Emma Straub - Modern Lovers

“Do you need help building things around here?” he asked. “I’ve been getting into woodworking. I’d love to help.”

Dave clapped Andrew on the back. He smelled like sage and sandalwood. “That would be great, man. We’d love that. And if you ever need to crash here, go right ahead. There is always room in a bed.”

“Thanks,” Andrew said. It wasn’t clear if the beds Dave was offering already had people in them or not, but it seemed like it. Jessie, the girl with the braids, walked quickly toward them, her feet in ballerina turnout. She held a small cup in each hand.

“You guys have to try this juice I just made,” she said. They each took one and raised it to their lips.

The juice was green and pulpy, leaving stringy pieces in between Andrew’s teeth. Dave seemed to have no trouble sucking it down. “What’s in it?” Andrew asked, after he swallowed. There was a funny taste, medicinal, lingering in the back of his throat.

“Kale, chili peppers, anise, apple, orange, St.-John’s-wort, a few other things. It’s good, right?”

“Delicious,” Dave said. He pulled on his beard. “Mmmm.”

“That’s right,” Jessie said. She took a few tiny steps forward and kissed Dave on the mouth. Then she pirouetted around and walked back the way she’d come.

There was nothing about youth that was fair: the young hadn’t done anything to deserve it, and the old hadn’t done anything to drive it away. Andrew thought about Harry and the stolen photos and Ruby and her purple hair, and even though part of him wanted to call Zoe and Jane back and yell at them even more, mostly he wanted to know how it was that he wasn’t the child anymore, how his baby boy had become a teenager, and how it was possible that he — Andrew Marx! — would soon be fifty. It didn’t matter what any listicle said, about how fifty was the new thirty. Harry was going to start having sex, and Andrew was going to be a grandfather, and then Andrew was going to be dead. It was a chain of events that he couldn’t stop, even if he had all of his parents’ money. They had tried — the sports cars in the garage at the country house in Connecticut, the “skin treatments” his mother had every three months in an attempt to erase the lines and spots from her face — but it was all a pathetic Hail Mary. Andrew just wanted to pause time for a little while, to pretend that he was still young enough to do something that mattered. He wanted to drink juice and sit in a quiet room and wait for all the young bodies around him to dance.

Harry had been weighing the decision for weeks — three weeks, every day since Ruby’s graduation. He was going to kiss her, with tongue. If that’s what she wanted. If she let him! It was unclear how exactly to make a kiss happen. They had to be alone, obviously, and they had to be sitting close enough together that Harry didn’t have to lunge across the room like a zombie, eyes closed and mouth open. Other than that, though, he really wasn’t sure.

He and Ruby hadn’t spoken since the Grand Theft of 2014. Harry’s parents had gone crazy, as if Ruby had taken nuclear-bomb codes from the president’s briefcase. It really didn’t seem like that big a deal, or at least it hadn’t before they’d been discovered. Harry hated being in trouble, but he also hated that Ruby was now going to think he ratted her out. He’d been trying to figure some casual way to tell her that he hadn’t narced on them, but so far all he had was a text that said HEY with the emoji for a bomb and the ghost sticking out its tongue. It wasn’t quite there yet.

It was Friday morning. He’d done nothing all week. On Wednesday, he went to see a crappy movie with Yuri, one of his few friends from Whitman who wasn’t off doing something glamorous all summer long. Most kids were at their summer houses, or backpacking across New Zealand or Israel or France. Yuri lived in Windsor Terrace and was working at a Starbucks and made Harry free iced coffees when he visited. On Friday, Harry and his parents went to the Tibetan restaurant by the train. The entire time, all week long, Harry had been thinking about walking into his SAT class and worrying about whether Ruby would still sit next to him.

There were three houses for sale in their neighborhood, and his mom was working them all — one down by Newkirk, one at the end of their block, and one over on Stratford. Sometimes she dragged Harry along when she was setting up for things. He liked to fill the giant glass bowls with the Granny Smith apples, that kind of thing. It all seemed so goofy, but his mother swore that it worked, as if someone would say, I freaking love apples. I need to buy this house. Mostly, though, it meant that his mother was AWOL most of the time and so was his dad.

Because the bidding wasn’t over yet, Elizabeth was able to take down the listing on eBay. Zoe and Ruby had brought the pictures back, and Zoe stood there in the doorway while Ruby apologized to Elizabeth. Harry sat on the stairs, cringing. It was his fault, too, and he was technically in trouble, but everyone involved knew that he never would have done it without Ruby. Her voice was flat and even, just this side of insolence. Elizabeth nodded and offered her terse thanks, and then Zoe and Ruby were gone. Harry thought he saw Ruby wink at him quickly on her way out the door, but he was probably seeing things. He held his phone in his hand all night long, waiting for a message, but none came.

Harry slid out of bed and pulled on his jeans, still sitting in a crumpled pile on the floor, as if he’d just evaporated out of them. He swabbed some deodorant under his arms and shuffled into the hallway.

“Dad?” There was no answer. Harry poked his head up the stairs, toward his parents’ bedroom. “Dad?” Still no answer. His father was almost always home. When Harry was small, he actually believed that his father didn’t sleep but instead just sat in a corner of a room, waiting to be played with, like the biggest toy in the house.

Harry walked slowly up the stairs. His parents’ room was empty, except for Iggy Pop, who was still curled up in a ball at the foot of the bed. Harry wondered if Ruby had gotten grounded, or if she’d ever been grounded. Being grounded was such an ancient concept, like feudalism, or jazz being cool. It had no place in modern society. Parents couldn’t even take away phones or computers, not really, because then how could you call for help if you were run over by a bus on the way to school, and how could you turn in your reading logs and science worksheets? It would be like giving your kid an abacus and sending him off to his calculus final exam.

His mother’s laptop was sitting open on her small desk, which was against the far wall, away from the windows. Harry sat down and clicked the mouse. Her computer woke up, a photo of Harry and Iggy asleep on the couch together a few years ago as the background. Without thinking about it, Harry clicked the mail icon on the bottom of the screen, and Elizabeth’s e-mail in-box leaped up, alert and dinging.

He wasn’t a snoop — his mother’s e-mails were boring. Of the fifty or so e-mails in her in-box, half of them were from work, and the rest seemed to be junky things that she should unsubscribe from. Harry tried to tell her how to do it, how easy it was to click a few buttons and not get a hundred e-mails a day from the Container Store or whatever, but she didn’t listen. Ruby was right — his mother was obsessive, but not about everything. Her e-mail in-box looked like it belonged to a hoarder with an online-shopping addiction. He scrolled through for a minute, checking to see if Ruby’s moms had written, if they’d said anything about him. It wasn’t like him to read someone else’s private correspondence, but Harry felt bad — felt bad that Ruby had probably gotten into trouble and all he’d gotten into was a hug. His parents were so sure that he’d never do anything wrong, that he wasn’t capable of it, and all that love and trust made Harry want to rob a bank. And so he started reading. It was a low-level crime, but it was a crime, and that’s what counted.