I fight to concentrate on this moment, in the car with my mother, but my ears are swimming with too many sounds.
My mind just keeps replaying it. Luke Cohen, in the middle of Wally’s, looking at me like I’m a complete stranger.
3
THEN
Mel called beingsick her Big Bad. She had this theory that we all had one, whether we knew it or not. She also believed it could change over time, that the most pertinent issue in your life could go from having a bad temper to being bankrupt or something.
My mother’s Big Bad was that she was a barely functioning depressive. My father’s was that he didn’t know how to help her or how to be two parents, so he buried himself in running EyeCon. Luke’s, Mel said, was how determined he was that he would never end up like his father. And Rowan’s, I knew even without Mel’s telling me, was how desperately he wanted things. To play tennis in college, to perfect his already near-perfect forehand, to make his mother well. It oozed out of him, a desperation that made his skin glisten and his eyes blaze.
“What’s mine?” I asked her multiple times, afraid it was something like I didn’t belong anywhere or that everyone I loved was destined to eventually grow tired of me. Knowing Ro’s reason for kicking me out of their house that night helped, but in the days before he told me, an awful seed of doubt had taken root inside me. And it still made me wonder if there was something horrible at my core. Something that meant home would always be a fantasy for me, something I could experience only by proxy.
But Mel refused to tell me what my Big Bad was. “You’ll know when you know,” she insisted. I could never figure out whether she knew what it was and didn’t want to say, or whether she had yet to figure it out. Probably the former. Mel had this way of looking in your eyes and seeing your soul, of listening to your small talk and hearing the dreams you’d never said out loud. She read people the way some people read tea leaves. She knew me, the way no one else did.
So, of course, she knew about Luke.
The first time I suspected this was the day of the fair, during the summer between seventh and eighth grades. The Dog Days Fair always took place during the last days of summer in Winchester. The fair was downtown, just a couple of blocks away from the bakery, so Ro, Luke, and I walked over to it that morning while Mel stayed back at the store. The day passed slowly, the air sticky with sweat and humidity and the smell of roasting hot dogs. At thirteen, the prospect of endless rides and caramel popcorn had lost some of its appeal for me, but Luke took his boredom to a whole other level, trailing behind Ro and me and playing on his phone for most of the afternoon, as if it were a special kind of torture being forced away from his equations and scientific formulas for even one day. Not that I blamed him. I too wanted nothing more than to go back to the air-conditioned peace of Rosas and see if we could weasel any baked goods from Mel. But Rowan had a list of rides he wanted to go on and Mel said we’d all been spending too much time indoors over the summer, so we soldiered on.
By the time we were ready to head back to Rosas, I was ready to write the day off as completely unremarkable. Until Luke disappeared for a few minutes and reappeared with a small stuffed white polar bear.
“Here,” he said, holding it out to me.
“Where’s mine?” Ro said, trying to grab it out of his brother’s hands, but Luke swung the bear out of his reach.
“You won this?” I asked, stunned as I took it from him.
“I bought it.” Luke said it like it was nothing, like it was every day he bought me a stuffed animal at a fair, but it was absolutely a big deal to me. It was a gift. The first non–special occasion gift he’d ever given me, and I was convinced it meant something.
Ro made to grab it out of my hands again, but I held it behind my back. I was never letting it out of my grasp, if I could help it. To Luke, I whispered a shy “Thanks.”
He shrugged and went back to playing on his phone.
I was still on cloud nine when we walked into the bakery a few minutes later.
“How was it?” Mel asked.
Ro gave her a recap of the day, all the rides we’d gone on and all the games we failed to win. I contributed here and there, but I was still flipping out over this new development.
Luke had given me a freaking stuffed animal.
That’s what couples did on dates.
And then, as Mel was closing up the store, I’d seen it. Luke reaching into his pocket and handing her the change. She whispered something to him, and when he nodded, she patted his back. I knew right then and there what an idiot I’d been.
Mel had told him to buy me the bear. The gesture hadn’t been spontaneous or romantic or any of the things I’d thought just seconds ago. It was an act of charity, something his mother had made him do.
“Ready to go?” Mel asked, looking over at me and Ro. I nodded and followed them out of the store, feeling small.
I suspected then that Mel knew how I felt about Luke.
I knew it for sure when I strode into the Cohen house four years later, and Mel and Naomi were sitting in the living room, watching TV and laughing at something I hadn’t heard. Sydney was curled up at Mel’s feet, sleeping.
I hadn’t seen Mel since she had completed her first month of treatment two days earlier, so I’d taken the bus from summer school and brought snacks to celebrate. Boring snacks like rice cakes and saltine crackers, as they were the only things that didn’t set off her nausea.
Ever since Ro had told me the truth about that night, I was back to visiting Mel whenever I could. Notallthe time, because I was still a little afraid to overstep, but I came over often enough that Mel knew I cared.
“Jessi-girl! Please tell me there is food in that bag,” Mel said, staring longingly at the plastic bag in my hand.
