I start to roll my eyes like I usually do but pause at the sight of him in the doorway—the sun is starting to set, casting warm colors on his face, honeying the brown in his eyes and gleaming in his dark hair. I’m itching to know what it might look like through my camera lens, an itch I’m not so familiar with. I almost never photograph people.
Actually, these days my parents keep me so busy I barely photograph anything at all.
Leo’s expression starts to shift, probably because I’ve been staring too long. I look away sharply and pop a wheelie on the way up to his front porch.
“Show-off,” he says.
I prop my skateboard by the door and stick my tongue out at him. It’s a relief to be on teasing terms again, but it’s immediately punctured by what he says next.
“Where’s Connie?”
He winces as soon as he asks, but I do what I do best and walk it off.
“Busy with last-minute details for tomorrow’s Keyboard Wash for the junior class fundraiser.”
“Keyboard Wash?” Leo’s a senior, along with his non-Connie-and-Abby friends, so he’s out of the loop on half of our goings-on. “Like a car wash for keyboards?”
“I’ve watched you use yours as a dinner plate, so I’ll pencil you in.”
I follow him into his house, inhaling warm butter and burnt cheese and, as always, the faint waft of cinnamon. Leo flicks on the front hall light, which exposes the precarious tower of pans, pots, and miscellaneous ingredients crammed into the small bit of counter real estate he has in his kitchen. His laptop is propped up on the table, open and exposed enough that I figure his parents and his sister, Carla, must be out.
I’m about to ask about the DNA test results displayed, but he puts a plate in front of my face first.
“Lasagna ball?”
I pull a wrapper out of my pocket and spit my gum in it. “Hell yeah.”
“Careful, they’re—hot,” Leo says with a sigh, seeing I’ve already blatantly ignored his warning by popping it into my mouth.
The roof of my mouth instantly burns, but not enough that I don’t appreciate how absurdly delicious it is—the legendary lasagna balls, one of Leo’s many workarounds to actually cook in his house. He’s become something of an oven snob and doesn’t trust his to stay at a steady temperature, so he got himself a high-end toaster oven—hence, a lot of bite-size, dollhouse recipes, so I always feel like I’m in some fancy culinary pop-up when I’m just as stuck as I always am in the depths of Seattle suburbia.
“Are you okay?” he asks, with his usual mingling of exasperation and concern.
“You could’ve come over,” I say, the ricotta legitimately steaming out of my mouth.
This is part of the reason Leo has been essentially absorbed by the Day family—our kitchen is humungous. And while we appreciate all that extra counter space for laying out several boxes of Domino’s pizza during a feeding frenzy, nobody in our family actually cooks. Leo, on the other hand, is basically the Ina Garten of our high school and needs the space to fully manifest his Food Network dreams (plus, if we’re being real, the ego boost of the Day brothers hollering about his six-cheese pizza at the top of their tiny lungs).
Not that Leo comes over much these days. We’re not so great at being alone like this anymore. And as supportive as I want to be, I can’t help the way my eyes keep skirting to the door, the way I keep waiting in the beat of silence that Connie usually fills.
“Is that Kitty?” Leo asks, looking at my camera case.
There it is again—that squeezing cycle of panic and relief. The teetering line between are we okay? and we’re okay enough.
“And all nine of her lives.”
“She’s probably down to about six by now,” says Leo. He would know—he’s the one who gave the camera her name, after she survived more than a few harrowing drops, near plunges into bodies of water, and that time I thought it’d be cool to hang upside down from a jungle gym to get the sunset through the metal bars and ended up with a mouthful of playground rubber.
“You mind?” he asks.
I tuck my chin to my chest, hiding my smile as I pull Kitty out of her carrier. Leo reaches over my head into the cabinet to grab his mom’s nice white plates, and I start arranging the lasagna balls on them. For a bit we’re so