Page 52 of Gave Proof Through the Night

“Oh, honey.” His mouth twitches. “Lying wouldn’t be the worst of your crimes.”

Crimes. If only he knew how right he is.

“I’m not a common thief, you know,” I say, mostly to buy myself a second to recover.

“I know.” His eyes hold mine, warm, a little too knowing. “There’s absolutely nothing common about you. America the beautiful.”

“Clever. That’s literally what it says on my birth certificate, so joke’s on you.”

“Oh, really?”

“Yeah. The-Beautiful is my middle name.” (It’s not) I tip my chin up. “What’s yours?”

“Adrián.”

I go quiet for a second, caught off guard in a way I don’t fully understand until the word settles. “Oh. That’s… actually beautiful.”

A beat.

“And?” he says.

“And what?”

“I’m waiting for the punch line.”

“I don’t have one.” I mean it, which surprises me almost as much as it seems to surprise him. “It’s a beautiful name. Jeremiah Adrián Precio. It just rolls off the tongue.”

He looks at me like nobody’s ever said that to him before and meant it, and something in my chest does a full, undignified cartwheel, right as the first firework goes up.

He doesn’t let go of my hand. Just tugs, gentle, until we’re both dropping back down onto the flattened jersey, both of us tipping our heads up to the sky.

The fireworks completely bombard the entire city with gold and white. A huge chrysanthemum blooms into a thousand trailing sparks and the whole Mall below us gasps in unison. Three rockets shoot off in three different directions at once, bursting into something that looks like a red, white, and blue smiley face, lopsided and delighted with itself, and I laugh out loud before I can stop it. Fireworks are launching from ten different sites from the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool to barges in the Potomac. The whole sky is lit up, blinking gold and red like somebody hung Christmas lights and they just exploded everywhere. The air smells like sulfur and summer and brings back the best memories of my childhood, when I used to watch the show from the roof of my dad’s trailer.

“My dad used to tell me they were just for me,” I say, before I can stop myself. “The fireworks. For my birthday. This whole insane production, orchestrated in my honor.”

“That’s sweet, actually.” He says it softly. “That he wanted to make them special for you.”

I watch a gold one unfurl overhead and chuckle at the memory. “It’s embarrassing how long I chose to believe it. Like, deep into double-digit birthdays long. I was doing long division and still thought Congress had personally signed off on a pyrotechnics budget for one specific eleven-year-old.”

He just watches me for a second, something quiet and warm settling into his face, like he’s been handed something small and is deciding how carefully to hold it.

“That’s a good dad move,” he says finally.

I just watch the sky do its thing and let myself, for one indulgent second, believe it a little bit again.

“Yeah,” I say after a minute. “It really was.”

The show goes on for what feels like forty minutes. They really pulled out all the stops for America 250. There isn’t a vacant spot in the DC skyline and it’s simply breathtaking. I watch, transfixed, mouth probably hanging open in a way that is not remotely cool, and it takes me embarrassingly long to notice Jeremiah isn’t watching the sky at all.

He’s watching me.

“What?” I ask, suddenly, stupidly self-conscious, like I’ve got mustard on my chin.

“You,” he says, simple as that. “I’m mesmerized. Watching you watch this like it really is all for your birthday.” His voice drops, rougher now. “Your face. The way it lights up. That smile you get, wide and completely artless.”

Artless. If only he knew how much art goes into every single thing I do. Not this, though. This is just me, on a rooftop, with a hockey player looking at me like I hung the moon and possibly also invented the color gold.

“I like you,” he says. Plain. Unarmored. No jokes hiding behind it.