Page 111 of Wayfarers

right up—the soft collar of his oxford shirt, his hands.

He likes that I sing in the car. He thinks I’m funny. Selfishly

I want him to sometimes look at me like he can’t believe

his luck. Like I’m somebody who’s lucky.

But that’s an idea

of someone. Once you have the real thing, the reality

erases it. Now I close my eyes and Cal is asking me

to prom. Asking me to turn my music down. He’s looking at me

because the check is on the table. The door’s caved in

and the mirror’s shattered and when we collided

I bit through my tongue and I yelled his name until I hated it

and I hate saying it even more now.

Sylvie

“I don’t know,” he says.

“You’ve never thought about it?”

Knox takes a minute to choose his words. “I’ve thought about it. I had a lot of time to think about it. But for the longest time that’s all it was. I’d see a girl eating an apple in the park and I’d come up with a name for her. Like—Daisy,” he says, smiling at me. “Maybe Daisy really likes Catcher in the Rye. She wants to be a veterinarian, and specialize in . . . I don’t know, turtles. Maybe she’ll laugh at my stupid jokes.”

“In my head,” I tell him, “they always laugh at my jokes too.” I don’t tell him I’m as jealous of his hypothetical Daisy as I am of his real Isabela.

“I don’t know if it’s a bad thing. Wanting people to laugh at your jokes. I guess it could be worse. Like—there was this gross guy we used to travel with. You’d say something stupid, something sort of funny, and instead of laughing, he’d stare you down. He did it to the girls especially. It was his way of shifting the power. Like, ‘I’m not willing to agree with this idea you have about yourself, that you’re fun to be around.’ It’s a dick move. You want someone who can play along.”

“I don’t think I’ve laughed at a single one of my stepfather’s jokes,” I tell him. “And I guess I could pretend otherwise, but yeah, I think it was a power move on my part. Because you feel powerless when your mom brings someone home and is like, hey, this guy is living in our house now and he’s eating the Klondike bars you bought for yourself and you have to listen to him.”

“Did you? Listen to your stepfather?”

“Sort of? He was, like, playacting at being a stepfather. He’s twenty-five.”

“Elaborate, please.”

“Okay, so I wasn’t going to argue with him unless I had to. If he was like, ‘Sylvie, did you brush your teeth?’ I’d say yes instead of being like, ‘I am not a hyena, of course I brushed my teeth, where do you get off.’ Because for once, his question made sense. He was at that moment doing a decent impression of an adult human. But if he was like, ‘Sylvie, we need to celebrate your mom’s half-birthday by going to New York for the weekend, it doesn’t matter that you have an AP test next week, you need to get your priorities in order,’ then yeah, no, I wasn’t going to listen. Sometimes I got a little . . . mean.”

“Did that happen? The New York thing?”

“Yeah,” I say. “They just . . . went places. Tourist places, mostly. New Orleans for Mardi Gras. They went to Napa wine country, I think. Tulum in the winter. Sometimes I went but mostly I stayed home. It didn’t really ever feel like a vacation, not when I was watching my mom pound margaritas and my stepdad hit on undergrads on spring break.”

“Yikes.”

“Yikes is right. It was never like, oh Sylvie, let’s plan a summer vacation, we can go to the Grand Canyon or Yosemite or some other beautiful place and explore it, or we can go to New York and go to the MoMA—”

“The MoMA?”

“The Museum of Modern Art, I’ve always wanted to go, but my mom just wants to go to these restaurants she’s seen on TikTok and order, like, viral food that tastes awful”—Knox is shaking his head uncomprehendingly, so I start translating while I’m talking—“not like the food has the flu, like the food is, like, banana pudding brushed with real gold flakes and so everyone takes pictures of it and then everyone else wants to take pictures of it, including my mom, so you eat the gold flake pudding and it tastes just like the stuff you get at the Jewel-Osco at home.” I make myself take a breath. “I realize that all of this is incredibly privileged of me. I didn’t get to go on the right fancy vacations. Cry about it. I know. Cal and I—” I make myself finish the sentence. “Cal and I used to fight about it. I think he would’ve loved to go to Mardi Gras, honestly.”

“I don’t know if you’ll believe this,” he says, “but I think your mom and my mom are maybe a lot more alike than you’d imagine.”