Page 17 of The Lies We Play

The talk he gave me about love and the game was worse than the sex talk. The sex talk was at sixteen and pretty simple: consent, condoms, respect your partner, respect yourself, don't be an idiot in a hotel room because your mother will somehow know.

The love talk was harder.

There’ll be a woman or a man who falls for you when you’re ready, he told me. You don’t have to rush toward the first person who makes the room change.

Which is deeply inconvenient advice right now.

Because the roof has changed.

She has changed it.

So this . . . a cute neighbor is not ideal.

I glance toward the chair and say, “You want to use it?”

She tilts her head toward my beer and says, “You could share that.”

I snort. “Are you even old enough to be on a roof on your own?”

Her brows lift, but she doesn’t respond.

After a beat, she walks over to the parapet about ten feet from me and sits on the concrete edge with her back to the city and her feet flat on the tar paper. She doesn’t sit facing me. She sits at an angle, which might be a roof-shared-situation diplomatic seating, and I respect it.

“I’m eighteen,” she says. “I’ll be nineteen in November.”

She says it as if the beer is not that far from her age. As if I am the unreasonable one for noticing arithmetic.

I hold up the bottle. “Then this remains mine.”

“Tragic.”

“For the beer, maybe.”

That gets me another almost-smile. Closer this time.

Then she glances at my book.

Her expression changes.

“Oh, no.”

I look down, then back up. “What?”

She points at the cover. “Cloud Atlas.”

“I’m enjoying it.”

“That’s not the question.” She says.

“There was a question?”

“The question is whether you are going to be one of those people about it.”

I close the book on my finger. “What’s one of those people?”

“The person who reads Cloud Atlas and then mentions, in the next conversation, that they recently read Cloud Atlas. And the conversation after that. And the conversation after that. Eventually, you are the friend who has read Cloud Atlas, and that is your entire personality.”

“That is an extremely specific warning.”