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He doesn’t smile, of course. Well, hedoessmile, but never at me. Whenever we’re in the same room, he’s an imposing, sky-soaring, stern presence whose main pastime appears to be judging me unworthy of Greg.
“Don’t like the wine?”
“That’s not it.” I blink, flustered. There’s a tattoo on his forearm, just peeking out of the rolled-up sleeve of his shirt. Becauseof coursehe’s wearing jeans and a plaid shirt, even though the Evite specifically asked for semiformal.
But he’s Jack Smith. He can do whatever he wants. He probably has a permit carved in those ridiculous biceps of his. Stamped on the blue quarter of his right eye, the one that sticks out like a sore thumb in the chestnut of his irises.
“The wine was great,” I say, collecting myself. “But there was a fly in it.”
“Was there?”
He doesn’t believe me. I don’t know how I know, but I know. And he knows that I know. I can see it, no—I canfeelit. There’s a tingle at the base of my spine, liquid and sparkly and warm.Careful, Elsie, it says.He’ll have you arrested for crimes against grapes. You’ll spend the rest of your life in federal prison. He’ll visit once a week to stare through the plexiglass and make you uncomfortable.
“Izzy must be looking for you,” I say, hoping to get rid of him. “She’s upstairs.”
“I know,” he replies,notheading upstairs. He just studies me—attentive, calm, like he knows something secret about me. That I floss once a week, tops. That I can’t figure out what the Dow Jones is, even after reading the Wikipedia entry. Other, scarier,darkerthings.
“Is your girlfriend here?” I ask to fill the silence. He once brought someone to a family thing. A geologist. The most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. Nice. Funny, too. I wish I could say she was out of his league.
“No.”
Silence, again. More staring. I smile to hide how aggressively I’m grinding my teeth. “It’s been a while.”
“Since Labor Day.”
“Oh, right. I forgot.”
I did not forget. Before today, I’ve met Jack twice, as in two times, one and then another, and they’re both stubbornly wedged in my brain, as pleasant as spinach leaves stuck between molars.
The first was Greg’s birthday dinner, when Jack and I shook hands and he nodded back at me tightly, when he spent the night giving me long, searching glances, when I overheard him ask Greg, “Where did you meet her?” and “How long has it been?” and “How serious is this?” with an inquisitive, deceptively casual tone that sent an odd shiver down my spine.
So Jack Smith wasn’t a fan. Okay. Fine. Whatever.
And then there was the second. Late in the summer, at the Smiths’ Labor Day pool party, where I didn’t swim. Because there’s no way to hide my pod in a bikini.
I’m not embarrassed to be diabetic. I’ve had nearly two decades to make peace with my overactive immune system, which has way too much fun destroying necessary cells. But people’s reactions to the knowledge that I must pump insulin into my body on the reg can be unpredictable. When I was diagnosed (at ten, after a seizure in the school gym that earned me the cruel but uncreative nickname of Shaky Elsie), I overheard my parents chat, low whispers behind the hospital room’s divider curtains.
“Not this, too.” Mom sounded exhausted.
“I know.” Dad sounded the same. “It’s gotta be on us. Lance is flunking out of high school. Lucas is going to be arrested for fist-fighting in the Walmart parking lot any day now. Of course the one easygoing kid we got turns out to havesomething.”
“It’s notherfault.”
“No.”
“But it’s going to be expensive.”
“Yeah.”
I don’t blame my parents: my brother Lancedideventually flunk out of school (and now makes an excellent living as an electrician), just like Lucasdidend up being arrested (albeit behind a Shake Shack, and for possession of drugs that are now legal). Mom and Dad were tired, overwhelmed. A little poor. They’d hoped for a break, something easy for once, and I was truly sorry I wasn’t it. To make it up to them, I’ve tried to make my health issues—and any other subsequent issues—as ignorable as possible.
I find that people like me better if they don’t have to expend emotional energy on me.
That’s why I didn’t swim at the Smith Labor Day party, opting to sit on a blanket and eat a slice of cake, an artfully arranged smile on my face. Why I miscalculated the carbs I ate and the insulin I’d need. And why I stumbled across the lawn of the Smiths’ Manchester-by-the-Sea vacation home high on glucose, vision blurry, head pounding, trying to remember where I’d put my phone so that I could adjust my bolus, and—
I walked right into Jack.
Literally. I didn’t see him and stepped into his chest like it was a supermassive black hole. Which it wasn’t. A black hole, that is. Plenty supermassive, though.
