“Huh,” Michael said, looking down at the tiny speck. “It’s… it’s really nice.”
I laughed delightedly. “You don’t even know what it is!”
“Well,” he said. “No, I don’t.”
“Can’t you guess?”
“Well,” he said, again. “It looks like… I mean, it closely resembles… a rock.”
“It is a rock,” I said. “Guess where it’s from.”
Michael eyed the rock. “I don’t know. Genovia?”
“No, silly,” I crowed. “The moon! It’s a moon rock! From when Neil Armstrong was up there. He collected a bunch of them, and then brought them back and gave them to the White House, and Richard Nixon gave my grandmother a bunch of them when he was in office. Well, he gave them to Genovia, technically. And I saw them and thought… well, that you should have one. Because I know you like space stuff. I mean how you’ve got the glow-in-the-dark constellations on the ceiling over your bed and all…”
Michael looked up from the moon rock—which he’d been staring down at like he couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing—and went, “When were you in my room?”
“Oh,” I said, feeling myself beginning to blush again. “A long time ago—” Well
, it had been a long time ago. It had been way back before I’d known he liked me, when I’d been sending him those anonymous love poems “—once when Maya was cleaning in there.”
Michael said, “Oh,” and looked back down at the moon rock.
“Mia,” he said, a few seconds later. “I can’t accept this.”
“Yes, you can,” I said. “There’s plenty left back at the palace museum, don’t worry. Richard Nixon must have really had a thing for Grandmère, because I’m pretty sure we got more moon rocks than Monaco or anybody else. ”
“Mia,” Michael said. “It’s a rock. From the moon. ”
“Right,” I said, not certain what he was getting at. Did he not like it? It was kind of weird, I guess, to give your boyfriend a rock for his birthday. But it wasn’t just any rock. And Michael wasn’t just any boyfriend. I’d really thought he’d like it.
“It’s a rock,” he said again, “that came from two hundred thirty thousand miles away. From Earth. Two hundred thirty thousand miles away from Earth.”
“Yes,” I said, wondering what I had done wrong. I had only just gotten Michael back, after having spent a whole week convinced he was going to dump me over one thing, only to discover that he was going to dump me over something else entirely? There is seriously no justice in the world. “Michael, if you don’t like it, I can give it back. I just thought—”
“No way,” he said, moving the box out of my grasp. “You’re not getting this back. I just don’t know what I’m going to get you for your birthday. This is going to be a hard act to follow.”
Was that all? I felt my blush receding.
“Oh, that,” I said. “You can just write me another song.”
Which was kind of vixenish of me to say, because he had never admitted that the song, the first one he’d ever played me, “Tall Drink of Water,” was about me. But I could tell by the way he was smiling now that I’d guessed correctly. It was. It totally was.
So then we ate our sundaes and watched the rest of the movie, and when it was over and the credits were rolling, I remembered something else I’d meant to give him, something I’d thought of in the cab on the way down from the Contessa’s, when I’d been trying to think up what I was going to say to him if he broke up with me.
“Oh,” I said. “I thought of a name for your band.”
“Not,” he said with a groan, “the X-Wing Fighters. I beg of you.”
“No,” I said. “Skinner Box.” Which is this thing this one psychologist used on all these rats and pigeons to prove there’s such a thing as a conditioned response. Pavlov, the guy Michael had named his dog after, had done the same thing, but with dogs and bells.
“Skinner Box,” Michael said carefully.
“Yeah,” I said. “I mean, I just figured, since you named your dog Pavlov—”
“I kind of like it,” Michael said. “I’ll see what the guys say.”
I beamed. The evening was turning out so much better than I had originally thought it would, I couldn’t really do anything but beam. In fact, that’s why I locked myself in the bathroom. To try to calm down a little. I am so happy, I can barely write. I—