Page 58 of The Getaway List
This is getting less and less true as the summer goes on—while Mariella took me up on the offer to be her emotional-support bystander a few times, she’s confident enough to hold her own in the wild now. I feel like I need to impress this upon Luca, so I turn to him and put both hands on his shoulders.
“Luca. You are very good company. That’s why Mariella asks you to go places. You’re an exceedingly kind human being with a giant, ridiculously amusing imagination and apparently no taste in dessert, which is just a tribute to how good of a friend you are that we’re all willing to forgive you for it.”
He wavers for a moment, like there’s something he wants to say but isn’t quite sure if he should.
“Thank you for saying that,” he says in the end, with enough finality that I know he wants me to drop it. “Even if I’m not sure that dessert thing is true for Tom.”
“Valid point. The rest of us will go to the grave with your secret,” I vow. “Now, where are we going to get a snack around here?”
Before Luca can answer, my phone lets out a loud ping.
“If you’ve got to pick up a dispatch, I don’t mind,” says Luca.
I sigh. “It’s not a dispatch. It’s my mom.”
With yet another text indicating that she is still living in the reality where I’m coming home mid-August as planned, and that my “I’ll think about it” was in fact already thought out and decided. Last week it was a photo of the back-to-school section of Target: Anything you want me to grab before classes start? Today it’s a reminder that class sign-ups are next week, if I want to take another look at the roster.
I’d put a stop to it, but I’m so grateful that we’re on speaking terms at all that I can’t seem to do it just yet. Talking to Mariella made me realize we were long overdue for a discussion, but I wasn’t accounting for this—the relief of having some normalcy with my mom back, even if it’s just a shade of what it was before.
Luca peers at the text over my shoulder and winces. “Okay, then. I’ll be your self-advocacy friend for the afternoon, too. Tell her to keep dreaming.”
This wrestles a smile out of me if only because the mental image of Luca marching up to my mom and saying that to her face is more amusing to me than all of the short stories I’ve written this summer combined.
“I’ll get there,” I say reluctantly.
Luca pats me on the back with adorable authority for someone who hasn’t wielded much of it in his life. “She’ll get on board. And one day we’ll go back to that bookstore and have books with our own names on them, and disappointing our dessert-loving, New York–hating parents will all have been worth it.”
I smile at him, because the idea of that has an impossible kind of magic. I just hope I have enough courage to reach for it, knowing I might not have my mom’s support or Tom at my side when the time comes. Knowing that this is a kind of magic I’m going to have to make on my own.
Chapter Twenty
“We should also take out the trash to make sure all the wrappers from the freezer burritos are out of sight, so she doesn’t think she’s coming home to two deeply advanced cases of scurvy,” I say.
Tom looks up from the fridge we’re cleaning the leftovers out of and says, “Trust me. The hallway could be littered with empty vodka bottles and I don’t think my mom would bat an eye.”
“We’re putting that on the list of things we’re never saying to my mom, ever ever,” I say, widening the trash bag I’m holding out for him.
We’re not really cleaning for cleaning’s sake, because Tom has assured me that a house cleaner always comes and scrubs the place from top to bottom the day before his mom gets back to town. But the closer we get to Vanessa coming back the antsier Tom seems to be, like he can’t focus on a task for more than a few moments to save his life. I figured cleaning might be a constructive, Tom-friendly way to work out whatever it is that’s eating at him, so we’re going through the motions of being responsible apartment dwellers and not two people who have mostly subsisted on Pop-Tarts the entire summer.
“You never told me what your mom thinks about the whole ‘leaving New York’ thing,” I say, wondering if that has something to do with his unease.
Tom shrugs. “She just said it would be nice to catch up with my aunt.”
My brows furrow. “She does understand that you’re like—moving moving. That this isn’t a social call.”
Tom just shrugs again. “I’m not sure if she’ll notice my being gone either way.”
I’m not sure what’s more concerning, the words coming out of Tom’s mouth or the casual way he says them. Like he’s come to terms with them in such a permanent way that they don’t have nearly the effect they should.
“I feel weird eating up the last of your time with your mom when she gets back. I can leave earlier,” I tell him. “Really. The sublet starts in two days. Plus, then I can establish myself as the alpha of the apartment and whip the boys in line.”
In a disappointing turn of events to all the Craigslist bots I accidentally messaged looking for a sublet, it turns out that Jesse and the band found a permanent apartment to lease that has a little alcove up on a ladder with just enough room for a mattress and a makeshift bedside table. While it’s not strictly legal for me to move into it, it sure is cheap, and comes with the added perk of roommates who are definitely not going to cut off my hair and sell it in my sleep. (Some of Luca’s ghost stories the other night were a little too specific for my taste.)
“I don’t want to keep you from your New Girl self-insert fanfiction, but if you don’t mind staying—I don’t know,” says Tom. “She’s just…”
“A lot?” I supply. It may have been years since I’ve seen Vanessa, but that doesn’t make the impression she leaves any less deep. From what I’ve heard from Tom these past few weeks, her tendency to act like a human pendulum—distracted and disengaged one second, and then shining a spotlight brighter than the sun on you in the next to make up for it—has only gotten more pronounced.
Tom shifts uncomfortably. “It’s weird. It’s like I never feel like I’m—interesting enough for her.”
