After a moment we break apart and I glance nervously at the house windows, but nobody’s spying. Sawyer traces my wet lips with his thumb.
“Let me know if you need anything,” he says.
“I will.”
“You going to school tomorrow?”
“Yeah.”
“Good. I felt weird being there without you today.”
I nod and look down. “Does everybody know?”
“Yes. It was pretty much the topic of the morning. People are sorry. Mr. Polselli wanted me to tell you he’s glad your family is okay.”
“That was nice of him.” Suddenly I don’t want to go to school. It’s going to be awkward, not for the first time this year. I glance at the dashboard clock. “I should get inside before my dad starts in with the pregnant bit,” I say.
Sawyer smiles. He releases my hand, reaches behind my seat, and pulls out a package with a bow. “Here,” he says, handing it to me.
I look at him. “But you paid for the phone chargers and a bunch of other stuff.”
He shrugs. “So? You think I want to be known as the guy who got his girlfriend a phone charger and underwear for her birthday? You think I want that hanging over my head the rest of my life?”
The rest of his life.
He catches himself and adds, “I mean, when you’re famous and you’re out there telling your first-boyfriend stories . . . well, I don’t want to be remembered for that.”
I laugh, but it sounds hollow in my ears. “I guess I don’t want you to be that guy either, since it would only make me look bad when it comes to my choice in boyfriends.” I shift my eyes to the package and start opening it, letting the distraction of working the taped corners ease the awkwardness of the moment.
Under the paper is a plain brown rectangular box. “Perfume?” I guess.
“No guessing.”
I shake it.
“You might not want to do that.”
“A can of soda?”
“Which is somehow better than a phone charger? Open it.”
I can’t imagine what it is. It’s too heavy and big for jewelry, and it’s clearly not a book. What else do boys get girls for their birthday?
I open the box and pull out something in bubble wrap. I ease the tape off and unwind it to find: a superhero bobblehead. In my own likeness. And on my cape is a giant letter I. I crack up and tap my bobblehead. “Best present ever! How did you do it?”
He looks relieved. “Through a website. I sent them a photo of you.”
I examine it. Dark hair, brown eyes, skeptically arched eyebrow. “Yep, that’s me.” I point to the letter I on the cape. “Is that for ‘interesting’? ‘Intelligent’?”
“No,” he says quietly.
“ ‘Important’?” I guess, batting my lashes.
He shakes his head.
“No, wait, I know. ‘Insane.’ ”
“No,” he says. “It’s for ‘invincible.’ ”
“Invincible,” I repeat.
He nods and looks away. “Because I need you to be.”
For the first time since the fire, I think long and hard about the vision curse.
Ten
Mom, Dad, Trey, Rowan, and I pile into the delivery car, which no longer has anything to deliver, so I guess it’s just a car. We go to one of those Japanese teppanyaki places where the chef does all those spatula and knife tricks and makes an onion volcano and tosses food into his hat and at your face, and we all try really hard to have a good time for the sake of everybody else. It’s weird, actually, the five of us all eating dinner together like today is Christmas Day or something. And when I think about how life could be like this for who knows how long, it makes me feel like I’m suffocating.
During a lull in the chef action, Rowan makes a paper airplane with her used napkin and gives it to me for my birthday. Trey presents me with his soup spoon and three mints that he swiped from the register area while we were waiting to be seated. And Mom and Dad slip me twenty bucks, no card or anything—they haven’t had time to do more. The chef finds out it’s my birthday and does the fake ketchup squirt trick on me—where a red string comes out of the bottle when he squeezes it—and tosses me an extra shrimp, and then after we’re done eating, the server brings me a free dessert with a candle in it, which is pretty cool.
When we get back to Aunt Mary’s, she and the younger two cousins are frosting a birthday cake for me, so of course I’m forced to eat a piece of that—what a shame. But for once I can’t even finish it. My stomach feels like lead. Being here at Aunt Mary’s is like a glaring reminder that our home has been destroyed. And finally, as eleven Italians sit around in rare quiet eating cake, Trey asks the question we’ve all wanted to ask but didn’t quite know how.
“So, Pops, what are we going to do now?”
It’s startling. My dad looks at him, and at first his face goes to that normal sternness that we’ve gotten so used to recently, as if Trey was acting up. But then it softens. “We have insurance,” Dad says. “We’re going to be okay.”
“Well, are you going rebuild the restaurant or what?” Rowan asks.
Dad looks at Mom.
“We don’t know yet,” Mom says. “We’re trying to figure that out.”
I sit up. “What would you do if you don’t rebuild? Do you know how to do anything else?”