Chapter 18

“Remind me how you two know each other?” I slide into the front seat of the rental car as Silas shoots a goodbye wave toward Sadie. He invited her to join us, but she said something about needing to call Cora.

“Sadie?” Silas asks, ducking in next to me. He’s been cradling Puddles like a fat football under one arm, but now he holds her out toward me—tongue lolling from her mouth, droplets of slobber hitting the driver’s seat with every pant.

“Surprise,” Cleo chimes from the back. “We have a furry hitchhiker.”

“I hate surprises,” I mutter, just as Silas says, “Can you hold her while I drive?”

We stare at each other over the center console. “Absolutely not.”

“Oh, come on.” He jiggles her so her back paws sway over the seat. “Can we try? She’s a wonderful road trip companion.”

“How long is this drive?” I ask, eyeing Puddles. Her breath is hot and smelly, wafting at me with every exhale. I imagine my blouse slick with slobber.

“Ninety minutes,” Mick offers from the back seat, and I hold up both hands.

“It’s a no.”

“Give her to me,” Cleo says, sticking her hands between the front two seats. She wiggles her fingers, sharp green nails flashing. When Silas eases Puddles off to her, Cleo looks at me through her long eyelashes—glittering with glued-on rhinestones. “She’s a pug, not a piece of poop.”

“I didn’t say she was—”

“You’re treating her like one,” Cleo says, settling the loaf that is Puddles into her lap. “She has feelings, you know.”

“The summer is young,” Silas says before I can respond, finally dropping into the driver’s seat and shutting his door. “We have time to make a dog person out of Audrey yet.”

“Everyone’s a dog person once they meet the right dog,” Mick says. He reaches forward to squeeze my shoulders and I slide down in my seat, feeling acutely like I made the wrong choice in coming here. “Puddles is definitely the right dog.”

“Anyway,” Silas says. I watch his eyes flick up, check on Puddles in the rearview, before he taps the blinker and eases us onto the road. “Sadie was my math tutor. Does that answer your question?”

I look at the side of his face, half-hidden behind dark sunglasses and that baseball cap. Silas called Sadie his bonus mom, so... “No?”

He smiles crookedly, casting a glance my way. “My dad hired her to help me after my mom died. My grades were terrible, along with everything else about me.”

I turn away from him instinctually, tensing at the honesty of this admission. We don’t even know each other.

“Sadie was at the University of Michigan then,” Silas says. He punches on the radio, and something acoustic fills the car. “In Ann Arbor. At first she was just helping me with algebra, but then she kind of stuck around to help me with everything else. Lily, too—my sister.” I hazard a glance in his direction but he’s staring straight ahead, eyes on the road and one hand on the wheel. The other drums his knee, casual, like this is the easiest thing in the world to talk about. “Our dad was having a hard time—Lily was seven and I was thirteen and Sadie kind of saved us, I don’t know. She took a job at American right before my senior year and I didn’t really know where to go for college so I went there.” He slows for a stoplight and looks over at me, and I’m grateful for the sunglasses between us. “My dad had no idea what to do with us after my mom died. And Sadie just became our family.”

What happened to your mom?It’s right there at the back of my throat, waiting to be asked. But I can’t make myself say it, and as music fills the space between us, Silas looks at me again. He laughs, shaking his head a little.

“What?” I say.

“You know that term resting bitch face?” I frown, bracing for the insult. “You have resting mathematician face.” His eyes flick to mine before falling back to the road. “Like you’re always trying to figure something out.”

“Probably how she wound up in this car with you two idiots,” Cleo says, but there’s something unquestionably affectionate about it. From the corner of my eye, I see her reach forward to tickle her fingernails along the back of Silas’s neck.

The plaza in Taos is a scaled-down version of the one in Santa Fe, an unshaded park surrounded on all sides by tourist shops. The park is bare and hot, its few trees doing little to provide relief from the afternoon sun. I watch Puddles totter into the grass and squat to pee for the third time since we left the car.

“So,” Cleo says. She’s holding Puddles’s leash while Mick and Silas buy us ice cream, and her eyes flick to mine behind her square yellow sunglasses. “That was kind of gnarly last night.”

The show is the last thing I want to talk about—especially with Cleo, who seems to hate me. The Polaroid camera dangling from her neck sways precariously as Puddles tugs her farther into the grass.

“If I called out my mom like that in public, she’d evaporate me. Like, ream me so intensely I’d simply vaporize.” She cocks an eyebrow at me. “My mom’s not Camilla St. Vrain, though.”

“Lucky you,” I mutter, and Cleo studies my face.

“Why do you hate her so much?”

“I don’t hate her,” I say, though it feels more like an automatic response than one I’ve actually considered. “It’s more complicated than that.”

“I mean, sure,” Cleo says. “She’s your mom. That shit’s always complicated.”

“What’s complicated?” Mick asks, stepping up beside us and extending a mint-chip ice cream cone in my direction. Silas hands one to Cleo, something rainbow swirled and exactly as colorful as she is. She trades him for Puddles’s leash and I wonder, not for the first time, what exists there between them.

“Motherhood,” Cleo says, licking at her ice cream. We drift across the plaza toward a line of low-slung tourist shops. “Being a daughter.”

“Mmm,” Mick says sagely, like this is enough of an answer all on its own. “So we’re talking about the show.”

I wince—part brain freeze from my ice cream, part humiliation. Clearly, they’ve all talked about it without me.

“I thought it was kind of funny,” Mick says, shrugging. “That lady’s so peace and love all the time it honestly freaks me out. ‘Absolutely horrible’ is a little intense, but—”

“But you chose to be here,” I say, and all three of them turn to look at me. Like they’re surprised: she speaks. “I didn’t choose this. She’s always choosing for me.”

There’s a beat of silence before Cleo says simply, “That sucks.”

“But you’re almost in college,” Mick says, chocolate ice cream on his chin. “She won’t be able to tell you what to do once you’re gone.”

“I’ve been gone,” I tell them. “She sent me to boarding school in sixth grade.”

Silas stops, turning back to look at me. “You’ve been away from home since sixth grade? What is that, like eleven years old?”

I nod, surprised by his surprise. With all of us stopped, Puddles shuffles toward me and starts licking my ankle. I move it swiftly out of her way.

“How often do you see your parents?” Silas asks, and behind his shoulder Cleo drags Mick toward one of the shop windows to point something out to him.

I think about it, running through the last calendar year. “Twice a year, maybe? My dad tries to visit, and I usually see Camilla at the holidays.”

“Summers?” Silas asks, taking a step closer to me.

“Camp.” Ice cream drips onto my hand, and I lift it to my mouth to lick it off. “Or summer sessions at school.”

Silas’s gaze lingers on the back of my hand before coming up to mine. “That’s lonely,” he says.

The words move through me like ice. I feel cold, suddenly, and exposed. I feel eleven years old, gulping back tears at the Summit School while my mother flies home to launch her lifestyle brand.

“It’s what I’m used to,” I say. Mick and Cleo have disappeared into the store, so I step over to a bench and sit down. I don’t look at Silas as he follows, parking Puddles between his feet. I’m worried that if we make eye contact, he’ll see through this version of me into that younger one, scared and alone. “And it’s good to get ahead in my coursework.”

“Right,” Silas says, running a hand over Puddles’s head. She’s panting hard, her tongue so long I can’t quite believe it fits in her mouth. Silas going quiet makes me want to keep talking—to fill this weird, sympathetic silence between us.

“What does it mean?” I ask, and he looks up at me. I point to his hat. “GG’s Gardenshare?”

“Oh.” He smiles, adjusting it on his head. “My grandma runs this gardenshare program—like a CSA, but it’s just stuff from her garden. My cousins and I would help her out with the deliveries when we visited on summer breaks growing up. She makes us all call her GG because she thinks grandma makes her sound old.” I imagine a swarm of children moving between rows of vegetables; grandparents in overalls watching them from a back porch. It could be a fantasy, it’s so unfamiliar to me. My parents are both only children; I have one grandfather on my dad’s side, in a south Texas town we never visit. My mom’s parents died when she was twenty. “She lives in the mountains about an hour from Denver, little town called Switchback Ridge.” Silas looks up at me, sun in his eyes. “I’ll visit her in a couple weeks when we’re in Colorado. You should come.”

What?

“I get it now, you know.”

I blink at him, holding my ice cream like a shield. “Get what?”

“At the show in LA, that back alley. The centering practice.” He holds up his fingers and taps his thumb to each one in turn, the first time I’ve ever seen someone reflect my habit back at me. “You’re centering yourself.”

I picture him yesterday morning, eyes on mine in the pale morning light on the rooftop. Backstage at the show last night, reminding me with one quiet gesture of all the calm I contain. I want to push back—I want him not to be able to read me like this. But it comes out all on its own, one quiet word. “Yeah.”

He nods, looking down at Puddles. A few strands of hair fall loose from the GG’s Gardenshare cap and brush his cheek, hide him from me. “Did she teach you that?”

“No,” I say. I picked it up during my first and only counseling session at the Summit School. When you start to feel ungrounded, the therapist had told me, find something concrete to focus on. Like noticing the colors around you. Or eating a piece of candy.

Colors were a shade too subjective—cast through the unreliable filters of our eyes, the time of the day, the slant of the light. And how often did I have candy on me? But I always had my same hands. My ten fingers.

I don’t tell Silas any of this. I say, “That one I learned on my own.”