Page 28 of Haunted

“You okay, dude?” Liam asks.

“Fine,” I say, and overshoot the foam on a cappuccino.

He’s been waiting a year. Today he stood in that courtyard in his dress uniform and asked if he could call me, and I told him I’d call him instead. I still don’t know which one of us I was lying to.

I look up at the sketch I hung this morning. The one I thought Lance frowned at, for about half a second. I’ve been staring at it all afternoon, trying to see what he saw, and I finally do.

It’s a pencil sketch of the Bean Stop interior. The tables, the bar, the chalkboard menu, the espresso machine. Every surface rendered in careful detail. I spent weeks on the blending alone.

There are no people in it.

I pull my portfolio from under the counter and page through it. Sketch after sketch. The courtyard. The street outside. Aunt Shelley’s kitchen. The view from my bedroom window. They’re technically good—better than anything I did in high school. But every one of them is empty. No faces. No figures. No bodies in the chairs, no hands around the cups. I’ve been drawing the world with everyone removed from it.

I close the portfolio and set it down. I look at the sketch on the wall, and then at Liam beside me, laughing at something a customer is saying. I remember Lance in the courtyard with the light on his face. It’s like seeing color for the first time after months of pencil graphite.

I let myself imagine it, because I’ve spent all afternoon refusing to. Lance in that uniform, coming through a door somewhere with his bag over his shoulder, and me going to him. That part’s easy. That part I could have tomorrow.

Then I imagine the rest of it. Lance leaving. Lance leaving again. Me here, in the same apron, behind the same counter, keeping everything warm until the next time.

I’ve been telling myself I’m waiting for something to find me. Some idea, some reason, whatever it is that’s supposed to knock on the door and tell you what I’m for. But nothing is going to knock while I’m standing here holding still.

He’s out there doing things. Boot camp. The Corps. A life he chose and went and got. And in his version of the future, I’m exactly where he left me.

It’s not cruelty. He doesn’t even know he’s doing it. But I feel it settling over me like a weight.

If I don’t move now, I never will.

I finish my shift. I close out my register, wipe down the bar, restock the syrups. Then I make a chai latte to go and walk home.

Aunt Shelley is looking over work papers at the kitchen table when I come in. She’s in her reading glasses and one of her oversized cardigans. She looks up and takes the chai like I’ve given her a surprise gift, even though I bring her one every day.

“Lance came by the café,” I say.

She sets down her pen. “And?”

“He kissed me.”

She takes a sip of the chai. “And how was that?”

“It was—” I sit down across from her. “It was really good. And that’s the problem.”

She waits. She’s really good at waiting for me to find the right words. She doesn’t fill silence the way Lance does.

I find the words, and they scare me more than I want to admit. “He’s in the Marines. He’s doing things. He’s got this whole life. And seeing him really made me think about what I’m doing with my life.”

“So, what are you doing with your life?” she asks me.

I open my mouth and close it. “I don’t know.”

She takes off her glasses and folds them on the table. “You know what I think about, sometimes? The difference between a rut and a grave is how long you spend in it.”

I stare at her.

“Parker, I love having you here. You know that. But I always pictured you somewhere that felt like an adventure. Being yourself for once.” She takes another sip. “Whoever that turns out to be.”

I look at the chai latte in her hands. The cinnamon on top. The cardamom I always add because she likes it The spices smell like somewhere else when I grind them. They come from someplace I have never been and can’t even imagine.

“What if I went to India?” I say. “Just for a little while.”