. Without the lies he was still the same old Sam who spent most of his spare time reading or making up imagination games to play with his little sisters. The same old Sam who could manage a conversation with any adult, but never seemed able to pick up the rhythm with people his own age.
New Sam could pick up that rhythm. New Sam knew how to do all kinds of things, and within a month, any student at HHHS would have been able to tell you so. New Sam could ride a motorcycle, and hotwire a car, and get in touch with at least four different high-profile musical artists. He’d been to seven countries and two jails, and could tell you how to navigate through each. He had never yet encountered a test he couldn’t cheat on.
It was a shame, really, that all his claimed knowledge wasn’t possessed by Actual Sam, sitting within and watching himself tell whopper after whopper to his new classmates. He was the one who had to suffer the consequences of, for example, theseries of lies that led him to the tech booth on that particular afternoon.
First he’d lied to his parents. He’d told them he’d try out for the school musical to get them to stop insisting he sign up for an extracurricular. Then his father had offered to drop him off at the Saturday morning audition call on the way to his squash game. Sam had no choice but to go into the building and try to find something less embarrassing to do than mangling an innocent song in front of his classmates.
He’d been happy to encounter the HHHS Stage Crew, who dressed all in black as Sam already did, and ideally never sang at all. They asked him if he’d ever done stage crew before, and he lied; they asked him if he’d ever used a light board before, and he lied; they asked where he’d used light boards in the past and a story poured out of him about a series of raves he’d helped run. He had, in fact, never attended a rave—he’d pulled the entire tale from an episode of a terrible television show—but this seemed to convince them.
It would not occur to Sam until well into adulthood to wonder if they’d found this convincing because they, too, had never been to any raves. If he had, he might have found exactly the acceptance he was seeking in that collection of bright, offbeat teenagers.
Instead, he’d broken into the tech booth after school in hopes of teaching himself to use the damn light board before anyone worked out he was a liar. Now he flicked through the manual desperately and, praying that there weren’t any adults in this part of the building, followed the instructions to turn up the main stage lights.
As if on cue, he heard the backstage door slam open. Sam froze with his hand still over the board, sure it was a teacher and deciding on some deep internal level that trouble followed thesame rules as the T. rex inJurassic Park: If he didn’t move, it couldn’t find him.
But, to his surprise, a boy stepped out onto the stage. His narrow face was loosely familiar to Sam. They didn’t have any classes together, but Sam was pretty sure the guy was in his grade, and that his name was Jake. Sam had seen him hanging around amongst the upper echelons of the Popular Kids. Jake—assuming that really was his name—didn’t have to beg for scraps of attention through unearned notoriety the way Sam did. Everything about him seemed to suggest he’d belong anywhere he was, without even needing to try.
Jake didn’t seem to notice that the stage lights were on and shouldn’t have been. Or, at least, the lighting didn’t stop him from taking his shoes off and stepping out of his sweatpants to reveal a pair of skintight leggings worn beneath them. Without putting his shoes back on, he did a series of lithe, graceful stretches, pulling his long limbs into a variety of shapes, his thigh and calf muscles clearly visible under the clinging Lycra. Sam found this…upsettingly hard to look away from. It went on for nearly fifteen minutes before Jake straightened up, cracked his back, pulled a pair of battered-looking slippers from his bag, and slid them onto his feet.
Then Jake began to dance, and Sam forgot to worry about looking away, or learning how to use the light board, or anything else. He just leaned forward on his elbows and watched.
Sam didn’t know enough about dance to have a real sense of what he was looking at. All he could tell was that it was ballet, and that Jake wasincrediblygood at it. This last point would be obvious even to a toddler. Or a dog. Or an alien who’d never heard of dancing before. Jake moved across the stage so fluidly that he seemed almost to be a marionette, spun around and lifted high into the air as if on invisible strings. And if therewassome hidden puppeteer moving Jake around, then they had agenerous grip on the capabilities of the human body. It almost looked, in certain moments, as though Jake was flying.
There wasn’t any music, at least not any that Sam could hear. Jake was wearing headphones, an iPod shuffle clipped onto the band of his leggings, so whatever was playing was audible only to him. It didn’t matter. As Jake leaped and whirled, carving sweeping arcs into the air and then pinioning himself down into intricate steps on the tips of his toes, a story seemed to move with him. It was almost as though he was two people instead of one, the emotion radiating out not only from his face but, in a way Sam couldn’t begin to understand, his movements.
Sam realized somewhere around the two-minute mark that it was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. Not just the dancing, but Jake himself: his long-limbed grace and the joy that radiated from him, enveloping Sam from across the auditorium. He moved as though the laws of physics were only guidelines, with which he could disagree at will.
After a few more minutes, Jake lifted his arms in a long, smooth motion as he leaped and his shirt lifted, too, exposing a glimpse of bare skin, toned abdominal muscles. Sam found his mouth suddenly bone-dry. His palms were sweating.
He was surprised to find himself standing up, moving towards the door in the side of the tech booth. As if pulled by one of the invisible strings that he’d imagined carrying Jake through the air, Sam hurried down the stairs into the auditorium on light feet. He sucked in a breath when he stepped out among the empty seats, and then immediately became transfixed again by the performance in front of him. His feet moved of their own accord, taking one step after another, until he was close enough to the stage to see that Jake’s eyes were closed.
