Falling From the Sky (21 page)

“Oh my God,” Micah says under his breath. He pulls his hand from mine and buries his face into his palms.

Zoey shoots Micah the same glare Jade shoots Abby, and I clamp down on my lip with my teeth just like I did when Coach Bennett announced Zach Perry had been dismissed from camp. It’s like wanting to laugh at a funeral; you know you can’t, and it takes everything in you to fight it. And the gorgeous guy beside me isn’t doing much to fight it. The longer the girls dance, the more Micah laughs, and the more he laughs, the harder I bite.

“Micah!” Zoey says through her teeth.

He falls over toward me in his seat when Zoey nudges him. A smile creeps across my face, so I turn my eyes back to the stage. If I look at Micah and his laughing smile, I’ll catch it and end up laughing along just because he is.

But looking at the stage doesn’t help. The girls lean to the right and clap twice. Then they lean to the left and do the same. Abby again mixes up her left and right, steadily bumping into the girls beside her.

“Calm down,” I whisper to Micah.

He buries his face into my shoulder, shaking his head. I stretch my arm out behind him and hug him close to me, his face still in my shirt sleeve. There are as many eyes on him as there are on Abby’s out of step dance moves, and Zoey mumbles through her teeth that she’s going to kill him when we leave tonight.

I keep my arm around a semi-composed Micah until the end of the recital. As soon as the auditorium lights flicker on, Micah pops up from his seat and stumbles over a few people trying to get out of the room. I catch one look at Zoey’s face and decide it might be in Micah’s best interest if I follow him. He’s against the wall right outside of Studio C1 when I walk out, and that goofy smile wraps from one side of his face to the other.

“Dude, you lost it in there,” I say, leaning back next to him.

He grabs my hand and squeezes it before I have time to hesitate and pull away. “Ridge, did you not see her? It was like she completely forgot everything she’d learned the minute she walked on stage.”

That is true. Abby even leaned forward at one point and looked both ways, like crossing traffic, to see what the other girls were doing.

“I know,” I admit. “I saw. Zoey’s going to kill you.”

Micah shook his head. “She won’t say anything as long as I tell Abby how great she was and pretend like she didn’t mess up.”

The hallway soon fills up with the many parents and grandparents we’d brushed past earlier on our way to Studio C1. Micah’s hand remains glued to mine, but there is no point in pushing him away now. Too many people have seen us, too many old ladies have pointed us out to their friends, and too much of his heart will be broken if I let go.

Abby and Jade’s voices hit my ears before I see them. The crowded hallway parts into a squiggle of a line, and Abby’s smile rushes toward us.

“You were awesome, Ab!” Micah says with exaggerated enthusiasm.

Her smile drops, and she looks at the floor while fiddling with her petal skirt. “I kind of messed up some.”

“Really? I didn’t even notice. I thought you were the best one up there,” Micah says.

He amazes me with the seriousness in his voice now. If he hadn’t been face-planted into my shoulder shaking with laughter, I’d believe him. But the most important thing is for Abby to believe him and the return of her smile signals that she does.

“She just kept messing up,” Jade’s voice whines from behind us.

Zoey gives her the same mean stare she gave Micah just moments ago but with a little less intensity. “She didn’t mess up much. You both were really great.”

Jade slams her shiny black tap shoe against the tile floor. Her arms fold across her chest, and her eyebrows bend in an evil V-shape.

“You didn’t do anything right,” she says to her sister. “You messed it all up.”

“I didn’t mean to!” Abby shouts back in Jade’s face.

Zoey makes a perfectly-timed intervention between the girls, as if a cue card popped up that read, “Enter Zoey. Zoey saves the day.” I try to cross my own arms and lean back casually while Zoey and Kyle the Ripper play referee between the twins, but my attempt of being nonchalant is spoiled by Micah, who pulls my arms back and wraps himself up in them.

“Can I bum a ride from you tonight?” he asks. He glances back at the lecture Zoey is giving the girls and returns puppy dog eyes to me.

“Yeah,” I tell him. I pull him close enough so no one else will hear me. “You sure you don’t want to ride with them?”

He raises an eyebrow in response. I dig around in my pocket for my keys and turn my back to the crowd of glitter. Then Abby’s voice rises above all the noise in the building. She screams out that she wants ice cream. Micah latches on to my arm again and pulls me back, obviously not ready to leave.

“It’s late,” Zoey explains even though it’s barely after seven. “And you’ve gotta get ready to go to your grandparents’ tomorrow.”

Abby and Jade both shift from side to side, hanging their heads, and exaggerating their sadness with pitiful faces.

“Let’s go,” I whisper to Micah.

He shakes his head. “She’ll give in.”

“Yeah, probably so,” I agree. “But that doesn’t involve us. C’mon.”

The twins’ argument is quickly won after Kyle the Ripper agrees that Zoey should take them for ice cream. His defense case is that the girls will be gone all weekend, and Zoey should let them have some fun before they leave on the court-negotiated monthly weekend visit to their dad’s house, which really means they will spend the weekend with
his
parents because he doesn’t hang around much.

“We’ll meet you there,” Micah says to them. He turns back to me with another excited smile. “This place is awesome. You’ll love it.”

I don’t question him. He’s been right every time he’s said that so far.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Micah glues himself to the clear pane of the ice cream freezer, cuddled in between Abby and Jade. All three of them stare wide-eyed into the metal containers of frozen colors, and Jade argues with Micah about which flavors are the best. I can’t figure out which ones they’re talking about because Micah goes from “Ohmygod that one is amazing!” to “That one is awesome too!” in the time it takes to blink.

Jade settles on a rainbow swirl flavor, and I wonder exactly what Micah is thinking when he commends her on an awesome choice. I don’t think he’s talking about ice cream. Abby dwells longer, like her uncle, over thinking everything like this is the biggest decision she’ll make all year. For a five-year-old, it probably is.

“What’s good?” I ask Micah, even though I know he’s going to point to five tubs at once and tell me in one long sentence how great they all are.

“I’m debating between chocolate chip and strawberry cheesecake,” he says instead.

“Have you not had enough chocolate chips this summer?” I question him.

He fights a smile and stares into the freezer. My hands are cold, and I haven’t been pressed to the glass like he has. I reach over and lock my fingers in between his.

“Hypothermia killed all those people on the Titanic, you know,” I say, squeezing his hand.

This time he can’t fight the smile. “I know,” he says. He pulls his other hand back from the glass. “It has real chunks of cheesecake in it.”

The girl at the counter confirms this final decision before I have a chance to. “So strawberry cheesecake it is then,” she says, already dipping into the metal tub. “Same for you?” she looks up at me.

“Uh, just give us one large cup. Two spoons,” I tell her. I stare at my tennis shoes as soon as the words leave my mouth because I don’t want to see whatever look she’s giving me.

Micah links his arm around mine and leans close to my ear. “That’s a bit on the romantic side, Jump Shot. I’m impressed,” he teases me.

I push him with my shoulder and continue to stare at my Nikes and the speckled tile floor. “Hush before I change my mind,” I say under my breath so only Micah will hear me.

I shuffle back and forth, avoiding eye contact with everyone in the room. Abby and Jade choose a corner table with Zoey and Kyle the Ripper, and I try to zone in on the “my ice cream is better than yours” argument the girls are having. For some reason, my brain doesn’t cooperate, and I can’t focus on anything but the guy standing next to me.

“Thanks,” Micah tells the girl behind the counter.

He reaches over for our ice cream – with two spoons – and tells Zoey we’re going to be outside. This is the smartest thing he’s done all night. We climb onto the hood of my car, and Micah spoon feeds me the first bite since he seems to think I’m incapable of trying new food without his help.

I let Micah scrape out the last bit of melted pinkness from the cup while I scroll through the pictures on his phone. The one that Zoey took tonight looks about as stupid as all of the others. The black and pink building is a terrible backdrop. Jade looks like a diva, and Abby is hugging my leg. I type in 0306 to link to Micah’s phone anyway. The code is invalid. I peck the numbers more slowly this time, making sure they’re correct. And they’re not.

“Are you trying to lock me out of your phone?” I ask. I sound like a snooping girlfriend.

“No,” Micah assures me. “I changed it. 5683.”

“Last four digits of your social?”

He laughs. “No. That’s boring. This one reminded me of you.”

Five. Six. Eight. Three. Fifty-six, eighty-three. I run the numbers through my head on repeat, but they don’t match up with anything obvious – not my birthday, not any day of the summer, not my phone number. I type in the new pin code and am instantly linked to Micah’s phone. I scroll through his pictures, sending any picture of importance to my phone, while Micah walks back inside to throw away the empty cup and tell Zoey we’re about to head out. Abby runs over to the floor-to-ceiling glass window of the ice cream shop and waves goodbye to me as Micah walks back outside. I wave back to her as I ease into my driver’s seat.

Micah isn’t talkative tonight. Aside from “Zoey gave me these for you” when he handed me wallet-sized pictures of Abby and Jade in their yellow flower dance costumes, he hasn’t said anything to me. I really can’t stand this silence.

“You’re quiet tonight,” I say from across the bedroom.

He looks back at me and shrugs and then walks over to the bed and sits next to where I’m lying. “I just wish I was yours,” he says.

That wasn’t even on my list of theories of things that could be bugging him, and I don’t fully understand what he means.

“Huh?” is all I can manage to spit out.

“You’re not mine. You’re not my boyfriend,” he says, not hesitating with the last word. “Just for one night, I wish you were mine, and I didn’t have to constantly think that you belong to someone else.”

I don’t respond. I don’t know how to. Micah stands up and paces the room like he did the night he told me about Taylor.

“Tonight was good,” he says. “It felt real, you know, like we were really together. And you impressed me, a lot. But then I started thinking how you and Samantha probably get one cup with two spoons, and it wasn’t so great anymore.”

He stops wearing out the carpet and sits on the bed again. I push myself up into a sitting position and wrap my arm around his shoulder although I doubt he wants it there.

“Me and Samantha really don’t go anywhere, and we definitely don’t get ice cream together. Or jump off bridges or play Xbox or go to festivals with awesome bands. And I don’t do dance recitals either,” I tell him.

He steals a peek at me. “Do you hang out with graffiti thugs?”

“Only on holidays,” I say.

It’s enough to make him smile and gently elbow me in the ribs. I hesitate before saying anything else, but when he gets like this, I start selling pieces of my pride and my soul to see him happy again.

“Does your family think I’m your boyfriend?” I ask, since the topic is already somewhat out there. I feel like I already know the answer.

He shrugs. “They assume, but I tell them you’re not any time they say you are.”

I nod. Figures. It sort of stings that he corrects them, but at the same time, I understand why he does. I’m
not
his boyfriend, and while part of me thinks I want to be, the other part of me is absolutely terrified to put that label on us.

“Poppa B still thinks you are, though,” he says. “He gave me this speech the other day about how he doesn’t want to see me get hurt again. It was kind of weird coming from him.”

I use this opportunity to dig deeper and ask about his family. “But it’s a good thing, right?”

“Well, yeah, I guess,” Micah says, almost unsure of how to answer. “He’s trying to step up now that Nanna is gone and do all the things she did for me.”

“What about your mom?” I ask. I pray this isn’t the wrong question.

He laughs – not a normal laugh but more like one of those pathetic ‘I can’t believe you even asked me that’ kind of laughs.

“Ridge, you’re not stupid. You’ve seen my mom. She’s not exactly all there. Some days I don’t think she even remembers her own name,” he says.

I don’t even know what to say. I’ve never seen Micah so insensitive. I got the vibe that she was an absentee parent, but Micah rarely ever shows an uncaring side. Even when he’s hurting, his heart is still solid.

“What happened to her?” I ask.

Micah shakes his head. “Nothing,” he says. “She was fine, and she could be now if she wanted to be. First it was the ‘my only son is gay’ ploy. Then ‘my only daughter got knocked up right out of high school’ story. Then ‘my mom has cancer.’ She used every sob story she could to her advantage, had a nervous breakdown – which I’m still not sure was even real – and now she walks around like she lives in the fucking clouds.”

I exhale and think out my next sentences very carefully. I don’t want to say anything that could suggest I’m defending his mom. I get it, tragedies happen and sometimes you’re disappointed, but I honestly believe that no matter what happens, a parent should never stop being a parent. I feel him on this. Completely.

“She should’ve been there for you,” I say. “No matter how tough things were or how disappointed she was. She’s missing out.”