“Lily.”
He looks so hopeful and excited at the possibility, but I can’t read my teenage thoughts out loud to him over FaceTime. I’m growing red just thinking about it.
“Please?”
I cover my face with a hand. “No, don’t beg.” I’ll give in to those blue puppy-dog eyes if he doesn’t stop looking at me like he is.
He can see he’s wearing me down. “Lily, I have ached since I was a teenager to know what you thought of me. One paragraph. Just give me that much.”
How can I say no to that? I groan and toss the phone on the bed in defeat. “Give me two minutes.” I walk to my closet and pull down the box. I carry it over to my bed and begin flipping through the journals to find something that won’t embarrass me too much. “What do you want me to read? My retelling of our first kiss?”
“No, we’re going slow, remember?” He says that teasingly. “Start with something from the beginning.”
That’s much easier. I grab the first journal and flip through it until I find something that looks short and not too humiliating. “Do you remember the night I came to you crying because my parents were fighting?”
“I remember,” he says. He settles into his pillow and puts one arm behind his head.
I roll my eyes. “Get comfy while I mortify myself,” I mutter.
“It’s me, Lily. It’s us. There’s nothing to be embarrassed about.”
His voice still has that same calming effect it’s always had. I sit cross-legged and hold the phone with one hand and my journal in the other, and I begin to read.
A few seconds later the back door opened and he looked behind me, then to the left and right of me. It wasn’t until he looked at my face that he saw I was crying.
“You okay?” he asked, stepping outside. I used my shirt to wipe away my tears, and noticed he came outside instead of inviting me in. I sat down on the porch step and he sat down next to me.
“I’m fine,” I said. “I’m just mad. Sometimes I cry when I get mad.”
He reached over and tucked my hair behind my ear. I liked it when he did that and I suddenly wasn’t nearly as mad anymore. Then he put his arm around me and pulled me to him so that my head was resting on his shoulder. I don’t know how he calmed me down without even talking, but he did. Some people just have a calming presence about them and he’s one of those people. Completely opposite of my father.
We sat like that for a while, until I saw my bedroom light turn on.
“You should go,” he whispered. We could both see my mom standing in my bedroom looking for me. It wasn’t until that moment that I realized what a perfect view he has of my bedroom.
As I walked back home, I tried to think about the entire time Atlas has been in that house. I tried to recall if I’d walked around after dark with the light on at night, because all I normally wear in my room at night is a T-shirt.
Here’s what’s crazy about that, Ellen: I was kind of hoping I had.
—Lily
Atlas isn’t smiling when I finish reading. He’s staring at me with a lot of feeling, and the heaviness in his eyes is making my chest tight.
“We were so young,” he says. His voice carries a little bit of ache in it.
“I know. Too young to deal with the stuff we dealt with. Especially you.”
Atlas isn’t looking at his phone anymore, but he’s moving his head in agreement. The mood has shifted, and I can tell he’s thinking about something else entirely. It brings me back to what he tried to brush off earlier when he said it’s been one of those weeks.
“What’s bothering you?”
His eyes return to his phone. He seems like he might brush it off again, but then he just sighs and readjusts himself so that he’s sitting higher up against his headboard. “Someone vandalized the restaurants.”
“Both of them?”
He nods. “Yeah, it started a few days ago.”
“You think it’s someone you know?”
“It’s not anyone I recognize, but the security footage wasn’t very clear. I haven’t reported it to the police yet.”
“Why haven’t you?”
His eyebrows furrow. “Whoever it is seems younger—maybe in their teens. I guess I’m worried they might be in a similar situation to the one I was in back then. Destitute.” The tension in his eyes eases a bit. “And what if they don’t have a Lily to save them?”
It takes a few seconds for what he says to register. When it does, I don’t smile. I swallow the lump in my throat, hoping he can’t see my internal reaction to that. It’s not the first time he’s mentioned I saved him back then, but every time he says it, I want to argue with him. I didn’t save him. All I did was fall in love with him.