Under the Same Stars by Libba Bray(76)
Miles claws his fingers. “Meow!”
He wants to press Chloe for more about Daria and what she said about him, for every single detail. But that wouldn’t be cool.
“Well. I am devastating in this outfit.”
He waits for her to make fun of him. She doesn’t, which is also off-putting. Some middle schoolers who are entirely too old to be trick-or-treating swagger up to the bottom step and hold out their bulging bags. “Yo. Trick or treat.”
Miles cradles the bowl with both arms. “Sorry. We are quality control. These have razor blades in them.”
“Fuck you!” the shortest one says in a voice that’s just barely postpuberty. They take off running.
“The youth!” Miles says with mock outrage.
Chloe laughs and fishes in the bowl for Twizzlers. “She’s really pretty, though,” she says a few seconds later.
“Who?”
“Daria!”
Someone sets off a firecracker down the street. The gunshot pops whistle up and crack open in a flower of light. Chloe leans back against the wrought-iron railing and looks at Miles. “What would you say is your type? Like, name a celebrity crush.”
There’s a molecular shift in the air between them. This feels like a test he is bound to fail.
“Ms. Frizzle.”
She whacks his arm. “Be serious!”
“Hey! She’s smart. Always up for an adventure. And she’s got that sweet school-bus ride.”
Chloe bites off the end of a red licorice twist. The sulfurous tail of the firecracker still lingers in the night air.
“What about you? Your type,” he asks, even though he knows he shouldn’t. He’s venturing into a territory he’s not sure he can back out of easily.
Chloe looks up at the night sky where a thin haze of fog has crept down and shrouded the long row of cornices. “Smart. Funny. Weird. Not weird-weird but, you know. Unique.”
Miles goes very still. Is she talking about him? Is this her way of hinting? Dating is a question they have silently danced around for years. Miles has always been afraid of a romance with Chloe. What if it got weird and complicated? He couldn’t bear losing what they have. Last spring, the two of them almost kissed. It was Memorial Day weekend and a group of them had gone to Coney Island to ride the coaster, shoot plastic ducks, and eat curly fries at Nathan’s. The day had been warm and beautiful. It was Danny’s first time meeting Chloe.
“Yo, you didn’t convey to me how fully awesome Chloe is. She single?”
“What she is, is really smart. Too smart for you, DanDan.”
“Don’t mangle my mojo, dude!”
It didn’t stop Danny from trying to shoot his shot the rest of the afternoon, asking Chloe to go with him on every ride. Miles had been amused at first, then irritated, and finally, jealous. He became determined to win Chloe a prize: a giant stuffed panda with absurd googly eyes.
“I got this,” he promised Chloe after his fifth go-round at the water pistols.
“I see that,” Chloe laughed.
“Dude. This is boring,” Danny griped.
Chloe patted Miles’s arm. “Yeah. It’s okay. You can stop.”
“Never! Death before dishonor!”
It took twenty-eight dollars and pity on the part of the carnival worker, but Miles finally won the stuffed animal. Chloe named it Twenty-Eight-Dollar Panda. By that time, the day had slipped away. Danny had wandered off to ride the Electro Spin with some Dominican girls from the Bronx that he met in line for ice cream. The sunset pulled itself down into the murky Atlantic. The boardwalk neon bloomed. The waves whispered back and forth beneath the screams and click-clack of the coaster. Chloe and Miles strolled the salt-worn planks, Chloe hugging the oversized trophy panda to her chest. They were talking about their upcoming senior year and all of the plans they had, all of the last high-school hurrahs before they were flung into new futures, possibly without each other for the first time in years. The conversation had slowed to halting, half-finished phrases until it melted into a contented silence, as if they’d been emptied of all they’d needed to say. They stopped to look out at the gray line of the horizon where the ocean met the sky and Miles had wanted nothing more than to kiss her, to show her what she meant to him. He loved her in a new way at that moment and it was as heady as the bright lights and whirring rides behind them. She’d looked up at him as if she sensed the kiss forming in his thoughts. Miles leaned in closer. Chloe turned her face up to his. At the last minute, Miles chickened out. He dodged right and kissed the panda on his furry face. “I love you, Expensive Panda! Don’t ever change!”
Four weeks later, Chloe left for summer camp and started dating a fellow CIT named Jared.
“You snooze you lose,” Danny told him once Miles got the news.
“Whatever,” Miles had said. He’d had his chance and he’d blown it, sure that there would be other chances ahead.
“I don’t think I’m anybody’s type,” Chloe announces from her perch on the brownstone’s steps. She’s fishing. He knows it; she knows it. She and Jared broke up a month ago. She’s free. He’s free. There’s nothing stopping them except the years of friendship and the weight of what happens once they graduate. Another firecracker screams up, fizzles into two dull pops. Their smoke joins the fog.