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I flatten my back against my seat so he can lean over me and peer out the window. “Wait, that?” he asks. “That little island thing with all the buildings?”
“I think so.”
He’s balancing himself with a hand on the edge of my seat, between my knees. I try not to think too much about his proximity—or the goosebumps running down my spine. “I thought it’d be bigger,” he says.
It looks plenty big to me, with the buildings stretching up toward the sky and shorter ones covering land as far as the eye can see. Ferries move through the harbor. In the distance, I see another plane swooping through the clear sky.
For the first time all morning, I’m glad I came.
Maverick, this person I've only known for a few hours, seems to read my mind. He settles back into his own seat. “You made it,” he says, patting my arm with a smile. It’s a nice smile. I feel bad for labeling him as a vapid jock ten seconds after meeting him. If it weren’t for him, I honestly might have passed out on the floor of this airplane—and that would have been way more embarrassing than one kind person holding my hand while I cried. “We’re here.”
“Yeah.” I smile for the first time today. “We’re here.”
Chapter One
Azalea
I’mbleary-eyedandsquintingagainst the early morning sun as I take a left turn out of the train station parking lot. I’ve just gotten off a twelve-hour overnight trip from Denver. I spent most of the night staring at the blackness outside, trying and failing to fall asleep in my cramped coach seat, and now I have to drive forty-five minutes to my dad’s house. It’s Monday and I have class this afternoon, so the original plan was to go straight back to school, but there’s no way I can stay awake for the extra half hour it would take to get there.
I’m returning from a visit with Audrey, my childhood best friend. This is the third fall I’ve lived away from her, and the third time I’ve seen her since moving away in the spring of our senior year. She is in beauty school and works at a salon on the weekends, so it’s a bit of a chore to find a time when we are both free, but we always make a point to figure it out. Last year she came to me; this year, it was my turn. We don’t have as much time together when I’m the one who travels, since I’m not willing to fly by myself. It was a quick trip—the train left Iowa on Friday night, arrived in Denver early on Saturday morning, and I was back on it heading home by Sunday night. I wish we had more time, but it’s October, school is getting intense, and I’m a biochemistry major with plans to go to pharmacy school. I can’t slack off.
It was great to see Audrey, as always, even though we’ve grown apart in the past few years. We’ve been friends since kindergarten, but I guess things change when you stop seeing each other every day. I consider Callie and Maverick to be my closest friends now. Audrey has a friend from the salon who seems to occupy the same place in her life that I once did. It’s a little sad, and I think I can attribute some of the heaviness in my heart to this, but not all of it.
Mostly, I think it’s from being around her family.
Audrey has two parents, five siblings, and numerous other family members who live nearby. At any given time, some combination of grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins are bound to show up at her house. It’s always been that way, and since I was a part of the revolving door for over a decade, I never really thought about it. Yes, her family is the opposite of mine and always has been, but that’s just the way it is. I was never jealous. I never felt like I was missing out on much.
Until this weekend.
I can’t put my finger on why it was different. I’ve been in that noisy, chaotic house a million times. For whatever reason, though—maybe because Audrey and I have drifted apart and I felt like more of an outsider than I have in the past—I saw her family in a new light this weekend. I listened to everybody talking to and over each other, the multiple conversations happening at once, and I marveled. I marveled at the bickering, the inside jokes, the offhand references to people and places and events that everybody understood instantly.
My dad and I have that same kind of shared, personal language, I guess, but we’re different. It's just the two of us. I can’t even imagine a houseful of people sharing in the little bubble we’ve always occupied together.
Audrey’s older sister, Delia, is pregnant with a little boy, and at one point, the siblings got into a heated conversation about who would be the godparent. They each made their case loudly, listing their perceived positive traits and all the things they would do with and for their nephew. The argument escalated until one of Audrey’s brothers put another brother in a headlock, and then their mom came into the room to declare that it didn’t matter who was named the godparent; if the baby were orphaned, she’d be taking him, and that was final. Delia and her husband quickly agreed with this plan, the siblings dispersed, and that was that.
The whole time this was going on, even as I laughed along with everyone else, I was thinking about the time in second grade when I asked my dad who would take care of me if he died. His response was that nothing was going to happen to him, so we didn’t need to worry about it. When I pressed him, he told me again to stop worrying about it, this time with an uncharacteristic edge to his voice. I dropped it.
Now, as an adult, I suspect that he didn’t really know what would happen to me.
Sitting in Audrey’s living room, I realized that this unborn baby already has more people loving him than has truly loved me in my entire twenty-one years of life. I have my father and a handful of close friends, and…that’s it. There’s nobody else. My dad’s parents passed when I was young; I’ve met them, but don’t remember them at all. He has some extended family scattered throughout the country, but nobody he or I are close to. They don’t send cards or call on holidays, and neither do we.
That’s what has caused this hollow feeling in my chest—the realization that I have so few truly meaningful relationships in my life, and even those are feeling tenuous. Audrey lives twelve hours away, and my two close college friends have one foot out the door. Callie wants to move to Chicago after graduation, and Maverick is going to be drafted by a professional baseball team next summer. And what if the worst happened and something happened to one of my small circle?
Especially my dad. Just the thought makes my body go cold. I don’t know my place in the world without my father—it's why I chose to go to Iowa State, thirty minutes from Des Moines, instead of the school in Colorado I’d always planned to attend.
I want what Audrey has. What her nephew has. I want a life where there’s no way I will ever be alone.
These thoughts churn through my mind throughout the entire drive, and when I pull into my dad’s driveway, I barely remember getting there. I’m going back to school later, so I only bring my keys and my phone with me into the house. The couch looks inviting, but I decide to go upstairs to my old room so I can lay down in a bed.
I’m halfway up the stairs when my dad’s voice comes out of nowhere, making me jump. “Zay-Zay? Is that you?”
Pressing a hand to my chest, I walk into his office. He’s behind his computer monitor, peering at me over the top of it.
“You scared me. I thought you’d be at work.”
Dad leans back in his desk chair, stretching as he does. He’s wearing pajamas and glasses instead of contacts. It looks like he’s trimmed his short beard since the last time I saw him. “I took off today. I have a guy coming to look at the water heater. Why aren’t you at school?”
“I barely slept on the train.” I cross the room and lean over to give him a hug. When his arms go around me, I instantly feel a little bit better. “I was afraid I’d fall asleep at the wheel if I tried to go all the way to Ames.”
