Our Year of Maybe

“Hey, I played flute!” Carlie says.

“In middle school,” Chase says. “And you hated it.”

Carlie shrugs. “I was good, though.”

“Humble, too,” Jess says.

“Our dad was great.” Chase’s eyes go dreamy, lost in memory. “He played in a band in Argentina when he was in college. Mom, do you have the tapes?”

“I have the tapes!” she says, rocketing out of her armchair. “And by tapes, we do mean literal tapes.” She rummages through the cabinet unit, pulling out a tape and placing it into a sound system. “Oh—this was Ernesto’s twelve-minute drum solo.” She eyes Carlie. “That must be where you get your humility.”

It feels almost like a betrayal, being so at home with this family that isn’t mine and isn’t Sophie’s.

I can’t help loving it.

“Who knew you were so good at Taboo?” Chase says.

“Beginner’s luck?” We decided to go for a walk around his neighborhood after putting the game away because I wasn’t ready to go home yet. And I don’t think he was ready to let me. “I really like your family.”

“They’re a little too much.”

“They’re exactly the right amount,” I say. “I . . . was sort of surprised by how much your dad came up.”

“It was a long time ago. We all just thought we’d be miserable if we only cried when remembering him. We didn’t want it to ever feel like we couldn’t say his name in our house.” A smile crosses his lips. “I remember bits and pieces of him. Mostly his drumming. He had a kit in the garage, and you heard him on the tape—he was good. He was the one who got me into music.”

“I’m sure he’d have loved Diamonds.”

Chase laughs. “He’d have a lot of constructive feedback.”

We pass a bar. A restaurant. Another bar. Chase hums a song I don’t know, a sound I’ve gotten used to. It’s not at all grating. It’s completely endearing.

“I can’t wait until I’m twenty-one,” Chase says. “We could get into so many more shows. It’s not even nine o’clock and we can barely go anywhere.”

I point. “That bookstore’s open.”

He smirks. “How convenient.”

Inside, I inhale the musty scent of old books. The store’s deserted except for a woman reading a fantasy novel behind the cash register and two orange cats curled in a plush bed next to a bin of bargain reads.

I find myself drifting toward the section marked PHILOSOPHY. I run a finger over the peeling-apart spines of the books. Aristotle, Aquinas, Bacon, Böhme, Comte. When I land on Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy, I pull it out and open it.

“The ending in that one is kind of a letdown,” Chase says from behind me. He brushes my arm with a few fingers.

“Descartes is considered the father of modern Western philosophy. Have you heard the phrase ‘I think, therefore I am’? Or in Latin, cogito, ergo sum?”

“I have not. Explain it to me?”

His nearness makes my heart race. Staring down at the yellow-gray page, I say, “Descartes was trying to find a statement that couldn’t be doubted. He’d already disproved everything he used to believe in, but the fact that he was able to think meant that he existed, and that couldn’t be disproved.”

“You’re so cute geeking out over all this,” he says. “You don’t even know.”

My heart leaps into my throat, making speaking a serious challenge. “When I first read that—cogito, ergo sum—I felt . . . reassured somehow. That no matter how terrible I felt, I existed. I could think. God, I probably thought way too much. I still do.”

“Not a bad thing,” Chase says. He backs up a bit, and my body misses his closeness already.

We continue to wander.

“I went to services last night,” I tell him.