Max rolls her eyes. “I am sorry, Willem, but charming as you are, it’s not going to happen with us.”
I laugh and give Max a wet kiss on the cheek, which she wipes off, with excess drama. Up on stage, Jeroen attempts a false punch at Charles and stumbles over himself. Max claps. “Mind that gout,” she calls.
Petra swerves around, her sharp eyes full of disapproval. Max pretends to be absorbed in her script.
“Fuck running lines,” Max whispers when Petra’s attention is safely returned to the stage. “Let’s get drunk.”
That night, over drinks at the bar, Max asks me, “So why don’t you?”
“Why don’t I what?”
“Get off with a girl. If not Marina, one of the civilians at the bar.”
“Why don’t you?” I ask.
“Who’s to say I don’t?”
“You leave with me every night, Max.”
She sighs, a big deep sigh that seems a lot older than Max, who is only a year older than me. Which is why she doesn’t mind seat-warming, she says. My time will come. She makes a slash mark over her chest. “Broken heart,” she says. “Dykes take dog-years to heal.”
I nod.
“So what about you?” Max says. “Broken heart?”
At times, I’d thought it was something like that—after all, I’d never been quite so strung out about a girl. But it’s a funny thing because since that day with Lulu in Paris, I’ve reconnected with Broodje and the boys, I’ve visited my mother and have been talking to her again, and now I’m living with Uncle Daniel. And I’m acting. Okay, perhaps not acting, exactly. But not accidentally acting, either. And just in general, I’m better. Better than I’ve been since Bram died, and in some ways, better than I was even before that. No, Lulu didn’t break my heart. But I’m beginning to wonder if in some roundabout way, she fixed it.
I shake my head.
“So what are you waiting for?” Max asks me.
“I don’t know,” I answer.
But one thing I do know: Next time, I’ll know it when I find it.
Thirty-eight
Before Daniel leaves, we hang the last of the kitchen cabinets. The kitchen is almost finished. The plumber will come to install the dishwasher and we’ll put in the backsplash and then that’s that. “We’re nearly there,” I say.
“Just have to fix the buzzer and tackle your shit in the attic,” Daniel says.
“Right. The shit in the attic. How much is there?” I ask. I don’t remember putting that many boxes up there.
But Daniel and I lug down at least a dozen boxes with my name on them. “We should just throw it all away,” I say. “I’ve gone this long without.”
He shrugs. “Whatever you want.”
Curiosity gets me. I open one box, papers and clothes from my dorm, not sure why I kept them. I put them in the garbage. I go through another and do the same. But then I come upon a third box. Inside are colored folders, the kind Yael used to keep patient records in, and I think the box must be mislabeled with my name. But then I see a sheet of paper sticking out of one of the folders. I pick it up.
The wind in my hair
Wheels bounce over cobblestones
As big as the sky
A memory rushes back: “It doesn’t rhyme,” Bram had said when I’d showed it to him, so full of pride because the teacher had asked me to read it to the entire class.
“It’s not supposed to. It’s a haiku,” Yael had said, rolling her eyes at him and bestowing upon me a rare conspiratorial smile.