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Wes exhales a stream of smoke. “I’m from Rhode Island.”
August pauses with the joint halfway to her mouth. “Oh, I just assumed because you’re such a—”
“Dick?”
She turns her head, squinting at him. It’s gray and dim up here, shot through with orange and yellow and red from the street below. The freckles on his nose blur together.
“I was gonna say a New York purist.”
The first hit burns on the way down, catching high in her chest. She’s only done this once before—passed to her at a party, desperately trying to act like she knew what to do—but she repeats what Wes did and holds the smoke for a few long seconds before letting it out through her nose. It all seems smooth until she spends the next twenty seconds coughing into her elbow.
“I moved here when I was eighteen,” Wes says once August is done, mercifully not commenting on her inability to handle her smoke. “And my parents basically pruned me off the family tree a year later once they realized I wasn’t going back to architecture school. But at least I still had this shitty, smelly, overpriced, nightmare city.”
He says the last part with a smile.
“Yeah,” August says. “Myla and Niko kind of… alluded.”
Wes sucks on the joint, the cherry flaring. “Yeah.”
“My, um… my mom. Her parents were super rich. Lots of expectations. And they, uh, basically acted like she didn’t exist either. But my mom is pretty fucked up too.”
“How so?” Wes asks, flicking ash before passing the joint back.
August manages to hold the second hit longer. She feels it in her face, spreading across her skin, starting to soften her edges. “She told me my whole life that her family didn’t want anything to do with me, so I never really had a family. And a couple of weeks ago, I found out that was all a lie, and now they’re all dead, so.”
She doesn’t mention the son they forgot or the letters they intercepted. By now, she knows she wouldn’t have wanted anything to do with her mom’s family, even if she had known they cared about her. But she’s Suzette Landry’s daughter, which means she’s bad at letting shit go.
“Is that why you haven’t been talking to her?” Wes asks.
August drops her eyes back to him. “How do you know I haven’t been talking to her?”
“It’s pretty easy to notice when the person on the other side of your wall stops having loud phone conversations with their mom every morning at the ass-crack of dawn.”
August winces. “Sorry.”
Wes accepts the joint from her and holds it between his thumb and forefinger. He looks distant, a stray breeze ruffling the ends of his hair.
“Look, nobody’s parents are perfect,” he says finally. “I mean, Niko’s parents let him transition when he was like nine, and they’ve always been super cool about it, but his mom still won’t let him tell his grandpa. And she’s constantly bugging him to move back to Long Island because she wants him to be closer to the family, but he likes it in the city, and they fight about it all the time.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Yeah, but at least she’s trying, you know? People like my parents, though, like your mom’s parents—that’s another level. I mean, I wanted to go to art school, and my parents were like, great, you can sketch buildings, and then you can take over the firm one day, and no, we’re not paying for therapy. And when I couldn’t do what they wanted, that was just it. They cut off the money and told me not to come home. They care about how it looks. They care about what they can circle jerk about with their idiot fucking Ivy League friends. But the minute you need something—like, actually need something—they’ll let you know just how much of a disappointment you are for asking.”
August has never thought of it quite that way.
Every day, she watches Wes turn cold and fuck his own life up, and she never says a word, because she knows there’s something big and heavy pinning him down. She’s never given her mom the same understanding. She’s never thought to transpose his hurt onto her mother’s to make better sense of it.
One of his last words sticks in her head, a drag at the bottom of the pool, her brain sloshing around it. Disappointment, he said. August remembers what he said after Isaiah helped them move a mattress.
He doesn’t deserve to be disappointed.
“For what it’s worth, you’ve never disappointed me once since I’ve met you.” August scrunches her nose at him. “In fact, I would say you have exceeded my expectations.”
Wes takes a hit and laughs it back out. “Thank you.”
He stubs out the joint and pulls himself to his feet.
“And… you know. For the record.” Carefully, August rises. “I, uh, I know how it feels to spend a long time alone on purpose, just to avoid the risk of what might happen if I wasn’t. And with Jane… I don’t think I could possibly have found a more doomed first love, but it’s worth it. It’s probably going to break my heart, and it’s still worth it.”
