Jesse bumped me with his shoulder. “You first, Spy Girl.” He laughed. “You look geared up for it.”
“Ooh, don’t call me that,” I said before I could stop myself.
“What? Spy Girl?”
“Yeah.” I glanced around us, but the people walking by were all in a hurry to get home. No one cared about our conversation. “It’s just a costume. And I have a name, you know.”
“I know,” he said. “Maggie.”
No one had ever said my name like that before, like it was quiet and special and unique, the only real name that I had, the one hardly anyone knew.
“I just …” I tried to explain without actually explaining. “I like my name. I like when you say my name.” Then I passed him back the ice cream. “It’s melting. You should eat more of it.”
“I’m good,” he said, and he took the ice cream and set it on the step without breaking eye contact with me. “Maggie.”
My heart was turning into a hummingbird, crashing against my ribcage every time he said my name. I’ve been nervous and scared and even petrified before, but I had never felt like this. “Well, you don’t want to wear my name out,” I teased him, moving back ever so slightly and reaching for the ice cream. “You sure you don’t want more? Because I’m starving.”
I was so not hungry.
“Wait, you just told me to call you by your real name, then when I say it, you get all weird and uncomfortable.” His eyes were boring into me, like he could see every phony birth certificate, every illegal passport. “You don’t like your name?”
“No, I like my name a lot,” I lied. “Margaret’s a very … classic name. I just … I feel like we keep talking about me. And Roux. Let’s talk about you.”
He paused and ran a hand through his hair, which only served to make it curlier. “So what about me? What, did you google me or something?”
Jesse seemed annoyed now, looking everywhere except at me. I had thought that I couldn’t handle him looking at me anymore, but now that he wasn’t, I wanted his gaze back where it had been.
“I didn’t google you,” I lied. “I just—”
“So you googled my dad probably. Every other girl has.”
The condensation from the ice cream was starting to run off the carton and onto my fingers. “Who’s your dad?” I asked, hating the way the lie felt in my mouth, dirty, like ash. “Why would I google him?”
Jesse took a deep sigh and his shoulders sagged forward. His hair fell back over his forehead, and I found myself wanting to brush it away, to touch his skin with my fingertips. “Sorry,” he said. “I get a lot of girls trying to use me to get to my dad. For internships, college letters of recommendation, party invites, all that. And it’s been a really shitty year. Especially this summer.”
“What happened this summer?”
He laughed a little, only it wasn’t a funny laugh, more like an exhalation of breath. “I haven’t told anyone yet. You can’t tell anyone, either, ‘cause it could really screw things up for my dad.”
My heart was starting to race again. Was it because Jesse was about to say something about the magazine article? Or was it because he was sitting so close to me that our hipbones touched? “Okay,” I said. “I know how to keep a secret.”
“My mom left in June.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
“Yeah. She and my dad never really got along. They were either fighting or not talking. But then I guess everything came to a head and she left right before school ended in June.”
“Do you know where she went?” I asked. The street was quiet now, a temporary lull caused by red lights and the late night, and I lowered my voice to match the hum of the distant traffic.
“I think Connecticut. We have a house out in Westport. Or maybe she’s in Europe. I’m not sure. She said she’d call”—he shrugged—“ but she doesn’t. When she left, she said she just needed time alone for a while. And my dad doesn’t want anyone finding out because he’s already under a lot of pressure with work and, you know, if a blogger finds out or someone at the New York Post …” Jesse’s voice trailed off and his eyes looked glassy, like a doll’s. “He thinks rumors could spread and hurt business.”
I sat next to him and thought of my summer days spent watching Icelandic TV and endlessly spinning locks on the safes’ dials, watching the neighbor boy and wishing I knew what to say to him. I wondered if Jesse had felt the same way, lonely for someone to talk to, penned in by things beyond his control. “Do you miss her?” I asked.
Jesse was quiet for a long time. “I miss the idea of her,” he said at last. “It’s like when people leave, you can’t change anything or make it better. Maybe you can’t do that when they’re still there, either, but at least you think that you can maybe try one day.
“You know what I did?” he said, then continued before I could even answer. “I’m an idiot. I stole this book from the bookstore and then got caught.”
I froze. I couldn’t help it. “Really?”
“Yeah. I practically waved it in the security guards’ faces as we left, so it wasn’t really hard to catch me. I just thought …” He trailed off for a minute and then let out a deep sigh. “I thought that maybe if I got caught, it’d get in the papers and blogs, and my mom would read my name and think of me.”