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“Okay,” he said, giving her a stern look. “Then we should probably just pick the restaurant now, since there’s no way they won’t have whoopie pies in there. Unless, of course, we’re no longer in Maine. I wouldn’t be surprised if you just made me walk all the way to Canada…”
“We’re only one town away,” she said, rolling her eyes. “And you haven’t won yet.” They were standing just outside the entrance now, the sweet smell of chocolate drifting through the screen door. “If they don’t have whoopie pies in there…”
“Which they will,” he chimed in.
She shook her head as she paused to think; her mouth was twisted in concentration.
“If they don’t,” she said eventually, “then you have to make me one of your drawings.”
He couldn’t hide the look of surprise on his face. For a moment, it felt as if she’d seen right through him. Graham was always careful about discussing things like this in public, and though his drawings were hardly anything at all—they were just doodles, really, sketches of skylines—it still was a piece of himself that he kept close.
He’d forgotten that he told her about them: a late-night e-mail sent after some premiere party, when he’d sat alone in his room in the big, empty house and written to this girl across the country about how his pencil moved as if on its own. He’d told her that it was an escape, this type of art, the best kind of travel. He’d told her it made him happy.
How could he have forgotten that the person he was writing to all those months was the same one standing before him now?
It took him another moment to find his voice. “Deal,” he said finally, and her face broke into a smile.
“Great,” she said, pushing open the door. “Hope you brought a pencil.”
Inside, the place was at least twice the size of the shop back in Henley, lined with colorful bins of candy and giant lollipops. There were buckets of saltwater taffy, bins full of jelly beans, and a glass case with more than a dozen different kinds of fudge. Graham was eyeing a display of vintage candy when he realized Ellie was watching him. When he caught her eye, she jerked her head toward the cashier, and he wandered over obediently.
He’d forgotten his baseball cap—the thi
To Graham’s relief, this woman fell into the second category. She gaped for only a moment before lowering her eyes, as if afraid to look at him.
“I was just wondering,” he began as she worked to compose herself, to keep her face carefully neutral, “whether you might have whoopie pies here?”
“Whoopie pies?” she asked, already looking apologetic. “I don’t think we do.”
She began to glance desperately around the shop, as if they might suddenly materialize on one of the shelves, and Graham could almost feel how badly she wanted to come through for him. He was about to wave it away and buy something else when Ellie stepped up beside him.
“Can I ask you one more question?” she said. “Just for research purposes?”
The woman nodded, chewing her lip.
“Have you ever even heard of a whoopie pie?”
“I don’t—” she began, then looked at Graham, who raised his chin up and down almost imperceptibly, and the cashier’s eyes drifted back to Ellie. “Actually, I think I have. Yep.”
Graham beamed at her, just as Ellie gave him a little punch to the ribs. Laughing, he jumped away in surprise.
“Fine,” he said. “You win.”
The woman blinked a few times, and Ellie smiled at her. “Thanks,” she said. “I think we’ll just have some ice cream.”
Afterward, they took their cones outside to one of the picnic tables, where they ate fast, trying to keep them from dripping. They were the only ones out there, alone except for the cars that rushed by, and the occasional seagull.
“This does feel sort of like cheating,” Ellie said, and he looked across at her, his stomach tightening. She’d never mentioned a boyfriend, but then, they’d always avoided anything too specific, and he realized now he’d never even thought to ask. He was still working out how to phrase his question when she held up her ice cream.
“Ah,” he said, realizing what she meant. He felt his shoulders relax. “I’m sure the good folks at Sprinkles will forgive you.”
“Especially since it was in pursuit of a quest.”
“A failed quest,” he pointed out.
“Still.”
“I think you have to be more of a believer for these things to work,” he said, wiping some ice cream from his face. “How are you supposed to find what you’re looking for if you’re not convinced it’s even out there?”
“Yeah, well, if I remember correctly, Ahab caught a few glimpses of Moby-Dick, and Dorothy definitely knew her home was in Kansas,” she said with a grin. “At the moment, the whoopie pie is still nothing but a myth.”
Graham smiled too, and when their eyes met, they remained there like that for several seconds, stuck in an odd kind of staring contest, before Ellie looked away.
“Okay,” she said, tossing the last of her ice-cream cone to the seagulls that were milling about nearby. “Time to pay up.”
She fished a pencil out of her bag, then grabbed a menu from the pile stacked beneath a rock in the middle of the table and flipped it over, sliding it across to Graham. He wiped his hands on his shorts and frowned.
“I never said I was good,” he told her, taking the pen. “Just that I liked doing it.”
“That’s the best kind of good.”
“Any requests?”
“One of your cities,” she said as he bent his head over the paper. He could feel her watching him as he drew, sketching out a series of boxes. He’d been telling the truth; he wasn’t good. It was really more geometry than art, what he did, but he felt himself settling into the motion, the precision of the lines and the sureness of the corners. There was something methodical about it, something cathartic; when he drew, the rest of the world fell away.
He’d filled nearly half the page before she spoke again, and her words startled him enough that his pencil ripped a tiny hole in the paper. He rubbed at it, trying to smooth it out again, then glanced up.
“Sorry,” he said. “What?”
“That woman recognized you.”
He held the pencil very still and felt his muscles go tense. “Yes.”
“That must be…”
He waited for her to say what everyone else always said: That must be cool. Or that must be weird. That must be disconcerting. That must be a dream come true. That must be interesting or awful, crazy or bizarre.
Instead, she shook her head and started again. “That must be hard.”
He raised his eyes, but said nothing.
“It would be for me, anyway. All those people recognizing you. All those cameras. All those eyes.” She lifted her shoulders. “It must be really, really hard.”
“It is,” he said, because it was. Because it was like walking around with your skin turned inside out, tender and pink and shockingly exposed.
But at the moment, the only person looking at him was Ellie, and that was different. He didn’t want to think about all the rest of it.
“You get used to it,” he said, though it wasn’t exactly true. It was just a thing to say when the truth was too hard to explain.
She nodded, and he turned back to his drawing, finishing up the last few buildings, putting in the windows and the doors, tending to the stairs and the sidewalks, adding the occasional flowerpot or fire escape. There was a world to be built right there on the page, and Graham didn’t look up again until he’d finished.