DP Movers—their slogan was “You point the way, Dream Point!”—had arrived this morning at eight thirty. For the past three hours, they’d been carting boxes of clothes and books and kitchen utensils, and mostly, the carved figurines and masks and exotic musical instruments Jake Gordon’s mother had collected from all over the world, into the flatbed of their truck and stacking them up in tight systematic rows. The moving truck, a pale cavernous brick of sea-foam aluminum, was almost full now. Almost ready to haul the history of Jake’s life across town to the north shore, where the fancy people in Dream Point lived in their elaborate mansions, bunkered between their security gates and their private beaches.
Watching the movers sweat in the crisp December air, Jake had a hard time getting his head around the fact that he would be one of those fancy people now. He didn’t feel like he’d changed at all, but his mother, Janey, had married Cameron Pendergrass, maybe the fanciest of them all. He owned the Mariana Hospitality Group, a chain of hotels all over the world, including three massive, full-service island resorts, one in the Bahamas, one in Antigua, and one on some island in the South China Sea. He was easily the richest person in Dream Point.
As the stringy tattooed guys who looked like they shouldn’t be anywhere near this strong carried the last of the boxes from the house, Jake sat in a wicker-backed kitchen chair, its legs sinking into the moist soil of the front yard. He stared out at Greenvale Street and tried to distract himself from thinking how completely his life would change by wondering what would happen to all the stuff they were leaving behind. The couch, the dining room table, the bed he’d slept in since he was six years old, even the chair he was sitting in now—they were ditching all of it. The white stucco bungalow that Jake had always known as home—new people would be living in it by New Year’s.
And Elena Rios, his best friend and partner in skeptical endurance of the cliquey, shallow life at Chris Columbus High, who knew all his secrets, or all but one—she’d no longer be living right next door. She’d promised to hang out with him and watch the movers work this morning, and he’d dragged two wicker-backed chairs out onto the lawn, but the one next to him was still empty.
He’d texted her three times already, giving her status updates on the movers’ progress, and all he’d heard back was one hard-to-interpret message saying, “THESE THINGS TAKE TIME ;D.” Tilted on the uneven soil of the lawn, the chair looked sad and lonely beside him.
“Hey, yo,” the crew captain called to him from the back of the truck, squinting under the dingy red Santa hat he’d draped over his head. “You wanna sign off on this, or what?” He wagged a tin clipboard at Jake as though he thought Jake should have been able to read his mind.
Jake wandered over to the truck. His mother had put him in charge. She had to be at Tiki Tiki Java, the coffeehouse she owned on Shore Drive, and Cameron, obviously, wasn’t interested in spending his precious time coordinating with moving companies—he had employees for that. School was out for Christmas break, so it wasn’t like Jake had anywhere better to be, anyway.
“Just the boxes, yeah?” the mover said. “That’s some nice stuff in there. You’re leaving all of it?”
“Yeah,” Jake said.
“The TV? That speaker system? Shit ain’t cheap.”
“Salvation Army is coming to take it away.”
“Oh?” The guy raised an eyebrow. He was trying too hard not to seem overly curious. “When’s that?”
“This afternoon,” Jake lied.
The guy ticked his cheek. He braced the clipboard on his forearm and held the pen rubber-banded to it out to Jake. “You gotta push hard to get through all three layers,” he said.
Jake signed the sheet and reminded the guy that his mother would be there to sign on the other side.
As the guy rounded up his three workers and closed the truck, Jake headed toward the house for one last look.
He checked his watch. It was almost noon. Still no sign of Elena.
She didn’t usually flake like this, at least not with him. He knew she was elusive. She liked it that way. Enjoy being with me while I’m here and don’t ask for more. That was her attitude. But Jake had always been the exception to this rule. He was the person she didn’t hide from.
As he wandered the rooms of the house one last time, it took every ounce of his being to restrain himself from frantically bombarding Elena with the kind of needy, selfish where-are-you texts that he knew she hated getting from other people—her sister, her father, the couple of boys she’d briefly, disastrously dated.
He’d known her all his life. There was a photo of the two of them in their diapers sitting in the dirt under the swing set in Seminole Park, reaching out to fumble at each other’s chubby hands. She’d been there for him when his parents’ marriage finally broke up and his father moved permanently to the Keys. He’d been there for her throughout the long saga of her mother’s death of ovarian cancer and the roller coaster of chemo and radiation therapy, of hope and despair and hope and despair that had consumed her life for a year and a half. He’d watched her grow from a sassy, string-bean tomboy to a dark-haired, dark-eyed, darkly intelligent young woman whose sense of the world was as off-kilter as his own.
He adored her.
The truth was, he loved her.
He’d known it forever. Since middle school, at least, when they’d both begun to wonder why the other kids in their class seemed to always, only want to talk about LeBron James and Miley Cirus, when he’d begun to sense that Elena was the only person he knew who thought deeply about the world. She was curious, so curious that after she’d seen Spirited Away, the surreal, slightly spooky Miyazaki movie, she’d explored where it had come from and uncovered a whole world of Japanese anime. She didn’t care if nobody else had heard of this stuff. It was interesting to her, and that was enough.
He loved that confidence he saw in her. He loved her compulsive joy, the goofy silliness she allowed herself to indulge in. And her fiery loyalty, the way she’d leap to the fight when she felt like he, or her sister, Nina, needed defending.
But it wasn’t just that. Lately, it was physical, too. Her olive skin. Her perfect toes. The way she wore her hair in that modified pixie cut, close and tight around the back, her curls swooping up over her forehead. The sweet curve of her hips and the faint strawberry mark that peeked out like a tattoo from the side of her bikini bottoms.
If she weren’t his best friend, he would have admitted it long ago. Even though he was just moving across town, he felt he had to tell her now. At least then she’d know that all those songs he’d written for “Sarah,” the “girlfriend” who “lived down the beach from his dad in the Keys,” had really been about her.
If only she’d come out to say good-bye, he could say the lines he’d been rehearsing all week.
He sent her one last text. “THEY’RE DONE. GOTTA GO IN 10.”
She responded immediately. “LOOK OUT THE WINDOW.”
And there she was in the chair he’d put out for her, casual, in tight jean shorts crisply folded up just above her knees, sporting her favorite Cowboy Bebop T-shirt. She made a goofy face, crossing her eyes and sticking out her tongue, briefly, then returned to hunching over