“I just always loved it ever since she said it that night,” I say, rushing to explain. “It’s not like I think I have the right to her words or anything like that. I just never forgot it, and I always thought ...”
“It’s nice,” Luke says, retracting his hand and digging his spoon into his cup of yogurt. “She’d have loved it.”
I don’t know what to say, so I say nothing.
“When’d you get it?” he asks.
“October,” I say. He glances up at me then, meets my eye.
October, which used to be the worst month of our lives, before August was. Or maybe it was still October.
“I like it a lot,” he says. “You added an extra word, though.”
I’m surprised that he noticed. I mean, duh, he was there when Mel said it. I just didn’t think it made as profound an impact on anyone else as it did on me.
“Yeah,” I say. When I got those words put on my arm, I thought a lot about Mel, but I also thought about me. I thought about the way I’d felt about myself the last year, like I belonged nowhere, like I would never be able to hold on to everyone I loved.
Ever since the talk with my parents, things had gotten better between us, but that didn’t mean everything was always great. This new family that had meetings and laughed together and hung out still felt shaky.
But as the artist started to draw those words on in black ink, I’d decided something: it didn’t matter whether my family broke again or whether it didn’t. It didn’t matter whether I had ever been an official member of the Cohen family or whether I hadn’t. Not because they stopped mattering to me. If anything, they mattered more to me than ever, because I knew now that wehadbeen family, we had chosen each other, and that was a special kind of beautiful.
But I also wanted something I could hold on to, a sense of belonging that never went away.
Maybe those words—the things I chose to believe about myself and the things I aspired to be—could be the space I carved for myself in this world, a place I could come back to over and over again, and it would always be there because it was inside me.
I say none of this out loud, and Luke and I are back to eating silently. When we’re done, we walk back out to his car. He looks like he’s deep in thought, and when we climb in, he doesn’t start the car.
He runs his hand through his hair. “I’m going to be really bad at this,” he says. “Seeing you, then going back to pretending not to know that you’re here.”
“I’ll keep my distance,” I promise, but he shakes his head.
“That’s not what I mean,” he says. “Or, rather, I don’t know what I mean, but I don’t want us to be strangers.”
I blink at him. “Let’s not be, then.”
“I’m not promising I can be your friend.” He doesn’t look at me as he speaks—as if he’s just made an awful confession.
I’m confused. Does he want me to change schools? Because that’s kind of ridiculous. It’s not like I followed him here. This is the best school in our state.
“I don’t know what you want me to say,” I say now.
“Maybe let’s not say anything,” he says. “No promises, but no bullshitting either.”
I frown. “I don’t get—”
“I want to know you,” he says. “But not as Mel’s son or Ro’s brother or an ex or a coworker.”
“That’s pretty much all the titles.”
He gives me a crooked smile. “So let’s figure out what’s left,” he says.
I think about saying no.
For all the usual excuses.
We don’t work.
We made mistakes.
