Page 75 of Everything's Coming Up Rosie

I kick my legs out at him and say, “Are you nuts?”

He chuckles and takes the box out the front door. I see him walk around to the side of the house, toward the back of the yard, and release the chipmunk into an open grassy area.

He’ll have some story to tell Simon and Theodore when he gets back home.

With the coast clear, and while Booker is still outside, I jump down and snag a hoodie from the hooks outside the laundry room. I pull it on over my tank top because this whole debacle has already exposed me more than I’m comfortable with.

My overreaction was pretty stellar, as my rodent overreactions always are.

But when he walks back in, the only expression on his face is concern. “Are you okay?”

I let out a little sigh of relief. “Yeah. I mean, embarrassed... but yeah, I’m fine.”

“I get it,” he says, clearly trying to make me feel like less of a loser. “Some people are afraid of snakes, some people are afraid of bats, and some people are afraid of chipmunks.”

“And some people are afraid of all three of those things.” I hitch two thumbs back toward my own body. “My snake fears are worse than Indiana Jones’s. Plus, I grew up across the street from a guy who got bit by a bat. He thought it was his superhero origin story, but I think all he got was two weeks in the hospital.”

Booker smirks. “Well, we all have our fears, I guess.”

He throws away what he just said as an aside, but my senses perk up. “Even you?”

A shrug. “Sure.”

Now I cross my arms over my chest, thankful for the cover of the oversized hoodie. “Like what? Obviously not chipmunks,” I try to say nonchalantly.

He starts to say something but then stops. He eyes me for a few seconds. “Wait. Are you... asking me a question?”

Dang it.

He smiles. “Did you really think you could slip that past me?”

“I mean, yeah.” He’s like a mystery, and I’m Sherlock Holmes.

We’ve hung out several nights this week, but most of the information I’ve shared or learned has been surface-level at best.

He did let it slip that he used to have a childhood crush on Stephanie fromLazyTown, but that’s about it.

“I think the only waythat’sgoing to happen is if, you know—” He motions both hands toward me as if to remind me this deal is not one-sided.

Double dang it.

I look away, thinking about how I keep getting faced with this same issue—chances to be a little more honest than I’m comfortable being—which is causing me to ask myself why I hold back. I never had my diary shared with the entire student body. Nobody ever pantsed me in gym class.

But when it comes to opening up, it’s like I walk right up to the line, inch my toe forward, even make the decision to spend the summer being my true, authentic self, but then I dive for the safety and comfort of solid ground.

Arthur saw right through that.

I haven’t told my mom or my friends the truth about New York or this job. That it’s not at all what I thought.

Do I need to practice telling the truth? The whole truth?

And is Booker a safe person to practice with?

A few years ago, I enrolled in a master class with a renowned acting coach. Her method of creating characters was to name the emotion you needed to portray and then relate it to something in your own life. Your character is feeling alone? Tap into a time whenyoufelt alone in your real life, roll around in those memories, and bring that emotion to the present. As you mined thatexperience for every feeling it produced, you began to get a better understanding of the character.

Unfortunately for me, thatminingmeant a lot of probing questions in front of a group of people. And that whole exercise proved to me that, while I’d spent years studying human nature, I didn’t really understand my own.

This particular professor wasn’t deterred by that, since these questions were meant to expose our emotional blockages, and eventually, she hit a nerve that brought me to tears.

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