Page 35 of Here for a Good Time
“I know we don’t need to. But I’d like to.”
“I’d… rather not. Don’t want to jinx anything,” he adds.
“Oh. Right. Gotcha,” I say, not used to Zwe keeping things from me. I try a different route. “Hey, do you think your parents will ever retire? Sell the store?”
“The day they do, I’ll know they’ve officially lost it,” he says, sounding like he’s smiling.
“Wouldyou?”
“Would I what?”
I make an effort to keep inhaling and exhaling through my nose instead of my mouth. “Sell the store? If it were up to you?”
Zwe doesn’t answer for a long while, keeping his focus down and on the grass. “It doesn’t matter,” he finally says. “The store isn’t mine. What would I do if I sold it, anyway? That bookstore’s all I’ve ever really known,” he adds with a dry chuckle. “I’m happy as long as they’re happy.”
I could immediately list ten things for him to do if he sold the store, but instead I bite my tongue. Zwe’s happy if his parents are happy, andI’mhappy if he’s happy.
We keep going in silence until I have to pause to take a breather.
“You okay?” Zwe asks as soon as his hearing clocks that I’ve stopped moving. He immediately turns around and walks over.
“I’m okay, just tired.”
“Hi, okay, just tired,” he retorts.
“Don’t test me right now, Zwe Aung Win. I swear to god, I will impale you with a branch.”
He chuckles under his breath. “Come on, we have to keep going. We can’t stop yet, we’ve only been walking for—” He checks his watch. “—thirty-one minutes.”
“You’re lying.”
“Hand on heart,” he says, placing his palm on his left chest.
“Ugggggh! I hate nature!” Although I try to keep my groan quiet, there’s a rustling commotion as two birds fly out from the branches of the tree next to me. “Sorry, no offense!” I whisper-call after them. “Great, now I’m apologizing to birds. Maybe the dehydration and exhaustion are already getting to me. Whoever said nature was relaxing was a bold-faced liar.”
“You know, if I were a dick, I would point out thatyoubooked this trip becauseyouthought all of this nature would be rejuvenating.” I go to punch his arm, but he laughs and hops out of the way. “However”—he lifts a quieting finger—“I’m going to be nice andnotpoint that out. Come on, let’s distract your brain. Tell me about… this newest draft of yours. It must be good if you risked your life to save it. What happens?”
Despite its innocuousness, I’m taken aback by this specific subject change. Ihatetalking about my work in progress. It puts too much pressure on me, forces me to talk about an idea that might or might not even turn out to be a real book as though it alreadyisone. Generally, Zwe knows this, too, and the rule is that we don’t talk about my new project unlessIbring it up. But then again, we’re kind of short on conversation topics right now, and Iwasthe one who made a big deal about bringing my laptop with me in a life-or-death situation because I couldn’t bear to leave my precious manuscript behind. So I guess I had this one coming.
“It’s… time travel,” I try to explain. The words come out slowly, because the truth is that I don’t actually yet know what does happen in this book. “This woman discovers a time-traveling manhole and she becomes obsessed with changing parts of her present-day life and then traveling forward in time to see how the changes have impacted her future.”
“Time travel, that’s fun,” Zwe muses. “How does it end?”
This is how I write: I know how a book starts and how it ends.
“She dies,” I say.
He laughs out loud, then clasps his hand over his mouth because we’re not supposed to be making any distinctly loud sounds. “Sorry,” he says. “I didn’t expect that. That’s funny, though.”
I stop in my tracks. “What’s the joke?”
He turns around, confused once he sees that I’ve stopped walking. “That she dies.” He’s drawing out each word as he gauges the situation. When I fold my arms, he adds, “Right?”
“Why’s that funny?”
“Wait,” he says with a small snort that makes me grind my teeth in response. “You’re not joking? She actually dies?”
“Well… yeah.”
