“Hmm. I’m trying to think if I can say the same.”
“And?”
She shrugs. “I dunno. I didn’t see you as a man before last Christmas. I saw you as a…”
Her pause kills me. I die waiting. “Don’t say ‘brother.’”
She laughs. “No.” And then she puts up a hand. “You’re not gonna like this though, because when I was a kid, and I was with you and Lauren, I felt like we were a family.”
“We were.”
“I know. But I mean…”
“Father?” I say. “You saw me as a father?”
“No. You were too young for that.”
“So it is brother.”
“No. Because if you were a big brother, you would not have expectations of me. You would’ve been all protective the way you were with Lauren. But you always treated us different. You always had expectations of me.”
Now it’s my turn to pause. “Did I? What kind of expectations?”
“You know. I had your back.”
“Oh.” I smile. “Yeah. One hundred percent. If shit went down, I always knew you had my back. So that makes us… friends. Just like I said.”
“You gotta start somewhere, I guess.”
I agree by nodding my head. “Yeah. So. You wanna get some dinner?”
“Like a date?”
I don’t want to pause here, but I do. Because this thing between Wendy and me, it’s precarious and I don’t want to fuck it up. But it is a date. It’s meant to be a date. This entire visit is a date. We are something else now and I’m trying to figure out a way to ease us into this new whatever it is we are, without pissing her off too much or forcing the inevitable hate speech as she walks out on me. I can’t deny it’s a date, or that sends all the wrong signals, so I go with truth. “Yeah,” I say. “Like a date.”
“Do I need to change?”
She’s wearing jeans, a black tank top that has a white skull on it, and her boots. Which can’t be the same brown boots she’s been wearing since she was ten, but they look exactly like the same brown boots she’s been wearing since she was ten. Her blonde hair is long and straight, one side tucked behind her ear. She is wearing no makeup.
“No,” I say. “Please don’t change.”
She walks over to me, leans up on her tiptoes, but this time she does not kiss me on the cheek.
Her lips are soft when they touch mine. She doesn’t open her mouth and neither do I.
It’s not a make-out kiss. It’s not an I-love-you kiss, either. It’s not even a promise-of-something-later kiss.
It’s just… hello.
CHAPTER SEVEN - WENDY
THE DAY I MET NICK
The boat is big and it’s in the ocean.
The ocean is close to a cliff.
Atop the cliff is a mansion.
And in the mansion is a massacre.
We are on the boat.
Yesterday I was in a place called Mexico and today I am off the coast of a place called California. This is all I know because I am small and no one wants to show me a map.
I’m not sure what to do with these facts, so I do nothing. I sit. I’m quiet. I listen.
The man with me is Chek. He’s got a mean face and bald head. But he’s not mean. Not to me. Not so far.
Chek is talking to other, meaner-looking people. They yell, they scowl, they pay no attention to me at all. I think it’s because I’m wearing a dress. Chek came to my orphanage in Mexico a few days ago. He wasn’t there for me—something else was happening. But he noticed me. Everyone notices me, that’s nothing new. My pale skin, blonde hair, and ice-blue eyes make them all take notice.
But not the same way that Chek did.
He came over to me, bent down, and asked me, in English, “What is your name?”
So I told him.
Then he just stood up, went over to the priest who runs the place, and started asking questions. They were all about me. He wasn’t very careful about this because he was facing me as he talked and I can read lips. So at first I thought, Well, he’s just another customer putting in his order. I’m never sent to the customers, so this had nothing to do with me, and I was about to turn away and go back to my coloring when he said, “She’s one of us and she’s coming with me.”
I remember thinking, Oh, shit, here we go. I guess I’m not so special anymore, am I?
Chek hit the priest in the face, knocking him down, and said, “Keeping secrets from me is a very bad idea.” And then he walked back over to me, held out his hand, and said, “Let’s go.”
That’s how I got on the boat.
But we stopped along the way and took the tender boat into a little coastal village, and he bought me some colorful dresses. I liked them. One was dark red and it was made of a soft gauzy material. Another one was bright yellow, like a canary. The third one was white. I was wearing the white one as the men on the boat argued about whatever was happening on the coast of California.