Page 69 of Everything All at Once

“How did you find out about this place?” I asked.

“Whenever I meet someone new, I ask them where they live, and then I ask them—what’s your favorite place there? And then I go and see for myself.”

“You didn’t ask me that.”

“I usually ask them. Sometimes I’m too busy dancing.”

“So you go to all these places, you audit all these classes... I still have no idea how you do it all.”

“I guess I just have a lot of time on my hands,” he said.

“I feel like I never have time for anything except school.”

“You’re here now.”

“Well, school is basically over.”

“You’ll have plenty of time this summer.”

“I guess. Three months, at least.”

“That’s enough time to see some cool things. Especially here. You can get anywhere in Connecticut within two hours.”

“I guess you’re right.”

“Usually,” he said, smiling.

“Remember when we were younger and there were all those field trips with school? Sturbridge Village, the Dr. Seuss Sculpture Garden in Springfield, the Basketball Hall of Fame. We even went to a waterpark once. Why did those stop? We finally got old enough to appreciate them, and all of a sudden they were taken away from us. And recess. We should still have recess.”

Sam laughed. “You want recess?”

“Just a break, you know? We’re on the same freaking campus as the middle school. We can see the swings from the English hallway.”

“Just out of reach,” he said dramatically. “So close, and yet...”

“Laugh all you want. Why didn’t we come and see things like this? History, you know? Our state. Our world. You have to be in chorus or band to go anywhere in my high school, and when people started figuring that out, everyone signed up because they wanted to go to Disney World. So they stopped sending them to Disney World. Now they just go to New York to see a musical. Chorus attendance has dropped dramatically. It’s a catch twenty-two. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t actually care about Disney and just want to sing. Just to clarify though, I do care about Disney.”

“Do you sing, then? Or play anything?”

“I was terrible at the recorder,” I said seriously, remembering our very first music classes as elementary-aged kids. The people who could afford new recorders got smooth, cream-colored ones. The people who bought secondhand got a sickly tan. They taught us how to put them together, take them apart. I slept with mine for two weeks, convinced that proximity would lead to a state of musical affluence. I had seen the posters of Garfield lying on a stack of books, bright text above him that saidI’m Learning Through Osmosis.

“Then Abe snuck into my room once, found the recorder under my pillow, learned to play ‘Hot Cross Buns’ in ten minutes, and I was over it. That was the first time I realized (but admitted to no one) that I didn’t like things I wasn’t immediately good at. Which is why I never play my father at Monopoly.”

“Can you sing?” he asked.

“I am potentially better at the recorder than I am at singing.”

“In the car? In the shower?”

“The shower has excellent acoustics, but no. What about you?”

“I play some guitar. And sing a little. Not well! And I think you’re right, you know. About the field trips. Except we’re jerks. We can’t even shut up during school assemblies. I don’t think they trust us not to act like idiots if they brought us somewhere that actually mattered.”

“I couldn’t imagine you acting like an idiot,” I said. Which reminded me. “I read another letter from my aunt.”

“Really? What did it say?”

And there it was suddenly, the answer. I didn’t need Sam to tell me what to do, and I didn’t need to murder anyone. I just needed the sun to go down.