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She didn’t go to his school. Paisley’s mother and her long-time boyfriend—a guy named Rick who owned the diner and always smelled faintly of pot—had chosen to homeschool her, which tended to happen around which shifts were quietest. But Paisley didn’t seem to mind. Owen had met her there during his first week in town, when he’d taken his dad for a milk shake to cheer him up after another luckless day of job searches. There’d been a notice for a dishwasher on the bulletin board near the door, and while Dad was paying the bill, Owen stood with his hands in his pockets, reading the description.
“It’s not particularly glamorous,” Paisley had said over his shoulder, and when he whipped around, he was momentarily lost for words. She flashed him a dazzling smile. “But it comes with a lot of free burgers. If you’re into that sort of thing.”
They only needed someone a few days a week, and Owen had applied without telling Dad. At that point, they were both still holding out hope that he’d find a job on a construction site, but in the meantime, Owen knew he would take anything, and the thought of his father wearing those rubber gloves and scouring pans at a sink for minimum wage made something go sour in the back of his throat.
When he finally got around to telling him, after a full week of work, Dad had only sighed, looking resigned. “That’s great,” he said. “But the money is yours, okay?”
Owen had agreed, but he always snuck most of it into his father’s wallet anyway. If he noticed, Dad didn’t say anything, and that was just fine with Owen. It wasn’t really about the money, anyway. He liked the distraction of the job, having something to do after school. He liked getting a paycheck, and he liked the free food. He even liked humming along to the radio in the steamy kitchen as he scrubbed at the flakes of dry ketchup that covered the plates like ink blots.
But mostly, he liked seeing Paisley.
She would flit in and out of the kitchen, teasing him for trying to do his homework while he worked, his textbook propped up near the sink, dotted with flecks of water so that after a while the pages became stiff and wrinkled.
“Always science,” she noted one day, her legs dangling from the counter where she sat eating an apple and watching him.
Owen had shrugged. “It’s interesting.”
“Which part?”
He used his forearm to wipe some soap from his cheek. “I like astronomy best.”
“Like horoscopes and stuff?” she asked, raising her eyebrows.
“No, that’s astrology.”
“So what’s your sign?”
“I have no idea,” he said. “That’s not—”
She gri
“Astrology is totally different,” he said, glancing up to see if she was embarrassed by the mistake, but that was something he hadn’t known about her yet: There was nothing in the world that embarrassed Paisley.
“I have a book about this stuff,” she said. “You should come over tonight and we’ll look you up.”
“I have one, too,” he teased, pointing a soapy glove at his textbook. “And mine has actual facts.”
“Facts are so much less interesting,” she said as she slid off the counter. He was about to ask “than what?” when she turned around and winked at him. “I’ll see you tonight.”
Now she stood on the top step with the light from the diner windows forming a kind of halo behind her, and he waited while she zipped her coat. When she was finished, she hopped down the steps and into the powdery snow.
“Happy Thanksgiving,” he said, and she rolled her eyes.
“Happy Day the Pilgrims Screwed Over the Indians.”
“I’m pretty sure it was the day they all came together and had a nice meal.”
“Oh right,” she said, leaning in to give him a quick kiss. “They screwed them over later.”
“They’re all set in there?” he asked, as she pulled on her mittens. “Did you get some turkey?”
“Tofurkey,” she corrected, but when she realized he was kidding, she took his hand. “Let’s get out of here.”
They walked through the hushed streets in the direction of the lake. The beaches were mostly closed this time of year, but they often snuck out behind the private homes to sit on the piers and look out over the frozen water. Tonight, they found a darkened house and made their way around the back, watching the snow settle and disappear on the icy surface. The lake was so deep that it never fully froze, only turned cold and still, while the snow-capped mountains stood guard all around it.
“So how’d it go?” Paisley asked as they sat huddled together.
“It was okay, actually. He’s in pretty good spirits, considering.”
“Still no luck on the job front?”
Owen shook his head. “And now we’re in the off-season.”
“For construction maybe. But there’s plenty of other work during ski season around here.”
“Apparently not,” Owen said, reaching up to brush the snow out of his hair. His fingers were going numb and his face was stiff with cold, but there was something about being out in the arctic mountain air that made his heart swell and his lungs expand. He thought of the way New York City had been the opposite, how it had made him feel claustrophobic with its leaning buildings and swampy temperatures. How it had felt like the whole world was shrinking all around him.
Except on the roof.
Except when he was with Lucy.
For a moment, he allowed himself to think of her. It had been five weeks since her last e-mail. It hadn’t been a good-bye, exactly—nothing as dramatic as that. There was no signing off, no grand farewell, no bitter questions about why he’d stopped writing. One day there was an e-mail from her, completely and utterly normal, and then, just like that, they stopped, their correspondence ending the same way this whole thing had started: all at once.
But it wasn’t her fault. One day, not long after he’d mailed his second postcard from Tahoe, she’d sent him an e-mail about how much she was loving Edinburgh, how she’d visited the castle and seen the city from the top of a mountain called Arthur’s Seat. After reading it, he walked down to one of the many gift shops in town and flipped through the various postcard options. He’d already sent her two: the first, a photo of the lake at sunset with news that they would be staying here; the second, the same lake in shades of green and blue, with a joke about the Loch Ness Monster. But now, as he looked through the rest, he realized they were all the same: the lake under a pink sky, under an orange sky, under a sky so clear that the water was like glass. After a while, the repetition of the display started to hurt his eyes as he flipped through the many options, and he realized there was nothing new here to show Lucy, and that maybe the sending of postcards had come to an end.
But back at the apartment, he couldn’t bring himself to respond to her e-mail. A rhythm had been established where a postcard from him sparked an e-mail from her and vice versa. His were always lighthearted notes from the places they’d visited, scrawled in the limited space on the back of the cards, whereas hers tended to be longer and slightly rambling, unrestricted by the confines of paper. But sitting there with the cursor blinking at him, he wasn’t sure what to say. There was something too immediate about an e-mail, the idea that she might get it in mere moments, that just one click of the mouse would make it appear on her screen in an instant, like magic. He realized how much he preferred the safety of a letter, the physicality of it, the distance it had to cross on its way from here to there, which felt honest and somehow more real.
That week, he sat down at his computer every single morning, fully intending to e-mail her. But the days passed without him producing so much as a draft. He kept half-expecting her to write again, something new that might inspire a response from him, but nothing ever came, and he started to worry that maybe she’d moved on. After all, here in Tahoe, he had a new school and a new life, and he knew that five thousand miles away, she must be busy with her own version of these things, too.