eight
“Will… Are you awake?” Considering I was fully capable of understanding those words, then yes, I was awake. But of course, my vocal chords didn’t seem to be as awake as my mind, so I couldn’t say anything. “Will?” A soft hand brushed across my shoulder in a rubbing motion.
“Hmmmm?” I managed.
“Oh, good! You’re up!” But of course, I was still, technically, lying lifelessly on my bed, so I wasn’t, like, actually up. “We’re going to go for a walk, okay?”
“Where?” I groaned in a somnolent haze.
“‘Town,’ as you call it,” replied the other person.
“Why?”
“Because I can’t sleep and you’re the only person up that knows how to get to town from here!” The only reason I was up was because she had woken me up. “Let’s go!”
“Now?”
“Yes, now!” Suddenly, the rubbing on my shoulder stopped, and then my comforter was peeled off of me.
“What time is it?”
“I don’t know. One. Two. Definitely not three, though. C’mon—it’ll just be a short trip, and then we can come back and you can sleep!”
“How’d you get into my house?” I questioned, heaving myself in an upright position as my awareness increased.
“The back door was unlocked, but that’s not important—oh! Wow. You sleep in your boxers. Cool.” From the way she said it, though, she was anything but cool with it. I sensed a hint of discomfort, but my perception wasn’t too sharp at the moment, so that could’ve been a completely wrong form of judgment. “But if we’re going into town, I’d suggest putting on a shirt, Will, and maybe a pair of pants.”
Mutely, I flicked on my bedside lamp and then wandered over to my dresser. I pulled open the top left drawer and unearthed a pair of plaid sweatpants that I rarely ever wore and a University of Pennsylvania T-shirt. After rubbing my eyes, I pulled on the sweats and the tee, and then I began a new search for a pair of shoes. All I could find were some blue flip-flops, and I was pretty sure that if I walked out of my room like this under normal circumstances, my mom would send me right back until I could find something to wear that wouldn’t make her feel like a failure as a mother. But right now, it was one or two in the morning, so typical Brooks Family Dress Code didn’t apply.
“You might also want to throw on a sweatshirt or something,” she suggested after looking me up and down.
I glanced over to what she was wearing and noticed that her clothes weren’t much different from mine, though she had on a quarter zip. So, I went over to my closet and pulled out the first sweatshirt I could find and threw it on. It was red and didn’t have a hood and I was pretty sure that it said “HARVARD LAW” (my dad’s alma mater, as he mentioned WAY too often) across the chest. “Am I good now?”
“Isn’t that, like, tempting fate?” asked the girl.
“What?”
“Your sweatshirt. Like, you already have something from Harvard Law School, and I don’t know, I just think that it’s kind of like jinxing your chances of getting in, ya know?” I didn’t, unfortunately, know.
“Both my dad and grandpa went to Harvard Law,” I told her. “There’s a good chance that I’ll go there, too. But if I don’t get in, then it won’t be because of this sweatshirt. There’s no such thing as fate, Lilah. It’s just determination and hard work. Life choices aren’t predetermined.”
“Classic, Will,” she said, “being a nonbeliever in fate, that is. How unbelievably classic.”
“And I’m assuming that you do believe in it—fate, that is?”
“Eh,” she shrugged, walking over to the door. “I’m fifty-fifty. Fate’s totally possible, but then if I think that, then that opens a whole other door of unicorns and vampires, and I’m not that crazy.”
I thought about what she had said, but I didn’t reply. Instead, I just went back over to my nightstand, shut off the single light, and joined Lilah at the door.
She took my hand in hers and then led me out of the room, even though it was my room and my (well, my parents’) house and I should’ve done the leading. Nevertheless, I followed her through the hallway, past Charlie’s room, down the stairs, and out the door. All the while, we didn’t make a sound.
It was a lot easier sneaking out of the house than I had anticipated. I thought that the second I stepped through the front door, my parents would pop out from behind some bushes and go, “GOT’CHA!” while shining bright flashlights in my eyes. Then I would be grounded for, like, a week. But that didn’t happen. As Lilah and I exited my house without a word, Hillary and Robert didn’t unexpectedly appear. There were no bright lights, and the cops didn’t show up. In fact, nothing happened. One moment we were in my house, and the next, we weren’t. That was it.
Charlie snuck out a lot. Before we were shipped off to boarding school, back when we were still living at home, Charlie would disappear in the middle of the night sometimes. This was when he was fourteen or so, meaning that I was a young twelve. Our rooms were right next to each other, so I would hear the cringing hinges as Charlie tiptoed downstairs, risking seeing our father up for a late night glass of scotch (he wasn’t an alcoholic—he just liked his scotch). But Charlie never got caught. Even when he was visiting on a holiday weekend, and he carelessly left the house to go meet up with a girl or smoke something illegal with some friends, our parents never found out. Sometimes he would come back, stumbling over his feet with the strong smell of alcohol drenched in his clothes and on his breath. But even as he tripped up the steps, no one ever knew. Or, if they did know, they pretended not to.
Now, Charlie didn’t have to sneak out. If he wanted to spontaneously leave the house at three in the morning for whatever reason, he could do that. He didn’t have a curfew, and the only limits he now had were the laws—and even those he sometimes bent and were also bent for him. But Charlie could be limitless for two reasons: 1) he was the first child, and 2) he was eighteen. By our parents’ standards, Charlie was essentially an adult, meaning that he had the freedom to do as he pleased. I didn’t officially have this freedom yet.
This was my first time sneaking out. Charlie always told me that nothing would happen if I left the house at night, but I had always been scared. My parents had a good picture of me in their minds, and I didn’t want to mar that. If I were to sneak out and get caught, then they would never look at me the same way again. Charlie was the reckless one—not me. I was just Will, the good one who always listened. I didn’t ask to go to rock concerts just to meet up with girls I met at Starbucks, nor did I total cars because I was driving under the influence. And I didn’t sneak out. That was Charlie—not me.
But here I was now, sneaking out with a girl named Lilah Tov. It was a few hours past midnight and the only light illuminating our actions was that of the street lamps placed every hundred feet or so. Lilah vaguely knew where we were going due to our prior trip with her younger cousins, though it was clear that I was meant to be the navigator. So I navigated away, going through the familiar route, though seeing it in an entirely different light (literally). I had never gone into town at night before. Well, I had, but never this late—or early, depending on one’s view of time. The latest I had gone on this road was probably ten or eleven at night, and even then there were still faint traces of the sun present. But now, it was pitch black, except for the street lamps and the sprinkled balls of gas hanging overhead.
Lilah and I didn’t say a word to each other the entire way into town. She just held my hand comfortably, and I was really glad that I didn’t start sweating from my nerves. Because Lilah was holding my hand, and even if I hadn’t been fully awake before, that fact was more refreshing than a bucket of cold water. And it was nice just being next to Lilah in the dead of night (or morning), with no obligations or future aspirations. It felt kind of like we were the only two in a snow globe, though it wasn’t snowing and we could leave any time we wanted to. But the sentiments of isolation were the same. Nothing could touch us, and we had an entire world to ourselves.
Every so often, a car or truck would drive by, and we would both look on as the hum of the engine and the roaring of the wheels passed. Then it would become silent again, and it would just be the two of us. There were no cars or trucks or car drivers or truck drivers. It was just Lilah Tov and I.
We got into town in about fifteen minutes. When we got there, though, it didn’t feel like the town I knew. Everything was cloaked in a blanket of darkness, save for the occasional lantern suspended by a post. The shops all possessed “CLOSED” signs on them, and there wasn’t a person in sight. Kids weren’t playing on the central lawn, and moms weren’t gossiping on the benches. I didn’t even see a single squirrel or chipmunk scurry by, afraid that it would become road kill if it stayed put for too long. Everything was just empty and desolate and silent. It wasn’t so much creepy as it was weird. I had never seen town look like this, and I wasn’t sure if I liked it or not. But Lilah liked it—that much was certain.
“Lilah,” I whispered, for though there wasn’t anyone there, speaking at a normal volume just felt iniquitous.
“Actually, it’s boker, Will,” she replied in a similarly hushed tone.
I was pretty sure that she had made a joke, but I didn’t understand it, so I just said, “What?”
“You said ‘lilah,’ but it’s not night, Will—it’s boker,” she repeated the strange word again.
“I don’t know what that is,” I told her, allowing her to pull me over to the expanse of grass that marked the center of town.
“I know you don’t,” she laughed. We reached the lawn, and she took out a blanket from a drawstring bag that I hadn’t noticed she had been carrying. Then, Lilah lay out the blanket on the grass and sat down, dragging me down with her. “‘Boker’ means morning, Will. It’s not lilah—night—it’s boker.”
“Uh, I’m assuming that’s Hebrew?” I guessed, for it definitely didn’t sound like a word from my limited repertoire of romance languages.
“No, actually, it’s my brother’s name.”
“You have a brother?”
“Yeah. He’s ‘good morning’ and I’m ‘good night.’”
“Your brother’s name is Morning?”
“No, it’s Boker.”
“Really?”
“No, his name is Cole. But if I had a twin, I’d want them to be named ‘Boker,’” Lilah said. And then she dropped from her upright position and lay her head down on the blanket. Her appendages were all sprawled, except for one of her arms, which had a hand attached to it, which happened to still be connected with my hand. She didn’t let go.
“What does ‘Cole’ mean?” I asked. Though I had heard the name before, I was pretty sure that Lilah’s brother didn’t just randomly have a nice normal name. There had to be a backstory or a meaning behind it.
“‘Cole’ actually means ‘all,’ so since his name is ‘Cole Tov,’ it basically translates to ‘all good.’ Which is pretty fitting, because Cole’s a pretty easy kid,” she said with a grin. Cole Tov. All good. I liked that. It was kind of funny, and it just sounded nice.
“How old is he?”
“Thirteen,” she replied. “And because my parents like him more than me, they sent him to summer camp, which is actually fine, because I’ve never really been much of a camp person.”
“Uh, Lilah, why are we here?” I asked the thing I had intended to before that whole morning debacle.
But instead of answering, Lilah instead instructed me: “Will, lay down.”
So, I lay down so that my head was by her head, but our heads weren’t touching, despite how close they were. My back was pressed against the blanket and my eyes were focused on the sky above. And my hand, well, my hand was still clasped together with Lilah’s.
“I thought that we needed to celebrate Riley Prescott’s departure,” Lilah told me after a while. “So I figured that stargazing would be a perfect celebratory activity.”
“At two in the morning?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh. Okay.”
I stared up at the sky, and I couldn’t argue that this was the perfect way to celebrate Riley’s (and the rest of the Prescott family’s) leaving. This morning, right after brunch, the entire Prescott family left. We said our goodbyes and Riley said that we would have to find another time to “hang out” (which I was pretty sure was code for “hook up”). Grace and Charlie were probably the only two that would actually miss each other. Like, even my parents got sick of the Prescotts after a while. They could tolerate living in the same neighborhood, but when the Prescotts came over and stayed in the same house as us, it was a little much. I had survived the four days, through the awkward dinners and the explanation to Mrs. Prescott as to why Riley had tear tracks on her face (she didn’t believe me when I told her it was because we had gone canoeing). But they were gone, and now I was looking at stars with Lilah Tov, in the middle of a void town.
There were a lot of stars out tonight. They spread across the sky like freckles, and they looked nice. It was like stars had bedazzled (my mom went through a big bedazzling phase) the blank canvas of night. But the simplistic beauty of it all wasn’t what I liked the most. What I liked the most was the girl lying beside me. She was far more beautiful than any amount of stars, but I didn’t tell her any of that, because that would’ve made me sound like a total loser.
“Kohavim,” Lilah mumbled with a yawn.
“What?”
“Kohavim,” she reiterated. “It means ‘stars.’”
“Oh.”
“I’ve always liked the stars. They’re so far away, ya know?” I did know, but that wasn’t why I liked them. Their distance could be measured in numbers. Large, infinite numbers, but numbers, nonetheless. What intrigued me about the stars was still their beauty. Beauty wasn’t something you could measure or create a formula for. It purely qualitative, and I liked that about it. No one person perceived beauty the same way, for there was no one way to perceive it.
Suddenly, Lilah’s head turned towards me, taking a momentary pause from the stars. “You know, Will, I’ve always wanted to make out with someone under the stars…”
“Have you?” I said as nonchalantly as I could, not daring to move a muscle. If she wanted to make out with me under the stars, then she would. We both knew that it was up to Lilah. She was the hot one in this situation, therefor giving her all the power. I wouldn’t stop her from climbing on top of me and kissing me until my lips fell off, but it had to be her decision. I could easily lean over and start kissing her, but I wasn’t sure if she necessarily wanted that, so I didn’t. I just kept looking at the stars, as if they would help me.
“Yeah,” Lilah drawled out slowly, “I have.” And then she abruptly lifted her head entirely from the blanket and shifted her body so that it was no longer parallel to mine. She sat up for a moment, contemplating her next act, and then she took the plunge and placed her head not quite on my stomach, but also not quite on my chest. Our bodies formed an off-centered T, and the contact drove me mad. “You don’t mind, do you, Will?”
“No,” I grunted, “not at all.”
“Good,” she squeezed my hand that she was still holding, “because the ground is really hard.”
I let out a low laugh, causing her head to bounce with the movement of my torso. Some of her hair fell over my side, while the rest was tucked beneath her head. All I wanted to do was run my hands through it, and I almost did. If my self-restraint weren’t as phenomenal as it was, then I probably would’ve kissed Lilah Tov by now, or at least played with her hair. But I didn’t. Because the contact was all on her. The day she put my hand on her hair, telling me to play with it, I totally would. But until then, all I could do was idiotically fantasize about something so innocent, yet immensely intimate.
“You smell nice,” muttered the girl I couldn’t seem to get out of my head.
“Thanks,” I replied, instead of sharing the name of my shampoo or body wash, because that would’ve been freaking weird, “so do you.”
“This is kind of nice, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, it is,” I agreed.
“Tell me something, Will.”
“What do you want to know, Lilah?”
She laughed softly, as if what I had said was meant to be funny. “Why’d you come out here with me?”
“I didn’t really have a choice, did I?”
“Considering you don’t believe in fate, I think you did.”
“Well, you woke me up, and there’s really no way to say no to you, so, uh, yeah.”
“Why can’t you say no to me?”
I didn’t even think as I answered, “Because you’re really pretty.”
“You think I’m pretty?” Her mouth lifted up at the edges.
“Uh, yeah,” I gulped, too flustered to deny it.
“Good,” she grinned. “Because I think you’re pretty, too.”
It wasn’t exactly the compliment that I wanted to hear, but I would take what I could get. So I took it, and accepted the fact that I told Lilah that she was pretty and that Lilah thought I was “pretty,” whatever the heck that meant, and just tried to enjoy the beauty of the stars. Though, they still weren’t anything in comparison to the girl I was with.