Page 51 of See You Yesterday

Miles fidgets with the seat-belt buckle, and then with the collar of his shirt. “That’s what you’re wearing?” I asked when we met in the lobby earlier this morning. “I tell you we’re going on a once-in-a-lifetime adventure, and you decided that meant khakis and a striped polo?”

“What’s wrong with khakis?” He frowned down at his clothes. “They go with everything. And I like this shirt!”

The truth is, Miles doesn’t look bad at all, even if he does look dressed for a round of golf. In first class, he fits in. He also didn’t look bad when he was changing into my Veronica Mars shirt, but that’s completely irrelevant to today’s mission.

I stretch out my legs as a family of four bumps down the aisle, a howling baby in tow. “Wait. What about roller coasters?”

If living life to the fullest is our way out, then Disneyland was the fullest thing I could think of that we could realistically do in a single day. Yesterday, I told Miles he had to think bigger: somewhere in between Geneva and a 400-level class. It’s not a bucket list, exactly. More of a doing-whatever-we-want-because-there-are-no-consequences list, though that doesn’t have the same ring to it. A fuck-it list, if you will.

This is exactly what we needed: no school, no libraries, no physics. No thinking about the mysterious Dr. Devereux, who the world is set on convincing us doesn’t exist. For today, I leave all of that in Seattle.

“Oddly, I’m okay with roller coasters,” Miles says. “It’s the whole giant-metal-box-in-the-sky thing that makes me anxious.”

“This is the moment I give you all the science that keeps this plane aloft.”

“I’m aware. And yet… sometimes our brains aren’t entirely logical, are they?”

The thing is, I assume Miles’s fear of flying isn’t as intense as he’s making it out to be, if only because it’s so opposite from the person I’m starting to know—until the engines roar to life. He shudders in his seat as the plane taxis, eyes shut tight, jaw clenched, seeming to almost shrink in on himself.

This does something to my heart, because as frustrating as Miles can be, I don’t want him to be miserable.

“Do you… want to hold my hand?” I ask, unsure what else to offer. It’s meant as a joke. A way to distract him.

Completely straight-faced, Miles says, “I might.”

And just as the plane leaves the ground, I place my hand, palm up, on the armrest between us. Slowly, slowly, he threads his fingers with mine, a shy, uncertain graze at first before the plane hits a pocket of air and he grips my hand tight. His hand is warm, his nails short and clean. If I look down, I can see the tension in his fingers, the way his skin pulls taut over his knuckles.

“It’s okay,” I say, trying to sound as soothing as possible as he cuts off my circulation. “We’re okay. We’re safe.”

We are holding hands. We are holding hands, and maybe I was offering comfort and he accepted it, but that doesn’t change the fact that I have never held hands with someone not related to me until this moment, even if that someone is dressed like a suburban dad who raided an Eddie Bauer during a Labor Day sale.

I’ve never given a tremendous amount of thought to the concept of holding hands, but it’s nice, I decide, especially when his hand relaxes into mine as the plane climbs higher. His eyes are still closed, his chest rising and falling with the sharp rhythm of his breaths.

And somehow, when he lets go of my hand somewhere over Oregon with a soft “thank you,” I’m the one who’s breathless.

DAY SIXTEEN

Chapter 21

“BARRETT?” MILES CALLS A FEW yards away from me, his leashes twisted in a knot. It’s 3:26 and his phone is ringing, and he’s dropped it on the ground in an attempt to turn it off. “A little help here?”

One of his dogs has stretched to the end of its leash and is just staring at me, never breaking eye contact. Two of the puppies are wrestling, one is peeing, and one is sniffing that pee.

“You know, I would if I could,” I shout back, steering my own pack away from a woman and her aloof French bulldog.

In retrospect, adopting as many dogs as the shelter would allow us to was perhaps not the wisest idea. At first they would only let us adopt one—two if they were a bonded pair. But eventually they let us go with a whopping fifteen: three Labs, two pit-bull mixes, four Chihuahua mixes, a giant, gorgeous Samoyed, and a handful of complete mysteries.

It’s amazing what a massive amount of cash can accomplish. We’d recently come into an inheritance, we said. We wanted to give these dogs the best life we possibly could, a life of treats and snuggles and scratches behind the ears.

And for today, we will.

“Who’s the best boy? And the best girl?” The dogs seem to love when Miles speaks directly to them, because they stop what they’re doing and look right at him, some of their heads tilting. “That’s right, all of you!”

I make it to Miles’s phone before he does, kneeling down to pick it up. “Max,” I say, reading off the caller ID for the first time. “Your brother’s the one calling you every day?”

“It’s nothing,” he says. “He’s just going to ask if he can get a ride somewhere.”

“Oh.” If that’s the case, it’s strange that Miles has been so distant about it, but I decide not to push it. They’re not close—maybe it’s as simple as that.

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