But the thought of not going filled her with disappointment. When she added it to her disappointment over the curse, her mother, her friends’ blindness to the true nature of her relationship with Mitch—not to mention their own ridiculous happiness, courtesy of the curse—and her inability to finish her photography project, she felt like she was drowning in it. At the moment, moving to Seattle felt like her only lifeline in her sea of loneliness.
It turned out there wasn’t much else to see along I-40. All the fun tourist sites were miles off the highway. Since they didn’t have time to stop, they decided to push through and try to make it to Hoover Dam before sunset. The drive through New Mexico was long and eventless. Noah was still subdued, though he clearly didn’t want to talk about it, and Libby didn’t feel much better. But they’d had so much fun the day before Libby decided to push her negative feelings aside and try to regain some of their lost joy. She made him play several rounds of the Alphabet Game, which instigated a good-natured five-minute argument about the rules.
“Using license plates is cheating,” she insisted.
“Libby.” He spread out his hand and waved it in an arc. “We’re in the middle of the desert. We have to use license plates or this game will last until we reach Las Vegas.”
Next they resorted to keeping track of states on license plates. After Noah found Alaska, he grinned. “This reminds me of the trips my family took when I was a kid.”
Somehow, despite all the time they’d spent together, they’d never delved much into each other’s pasts. She wasn’t proud of her relationship history and she presumed Noah felt the same way about his own. But it felt strange they’d never shared much about their childhoods. “Tell me a story from when you were a kid.”
His eyes lost some of their sparkle. “You mean growing up as Josh McMillan’s big brother.”
The pain in his voice made her suck in her breath. “Noah . . .”
“What?” He glanced at her. “It’s true. He was four years younger than me, but it didn’t take long for me to fall into his shadow. He was like the most perfect child ever born.” He shot her a grin. “But I’d made it easy for him. It couldn’t be too hard to look good in comparison to me.”
“We don’t have to talk about it.” She should have known by now that there was a reason neither one of them had volunteered information about the past, their childhoods included. Libby’s past was full of regrets and betrayals. Why would she want to dredge it all up again? Obviously Noah felt the same way.
He was silent for so long she assumed that was his answer. Then he swallowed, as though he were preparing himself. “No.” He turned to look her in the eye. “I think you should know. I don’t want to keep anything from you, but I need to work up the courage to tell you some of it. Okay?”
She knew he was referring to something other than his childhood now, but damned if she knew what. But he was obviously trying to build a deeper level to their friendship and she wanted that too.
“Yeah.” She gave him a warm smile. “Okay.”
He sighed and sank back into the seat, his left arm gripping the steering wheel. “I was a pretty wild kid. My mom has videos of me literally bouncing on the furniture.”
She laughed. “I believe that.”
“When I was older, I was diagnosed with ADD, but not until grade school. So I went through the first ten years of my life trying so hard to be good, and never succeeding. I just couldn’t pay attention or even remember to behave. Schoolwork was a nightmare. Night after night of me trying to finish my spelling and math homework. My mother was more understanding, but my father . . .” His voice trailed off.
His right hand lay on the seat next to him and Libby covered it with her own.
He took in a deep breath and let it out, keeping his eyes on the road. “My father was a good man. He just didn’t understand me, but Josh . . . Josh, he understood. Josh was like a clone of my father. So when Josh started school—and of course excelled at everything—I think my father slowly disengaged from me.”
“Oh, Noah.”
“But my mother . . .” The affection in his voice warmed her heart. “My mother stood by me, no matter what. Even as I single-handedly fucked up my life in middle school.”
“How could you fuck up your life in middle school?”
He tilted his head and gave her a wry grin. “You didn’t see my grades.”
“You’re obviously intelligent—you graduated from high school early and started college when you were sixteen—so it couldn’t have been that bad. Weren’t you on medication?”
“Oh, yeah. Two daily doses of Adderall, but what most people don’t realize, especially my father, is that medication isn’t some magic spell that kills ADD. It only temporarily tames it. So while I could focus, I was still unorganized and late and left my homework at school almost daily. My mother tried to help me create systems to remember things, but my father wasn’t as understanding.”
“Noah. How could he have been so blind and short-sighted?”
He turned his hand over beneath hers and curled his fingers around her hand. “Libby, I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. My father was a good man. He just didn’t understand me. And Josh was so much easier for him to relate to than I was . . . I think he finally decided to leave me to my mother’s devices and focus on Josh.”