Who Do You Love(42)
Author: Jennifer Weiner

I leaned against the wall, feeling faint, holding the heart tight in my hand, while my own heart hammered in my chest, until Marissa came back from the bathroom and climbed onto my bed. I smelled Finesse shampoo and the apricot scrub that she used as she leaned close. “What is it? Let me see? Oh my GOD,” she squealed, when I opened my hand to show her.

“I know.” I couldn’t believe he’d done something so romantic and sweet, something that made me want to jump, and run, and cry with happiness. I took a record-breakingly short shower and practically waltzed back to the room. I dried and styled my hair, applied my makeup, pulled on a pair of light-blue jeans, a long-sleeved red shirt with tiny buttons at the collar. Then I rummaged in my bags until I found the Star of David pendant my nana had given me for my bat mitzvah. Carefully, I worked the charm off the gold chain and replaced it with Andy’s heart, adjusting it so it hung against the hollow of my throat.

•••

Too soon, there were only two days of the week remaining. I carried pieces of lumber, and watched Andy’s face and his arms as he sawed. He was nothing like the boys I’d known, with his dedication to his running, and his single mom in the city, and his friend Mr. Sills, and his stories about how he’d won the Catholic League’s cross-country championship, and how his buddy Miles was supposed to be on the trip but had gotten suspended for throwing another kid’s backpack out the school bus window.

“What’s it like, being biracial?” I’d asked him once, shyly, during one of our lunch breaks under the tree. He’d been peeling the slices of turkey from the bread, rolling them up and eating them first, the way he always did.

Andy shrugged. “I’ve never been anything else. I only know what it’s like being me.”

I thought I understood. When people asked me what it had been like to grow up with my heart thing, to have had all those operations, I could talk about missing school and birthdays, but the truth was that I couldn’t say what it was like because I’d never known anything different.

I wasn’t expecting Andy to expound on the topic, but he surprised me. Looking down at the ground, where there was nothing to see but dirt and twigs, he said, “It’s like being two people.”

“What do you mean?”

“When I’m with my mom or my . . .” I heard his throat click when he swallowed. “My grandma, I was going to say, but I haven’t seen her in a long time. They’re white, and when I’m with them, people think that I am, too, so sometimes I get to hear what they really think about black people.” He gave me a rueful look. “Which is pretty rough. I usually think the black guys on my track team don’t think I’m black enough, or they think I’m trying to be white, or trying to sound white . . .” He plucked a blade of grass from a patchy clump and rolled it between his thumbs. “And then there’s all the questions. People ask what you are, where you’re from, and you can’t ever just say America or Philadelphia. Then you catch them looking at you sometimes, trying to figure it out.” He tied the piece of grass in a knot, flicked it into the dirt with his index finger, and pulled out another piece. “You don’t ever just get to be . . .” More grass-twiddling. “Normal, I guess. Just a normal person where people look at you and they know what you are. You always have to decide—who you’re going to be with, who you want to be that day. That hour, even. The people who know me don’t think of me like that. But other kids . . .” He shifted his weight, rocking side to side like he was getting ready to stand up and walk away. “I wish sometimes I knew more kids like me.” Then, in a voice so quiet I almost couldn’t hear, he said, “I wish I knew my dad.”

I wanted to tell him that I understood about wanting to feel normal, about wishing that there was someone like you in the world, someone who’d been there, in the place where you were, and could talk about it, and would tell you the truth. But I’d never told anyone about Alice—not my parents, not Nana, not anyone. I didn’t have the words. I thought that maybe I’d kiss him—he looked so sad, with his eyes half shut as he looked at the ground. What I did was touch his arm, then slip my hand in his. I know, I thought, and he looked up like he’d heard me. I know.

•••

Then it was Saturday, our last night in Atlanta. “You did good,” said Alex as we crowded into the framed-out house. It was still unfinished, all rough plywood and bare walls, with stacks of PVC pipes for the plumbing piled up high, but it was undeniably on its way to being a real house, with rooms and walls and staircases and doors. And bedrooms. I wondered if Andy and I could miss the bus on purpose and find a blanket to spread across the splintery floorboards, that we could be there together when the sun went down. When the evening sky was pansy-purple, and all you could hear was a symphony of birdsong and crickets.