Page 85 of The Faceoff

“Your last question was whether a hot dog is a sandwich.”

“That is the realest question there is and you all folded⁠—”

“Sloane.” Wyatt’s got the warm steady thing turned on, gentle, genuinely curious, and I feel the small internal bracing I always feel right before someone aims a personal question at me. “You’re from Pennsylvania, right? Beau said. Whereabouts? My cousin’s out near Pittsburgh, I’m always trying to place people.”

And there it is. The question that isn’t a hard question, that’s just a friendly person being friendly, that lands on me like a hand on a bruise because the answer is a town I’ve decided not to name and a house I’ve decided not to describe and a father I’ve decided not to have, and the whole architecture of not-saying that I’ve built my Whitmore life on requires me to do the thing I’m very good at, which is answer without answering.

“Western part of the state,” I say. “Small town. You wouldn’t know it. Nobody knows it, that’s sort of its whole personality.” I make it land light, make it a little funny, redirect with the speed of long practice. “Pittsburgh’s the glamorous cousin. We didn’t talk to Pittsburgh.”

Wyatt laughs, satisfied, and it works — it always works, the deflection’s a clean one — and the conversation moves, and June asks Wyatt about his cousin and the heat comes off me.

But Beau’s gone still beside me.

Not obviously. Nobody else would catch it. But I catch it, because I catch everything, and I feel him do the math I just watched Wyatt skip past — feel him register that I answered a question about where I’m from without saying a single thing about where I’m from, that I have a town with no name and a family with no details, that he’s been fake-dating me for weeks and could not tell you my father’s first name or whether I have siblings or why I changed my last name or any of the things you’d know about a person you were actually with.

He doesn’t say anything. Of course he doesn’t. He’s learned, the way I’ve learned, that the not-asking is the kindness.

But I can feel him holding the new fact, the way I’m holding the exits-fact, and we sit there on his floor side by side each privately aware that we know almost nothing real about the other — that the whole intimate-looking thing we’ve built is intimate-looking and not intimate, a relationship with no foundation under the performance — and the awareness is its own kind of closeness, which is a paradox I’m too tired to take apart tonight.

He knows nothing about my family, I think. And I know nothing about his.

Which is the part I can’t tell him. Because it isn’t true.

It isn’t true, and the reason it isn’t true is sitting in a bookshop on Main Street being smug about it.

I know everything about Beau Sorensen’s family. I know it the way you know things you didn’t ask to know, absorbed over two years of afternoons with Margaret, who talks the way a river runs — constantly, in one direction, wearing grooves in you whether you meant to let her or not. I know his mother is Annika and does something with interiors and is, per Margaret, “too good for that family by a wide margin, present company included.” I know his father is Erik and was a defenseman and casts the kind of shadow you measure yourself against your whole life. I know about the twins, Liv and Britta, that he’d walk through a wall for. I know he was reading on tape long after the other kids had moved to books and that Margaret was the only one who ever said the word dyslexia out loud in that family because everyone else preferred to call it Beau taking his time. I know more about the shape of his childhood than he knows I know, and I have known it the entire time we’ve been doing this, and tonight, on his floor, while he privately mourns how little we know about each other, I am carrying the lopsided truth that the ignorance only runs one way.

It should feel like leverage. It doesn’t. It feels like the opposite of leverage. It feels like I’ve been reading a book over someone’s shoulder that he doesn’t know is open, and the longer I don’t tell him, the worse the telling will be.

Margaret did it on purpose. I’m sure of that now. The four hundred mentions, the you should hear how he talks about his sisters, the that boy reads more than anyone gives him credit for, he just does it with his ears — she was building him in me before I’d ever spoken to him, laying the foundation she clearly intended me to one day stand on. She’s known what she was doing since before I did. She always does.

“What?” Beau says, beside me, catching whatever’s moved across my face.

“Nothing.”

“That wasn’t a nothing face.”

“It was a thinking-about-your-grandmother face. They’re adjacent.”

He huffs a laugh, the real one. “What’d she do now?”

She told me your whole life, I don’t say. “She tried to put a QR code on the new arrivals wall. It links to a playlist. I don’t know what’s on the playlist. I’m afraid to scan it.”

“It’s show tunes,” Beau says. “She’s been making it for a month. She asked me how to do a QR code and I had to find out, which means I now also know how to do a QR code, which is a thing I didn’t need to know.”

“You did that. For her.”

“She asked.” He says it like that’s the whole answer, like she asked is a complete and sufficient reason to learn a thing you’ll never use, and it is, for him, and watching him not understand that it’s remarkable is the most dangerous thing that’s happened to me all night.

Margo drives us — most of us — home eventually, the night winding down the way the good ones do, in stages, and at the door Beau hands me my coat and there’s a beat, the tier-one inch, the careful air.

“Thanks for coming,” he says. “To the — logistics thing.”

“We didn’t do any logistics.”

“No. We didn’t.” A pause. “We never do, do we. We schedule a thing and then we just⁠—”

“Don’t,” I say, because I can hear where the sentence is going and I’m not equipped for where it’s going, not tonight, not with the exits-fact and the family-fact and the playlist sitting in my chest like swallowed stones. “It’s late. We’ll do logistics another time. There’s a list. We’re very organized.”