Ween Gray was the mostbeautiful girl Charlie Parker had ever seen, and the most brilliant. She didn't seem to realize she was either, which was crazy. But Charlie had eyes. Charlie knew the truth.
When she smiled, Charlie wanted in on the joke. When she pushed her dark hair behind her ears, Charlie thought, Yes, that is how you do it. When she walked down the halls in her collared shirts and knee-length skirts, he saw with absolute clarity how much classier she was than the other girls in their tight jeans and peekaboo thongs. Charlie had had some experience with girls in tight jeans and peekaboo thongs, or with one particular girl in tight jeans and a thong. She hadn't left a great impression.
But Wren wasn't like that girl, or any girl, even though she was clearly and definitely a girl. Once, on the senior patio during lunch, she'd lifted her arm to call over her friend Tessa, and her blouse hugged her curves. He drank her in for as long as he decently could.
On Wednesday, Charlie drifted through the last day of classes as if he were in a fog. Everyone else was wired at the prospect of summer, but Charlie didn't want summer. He wanted Wren. But unless he manned up and took action—like exchanging more than half a dozen words with her—he was doomed. Wren would go her own way after Saturday's graduation ceremony, and Charlie might never see her again.
On Thursday, his first official day of no school, Charlie worked alongside his foster dad at the woodworking shop his foster dad owned. He clamped a slab of cream-colored birch onto the workbench and switched on the router, shaping the wood to fit an oddly shaped nook in a client's bathroom. His thoughts stayed on Wren as he rounded the corner of the plank. Her sweet smile. Her shiny hair. The way her brown eyes grew pensive when the end of her pen found its way to the corner of her mouth, suggesting that she was contemplating something important.
One day in AP biology, Wren had argued with Ms. Atkinson about free will in the face of cellular determinism. It was at the beginning of the semester, but already most of the seniors were starting to tune out their teachers' lectures, and Charlie wondered if that was why Ms. Atkinson had tossed out the sensationally termed "parasite gene," a gene that supposedly triggered a propensity toward exploitive behavior in those who carried it. She encouraged the class to consider what the existence of such a gene might imply—"Is that what drives the president of a company to embezzle funds, or an addict to steal from a family member?"—and while Charlie drew into himself, Wren shook her head in frustration.
"Humans are too complicated to be explained by unraveling their DNA," Wren said. "Aren't they? Otherwise wouldn't our lives have no meaning?"
"Why do you say that?" Ms. Atkinson said.
"Because, okay, say a kid is born with the 'parasite gene,' if there is such a thing. Are you saying he has no choice but to grow up and mooch off others? He'll never contribute anything to society?"
"Nice job of assuming it's a guy," Thad Lundeen had said.
Wren had blushed. "Fine. Sorry. But what if a boy or a girl is born with… whatever. A fear-of-flying gene. Does that mean he or she can't grow up to be a pilot? No matter what, end of story?"
Different kids jumped in. The conversation grew loud and off-track, and Charlie wondered if he was the only one to hear her last comment.
"And what about souls?" she said, bowing her head and addressing her desk. "Don't souls count for anything?"
Her downcast eyes, her pink cheeks—he saw them in his mind still. He held in his brain an entire store of the amazing things she'd done and said. He loved the whole package.
And then, yesterday, when she waved at him outside the school…
Something had passed between them. Something he couldn't explain, and it had made him forget that he didn't believe in souls. Anyway, who was he kidding? He didn't believe in love, either, but this he knew: He loved Wren Gray. He'd loved her forever, it seemed.
The router jumped beneath his hands. Ah, shit. He'd turned it up slightly, so that the bit was pointing toward the left rather than straight down, and the webbing between his left thumb and forefinger moved directly into it. Shit. Shit, shit, shit. He clamped his T-shirt over the wound, and his foster dad, Chris, glanced over.
"Wassup, Chahlie?" Chris said in his rough Boston accent. He took in the blood soaking through Charlie's T-shirt and put down his rag and can of varnish. He came over and gave Charlie's wound a close, careful look. He whistled. "C'mon, son. Let's get you stitched up."
Grady Hospital was the largest hospital in Atlanta, as well as the fifth-largest public hospital in the United States. It smelled like shit, piss, and body odor. Patients on gurneys lined the ER hallway, since, with more than three hundred patients walking, stumbling, or rolling in each day, there were never enough rooms to go around.
"Just fill this out," a brown-skinned woman told the elderly white woman ahead of them in the long line.
"I'm fine," Charlie told Chris for the fiftieth time. He wasn't, but finances for Chris and Pamela were hard enough without adding on a couple hundred bucks for a drop-in visit to the emergency room. "Really. Let's go."
Chris ignored him, just as he'd ignored him the first forty-nine times.
Charlie sighed and searched fruitlessly for an escape route. At the next desk over, a girl tapped into a computer, head down, as a frizzy-haired woman standing before her complained about a crackling sound when she breathed.
"Don't worry," the girl said. "We'll get you taken care of." She looked up from the computer, and Charlie's blood froze in his veins. Not really; it oozed relentlessly through the towel Pamela, his foster mom, had given him, just as it had since he'd nearly sliced his thumb off. But it felt as if his blood froze, as well as his brain, his heart, and every last muscle in his body.
"Charlie?" Wren said, her expression registering equal shock.
Wren. Behind the desk. At the hospital. Why?
The frizzy-haired woman took her paperwork with a harrumph.
"Charlie," Wren said, beckoning him forward.
Chris approached the desk, relieved. "You know my boy?" he said. "Great, because Chahlie here got into a fight with a router, and if you've ever gotten into a fight with a router, you know who won."
Wren smiled uncertainly. "Ouch," she said. "Well, let me get you into the system. Can I see your driver's license and insurance card?"
Charlie had his license. That was no problem. But he had to look away as Chris patted his pockets and put on a show that they both knew would lead nowhere.
"Insurance card," Chris said. "Sure thing." He pulled out his wallet, a battered and bruised thing that was perhaps once made of leather. "Just give me a minute here…"
Wren watched. She bit her lip. She looked at the clock behind her and said, "Oh crap, Rhondelle's going to need her desk back. Her break's just about over." She stood up and came around to Charlie. "But, uh, come with me."
Chris frowned. "'Scuse me?"
Wren grabbed a clipboard. To Chris, she said, "Do you want to have a seat in the waiting room? I'll help Charlie with the forms, and I can come get you when we need you."
Charlie knew his face was a fiery red, but he followed Wren to a tucked-away corner of the reception area. He glanced over his shoulder. Chris looked confused, but he turned and walked toward the waiting room.
Wren sat on a cracked plastic chair and patted the empty chair next to her. Charlie sat.
"Thanks," he said. "Chris, he's not so good at… you know…" He sighed. He held his left hand, bundled and useless, close to his rib cage and stared at the floor, where a dead cockroach lay beside a vending machine.
"Why don't I fill this out for you," she said, sounding crisp and professional. He suspected she'd put some of the pieces together, such as the fact that Chris wasn't going to find that insurance card. He suspected she'd brought him over here as a way to let Chris off the hook.
"So, you have a job here?" Charlie blurted.
"Not exactly," she said. "I did it for my community-service hours." All Atlanta public school seniors had to complete seventy-five hours of community service. Charlie had fulfilled his through tutoring kids at his brother's middle school. "I finished in March, technically, but…"
"Working hard for free seemed like the best way to spend the first day of summer vacation?"
She looked at him strangely. He'd been trying to be funny. Had he sounded rude instead?
"They're always understaffed here," she said. "I like helping out. And it's better than fighting with… what's that thing you fought with?"
"A router. And, yes, working here is better. Better, smarter—you name it. I think it's cool that you help out just because."
"Oh. Um, thanks. What is a router?"
"It's a tool for making furniture. For cutting wood."
"And for cutting flesh?"
"Yeah, but only if you're a dumb-ass."
She smiled slightly, and they held each other's gaze. He still couldn't believe she was here, or that he was here. That they were here together.
Wren gave herself a shake and held the pen over the paper on the clipboard. "Right. So—oh my gosh, I don't know your last name. Crap. I am such a jerk. What's wrong with me?"
"Parker," he said. And nothing's wrong with you, not a single thing.
"Charlie Parker?" She sounded delighted. "Like the musician?"
"I don't know—which is to say no, I guess. Who's Charlie Parker?"
"Well, the other Charlie Parker"—she gave him a half smile—"was a famous jazz musician. Not that you should know who he is or anything. I just like jazz. Or, my dad does, and he's in charge of the stereo."
"I think my birth mom just liked the name Charles."
Charlie saw a subtle shift in Wren's expression, leading him to guess that "birth mom" wasn't a term she ran into often. She recovered swiftly. "And her last name was Parker."
"Still is, as far as I know." Except he didn't know and didn't want to know. "So. The other Charlie Parker. What instrument did he play?"
She opened her mouth, then shut it. Then she eyed him as if to say, Yes, I really am about to do this, before leaning close and singing a funny tune in a sweet, soft voice. "'Charlie Parker played be bop. Charlie Parker played alto saxophone. The music sounded like hip hop. Never leave your cat alone.'"
He grinned. She giggled. God, she was adorable.
"It's from a book my dad read me when I was little," she said.
"'Never leave your cat alone,' huh?"
"Words to live by."
Again, they gazed at each other. To Charlie, it felt like more than a coincidence that here they were, their thighs inches apart in their crappy plastic chairs, where, in any alternate universe, there was no way their paths would have collided like this.
She cleared her throat and sat up straight. Once more poising her pen above the clipboard, she said, "Your hand. Can I see?"
He tried not to wince as he unwrapped his left hand, the towel sticking to the webbing between his thumb and forefinger. The gash was deep but not too deep. He felt self-conscious about his fingernails, which were dark around the nail beds from years of staining wood.
Wren gently lifted his hand, turning it this way and that.
"I don't think you're going to lose your thumb." She glanced at him. "That was a joke. But you are going to need stitches."
Charlie had expected that. "Will it cost a lot?"
"Not if your dad—" She broke off, and Charlie could see the wheels turning in her head: how he'd called Chris "Chris," how he'd referred to his "birth mom." "Is the man who brought you in your dad?"
"Foster dad," Charlie said evenly.
"He doesn't have insurance?"
Charlie hesitated. "He makes cabinets. He owns his own shop. He has a workers' comp plan, but the insurance people aren't fans of power tools."
"Because in an accident, the power tools always win," Wren said. "And accident reports make the premium go up. Got it."
Actually, the problem was the high co-pays, but close enough. Charlie was surprised that she understood, but then he thought of the overcrowded emergency room and the cockroach on the floor.
Wren stood. "Stay here, okay?"
He tensed, because maybe he'd guessed wrong and she didn't understand. Maybe there were rules she knew about that he didn't. "What for?"
"So that I can… so I…" She looked at him. "Nothing bad's going to happen. But don't leave, because you do need stitches, or your thumb won't heal right. And you need that thumb, I assume? To keep making furniture or cabinets or whatever?"
He gave a terse nod.
She took the top sheet of paper out of the clipboard and folded it in half, then in half again. She put the clipboard on her seat. "Do you promise you'll stay?"
"I promise."
"Do you mean it?" she pressed.
He replied in his lowest, most serious voice: "I don't make promises I don't mean."
Twin spots of color rose on her cheeks, and, as was so often the case, Charlie had no idea what wrong or unusual thing he'd said this time.
She pulled herself together. "Um, good. Just stay here—I'll be right back."
She walked quickly toward what appeared to be a staff break room. When she returned, she carried a battered first aid kit. The first thing she did was very carefully clean his wound, and he winced at the sting of the antiseptic.
"Oh, I'm sorry!" she cried.
"No, please," Charlie said, chagrined that he'd made her doubt herself.
"Are you sure?"
"I'm sure."
She bit her lip.
"I'm sure," he repeated. "And thank you. Really."
Wren proceeded to stitch up Charlie's thumb herself. She cradled his hand in her lap and smoothed on a numbing cream first, and her touch was so gentle that Charlie knew he would gladly suffer a dozen injuries—a thousand—in exchange for this: the feel of her fingers on his, the tug of the thread, the slight pinch of the needle, the intoxicating scent of her as she leaned in close.
"Katya taught me," she told him. She pressed her knees together as she concentrated. When she shifted, the hem of her skirt rode up, revealing a finger's width of her skin. He wanted very much to look down her shirt, too, but he told himself not to. He almost succeeded.
"I think I know Katya," he said. "Russian? Wants to be a pediatrician?"
She glanced at him, baffled. "Yeah, that's her. But how do you know her?"
"I've met a lot of a nurses, that's all."
Now her expression was doubly baffled, and he felt like a fool. I've met a lot of nurses, as if he were bragging, as if he were some sort of player.
Speak, he told himself. Explain. Now.
"I've been here a lot, that's all. The pediatrics ward. That's how I know Katya."
"Why were you in pediatrics a lot?"
God, why had he brought this up? The last thing Charlie wanted was for Wren to be concerned about him. To see him as a charity case, or a charity case by proxy.
"Charlie?" Wren said.
"My little brother's in a wheelchair," Charlie said quickly. "He's fine, but stuff comes up. Like, we were here at the beginning of the year, because—"
He broke off abruptly. He picked back up with, "So, yeah. That's life. Who said life was easy, right?"
He forced a laugh. It was the stupidest laugh of all time. "Just shoot me," he said. "Do you have a tranquilizer-dart gun? A pill to make patients shut up?"
"You don't need to shut up," Wren said. She paused. "Why were you here at the beginning of the year? Does your brother have a chronic illness or something? You don't have to tell me if you don't want to, obviously."
But he did have to tell her. She sounded so worried. She was doing so much for him; he owed her an answer, even if he couldn't give the full answer.
"No chronic illness," he said. "Dev's paralyzed from the waist down, but not from a disease. He's eleven—did I tell you that? He's a sixth grader. He goes to Ridgemont. He's not, like, in some special school or anything. And in January, he… got burned. That's why we were here."
"I'm so sorry," Wren said. "How?"
Charlie went inside himself. How? Because two eighth graders cornered Dev in the bathroom of Dev's not-special school. They held a cigarette lighter to his leg. Dev couldn't feel it, but he could smell the burning. He could hear the laughter of the two eighth graders. Dev hadn't shared those details with Charlie, but Charlie had imagined the scene too many times.
"Charlie?" Wren said. She was waiting for him to answer.
"At school," he said. Then he closed himself off. He wanted to talk with Wren, but he didn't want her pity. He didn't want her to pity Dev, either.
She exhaled, then pushed the needle through the skin near the base of his thumb, knotted the thread, and clipped it off. "Now I have to do a row of stitches the opposite way." She peeked at him from beneath long lashes. "You doing okay?"
"I'm fine," he replied. "And Dev, he's doing better these days, too. He's a great kid."
"Is he your biological brother?"
"Nah. He was in the system, like me, until Chris and Pamela said, sure, they had a spot for him. They're going to officially adopt him." They'd wanted to adopt Charlie, too, but Charlie, for reasons of his own that had little to do with Chris and Pamela, had said no.
"Pamela's your foster mom?" Wren said.
"Yep, she's Chris's wife."
"But you call them your foster parents. How come, when you call Dev your brother?"
"As opposed to foster brother?" Charlie said. He thought about it. It wasn't that he didn't love Chris and Pamela. He did. And they'd done so much for him. It was a debt impossible to repay.
But Dev was different. Though Dev was no more connected by blood to Charlie than Chris and Pamela were, he brought Charlie out of himself in a way that few people in the world ever had, possibly in a way that no one ever had.
"I don't know," he finally said. Dev was his brother. Period.
Wren nodded, seeming to absorb and accept this. "Cool. I think you guys are lucky to have each other." She tied off another stitch. "And in the name of fairness, I should tell you I'm an only. I'd hate to be accused of withholding dangerous intel."
An only? Oh. An only child. As for "dangerous intel," Charlie didn't get the joke. He knew enough to know it was a joke, or was meant to be, but he'd learned over time that normal kids spoke a language particular to normal life, the subtleties of which didn't make it into state-run facilities or foster families.
"So 'only' kids are dangerous?" he asked, keeping it light.
"Very," she said gravely. She looked at him, or rather into him, and he felt sure she was telegraphing something that mattered. Something she wanted to give a shape to. Something sad?
She ducked her head and gave a funny smile, and Charlie cursed himself for failing to decode her secret message.
"Oh my God, are you all right?" Wren said.
"What?"
"Your hand," she said, and he realized he must have flinched. Or maybe his fingers had tensed into a fist, or the start of one.
She lay her hand over his, above the area of his wound, and gave him a brief squeeze. Tender, and then gone. Warmth, then cold.
"All done," she said. "Keep it clean. The thread'll dissolve on its own, so you won't need to come back to have the stitches removed. Good news, right?"
Was it? He would have happily come back.
She was acting very polite now. She was packing up the needle, scissors, and gauze, but he wasn't ready to go.
"Wren. You didn't hurt me. You're going to be a really good doctor."
She gave him a startled glance.
"That's what you want to do, isn't it? Be a doctor? You told us in biology."
"I did?"
"Yeah. You applied early decision to Emory because of their pre-med program, and you got accepted, which is amazing. Not that you got accepted. Of course you got accepted. Any college would accept you. They'd be idiots not to."
Wren's eyes were huge, making Charlie wonder if he was the idiot in this situation.
"You should be really proud," he said. "Um, I'm sure you are really proud." Her deer-in-the-headlights expression didn't change, making him feel acutely aware of the muscles of his own face, which felt rubbery and no longer within his control. "Aren't you?"
She snapped out of her trance and busied herself with an antiseptic wipe. For a moment, Charlie felt relieved. She wasn't staring at him anymore. He could, and did, work out the kinks in his jaw.
But he doubted that the small square antiseptic package demanded all of Wren's attention, and before long, her reluctance to look at him forced him to open his big dumb mouth again. He didn't want to. He just couldn't help it. Her sad-shaped something had returned, and Charlie couldn't stand it.
"Did you not get into Emory?"
She made a sound that was perhaps supposed to be a laugh but didn't fool Charlie.
"Then, what?" Charlie said.
Wren stopped fooling with the antiseptic wipe. Keeping her head bowed, she said, "If I tell you, will you keep it to yourself?"
"Yeah. Of course."
"Do you promise?"
Was she serious? Charlie would promise her anything. The sun, the moon, the stars. "I promise."
Her lips parted. She seemed about to speak but then pulled back. "Oh my God, I'm being ridiculous. I mean, God, Charlie. For some reason it feels like I know you, but I don't, and—"
She covered her eyes and pushed on them.
He thought, You feel like you know me? You feel that? About me?
She opened her eyes and gave him a wobbly smile. "Okay, done now," she said. She even managed a laugh. "That was really weird. I am so sorry."
"Don't be," Charlie said, his heart pounding. He glanced at Chris, who appeared to have nodded off in the hard waiting-room chair, then back at Wren. "I know we don't know each other that well. That's what it is. But we do know each other."
He struggled to find the right words, and, failing that, he struggled to force out any words.
Charlie understood silence.
He embraced silence.
Silence in the face of sadness made sense to him. It was a survival strategy. But Wren's silence, which clearly wasn't making her happy, was something he could do something about.
"Whatever's going on, I wish you'd tell me," he said.
Wren looked at him. She held his gaze and saw him, or that's how it felt, and she whispered, "It's dumb."
"I doubt it."
"You'll think I'm being a baby."
"I won't."
She bowed her head, and a wisp of hair fell from her ponytail. He wanted to brush it back. He wanted desperately to graze her cheek with the back of his hand and swear to her that everything would be fine.
"Please don't tell my parents," she said.
"Okay."
"The only person I've told is Tessa. She's my best friend. She's not entirely thrilled, because she's worried I'll never come back, but she's happy I'm doing what's right for me for once. Well, I hope it's right. I think it is."
Charlie pulled his eyebrows together. He didn't know Wren's parents, and he knew Tessa Haviland only by sight. And what did Wren mean by "never come back"?
Wren took a deep breath, then let it out in a whoosh. "I don't want to go straight to college. I know I'm supposed to, but I don't want to—not yet. I want to experience things and not just think and think and think about things. Does that make sense?"
Charlie wasn't sure what to say.
"Um, my dad," Wren said. "I love him. I do. But, like, when I showed him my college essay, he pulled my laptop out of my hands and fixed it for me." She looked nervous, as if she was worried she was being disloyal. "He rewrote the whole thing. Which was nice, I guess? But also…"
"Not cool," Charlie said.
"Not cool," she agreed. "It's like he wants to do his own life over, through me." She fell silent for a moment. Then she flashed him a smile that Charlie didn't quite believe. "So I applied to a program called Project Unity. And I got in."
"Wren, that's awesome," Charlie said.
"You know what Project Unity is?"
"Um. No. But I—whatever it is, I'm sure it's awesome." Dammit, he'd screwed up. She surely thought he was just saying whatever she wanted to hear, except he meant every word of it.
"What is it?" he said.
"It's like a starter version of the Peace Corps," she said. "It's a government program for volunteer work, and it's for a year, and all my expenses will be paid. I'll even get a stipend. The volunteers get sent to Africa or Guatemala or Mexico, anywhere people need help. I put Guatemala as my first choice. I applied to teach English to little kids."
"Wow," Charlie said. "Like, with textbooks, or…?"
"The people who run the program have all sorts of resources, but I thought maybe I could bring some picture books, too? Like ones I liked when I was little, and I could read those to the kids?"
She searched his face. "I might still be a doctor one day. But I want to do something now, not in eight years. I kind of feel like I have to, or I never will."
He wondered how much her desire to throw herself into Project Unity was tangled up with her need to get away from her parents.
"Did you ever want to go to Emory?" he asked.
She hesitated. "If I say no, will you be mad?"
Mad? Why would he be mad?
"Never mind," she said. "Ha. I'm the one who needs to be shot with a tranquilizer gun."
"No, you don't," Charlie said.
"I applied to Emory because that's where my mom works, and it's got a good reputation, and she and my dad were so proud when I got in," Wren said. "But there's just so much pressure. I'm sick of all the pressure. I'm sick of feeling like I'll ruin all their happiness if I don't do what they want me to do."
"Got it."
"Which I guess means… no, I didn't actually want to go. I feel bad saying that."
"Don't. It's your life, not theirs."
"Right," she said. She nodded. "It is, isn't it?"
Her determination, combined with her sweetness, disarmed him.
"And seriously, doesn't Project Unity sound awesome?" she said. "Tessa doesn't understand why I'd want to live in a developing country, but I'm excited. Going someplace totally new, where you can start fresh and do good things and be whoever you want—doesn't that sound amazing?"
Wren sounded amazing, talking about it. Wren was amazing.
Charlie's thoughts went to Starrla Pettit, who was the only other girl in his life, the only girl who served as a point of reference. Except Charlie didn't want Starrla to be his point of reference, and she wasn't in his life, not in that way. Except, she was Charlie's—what? What was Starrla to him, exactly?
Ah, shit. Charlie had no idea what he and Starrla were to each other.
But Starrla worked part-time at Rite Aid, and, starting next week, she was going to be bumped up to full-time, with benefits and a regular schedule. Charlie was glad for her. He hoped it worked out. He hoped she didn't screw it up.
Working at Rite Aid—hell, there was nothing wrong with that. If anything, he felt bad that Starrla didn't have the luxury of considering anything else, even if it was unlikely she ever would.
Wren wanted to do more, though. Wren wanted to save the world.
"Forget it," she said before he got around to responding. "You probably think putting off college is impractical, and that going to Guatemala is…" She sighed. "You think I'm crazy, huh?"
"No," Charlie said. "I think—" His voice sounded ragged. He shook his head, knowing he was trying too hard but unable to stop himself. "I think you're wonderful."
