The Book - E Lockhart

“Oh sure,” I said. “I’m all about penguins.”

“You have a fan,” I told my dad when I got home that evening. He and Hutch were messing around with a bunch of ugly bushes in the greenhouse on the southern side of our houseboat.

“I have many.” Dad grinned.

“You do not.”

“He does,” put in Hutch. “People write him letters asking all kinds of questions.”

“I am the Angus Young of container gardening,” said my dad. 2

“Oh, no,” cried Hutch. “You’re completely the Brian Johnson.” 3

“You think so?” asked Dad, flattered. “I don’t know. That Small Roses for Small Spaces guy is giving me a run for my money.”

“No comparison. He’s all flash and no substance. He’s the Sammy Hagar of container gardening, if he’s anything at all.” 4

“This guy at the zoo was all over me when he found out you were my dad,” I said. “He does the plantings over there and I helped him put in some things by the front gate.”

“Really?” My dad looked interested. “What are they planting?”

“I don’t know. They weren’t blooming yet.”

“You don’t know what you were planting? How could you not know what you were planting?”

I shrugged. “I planted what he gave me.”

“Roo.”

“What?”

“Nothing,” he said. “Don’t forget we’re going to Juana’s for dinner tonight.”

Juana Martinez is my mom’s best friend. She’s a Cuban American playwright with four ex-husbands and thirteen dogs. Her son, Angelo, is a year ahead of me at school, but he goes to Garfield, which is public, so we live in different universes.

Angelo and I have a bit of a history together. But only a little bit. There was a moment last year, in the middle of the Spring Fling Debacle, when he gave me some flowers. I kissed him on the cheek to say thank you, and he kissed me on my cheek back, and this tingle ran down my spine—but it was in the middle of a party and all kinds of badness was going on with me and Jackson (and with nearly everyone else there too), so nothing ever came of it.

I hadn’t seen him since that night. My family had been to Juana’s for dinner, because we’re always going to Juana’s for dinner, but Angelo lives part-time with his father and he had been a junior counselor at a summer camp on one of the San Juan Islands for a couple months, plus I had traveled, so we hadn’t had to face each other yet.

“Do I have to go?” I asked my mom, inside.

“Yes.”

“Why? I have a ton of homework.”

“It’s the weekend, Roo. You can do your homework later. And I don’t want you sitting home on Saturday night. It’s bad for your psychology.”

“Oh, like going out with my parents is any better?”

“It’s a lot better,” said my mom. “Juana is making corn pudding for you.”

I love Juana’s corn pudding.

“And she just finished a new play and she thinks maybe there’s a part for me in it.”

“That’s supposed to make me want to go?”

She laughed. “Go for the corn pudding. Go to make your old mother happy.”

Juana’s kitchen was an absolute maelstrom when we got there. Corn on the floor, a big fish on the counter with its eyes googling up, dishes piled in the sink and chopped herbs in small piles on the counter. “I’m getting it under control!” she yelled, wiping her face with her hand and smearing grease across her cheek. “Kevin, chop the head off the salmon, will you?” She grabbed a butcher knife and held it out.

My dad looked aghast and started to back away.

“I’ll do it,” said my mother, taking the knife.

Juana kissed her on the cheek. “Slice it up the middle, too. It’ll steam in ten minutes. I’m stuffing it with leeks. The corn pudding’s in the oven. I got bread from Paradise, the kind with black olives baked in. Oh, and there’s cheese somewhere in the fridge. Kevin, if you’re scared of the salmon, you can root around in there and find the Camembert. It needs to be unwrapped so it can breathe and get to room temperature before we eat it.”

My parents went to work in the kitchen.

“Get yourself a pop, Roo,” said Juana. “Angelo’s down in the basement watching television.”

I didn’t want to see the head come off of the fish. I grabbed a Coke and headed downstairs.

Angelo was sitting on a fur-matted sofa with two Labradors and a Yorkie. He was watching some reality TV show. “Hey, hey,” he said to me, half looking up.

He looked good—curly black hair, baggy clothes, brown skin with a bit of a tan leftover from summer camp. “Hey, hey, yourself,” I said, sitting down next to him and snapping open my drink. I would have sat farther away, but dogs were taking up half the couch.

“This guy,” said Angelo, pointing at the television, “he’s got to crawl through a tunnel that’s a foot and a half high—and filled with cockroaches.”

“Sick.”

“The girl who went before him chundered when she came out,” he said. “It was brutal.”

I looked at his profile. He has full lips and a strong nose. I thought of how the kids at summer camp must have looked up to him.

“I’m not too bad with bugs,” I said. “But I draw the line at cockroaches.”

He pressed his leg against mine. Just a bit, but I could feel the warmth of his thigh through his jeans.

I wondered if I should say something about all the weirdness back in April. Because I’d been talking to Doctor Z about how to make my “relationships” with other human beings better than they are—which is completely sucky—and I felt bad because of how I had treated Angelo that night when he gave me the flowers.

“You know that party,” I mumbled. “On our dock? I really was glad you came. It was a horrible night, and I did a lot of things I regret.”

“Yeah?”

“I can’t even tell you. The repercussions were completely harsh. I know I was rude to you.”

“De nada.”

“What?”

“ De nada. It’s nothing.”

“Oh. Sorry,” I said. “I take French.”

Angelo switched the channel to MTV. “No, it was all right. I started talking to this guy Shiv, you know him, yeah? We cut out after a while. Me and him and some other people drove back to his girlfriend’s house and went in the hot tub.”

“Ariel.”

“Yeah, that was her. They had this big tub on a deck overlooking the city, and Ariel gave me her brother’s suit to wear. So I had a posh night. Don’t sweat it.”

Almost everyone who goes to Tate Prep (except me) has a hot tub on their decks. Rich Seattle people are way into hot tubs. But Angelo doesn’t live in the Tate Universe.

“Oh,” I said. “Good.”

And then I surprised myself.

I reached over and touched Angelo’s chin. He turned to look at me, and I kissed him.

His skin was warmer than I expected, and he put his hand on my neck and kissed me back. I was wearing a shirt that buttoned up the front, and he right away undid a couple buttons and touched my left boob. I reached my hand in and opened the front-close bra so he could get the upper-region access.

It felt amazing. I hadn’t kissed anybody since April, and I could tell from the start that Angelo knew what he was doing.

I didn’t think about Jackson.

I didn’t think about Nora.

I didn’t think about my panic attacks, or my leprosy, or how weird it was that Angelo had hung out with Shiv Neel after my party.

I didn’t think about anything. It was better than working at the zoo.

“Dinner!” Juana bellowed from the kitchen upstairs.

I sprang back and squashed a Labrador (I don’t know its name) and it let out a surprised yelp. “Ag. Sorry,” I said, leaning over to pet the dog’s ear in apology.