Page 5

August 22

I wake up the next morning to Mom blasting NPR in the kitchen.

It takes me a minute to figure out what the noise is. I blink my eyes open and lay there with that groggy, vaguely ill feeling

that you get when you wake up too fast after sleeping terribly.

“Good morning, I’m Steve Inskeep and you’re listening to Morning Edition ...”

Groan.

I forgot about this. Mom listening to NPR at full volume every morning while she makes her coffee and granola, and simultaneously

reads the local paper like the multitasking monster she is.

I sit up, the old twin bed creaking around me, and grab my phone off the nightstand to check the group chat. Ian sent a thumbs-up

emoji in response to my text.

There’s nothing else. Nothing from Olivia.

I drop my phone on the bed and rub my eyes. I don’t know what time it was when I finally fell asleep, but I’m pretty sure

I had weird dreams. Dreams where I wandered around my old high school, trying to remember my class schedule. Dreams where

I was riding Michael’s bike, looking for Michael. Dreams where I was staring through the window of In Between Books, looking

for myself.

My mom raises her coffee mug in greeting when I go down the hall to the kitchen a few minutes later. “Morning!” she says brightly.

“I made a whole pot of coffee in case you want some.”

I shuffle toward the coffee maker on the counter and open the cupboard. Horrifyingly, Mom seems to have kept every single mug I painted at the birthday parties I had from age seven through seventh grade, when I decided I was too cool to paint mugs, and most of my friends decided they were too cool for me. I grab one. What even is this? It looks like a shapeless blob with eyes.

“So I thought we could drive over to the condo later,” my mom says, voice raised above the din of the radio. “I was going

to meet my real estate agent over there for a final look. You want to come?”

I pick up the coffee pot. “Sure. Sounds great.”

“Now that you’re home, we should go through your room too. Like I said on the phone, there’s not as much room in the condo,

so I’ll need to get rid of some things.” She stabs her spoon into her bowl of granola. “I was thinking of asking Michael Weaver

if he wants any of my old classroom books.”

I miss the blob mug and spill coffee all over the counter. “Oh?” God, it’s everywhere. Where are the paper towels?

“You remember Michael Weaver? You used to—”

“Yeah, I remember Michael Weaver.” (Aha. Paper towels, next to the sink.) “I ran into him last night, actually.”

That gets her attention. She turns around in her chair at the white-tiled dining table in one corner of the kitchen. “You

did? You didn’t tell me that.”

I sop up the spilled coffee. It takes three paper towels. “I’m telling you now.”

“Well, how was it?”

“Um. Fine.” I pour coffee into my cup, properly this time, trying to ignore the acid feeling in my stomach. “Awkward.”

“Oh, I’m sure it wasn’t awkward.” She waves a hand dismissively and turns back to her granola. “You guys have so much in common.

You should hang out while you’re here! You know he’s gay now?”

I choke on a mouthful of coffee. Cough and hack until my mom turns back around and fixes me with a frown. “Why are you so

shocked? People turn out to be gay all the time.”

“I’m not...” I take another sip of coffee in an attempt to soothe my throat. It’s too hot and burns all the way down. “How

do you know that?”

She looks thoughtful. “I don’t really remember. He’s been out a long time now. Not that he’s loud about it, but he doesn’t hide it either, you know? He was dating a fellow from Chicago for a while, I think, but they broke up a couple years ago. Anyway, he teaches ninth grade. That’s why I think he might like those books from my classroom. I suppose some of them are kind of young, but he’ll know who to hand them off to. How’d you run into him?”

My head is spinning. Michael’s gay now.

Michael.

The guy I grew up with. The guy I did cannonballs off the diving board at the pool with. The guy who would try to explain

the plotlines of Marvel comics to me during lunch and played trombone in our truly shit high school marching band.

Did he know in high school?

Did he know and not tell me?

“Um.” I focus on my mom, trying to pull my thoughts together. “I stopped at In Between Books. Just to see it. I mean, it was

closed, but... I ran into Michael. On the sidewalk.”

Because I wasn’t watching where I was going. Because I was so deep into some weird, intense flashback, all because of some

random kid in an oversize hoodie and glasses...

I stare into my coffee, watching the bubbles collecting at the edges slowly pop. I can’t shake this unsettled feeling from

last night, from whatever dreams I can’t quite remember.

I need to go back to the bookstore. When it’s open , so I can walk in and see what it looks like now, and what kid works there, so I can stop being stuck in these weird nostalgia

feelings. It would be fun to see it again. See what’s changed.

So I can remind myself that things have changed.

“When did you want to go to the condo?” I ask my mom.

“I told Cheryl I’d meet her there at two. Why?”

“I’m just... gonna go out for a bit. Look around Main Street and stuff.”

“Okay.” She picks up an iPad from the table. “Give Jeannie’s penguins the stink eye on your way out, would you?”

I borrow my mom’s Jeep, since the rental hatchback is still full of stuff. The Jeep is an old Grand Cherokee from the era when a car was cool if it had a CD player, and the odometer reads well over a hundred thousand miles now, but it’s got four-wheel drive, which matters for Illinois winters, and I have a feeling my mom will drive it into the ground.

I roll the windows down as I drive past ranch houses and split-levels with wide grassy lawns. It’s already warm and sunny,

and the breeze funneling into the Jeep is humid and smells like grass clippings. In the middle of Manhattan, the air probably

smells like garbage right now. Actual garbage. It’s the New York City smell of summer.

I hear birds. A lonely cicada buzzing in the trees. A lawn mower roaring in the distance. No hum of traffic. No car horns.

No rattle and shriek of subway trains.

It’s barely a ten-minute drive to Main Street. I pull into a free parking spot down the street from In Between Books, five

minutes after ten o’clock. The stores up and down Main Street are all open now. In the light of day, I recognize a lot—the

credit union, Frith & Schneider Insurance, Ethel May’s ice cream parlor, Floyd’s five-and-dime that’s part hardware store,

part craft store, with a smattering of used romance books for good measure. But Prime Pie Pizza is gone, replaced by a Subway.

There’s something called the Oak Café that looks scarily similar to a Manhattan brunch joint. And where Main Street Video

used to be, there’s a hip-looking coffee shop. Several women with strollers are sitting at the patio tables out front.

I take a deep breath and get out of the Jeep.

The sign on the door of In Between Books is flipped to open . The lights are clearly on inside.

So I pull open the door and walk in. A bell overhead jingles, so familiar it makes me shiver. The first thing that hits me

is the smell—the slightly musty smell of books and paper and old worn carpet. It’s almost comforting, that smell.

The store looks just like I remember it looking when I worked here. Gray carpet. Ugly bands of fluorescent lighting overhead.

Here’s the table of newly released books. There’s the newspaper stand with the New York Times , the Chicago Tribune... even the local Oak Falls Sun is still there.

And then there are all the shelves. The aisles between them are so nar row that it’s not really possible for more than one person to walk between the shelves—which is why I’m sure it was actually annoying, the way Michael and I would just sit in the aisles and read books. The signs on the shelves are still hand-drawn, labeling each section: travel, fiction, poetry, children’s.. .

Nothing’s changed at all.

That’s why I had some weird flashback moment last night. The store looks the same, and I saw some kid who reminded me of myself. Of course it was going to mess with my head.

I let my breath out, slow and shaky.

“Can I help you find something?”

I turn toward the counter. There’s a kid sitting behind it at the cash register. Maybe sixteen or seventeen, with kind of

shaggy short hair and oval wire-frame glasses, wearing a baggy Veronica Mars T-shirt and looking at me with raised eyebrows.

The hair stands up on the back of my neck.

This is the kid I saw through the window last night. The kid I think I dreamed about. It has to be.

But now it’s the middle of the morning, and I’ve had coffee, and I’m awake, and I’m standing in the middle of In Between Books...

And this isn’t a kid who looks like me. This isn’t a kid who reminds me of me, because I’m not staring through a dirty window

in some dim half-light. I can see clearly. Those are the glasses I had in high school. Those are my freckles, over my nose—the

nose that never felt particularly delicate to me, the nose I stopped worrying about the second I came out, when suddenly it

fit right in with the rest of me. Those are the round black studs I wore in my ears constantly, the studs I got from the Hot

Topic in the mall in Monroe, some trip where Michael also picked up some Pokémon T-shirts. That’s my messy brown hair, with

that cowlick in the middle of my forehead that I still haven’t totally figured out...

This isn’t a kid who looks like me.

This kid is me.

The version of me that worked at the bookstore. High school me.

I’m staring at myself.