Our Year of Maybe

“I’m glad.”

We’re facing each other now, a foot and a half of space between our bodies. The tug in my chest is magnetic, nearly impossible to ignore.

We’re not close enough friends yet to hug, are we? Or should we fist-bump, the way Kat and I did? Give a two-fingered salute like a too-cool love interest in a YA novel?

In my panic, what I do is stick out my hand.

For a handshake.

The socially awkward police better come arrest me now, lock me up before I vomit on someone’s shoes or make a dad joke.

I must look horrified by what my hand has done, but Chase just stares down at it and laughs.

“You crack me up. Pleasure doing business with you, John Lennon,” he says as he shakes my hand, his olive skin warm against mine.

CHAPTER 15

SOPHIE

WHEN SOMEONE TELLS YOU THEY “need some time,” they should give you an exact date they’ll be ready to talk about whatever difficult thing they can’t talk about right now. I need some time, but let’s reconvene next Thursday at four p.m., they should say.

I’ve been trying to give Peter space to think about the kiss. Yes, it’s been only a couple days, but it’s all I can think about.

“Sophie, you’re not spotting,” my teacher says in my weekly jazz technique class. I’ve been falling out of my double and triple pirouettes all afternoon.

“I know. I know,” I mumble.

I make it home in time to go trick-or-treating with Tabby, who got the night off from her waitressing job. Still, my mind’s somewhere else.

“Sophie, you’re dawdling,” Tabby calls from a few paces ahead, and I rush to catch up with them.

Tabby and Josh are really into graphic novels and dressed a little more elaborately than I did, as characters from Saga. Tabby’s Alana, an army deserter on the run with her baby (Luna) during an intergalactic war. Josh, with horns on his head, is Marko, Alana’s husband. They lose their minds when someone actually recognizes who they are.

On past Halloweens, Peter and I made our own Star Wars or Harry Potter costumes, or something related to whatever obscure book Peter was into that year. Once we went as half of the Beatles. Always what Peter wanted, but I was happy to defer to him, happy to see him happy. I loved seeing him get into it, even if we never trick-or-treated more than a few blocks and he couldn’t eat too much candy.

This year I painted whiskers on my cheeks and wore all black. I didn’t see Peter at lunch, and I didn’t mention Halloween to him earlier because I was too wrapped up in everything else. I didn’t think it was something I had to mention—I’ve never had to before.

We go along Forty-Fifth Street first, where a lot of the Wallingford businesses are handing out candy, then back up into our neighborhood. I’m past the age to be excited about candy and too young and not yet jaded enough to trick-or-treat ironically like some of the college kids toting around pillowcases, so most of the time, I hang back while Luna collects her goodies.

Okay, sometimes I collect a few goodies of my own. I have not yet outgrown sugar rushes. Plus, I’m on my period, and I’m fiercely craving a Reese’s.

“Your sister is so cute,” a woman says before dropping a Hershey’s Kiss into Luna’s outstretched bag, though her face is a little uncertain. Josh is Korean, so I’m not sure whose sister she assumes Luna is.

It can’t be the first time someone’s assumed this, though, and it probably won’t be the last. I feel a strange pang of discomfort for the two of them.

Tabby opens her mouth, but Josh beats her to it. “Yes, she is,” he says quickly. “Happy Halloween.”

We retreat down the block. My bag is half full, because I am usually an optimist, and when it’s candy, it’s hard not to be.

Tabby sighs loudly and adjusts her wings. “I don’t know why you have to do that,” she mutters to Josh, “let people think she isn’t actually our kid.”

“Isn’t it easier this way?”

“It’s a lie.” Tabby grips Luna’s hand as we cross the street. She started walking quickly, and now, at sixteen months, she rarely needs help.

“What good does it do if I tell a little old lady the truth? We’re seventeen, and this is our daughter. We don’t need her judgment. She doesn’t know us.”

I stay quiet, unsure what to say. It’s strange to observe this very adult conversation between my younger sister and her boyfriend.