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Lulu opens her mouth, probably to deny that I am her boyfriend.
“Nah. She’s stronger than she looks,” I say. I tell myself it’s because I don’t want to have to endure the awkwardness of that conversation. Mostly I just like the sound of the title.
Lulu blushes.
“So?” Marcus looks at us expectantly. “Let’s do something tonight.”
I glare at him.
“OK. OK. Never mind.”
As we leave, Lulu flexes her fist, staring at the scratches on the heel of her palm, tracing the creases.
“Where are we going?” Lulu asks once we’re settled in the truck.
I check the time on the dashboard. There’s still way too many hours between now and her surprise. “I was going to suggest the bookstore but...do you want to just go back to my place for a bit?” I ask.
“No way. Absolutely I want to go to the bookstore,” she says.
Lulu suggests a stack of nonfiction, historical books written by some of her faves and some of her friends. We end up leaving the store with a handful of books each and still a few hours to spare before we have anywhere to be. I bring her home with me. She sits on the couch, reading while I get a workout in. She brings me a water and prepares a snack. When I get out of the shower she’s listening to Rihanna and cuddling with Betty. She’s found a rugby match and has it on mute while she peels off the Band-Aids Mai gave her earlier. “I don’t need them,” she says at my frown. “They’re not that bad.” She rolls the bandages up into a ball and stuffs them in her pocket.
The couch groans as I sit beside her. Her legs have a constellation of bruises; some are fresh from her fall, just starting to turn purple, but some are older and yellow. “Lulu, what did you do?” I brush the back of my hand over her skin.
“What?”
“How’d you get all these?”
She pulls at a string dangling from her denim cutoffs, snorting as she laughs. “I have no idea. I don’t know if you’ve noticed but I’m a little clumsy.” She says it with a tone, like she’s embarrassed.
“Maybe it’s a platelet problem?” I fish my phone out of my back pocket.
She snorts. “It’s an accident-prone problem.”
I ignore her for Google.
“Are you googling it?”
I grunt. It’s not that I’mscared. I don’t think she has a rare form of blood cancer or something. I just want to make sure she’s OK.
“Don’t doctors always saynotto google it?”
“I get a pass,” I say, gruff.
She tangles her feet with mine. “How do you figure?”
“Emergency medical training.”
She laughs until I start reading out the symptoms of idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura. “I don’t have that,” she says, stony-faced. “I have whatever the medical term for clumsiness is.”
So, I google that. “It’s called poor proprioception.”
Lulu drops her head onto the arm of the couch behind her. “And I’m the nerd in this relationship,” she mutters.
“You’re not a nerd,” I say, still scrolling a page about what causes poor proprioception in adults. “Huh...”
“Is that a good huh or a bad huh?”
I pull her foot into my lap. She cracks her toe knuckles. “Have you ever thought...” I say as I press my thumb up the arch of her foot. “That you might be neurodivergent?”
