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I practically sprint home, tugging Luna alongside me. I watch her drink an entire sippy cup full of water. Then she grabs her favorite picture book and holds it up for me to read.
We settle into a living room armchair with the book. I’ll only call my sister if she starts showing any of the symptoms Diane mentioned. If Luna’s completely fine, there’s no sense in worrying her. She deserves a night off.
“Again,” Luna says when we finish the book for the third time. She doesn’t mind my slow reading, and by this point I’ve nearly got it memorized. She’s obsessed with this one; one night Tabby read it to her twelve times. But my voice is trembling, and I can’t stop staring at her, as though something disastrous is about to happen.
It’s only been twenty minutes. How long did Diane want me to wait? Why didn’t I ask? God, I’m not sure I can handle this on my own. With shaking fingers, I call the only person who could calm my nerves.
“Hey. Are you home?” I ask, peering out our front window at his house. The shades in his room are drawn.
“Yeah, why?”
“Can you come over? It’s kind of an emergency.”
He must hear the panic in my voice. “I’ll be right there.”
And just like that, he is, in his REI jacket and thermal T-shirt and constancy.
It’s strange, sometimes, that we still ring each other’s doorbells, but I guess it’s more out of habit than anything else. When Peter and I first started going to each other’s houses, our parents would say, “Make sure you ask if Peter wants something to drink!” or “Did you ask if Sophie wants a snack?” Training us to be polite, even though we’d been friends for so long. We grew out of that, eventually stopped asking because the other person knew they could grab a water glass or an apple and it didn’t matter.
“Did I interrupt you?” I ask, closing the front door behind him.
“I was just doing homework.”
“Fun homework?” I examine his face—there’s a brightness in his eyes I don’t entirely recognize. “You look happy.” I don’t mean it as an accusation, but somehow it sounds like one.
It’s been a couple weeks since the ice rink and the coffee shop and the awkward drop-off. A couple weeks of band practices and daylong weekend dates with Chase. This past week we saw each other only on morning rides to school.
I don’t dislike Chase. Really, I don’t. Jealousy—at least in the romantic sense—is part of it, of course. I can admit that. What’s worse, though, is the fear that I’m losing Peter to Chase, to the band, to a world that doesn’t have me in it. I’ve been slow to let Montana and Liz into my life, but Peter threw the door wide open for Chase and his band. He has been solely mine for so long, and now I am terrified he’ll realize there are far more interesting people out there than the girl across the street.
“Homework is always fun, Soph.” Without undoing the laces, he kicks off his shoes, then shrugs out of his jacket and hangs it on a hook in the hallway. He can’t possibly feel that comfortable at Chase’s house. I’m positive he wouldn’t stride into Chase’s kitchen and pour himself a glass of water. “What’s wrong? You said it was an emergency?”
I gesture to where Luna’s curled up in the armchair, focused on the pictures in her book. “Luna ate a piece of chalk, and I called Poison Control, and they told me she should be okay but that I should keep an eye on her. And I don’t know if I can sit here and quietly freak out alone.”
“You don’t want to call Tabby?”
Again I consider it, tangling my fingers in the chain of my Star of David necklace. Then I shake my head. “I can’t. This is my first time babysitting her, and I can’t have fucked up like this, and . . . I really need everything to be okay.”
He places his hands on my shoulders, the universal you-need-to-calm-down gesture. “I’ll wait with you. You don’t have to be alone.”
Peter heads over to Luna, scooping her up and placing her in his lap. Obviously he’s spent less time around her than I have, but there’s an ease to his interactions with her that I can’t help envying. Maybe he’s naturally good with kids and we’ve never been around enough kids for me to realize it. When he reads to her, he’s animated and all smiles, and I am putty on the couch next to them.
Eventually Luna’s eyelids start to flutter, and we take her upstairs.
“Thank you so much for doing this,” I whisper to Peter after we close the door to her room. We head down to the kitchen, where I place the baby monitor on the counter.
Peter leans against the counter next to the stove. “You don’t have to thank me. This is . . . This is what we do.”
“Do you want some pasta or something?”
“I could eat.”
The next few moments happen in perfect tandem: Peter filling a pot with water, me fumbling in the cabinet for which of four different varieties of noodles I want. I decide on bow ties. I know they don’t actually taste different from other pasta shapes, but they’ve always been my favorite.
There is something so effortless about him in my house like this, a time machine yanking me back a few years. When we attempted to make s’mores and we set off the smoke alarm. When the power went out and we ate organic knockoff SpaghettiOs out of a can and pretended it was a gourmet meal. When I got my first period and we were home alone and he was so terrified when I yelled from the bathroom that I was bleeding that he called 911.
Every space in my house has a Peter-memory attached to it, and I have ached for him in every one of those spaces.
“You’re sure you don’t have to get back to studying?” I ask, desperate for reassurance. What I’m hoping to hear: that he wants to be here with me, especially after the past few weeks have carved an odd distance between us.
