Ten minutes later, my room looks like it sprang out of one of Mom’s Real Simple magazines—more than worthy of the triumphant Mission Accomplished photo I’m about to snap for Jessie. But as soon as I pick up my phone, it starts buzzing with a FaceTime request.
Mikey. I press accept, smiling at his awkwardly close-up face on my screen. You’d think a boy who inherited his brother’s old smartphone at age eight would know how to operate a selfie camera by now. But even Bubbe is better at video chatting than Mikey. It’s pretty fucking adorable, actually.
“Check it out. Good bed, right?” I flip the camera to show off my handiwork. “Only thing missing is you, naked—”
Mikey clears his throat loudly and scoots backward, cheeks flaming. A second later, his niece, Mia, pokes her head into the frame.
“Neigh, kid!” I flip back to selfie mode, grinning frantically into the camera. “Look! Hi, Mr. Horsie!” I tilt my phone upward, catching the giant horse painting centered above Uncle Milton’s headboard. “Hiiiiii, Mia!” I add in this fucked up quasi-British horse voice.
Mikey looks amused. Also, vaguely alarmed.
“Hi, Author,” says Mia. Mikey murmurs something into her ear, and she looks back up at me. “Arrrrrrrthurrrrrr,” she adds, enunciating her r’s like a pirate and earning a fist bump from Uncle Mikey.
He’s so good with her. When I met Mia in person on New Year’s, she was too shy to speak to me. But Mikey never pressured her—he just held her and let her bury her face in his shirt while we talked. It made me melt. I couldn’t stop staring at him all night, couldn’t stop thinking about kissing him, even in front of his family.
It’s strange knowing I could be with them in Boston right now, living out this domestic-fantasy summer with my unbearably sweet boyfriend. If I think too hard about it, it aches a little. Maybe more than a little.
I swallow it back. “Mia! How old are you now?”
She mutters something shyly, too soft for me to hear.
“Sixteen?” I ask.
She giggles. “No!”
“Seventeen?”
“No!” Mia looks incredulously at Mikey before turning back to me. Mikey holds up four fingers behind her back.
“Okay, okay,” I say. “Hmm. Are you . . . four?”
“And a half!”
Mikey makes an oops face and shrugs.
“Of course!” I smack my forehead. “Wow. I miss you. How are you guys?”
Mikey pauses. “We’re . . . okay.”
“Just okay?”
“Mimi, want to go find your dad?”
“No,” she says promptly. No bullshit, just a rock-solid nope. Because Mia McCowan Chen is an icon.
“Go find Daddy,” says Mikey. Mia scowls and disappears from the frame.
“What’s up? Did something happen at dinner?” I try to remember if anything was off about Mikey’s texts last night. It’s hard to tell with him—no matter how good I get at reading his face, he’s still so mysterious in writing. I meant to FaceTime him last night from Bubbe’s house, but Bubbe always makes such a big scene about dinner, and then Jessie got in from Providence and we stayed up half the night talking in my mom’s childhood bedroom.
“Dinner was fine.” Mikey rubs the bridge of his nose. “We found out this morning—my brother eloped.”
“Robert did what?” My jaw drops.
“And he told my parents via text message.”
“He did not.”
“He did!”
“Nope. That’s too much, even for Robbie.”
Mikey cracks the tiniest smile. He gets the biggest kick out of my iron-jaw memory for random personal details. I can tell you Ethan’s top five most cursed insects, Ben’s ex-boyfriend’s zodiac sign, you name it. I may not be able to get through a page of a book without having to reread every third paragraph, but at least I remember my second-grade teacher’s husband’s name. It’s my vaguely creepy superpower. But I’m starting to think it’s not such a bad skill to have. Mostly because my boyfriend’s big, loud, tight-knit family is his whole entire world, and I could basically write a book about every single one of them.
“My parents are freaking out,” Mikey says. “Laura’s been over there since ten, and apparently Mom hasn’t stopped crying. It’s a mess.”
“I thought your parents liked Amanda!”
“They do—”
“He didn’t run off with some other girl, right? Or guy?” I gasp. “Did Robert marry a guy? That is—oh my God, that is the most epic way to come out. Why didn’t I think of it?”