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Katherine moved herself in front of Tibby’s clock radio and studied it hopefully.
“God, it’s almost eleven,” Tibby answered herself.
She was about to head directly down the stairs, but then she decided to brush her teeth first. When she arrived in the kitchen, Brian was at the table setting up dominos with Nicky.
“Let’s try to set up a few at once,” Brian counseled patiently, arranging them in a snaking row.
Nicky only wanted to knock them over.
“Hey,” Tibby said.
“Hey.”
“Did you eat breakfast?” she asked.
“Uh-huh. Yeah.” He seemed a bit nervous for some reason, the way his shoulders were rising toward his ears.
“What’s up?” she asked him. She went to the refrigerator to inspect.
“Just, uh…Can I talk to you for a second?”
She closed the refrigerator and stood up straighter. She looked at him. “Sure.”
“In…there?” He gestured toward the living room.
Tibby’s eyebrows nearly joined over her nose. “In there?”
Nobody ever did anything in the living room in her house. Loretta ventured in once a week to clear out the cobwebs. And every few months her parents had a party and acted like they relaxed on those perfect sofas all the time.
Mystified, she followed him. They posed on the sofa like cocktail party guests.
“So…what?” she asked him, a sprout of worry in her chest. It was slightly funny how they were sitting next to each other and both facing forward.
He rubbed both palms against the denim covering his thighs.
Tibby pulled her legs up onto the sofa so she could turn to him. “Everything okay?”
“I wanted to ask you something.”
“Okay. Ask.”
“You know the thing tonight?”
“Uh…you mean the senior party?”
“Will you go with me?”
Her eyebrows compressed even further. “We’re all going. Right? Lena…Bee…”
He waved a hand to acknowledge all that. “But will you go with me?”
She was utterly perplexed. “You mean like a date?” She blurted it out because it sounded so ridiculous.
“Kind of. Yeah.”
Suddenly, it seemed mean to snort or laugh at the preposterousness of this concept. She tilted her head. He was very brave to keep looking at her eyes the way he did.
She clasped her hands. It dawned on her that she was wearing a tank top and her pajama bottoms. Tibby spent an unusual amount of time in her pajamas, so it wasn’t like Brian hadn’t seen her in them hundreds of times. But here, in this stage-set living room, under the glare of this weird question, it only accentuated the weirdness.
“A kind of date?” she asked slowly.
“Kind of.”
She wouldn’t hurt his feelings. She just wouldn’t. It didn’t matter where this would lead them. She nodded. “Okay.”
She felt raw sitting with him on the sofa. When he leaned toward her she had absolutely no idea what was going to happen. His body moved in slow motion, and she seemed to see herself and Brian from some distant spot in the room. He possessed a new kind of confidence, a deliberateness. She was both terrified and eerily calm.
So she sat still, looking into his eyes as he reached toward her face. He didn’t kiss her or anything like that. But what he did felt just as shockingly intimate. The first three fingers of his right hand landed lightly on her warm face and smoothed out the rumple of consternation in the center of her forehead.
“Okay,” he said.
One day in the early spring when Lena stayed home sick from school, she watched a young woman on a daytime talk show who’d written a book about being adopted. This woman had never met or been contacted by her birth mother, and yet she spent her whole life wishing and hoping her birth mother would find her. She talked about how she didn’t want to move from the home where her parents had first adopted her. She didn’t like to take long trips. She always left explicit forwarding instructions when she moved. She made sure her phone was listed under her own name. She left her little trail of bread crumbs. She wanted to make sure she could be found.
Since then, Lena had thought about this woman many times, and she wasn’t sure why. She didn’t dwell on it. Minds worked in weird ways. Like how Lena always thought of Ritz crackers when she shaved her legs. Who knew why? And did it even matter?
But now, as she lay on her bed, filling out forms for school in September, Lena thought about the woman on the talk show again. She filled out a roommate questionnaire and she kept flashing on the woman’s sad gray eyes. She filled out the dorm preference sheet and she saw the woman’s twitching lower lip.
And as Lena lay back on her bed and put her hands over her face, it finally dawned on her. This woman reminded Lena of herself.
Without even realizing it, Lena had subtly resisted the idea of going away this summer. Even a week away from home made her feel slightly unglued. The thought of moving to another city in September, thrilling as it was, was also a source of agony.
Lena wanted to leave home. For one thing, she was ready. For another thing, since her dad had forced Valia, his widowed mother, to leave her beautiful Greek island and relocate to suburban Maryland, the Kaligaris house had been full of tension.
Lena looked forward to RISD. She wanted to be an artist, she was almost sure of it. Her art class this summer was the single joy in her life, apart from her friends.
And yet. And yet Lena didn’t want to go. And the reason was that she didn’t want to leave the place where Kostos could find her. And on a deeper level, she didn’t want to put more distance—in time or in space—between now and the time when he’d loved her. She didn’t want to become a different girl from the one whom he had loved.
The phone rang and Lena snatched it up before Valia could get it and yell at the innocent caller.
“Hello?”
“Hi, it’s me.”
“Carma. Hi. What are you doing?”
“Getting dressed. I had another waxing fiasco. What are you wearing?”
Lena cast her eye at the clock. She was supposed to meet everybody at the senior party in half an hour. She was bringing Effie as her date, because she had no other date and because Effie was spocking on some senior guy or other.
Lena then cast her glance on her open closet. She had no excitement in getting dressed. Her wardrobe had two categories: the clothing she had worn with Kostos—filled with memories—and the clothing she hadn’t—empty. She didn’t want either.
“I don’t know. I didn’t pick yet.”
