I grab for the cards, shuffle hastily, and deal them out.
Just my luck, I get another dud. I swap out three cards, trying for a high pair, but somehow I manage only to make my hand worse.
With a sigh, Xander lays down his cards and says, “Yes, it was about the expulsion.”
Confused, I study his hand. It’s even worse than mine. He must have assumed as much.
“Claire—the publicist—thinks that it’s my fault the press knows about it. She thinks I told someone at school and they sold the story.”
“And did you?” I ask.
The silence that follows stretches on for just a beat too long, and Xander won’t meet my eyes. “No,” he finally says, averting my gaze and fidgeting with the three of spades in front of him. “I didn’t tell anyone at school. I mean, it would be good money for anyone who tried to sell the story. The son of the people who literally wrote the book on parenting expelled from school? That’s worth a pretty penny, I suppose.”
Seemingly anxious to move on, he scoops up all the cards, shuffles, and deals. Xander wins with an ace high, and I brace myself for the inevitable. I remember exactly where his line of questioning left off. He was about to ask me why we moved from Portland. And I will have to tell him the truth. I will have to talk about Lottie.
Of course, I could lie. I could tell him we moved for my mom’s work or some other bullshit explanation like that. But that’s not how the game works. And something tells me Xander hasn’t lied to me once. When he definitely could have.
I guess that’s the big difference between real poker and our unique variety.
In this version, you have to have faith in your opponent.
“Why are you always looking at your phone?”
The question takes me by surprise. I’d been steeling myself to talk about the move, already cherry-picking which details to include and exclude. But he didn’t ask that. Either because he already forgot about it or decided he had more pressing inquiries on his mind.
My hand instinctively moves to my pocket before I remember with irritation that Siri still has my phone. I really need to figure out a way to get that back. But I have a suspicion that after my little meltdown at the party, it’s going to be difficult to convince her that I know how to cut loose.
Xander must interpret my delay as hesitation, because he awkwardly rubs his neck and says, “You don’t have to say it. I think I can guess.”
Huh?
He can guess that I ask Google questions all day in a vain attempt to keep the one unanswerable question at bay?
I swallow hard. “You can?”
He nods, looking remorseful. “You have a boyfriend, right? He’s worried about you stuck here at the airport.”
It takes me an unusually long time to digest the words that just came out of his mouth. They’re so foreign and so off base, I have a hard time even making sense of them.
Once again Xander misinterprets my silence. He sighs. “Yeah. I thought so. I figured it out a while ago. I just kept thinking, or . . . I don’t know . . . hoping that I was wrong.”
What?
I’m assaulted by a barrage of confusing thoughts and emotions. They’re overwhelming me, kicking my anxiety up a notch. I’m still trying to process the last inane thing he said. Now he’s saying he was hoping I didn’t have a boyfriend?
Why would he want that? I’m insane. He’s seen it for himself. I’m not the datable one. Lottie was the datable one. Lottie was the hot one. If Lottie were alive now, she’d be the one he’d be hoping didn’t have a boyfriend. I’m just the default choice. Because I’m the only one left.
Xander keeps talking. “I mean, why wouldn’t you? You’re pretty and funny and cool to hang out with. Even if you do kind of overreact from time to time.” He stops talking rather abruptly and then lets out a stutter of a laugh.
Is he nervous?
My mind is still whirling, still trying to keep up.
This is exactly the kind of thing Lottie would know about. She spoke boy fluently. I can barely even read the alphabet.
“Okay, you can say something anytime now,” he prompts. “I mean, please say something. You’re kind of freaking me out. And when I freak out, I have a tendency to ramble.”
“Sorry,” I say automatically. Because it’s the first thing that tumbles out. And, unfortunately, the second thing that tumbles out is, “You think I’m pretty?”
I swear I see splotches of pink bloom on Xander’s dark cheeks, but it’s impossible to be sure, because he bows his head and starts shuffling the cards. “Yeah. I mean, sure. I mean, obviously anyone would think . . .” He interrupts himself with a throat clear and stops shuffling in the middle of the bridge. The cards fall into a messy, uneven heap. “It’s not my deal.”
He shoves the jumbled pile at me.
Speechless and more than just a little bewildered, I transfer all my energy into doing the best shuffling job in the history of card shuffling. I split, riffle, bridge, split, riffle, bridge, split, riffle, bridge. Over and over and over until even the universe can’t keep track of what card went where.
I can sense Xander watching me the entire time. No, not just watching. Studying. Observing.
I tap the deck twice on the table and deal. It isn’t until I pass Xander his fifth card that I realize I never actually answered his last question. He made an assumption about the answer and I didn’t correct him.
Is that being dishonest?
Is that breaking the rules of the game?
I never actually said I had a boyfriend, so I didn’t technically lie. But I also didn’t pay him his winnings with a truthful answer.
He picks up his five cards and organizes them in his hand. I think about stopping the game right now and admitting my wrongdoing. But if I did, then I would have to tell him the truth. I’d have to tell him that the real reason I look at my phone five thousand times a day is because I’m crazy. So crazy even my therapist doesn’t know the extent of my craziness. What would he think of me then?
Would he still think I’m pretty?
Most definitely not. Certifiable trumps pretty every time.
I decide it’s much better to just let him go on thinking that I have a boyfriend back home. That he texts me every hour to make sure I’m okay. That I’m in a happy, healthy, fulfilling relationship.
It’s cleaner that way.
No mixed signals. No eyes locking across the table. No flirtatious smiles.
Nothing can ever happen between us. And it’s much easier if we both agree on that.
I pick up my cards and nearly let out a gasp when I see that I’ve dealt myself four shiny aces. One of the best hands a player can get.
I peer up at Xander to make sure he didn’t notice my terrible poker face, but his eyes are cast downward at his cards. He looks kind of adorable. With his brow all furrowed in concentration and his perfect white teeth raking over his bottom lip.
He thinks I’m pretty.
And funny.
Despite my attempts to hold it back, a small smile starts to chisel its way across my face. I hide the expression behind my cards. As I focus on my four beautiful aces, a thought comes barreling into my mind that’s so terrifying and so unexpected, I don’t even know what to do with it.
I think my luck is changing.
A Phone Call from Lord Voldemort
I throw my cards down atop Xander’s pathetic two pair. Xander’s eyes widen at the sight of them. It’s not every day you see a four of a kind. And with aces, no less.
“Whoa,” he says, impressed. “I think that warrants two questions.”
“Two?” I repeat excitedly, but then I think about the repercussions of agreeing to such a thing. If I ask two questions now, what happens if Xander gets four of a kind in the future? Or an even better hand? “That’s okay. I’ll just take the one.”
“Are you sure?”
I nod. “Unlike some people, I don’t change the rules on a whim.”
He crosses his arms in
mock offense. “Okay. Fine, Miss Morality. Let’s hear your question.”
“Why did you get expelled from school?”
His arms fall to his sides and he sits up straighter. Like someone’s just jabbed a rod into his spine. He pulls all the cards across the table and begins aligning them into a perfect stack. “Are you sure you want to waste your big four-aces question on that?” I can tell he’s trying to make his voice sound breezy, but I hear right through it.
“What’s wrong with my question?” I challenge.
He shrugs, refusing to meet my eye. “Nothing. It’s just, I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed by the answer and feel like you wasted such a big win on something so terribly unexciting.”
“Why don’t you let me be the judge of that?”
He clears his throat. “I got expelled because I didn’t read the assigned book for English class.”
“What? You got expelled for not reading a book? What kind of school is this? Nazi prep academy?”
“That’s another question.”
“That was a one sentence answer.”
He laughs. “Touché.” He cuts the deck and looks at the card in the middle. “The book was just the beginning.” Then he shuffles and looks at another card. On and on this goes until I’m afraid he’s never going to elaborate. When he finally cuts the deck on an ace, he says, “I guess it officially started when Samantha broke up with me. She was my girlfriend. We’d been dating since middle school. We were . . .” He shakes his head and gazes into the empty lobby. “I don’t know, we thought we were in love. But what did we know? We were thirteen when we first got together.”
I let out a huff of agreement, as if I’ve been there. As if I actually had a relationship in middle school and can relate to the juvenility of it all.
As if I’ve actually had a relationship . . . ever.
“Anyway,” he goes on, his fingers still deftly cutting and restacking the deck. “She cheated on me a few months ago, and I lost it. I just”—he pauses, looking visibly pained to continue—“lost my shit, you know?”
I nod. As if, once again, I can relate.
Although to losing one’s shit, I suppose I can.
“I stopped caring about anything. I stopped doing my homework. Stopped studying for tests. Eventually, I stopped showing up to school altogether.” When he says this last part, I could be mistaken, but he almost looks pleased with himself.
“And your parents let you just ditch school all the time?”
“My parents didn’t give a crap because they were never around to give a crap.”
“But your parents are—”
“Dr. Max and Dr. Marcia,” he says with a dramatic eye roll. “I know. The inventors of the Kids Come First method. Well, guess which kid has never come first?”
He tilts back on his chair and balances precariously on two legs. In that moment, with his far-off expression and the bitterness weighing down the corners of his mouth, he looks like a little boy.
“I could set the house on fire and they would never know. At least, not until their publicist saw it on Twitter.” He lets his chair fall back to the ground with a loud clack and deals the cards without another word.
A minute later I lay down a pair of sevens that just edges out his pair of sixes.
“What was the book?” I ask quietly. I almost didn’t want to win. This line of questioning has turned him into someone else. Not the Xander I surfed with on the train. And definitely not the Reginald Schwarzenegger I ate burgers with.
Xander looks visibly relieved at my choice of question. He must have thought I was going to delve much deeper. “A Tale of Two Cities.”
“You didn’t read that?” I blurt without thinking. “But it’s so good!”
He squints at me like suddenly I’m out of focus. “Are you on crack? The thing is like five hundred pages of Hemingway droning on and on.”
“It’s Dickens, actually and I thought you said you didn’t read it.”
“I started it,” he defends.
“Oh, but you have to read it. It’s such a classic.”
“You sound like my English teacher.”
That shuts me up.
“My teacher said he might be able to talk the administration out of my expulsion if I just read it and wrote the stupid paper. It’s what started my whole downward spiral, so I suppose he thought the book could save me or some symbolic crap like that.”
“Hold up,” I say. “You mean, you have an out—you can make all your problems go away—and you haven’t taken it?”
If there was anything in the world that would bring Lottie back, I would do it. I would be lined up, camped out, signed on the dotted line, banging on the doors to let me do it. The idea that Xander has the opportunity to make this all go away and he’s choosing not to take it suddenly starts my blood boiling.
What does he know about problems? What does know about loss? His loss is reversible. His problems are fixable.
“You think all of my problems revolve around a book?” he fires back, and I hear the hints of irritation in his tone. “If you do, then you clearly haven’t listened to a word I’ve just said.”
I shrink down in my chair, suddenly feeling foolish and stupid.
This is why you don’t talk, Ryn. This is why you shut up.
“I don’t have a boyfriend!” I blurt out. Because apparently, I just want to make matters worse.
He sets the cards on the table and squints at me. “What?”
I lower my voice. “I didn’t technically lie. You made a wrong assumption and I didn’t correct you.”
He rubs the back of his head, seemingly trying to rewind the conversation and bring my comment back to a context in which it makes sense. “So when I asked why you always look at your phone . . . ,” he begins.
“You answered for me. It just wasn’t the truth.”
I’m not sure how I managed to do it. But somehow his frustration gives way to curiosity. “So what is the truth?”
Instinctively, I reach for my phone again and have to remind myself that it’s in Siri’s custody.
“The truth is I’m insane.”
An amused grin cracks the surface of Xander’s face. “Well, I knew that.”
“No,” I tell him in all seriousness. “I’m really insane. Like certifiable. My therapist doesn’t even know the half of it.”
Therapist.
As soon as the word is out of my mouth, I wish I could take it back.
I just admitted to a cute boy who thinks I’m pretty that I have a therapist? Why don’t I just tell him about my menstrual cramps next?
When I brave a glance at him, however, I see that his face is completely neutral. My confession hasn’t appeared to shake him at all. Maybe growing up with psychologist parents desensitizes you to the whole therapy thing.
“We’re all a little crazy, Ryn,” he finally says. “But that doesn’t explain why you’re obsessed with your phone.”
“I ask my phone questions, okay?”
He ponders that for a second. “Like knock knock jokes?”
I roll my eyes. “No. Like every question that ever pops into my head. It makes me feel better to know the answer. Or just to know that an answer exists.”
There. I’ve said it. Aloud. The crazy is out.
Now I just have to sit back and wait for Xander to think up a polite excuse to get the hell out of here.
“Okay,” he says with a shrug and starts dealing the next hand. I stare openmouthed at each card that slides across the table.
“That’s it?” I ask.
“What’s it?”
“That’s all you have to say about the phone/question thing?”
He stops dealing after only four cards apiece. His eyebrows knit together. “Was there something else you wanted me to say?”
“I . . .” I stammer. “I don’t know. I mean, don’t you think that’s a little nuts?”
He purses his lips in thought. “No.”
“No?”
/> I don’t know why I’m pressing him. I should be grateful that he’s brainless enough to not see this for what it really is. But it’s suddenly like I need validation. I need him to confirm what I’ve believed for an entire year. He’s the son of two famous psychologists. If anyone should recognize crazy, it’s him.
“Actually, I was thinking how impressed I am by you.”
I nearly choke on my own spit. “Impressed?”
“Yeah. Most people I know keep their crazy bottled up inside. But not you. You put it out there. You found an outlet. A nondestructive coping mechanism. You figured out a way to deal with all the shit in your head without leaving a huge mess in your wake. Not everyone can do that.”
“I . . .” I start to say but don’t quite know how to finish.
I’ve never thought about it that way. Dr. Judy has certainly never analyzed it that way.
But what about the mess in my head?
Maybe my methods aren’t as benign as he thinks.
He deals the final card, and I pick up my hand. Without another word I discard one. Xander exchanges three. I lay down a busted straight draw. Xander has a pair of twos.
I lose.
He makes a tsk sound with his tongue and gathers up the cards. “Okay,” he says, his expression grim. “No more dicking around. It’s time for the big one.”
I had a feeling this was coming.
I knew I couldn’t put it off forever.
I guess I was just hoping that some unexpected act of God would save me. A flood in a city that sits a mile above sea level. A terrorist attack on a closed airport. A hurricane on top of a record breaking blizzard.
“Are you ready?” Xander asks.
I nod. Even though I’m not. Forty-two therapy sessions at two hundred dollars an hour, and I’m still not ready to talk about Lottie.
Will I ever be?
Do you ever actually feel ready to talk about something like this?
Or is it just one of those things you eventually have to force yourself to do? Ready or not?
Maybe it’s like diving. You can stand on the edge of the board, legs bent, arms above your head, counting to three over and over again, but until you actually make the effort to leap, until you actually push off that board, you’ll stand there forever. Looking into the water. Wondering how cold it will be. Wondering how hard it will hurt if you do it wrong.