Page 26 of Roadrunner

“We open them, silly,” Della said.

“Can we go one at a time? I want to watch everyone else open theirs.”

“That’ll take all day,” Addy said.

“It’s easy,” Della said. “I open mine blind and watch everyone else.”

We tried it her way. I lasted about a gift and a half before I gave up entirely and just watched.

Ten minutes later the floor was ankle-deep in torn paper. Riley had saved my gifts for last.

He opened the boots first. His whole face changed. He held them up like they weighed something. “I need these in my life.”

He pulled them on over his socks and stood. “Perfect fit.”

“I got your size off your old ones. Same maker, so you’d actually like them.”

He walked the length of the hallway and back, breaking them in. While he was gone, his mother leaned toward me. “He’s had those other boots since he was seventeen. He never spends money on anything. I’ve never met anyone so tight with a dollar.”

“I’ve noticed,” I said. “The truck. The bike.”

“He got that motorcycle for a song,” she said. “In cardboard boxes. He and his father put it together in the garage over a summer. Antonio begged him to paint it while it was still in pieces. Riley wouldn’t spend the money.”

Riley came back in his new boots and picked up the second gift. I held my breath while he peeled the paper away.

“I think I know what this is,” he said. “Maybe.”

It was flat. Two feet by four, a couple of inches thick. Under the paper was a plain cardboard box.

“A picture?” his mother whispered.

I nodded and didn’t trust myself to say more.

He lifted the framed piece out of the box. It faced Della and me first.

“Oh my.” She put a hand to her chest. “It’s beautiful.”

He turned it around, looked at it, and then at me. His eyes went bright. “How did you—”

“I found a woman in New York who does custom drawings. I had someone take pictures from across the road, like they were watching us from a distance without us knowing. Then I sent her a picture of me from that angle, and one of you. She did the rest.”

It was a black-and-white ink drawing of the rock where we’d had our first kiss, seen the way a stranger might have seen it from behind. Two silhouettes, his hand disappearing into the back of my jeans, my foot lifted slightly off the rock. The horizon behind us was done in watercolor, orange and pink bleeding into purple.

In the corner, beside the artist’s signature: First kiss.

Riley looked at it for a long moment. “I don’t even know what to say. It’s—”

“Beautiful,” his mother finished. “That’s the two of you, isn’t it?”

He turned it so everyone could see. “It’s the first time we kissed.”

Della wiped her eyes and hugged me. “The two of you. This is too much.” She fanned her face. “Tony, did you see this?”

Antonio nodded, fighting a smile of his own. “It’s beautiful.”

Riley leaned the frame against the wall and looked at me. “Alex.”

“What?”