Page 58 of Here for a Good Time
She shakes her head. “I appreciate the concern, but it’s okay, they don’t use the pier. They’re not allowed on resort property, so they have their own makeshift dock. It’s closer to the trail that connects the village to the beach. Or at least, it was. That’s a whole thing we’re having to sort out. But they’ll be okay, they always are.”
“Okay, that’s good,” he says on a sigh of relief, and she shoots him a grateful smile.
“You work at your parents’ bookstore, right?” she asks. “What do you think you’d do if they didn’t own that store? Or sold it? Do you think you’d still be selling books?”
Without taking a beat, he replies, “I’d do a PhD,” and the speed at which he says it makes me jerk back.
Since when has Zwe wanted to do a PhD? Sure, sometimes we’ve joked that his dream job would just be “Statistics,” but I didn’t think he was serious about it.
“Oh, yeah?” Leila’s asking. “In what?”
“Statistics. It’s what I did my undergrad in.”
“Ew, you want to do math?” she says, wrinkling her nose. “You were giving off hot nerd vibes, but I didn’t realize thenerdpart of your whole schtick was that strong.”
“Hey, stats isn’tjustmath!” Zwe shoots back. He’s grinning like a teenager on a first date, and I feel the overwhelming need to climb up a tree and give them some privacy. “It… makes sense. Ithelpseverything, anything, make sense. But ideally, I’d do a PhD and become a teacher. I know it’s corny, but I’d love to show kids how exciting math is.”
“That’s not corny. Do your parents know you want to go back to college and get into teaching? What did they say?”
He slaps a mosquito that landed on his arm. “They don’t know. If they did, they’d make me go, but I wouldn’t feel good about leaving them on their own. Especially now that they’re older.”
“Family, right?” she says quietly. He nods, and when they look at each other, there’s a silent exchange of understanding that makes me return to staring at the ground. It was one thing to feel the emotional distance increase between me and Zwe. But to feel thatandsee him actively get closer to somebody else? I feel like I’m going to be sick. “And how did you two meet?”
I look up right as Zwe glances back at me. Something jolts me from the inside when our eyes meet, because it’s like I’m looking at someone I don’t know. Because I don’t know this Zwe. I’ve met so many versions of him over the years, but never this one. He still looks so… angry? No, that’s not it.
Passive.
He looks passive, like I’m another guest at the resort he just met today. Like he forgot I was even walking two feet behind him this whole time.
“School,” I say. “Elementary.”
“Aaawww, so since you were babies!” Leila gushes. “Who approached whom?”
“I wanted to check out one more book than the library allowed and started crying because the librarian wouldn’t let me,” I say. Despite myself, I smile and steal another peek at Zwe. The knot in my stomach loosens ever so slightly when I catch a flash of dimples. “So Zwe came over and offered to borrow it under his name.”
“Stop!” As if commanding herself, Leila stops in her tracks, and puts a hand to her chest. “That is the fucking cutest thing I’ve ever heard!”
“It was a Betty and Veronica comic,” Zwe says.
Now it’smyturn to come to an abrupt halt. “You remember?” The words fly out before I can consider that Zwe still loathes me.
Hestops walking too, completing our awkward triangle. “Of course I remember,” he says.
Oh,I think.
Because I thought I was the only one who remembered.
One Christmas when I was shopping for Zwe’s present, I tried to track down a copy of that exact comic. I found one approximately a month later, too, thanks to my eBay alert. I didn’t buy it, though. I put it in my cart, went to check out, and then thought,What the fuck, Poe, this isn’t a present that Zwe would like. Because he’s not the nostalgic type. I am. Because he would open it and wonder what the punchline was but be too polite to ask outright.
But he remembered,I silently think as I study the dirt under my feet.
Without warning, the backs of my eyes start to prickle at the thought that we might die on this fucking island and I will never get to go Christmas shopping for him again. And at the thought that even if we do get out alive, I might have so irreparably damaged our friendship that evenifthat comic was still available in Dominik from Budapest’s store, there would be no point in getting it now.
“And you’ve been friends ever since?” Leila asks.
Unthinkably, that sounds like such a loaded question. I look back at Zwe, and find that his brown eyes are still fixed on me. It feels like there are so many things bubbling under the surface all at once, but I’m too scared to dive down and look.
Are we still friends?I ask, searching his face for the truth while praying that the truth is what I want it to be, what I need it to be.
