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I shake my head. There’s no point in burdening him with Bailey’s opinions.
“Well, at least let me walk you back then. I can’t let you walk home alone in the dark,” Mateo says.
“Are you going to miss the After Party with your teammates, though? Were you planning on going?”
Mateo snorts. “I have a feeling the only after party we’ll have tonight is campaigning for who should be which Richmond player for Halloween.”
“Yeaaaaaah, sorry about that,” I say with a guilty smile.
He takes my hand and winks. “You can make it up to me by detouring to take the long way back to AOPi.”
With each day that passes, I’m more convinced that the long way could never be long enough with Mateo.
“P.S., I’m digging the Christmas mood,” Mateo teases. I laugh and move to pause the music, but he waves me off to leave it playing as we walk.
The evening is getting cold, so Mateo eventually leads us back to AOPi when he realizes I’m shivering. “I’d offer you my hoodie, but I don’t have a t-shirt on underneath,” Mateo says apologetically, and I’m extremely grateful for the pitch black so he can’t see the color in my cheeks as I’m now fighting back thoughts of shirtless Mateo. Suddenly, I’m not so cold.
At the AOPi front porch, Mateo confirms the time and restaurant for tomorrow night with my parents, then gives me one last lingering hug. He’s down the stairs when he turns back and says, “Hey Lana? Don’t let Bailey get in your head. I think she generally means well, but she’s just jealous of you.”
I bark out a laugh. “Yeah no, Bailey Williams is absolutely not jealous of me. Well, maybe other than for the fact that I’m your girlfriend.”
Mateo cocks his head and stares at me. “You’re beautiful, determined, empathetic, successful, an amazing friend, and you go after what you want. Maybe if I tell you enough times, you’ll eventually recognize how uniquely incredible you are, Lana.”
My heart explodes with warmth, and I’m in an all-out war with my whole body to not fly down the steps to kiss him. I muster a grateful smile and open the door behind my back as I whisper, “See you tomorrow, Mateo.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Ilove my mom. I do.
But this new version of my mom is not someone I’ve been trained to deal with.
She and my dad arrived in Brooklyn at 4:00 p.m., so we met at Bookafe for afternoon coffee. We’ve been sitting down with our drinks for exactly twenty-three seconds when she leans in and asks about Mateo like he’s some sort of conspiracy theory. My dad rolls his eyes with a smile.
Mom wants to know everything about him: his personality, his interests, his family, his future plans, his soccer prowess—pretty much everything that could be on the Mateo Alvarez Wikipedia page. I try to answer her questions with enough detail to satisfy her without droning on forever, because I really want to hear about how things are going at home.
“Okay, but tell me more about Mateo’s?—”
“Mom,” I cut in. “You’re going to meet him at dinner, and you can ask him all the questions you want to then. But for now, I want to hear about how Olivia, Carter, and Dean are doing.”
She glances at my dad, and they share some sort of secret conversation in a split-second of eye contact. Uh-oh.
Dad clears his throat. “Well, may as well rip the Band-Aid off news from the home front. Dean was suspended from school for two days this week for fighting.”
My jaw drops. “What?! Was he hurt? What was he fighting about?”
Mom reassures me, “He’s okay, just a bit of a shiner on one eye. We’re more concerned about him emotionally. He won’t tell us what the fight was about. All he’ll say is that the other guy had it coming because of something he said. But he won’t say what that was.”
I know my mom is trying to put me at ease, but I see the stress on both their faces. I chew the inside of my lip and ask, “Have you considered having him see a therapist?”
“Oh honey, we’ve tried,” my mom says. “The school counselor talked to him about it too, but he refuses. Says therapists are for weaklings. But we keep praying he’ll change his mind.”
I can tell they’re ready to move on in the conversation, so I ask my mom about Samira, one of her Afghan clients from the summer that I became especially close to. She’s a single mom who escaped from Afghanistan with her 10-year-old daughter, Zahra, but her 13-year-old son, Hassan, had gotten separated from them. Samira chose to leave with Zahra when she had the opportunity, assuming that she would be able to send for Hassan shortly after. Of course, no one had any idea at the time what an impossible nightmare it would turn out to be to get people evacuated from Afghanistan after the final plane departed.
Mom smiles. “She’s doing well. She has a stable job, and Zahra is really starting to pick up on English at school. We’re still working every possible angle to get Hassan here.” She shares updates on some of the other families I worked with over the summer. Dad shares about the students he’s teaching in private lessons and jokes about enjoying his freedom before Nutcracker rehearsals begin in earnest.
At 5:45, my mom taps on her watch and says, “We’d best get going to the restaurant. It’s almost six o’clock.”
Laughing, I tease my mom, “Surely you’re not old and hobbling enough that it’s going to take you fifteen minutes to walk two doors down.”
