Page 11 of Seven Percent of Ro Devereux
Jazz raises her eyebrows. “You ready?”
When I nod, she turns to Maren. “You good to be on camera?”
“Oh yeah,” Maren says, scooting closer to me. “I’m ready for my fifteen minutes of fame.”
Jazz flashes her a smile, then gathers her skirt to climb onto thecoffee table. She cups her hands around her mouth. “MASHers! Listen up! Ro’s about to match.”
The room erupts into cheers, and Maren reaches for my hand. When she squeezes, I squeeze back. This ishappening. Silence falls, and Evelyn parts the crowd to come stand with us.
“All good?” she asks, and I nod.
Jazz has her phone out, already recording. Maren peers down at my screen over my shoulder. I open the app and it’s right there, a push notification with the wordsReady to meet your MASH match?
I click through, taking a deep breath.Reveal match. I look at Evelyn, who nods. Then at Maren, who squeals and says, “Come on, come on!”
The countdown clock hits ten seconds, and everyone starts chanting. It’s like New Year’s Eve on steroids, a hundred people in a high-rise screaming“Ten, nine, eight!”When they get to zero I grin like a maniac and hit the button.
At first, I think it’s a glitch.
My face freezes in its smile; I couldn’t move my lips if I wanted to. My entire body suddenly feels like plastic—like I’m fake, like this is a dream or a joke someone’s playing on me. It isn’t until Maren whispers “Oh my god” that I remember everyone’s watching me.
I look at Evelyn, the expectant set of her mouth, then back down at my phone.
Alistair Miller.
“She’s matched!” Jazz cries, deflecting. She turns her phone camera around and cheers, sending up applause and shoutingfrom everyone on the floor. Jazz is still talking, telling people on the livestream to reveal their own matches, to share them on social with #MASHmatch. But I can barely hear her, and when Evelyn cuts the distance between us a high whine splits my eardrums.
“What is it?” Evelyn asks. “What’s wrong?”
I swallow, forcing the words. “This guy and I—”
There’s no good way to explain what Miller is to me. I look at Maren, her wide eyes, her hand lifted to her mouth.No, I think. It repeats across my brain like a marquee.No, no, no.
“We have a history,” I manage, finally.
“A history,” Evelyn repeats. Her eyes move from my phone screen, to Maren’s face, to mine. Her gaze is puncturing in its intensity. “A history of what?”
07
When we were kids, Miller was sweet as a toothache. Almost painful in his purity, so sincere he was like an exposed nerve. He’d cry at a dead bird in the forest, or a tree gored black by lightning-strike. He cried when my mom left, though we were both too little to understand the permanency of her going. Or maybe he did understand, more than I did, and that’s why he was so upset.
I grew up temperature-testing the world by his reactions to it. If something set him off, it deserved my attention. If I couldn’t fix it, I moved on. We could do nothing about the dead bird, the black tree. But they were sad, he was right—and Miller always concerned himself with what hurt him, even if he could not solve it. That’s how we were different.
My mother was his mother’s best friend. They moved from Slate Lake together, got a little apartment behind the post office and found jobs—still half an hour from Denver but practically the big city compared to where they grew up. Her name was Willow, after an underappreciated tree in a state known for its aspensand pines. She married Alistair Miller, the new high school math teacher, and when their son was born they named him Alistair, too—like every other boy down the family line. She called him “the littlest Miller.” So I called him Miller, too.
I was born a month later. You can imagine it: two girls from the mountains sitting at the lake in their sun hats, their fat babies grabbing at sand in front of them. Miller and I did every milestone together, almost in sync, always him first.Miller took his first steps, Willow would tell my mom. And a couple of days later, I’d take mine. We shared all of it. When my mother left, we shared Willow, too.
She’s in the photos from my first and second birthdays, standing next to my mom. And from then on it’s just her, huddled behind my shoulder with Miller and Vera and my dad, sometimes Miller’s dad, too. Smiling into the pop of the flash—her kind, familiar face.
When I was thirteen it was Willow who taught me how to use a tampon, what a tampon even was. I sat in Miller’s house with hot tears in my eyes and his mother on the other side of the bathroom door, her voice patient and close.You okay in there, honey?I wasn’t okay, but I wasn’t Miller with the dead bird, either. My own mother was gone but I could swallow that pain, keep it inside me where no one could look at it.
I didn’t talk to Willow, or anyone, about my mom. It was too embarrassing to admit that Miller had a mother who loved him and I didn’t. I couldn’t imagine a single thing more shameful than revealing how much it hurt me. And underneath it all was what Iknew so well: that Miller was the better of us.
The adults in our lives gravitated to him; his quiet thoughtfulness drew them in all the same ways it drew me. Miller was entirely without pretense, absolutely knowable because he showed all of himself to everyone. He was unlike anyone else and impossible not to love, my very favorite person on the entire face of the earth. Next to him, what was I? It made sense, I thought, that if only one of us could have that kind of love, he deserved it and I did not.
And so Willow was ours, but she was always Miller’s first. She loved books and read us all kinds of stories, but my most vivid memories are of bone-cold Colorado winters huddled in Miller’s living room as Willow told us about mythology.
They had a round, spinning lounge chair across from the fireplace, soft from years of use and big enough for both our growing-up bodies. Miller and I would burrow there under quilted blankets and Willow would sit on the couch, reading to us from Edith Hamilton’sMythology. We loved those stories—Achilles with his spear, Circe with her spells. Miller would nudge me under the blanket at the good parts, gasp at every twist and look over to check that I was dazzled, too. I was.
