Page 11 of Take Me Home

“You played itevery time. Loudly. Never talked to me, just scowled all broody in your rearview mirror and cranked it up.”

“Broody,” he mused. His smile faded. “Yeah, well, as I recall, there wasn’t much talking happening in the back seat.”

Hazel’s cheeks burned. She checked her side mirror just for the excuse to turn her face from him. When she looked back, he was scrolling again through her playlists. He read, “ ‘We’ll Have to Muddle Through Somehow.’ What’s this? More sad girl acoustic?”

“That’s Christmas music.”

“Wow. Dark.”

She knew he was joking, but it stung. She wasn’t a dark person. “It’s from ‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.’ That’s a line from the original version, the one Judy Garland sings inMeet Me in St. Louis. Fun fact: there was also supposed to be a line that said, ‘This Christmas will be our last,’ but she thought it was too depressing to sing to the kid in the scene, and she made them change it.”

“Thank God for that,” he said, back to scrolling.

Hazel itched to snatch back her phone and talk about anything else besides her apparently depressing taste in music. “So, you make dollhouses?”

“Models,” he corrected. He selected a ukulele version of “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” before returning the phone to its cradle then nodded at her back seat. “That one’s for my nieces. It’s just a hobby.”

“Just a hobby? It’s so detailed. They all were.”

He laughed uneasily. “How long were you in my apartment?”

“Long enough to know you made one of your own place. Who’s that one for?”

He rubbed his eyebrow with one finger. Was he embarrassed? Okay, she’d said it teasingly, but she was genuinely impressed. Each model must have taken dozens of hours. They had so many tiny pieces. She pictured him with a headlamp and tweezers, bent close over his work area, his tongue peeking from one corner of his mouth like it did when he was deep in concentration. When Hazel wasn’t working, she mostly just rewatched entire TV series and blocked out the world.

Ash said, “That one was just going to be the café, but I figured why stop once I finished the downstairs. I don’t know. I don’t have, like, a purpose for them. I get tired of doing everything in 2D. I draft all these plans, but I never see them built.”

“The floor plans you’re always drawing on your laptop?”

“Yeah. At my internship, I mostly submit plans to the city and run errands, and the pay is crap, so I take extra jobs whenever I can. I make a little money doing freelance drafting on the side.”

“I thought the floor plans were for school.” His fancy, business-casual wardrobe made more sense now that she could imagine him in a cubicle at some architecture firm. She knew what time he arrived at the café every day, but it had never occurred to her that he came from another job. She’d always assumed he made all his money working for Cami. “So, you have, like, three jobs on top of your program?”

She winced at the surprise her tone betrayed, but she couldn’t help it. In high school—at least, during the one semester she was aware enough of him to notice—Ash had been flaky, apathetic. He arrived late to their homeroom, fell asleep during class, even lost his starting catcher position on the school baseball team for missing too many practices. His own best friend blamed Ash’s lack of focus and drive for their disappointing senior season. Not to mention the very first time she met Ash, when he bailed early on the volunteer field day she’d organized for at-risk kids. She couldn’t help but wonder, where was this work ethic back then?

“The internship will pay better once I graduate,” he said. “They’ll let me do more, and the hours will count toward my license requirements. The models just…help me unwind.”

“Lot of unwinding,” Hazel said.

“I assume you have a more exciting life away from the café.”

“Sure. Grad school is a riot.”

“You’re a TA, right? Actually teaching, not just doing grunt work for a professor?” He laughed at her suspicious side-eye. “What? You’ve stalked my schedule, but I can’t notice that you make your lecture PowerPoints on Thursdays?”

“Technically, I’m aresearchassistant for Dr. Sheffield, but he doesn’t like to teach on Fridays, so I usually fill in for him in Intro to Psych. It’s one of those mass lectures with two hundred students. Plus tutoring. Plus whatever else Dr. Sheffield dumps on me. So, it’s more like lab work, teaching,andgrunt work for a professor.”

“I bet you’re a good teacher. You’ve got a knows-her-shit, takes-no-shit vibe.”

“Well, the whole jobisa shit show, but…” She’d lost any sense of healthy boundaries with the students ages ago.

“You work hard.” At her dismissive shrug—frankly, she wasn’t sure how to take him being so openlyniceto her—he doubled down. “You do. I’ve watched you sit in that chair for five hours straight without taking a break.”

“Maybe I’m just keeping you from stealing it.”

“At least you did your undergrad here, so you don’t have to navigate a new campus, make new friends.”

She covered the scoffing sound that escaped her throat with a cough, but just barely. Though she’d been there for four years already, the shift from undergrad to grad school had unmoored her. She’d tried to make friends with the other students in her program, but at the first department mixer, she’d overheard some of them speculating about which first-year student had been awarded the coveted Benning Scholarship and answered too brightly, “Oh, that’s me. I’m Hazel.” They murmured strained hellos and immediately abandoned the dessert table to re-congregate in a far corner as though she’d announced she had Ebola. Dr. Sheffield didn’t help matters, tacking “our illustrious Benning Scholar” onto every utterance of her name all semester, cementing her outsider status.

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