I laughed and sat up straighter when I heard the toilet flush. “She’s okay. We’re headed to a museum today, I think. And lunch at Harrods. Then Les Miz!”
“I know you’re dying for the theater, but oh my God: Harrods!” She paused before quietly adding, “Tater Tot, Harrods is really nice. Try to have a good attitude.”
“I do have a good attitude!”
“Good.” Mom sounded unconvinced. “And make Nana buy herself something fancy.” Something clattered in the background—a pan against the stove, maybe—and even though I wasn’t hungry, my mouth watered for home cooking. I did the brief math—it was midnight there. I wondered whether she was getting a snack before bed, wearing her favorite flowery turquoise silk pajama pants and I’m A Proud Artist T-shirt.
“You tell her to buy herself something fancy,” I told her. “I’m not saying that. I’m already highly aware of how much this trip is costing.”
She laughed. “Don’t sweat the money.”
“I’ll try, somewhere between handling Nana’s controlling questions and having a good attitude.”
Mom, as ever, was unwilling to engage in bickering. “Well, before you go, tell me something good.”
“I met a boy last night,” I said, and amended, “Well, maybe more guy? Man?”
“Man?”
“Guy-man. He just turned twenty-one.”
My mother, ever the romantic, became dramatically—comically—interested. “Is he cute?”
A twisting ache worked its way through me. I missed Mom. I missed her easy encouragement that I find adventure in safe, tiny bites. I missed the way she balanced Nana’s overprotective tendencies without undermining her. I missed the way she understood crushes, and boys, and being a teenager. I didn’t actually think she would be angry with me for telling Sam about her and Dad—not anymore, now that I was officially an adult—but on the phone, across an ocean, was not the time or place to open that can of worms.
I’d tell her everything when I get home.
“He’s really cute. He’s like eight feet tall.” As expected, Mom oooh’d appreciatively. Just then, Nana turned the water off in the bathroom, making me rush to get through it. “Just wanted to tell you.”
Mom’s voice was gentle. “I’m glad you told me. I miss you, muffin. Be safe.”
“I miss you too.”
“Don’t let Nana make you paranoid,” she added just before we hung up. “No one is going to chase you down in London.”
Sam and I met on the lawn again that night.
We didn’t plan it. We didn’t even see each other after breakfast. But after Nana and I returned from the show, I snuck out into the garden beneath the sky full of stars, and Sam’s long body was once again stretched out on the grass, feet crossed at the ankle. He was a life raft in the middle of a green ocean.
“I wondered if you’d come,” he said, turning at the sound of my footsteps.
I’m not sure I could stay away, I wanted to say. Instead, I said nothing, and lowered myself down next to him.
Immediately I was warm.
We were both smarter that second night, layering up: He was wearing track pants and a Johnson State sweatshirt. I was wearing yoga pants and a 49ers hoodie. Our socks were bright white against the dark grass. My feet could have worn his feet as shoes and still have had plenty of room.
“I hope I didn’t get you in trouble with Jude this morning,” he said.
He did a little, but it wasn’t worth dwelling on because thankfully, Jude didn’t. After we left the hotel, she was swept up in the Tube, in the museum, in the glitter and pomp of lunch at Harrods. And then we walked, for hours, before ending the day with a production of Les Misérables at the Queen’s Theatre. My feet were still vibrating with the echo of my steps on pavement. My head was full of all the information Nana tried to cram in there: the history she’d read of royalty, and art, and music, and literature. But my heart was the fullest; I was absolutely besotted with the story of Valjean, Cosette, Javert, and Marius.
“She’s fine. And she’s asleep,” I reassured Sam. “I think she only got one foot moisturized before she nodded off.”
“Think she’ll set an alarm to make sure you’re back in the room by midnight?”
“She might . . .” It hadn’t even occurred to me that she would do that, but it should have. That was absolutely the kind of precaution Nana would take to make sure I was safe. And midnight—ha. If an eleven o’clock curfew was considered late, midnight would be scandalous.
God, I was so torn. On the one hand, what else could I do to prove to her that I wasn’t Mom? I wasn’t going to run away to the big city, get married at eighteen and pregnant soon after, chase fame and find heartache. I also wasn’t going to tip off the paparazzi and get us all swarmed on opposite sides of the world. I got why she was nervous—she lived through the chaos of my parents’ marriage dissolving and remembered the specifics far better than I did—but it was getting harder and harder to live under a constant veil of paranoia.
On the other hand, would being a little like Mom really be so terrible? Sometimes Nana acted like Mom couldn’t possibly take care of herself, but that hasn’t ever been true. It was like Nana saw Mom’s pure spirit as a weakness, but Mom found joy in every tiny moment and had the enormous heart of a romantic. Nana might not have relished the decade Mom spent with Dad, but without him, there’d be no me.
“I probably won’t stay out quite as late,” I admitted, pulling myself out of my mental spiral.
Sam sounded both teasing and disappointed when he whispered, “But I liked being out late with you.”
“I’ll sleep in my bed,” I said, grinning at him. Why had I bothered with lip gloss and blush before coming outside? My face was bright red even without it.
“Now that’s a shame.”
I stared up at the sky, unsure what to say and wondering if he could sense the way my blood seemed to simmer just beneath my skin. I didn’t remember him falling asleep last night, so I must have first. Did I curl into him, throw a leg over, press my face to his neck? Maybe he gripped my hip and pulled me closer. How long did he lie there before dozing off, too?
“Nana would murder us both if it happened again.”
“You’re eighteen, Tate. I know she worries, but you’re an adult.”
How was it that being told I was an adult made me feel even more like a child?
“I know,” I said, “but—and I realize how this sounds—my circumstances are a little different.”
In my peripheral vision, I could see him nodding. “I know.”
“I don’t think anyone cares where Mom and I are anymore, but . . .”
I trailed off and we both fell silent, leaving me begging silently for the ease of last night to return, for the effortless unrolling of conversation. Last night was like falling into a pool of warm water, of knowing you have the entire day to swim in the sun, and nothing to do at the end of it but sleep.
“What’d you do today?” I asked.
“Luther wanted to re-create the Abbey Road cover, so we found a couple of random dudes to round out the Beatles with us.” He smiled over at me. “Had lunch from some curry place, and then went shopping for some things for Roberta.”
“I feel like my day was a lot fancier, but you’re rounding the day out pretty well: those track pants are way nicer than my pajamas.”
He laughed, glancing down as if he hadn’t really noticed what he pulled on after dinner. The realization made me glow inside. For the first time all day, it didn’t occur to me to be self-conscious about what I was wearing; the only downside to our first day was my constant awareness that the department stores at the Coddingtown Mall in Santa Rosa clearly couldn’t compete with the fashion scene in London. In Guerneville, the things Mom bought for me felt edgy and modern; in London, I just felt frumpy.
Sam’s smile turned contemplative. “Can I ask you something?”
His cautious tone made me uneasy. “Sure.”
“Has your life been happy?”
God, what a loaded question. Of course I was happy, right? Mom and Nana were amazing. Charlie was the best friend I could imagine. I had everything I could possibly need.
Though maybe not everything I’d always wanted.
The thought made me feel supremely selfish.
When I didn’t immediately answer, he clarified, “I’ve been thinking about this all day. What you told me. I remember seeing your face plastered all over the cover of magazines down at the grocery store—People and whatever. Most of it wasn’t even about you, it was about your dad, and the affairs, and how your mom just . . . disappeared with you. But then I looked up Guerneville, and it seems like a really nice place and I thought, ‘Maybe they had a better life there.’ Like I did with Luther and Roberta.” He rolled to the side, propping his head on a hand, just like he did last night.
“Guerneville is nice but it’s not, like, nice,” I told him. “It’s funky and weird. There are maybe four thousand people who live there, and we all know each other.”
“That sounds enormous compared to the one thousand who live in Eden.”
I stared at him. Maybe his life had been just like mine, only on the complete other end of the country.
“So, have you been happy?” he asked again.
“Do you mean have I been happy in general or happy with my parents?”
His attention was unwavering. “Either, both.”
I chewed on my lip while I thought through it. Questions like this were such weird little provocations. I rarely thought about my life before, and I certainly tried not to feel sad about Dad. The entire world seemed to know him so much better than I did, anyway; I figured maybe when I was older, Nana wouldn’t mind so much letting me know him, too.
I’d been stupid in a lot of things—my crush on Charlie’s cousin from Hayward our freshman year, and the scores of letters I wrote him; loving Jesse but never having sex with him even though we both wanted to, simply because I never had any privacy; the early days of being so enamored with Jesse that I drifted from Charlie when she was dealing with her own family drama—but one thing I’d never done is disobeyed Nana and Mom when they asked me to be careful, to keep our seclusion a secret to protect me and Mom.