Page 121 of You, with a View

“That’s Eli—motherfucker,” Adam shouts.

My gaze slips from the stranger’s—Eli Joseph Mora, I’ll find out soon—to Adam, whose tongue is sticking out while he furiously pounds on a game controller. A second one lies next to him, a decimated bag of Doritos next to that.

When I direct my attention back to Eli, our eyes click. I hear it in my head, feel it in my chest, both in the memory and for real. Whenever I let myself think about the beginning, I want to get out of this moment as much as I want to wallow in it.

Fifteen-year-old me smiles up at fifteen-year-old him. “Hey, Eli. I hopeyou’renot the motherfucker.”

“Not that I’m aware of,” he says with a laugh. His eyes spark with amusement and other things, and the spark transfers to me, burrowing somewhere deep. It’ll wait there for years while we go from strangers to friends to best friends. It won’t catch fire until our junior year of college, when he joins me at Cal Poly after his two-year stint at community college.

“Who are you, then? Other than a stranger, until”—I look down at my watch, a Fossil one I bought with the cash my dad gave me for Christmas because he didn’t want to get the wrong one—“three minutes ago.”

“The new guy, I guess?” I notice his nose is sunburned along the bridge when he scrunches it. “I just moved from Denver, started at Glenlake two days ago.”

He doesn’t tell me now, but he will later—his parents moved him and his little sisters to Glenlake, a city in Marin County justnorth of San Francisco, to live with his aunt after his dad lost his job and they lost their house. He’s sleeping on a pullout in his aunt’s rec room. I always notice the way his shoulders pull up toward his ears, maybe wondering if I’m going to ask questions. He doesn’t trust me with all of his heavy stuff yet, but eventually he’ll trust me with a lot of it. I’m the one who’ll hide my heaviness away.

“And Adam’s already got you in his clutches?” I raise my voice. “You work fast, Kim.”

Adam grins, but doesn’t spare us a glance.

Eli looks over his shoulder at his new friend, then back at me, rubbing the nape of his neck. His expression is bashful, a little bewildered. “Yeah, I think he kind of adopted me.”

“He does that,” I say, remembering that first day of sixth grade when Adam and I met. How scared and lonely I was at a huge new school, where none of the pseudo friends I had in elementary school were all that interested in continuing our journey together. The closest friend I had, Heather Russo, told me when I got to her locker our first day to walk to the class I was so excited we shared, “God, we just started here, Georgia, we don’t have to be together all the time. Stop being so needy.”

Adam saved me from new-kid loneliness; it makes sense that he’d save Eli from it, though in the moment I don’t know that he’s lonely, too, or that Adam’s house will become his home as much as it is mine.

“All right, Eli,” I say, looking him up and down. He’s got on Nikes that are fraying at the seams, gym shorts, and a T-shirt with a hole near the neck. I can see a sliver of collarbone pressing sharply against his golden skin. “I guess I’m kind of adopting you, too.”

He lets out a breath, his eyes moving over my face. “Probably agood idea, since I’ve already got a nickname picked out for you and everything.”

“I’ll let you get away with that one, Ninety-Nine,” I say, and my chest warms at the way his grin widens. It’s an addicting feeling, knowing I’m in the middle of meeting a person I’ll get to hang on to.

Adam looks at me over Eli’s shoulder, his mouth pulling up, and I know he feels it, too: the three of us are going to be friends. Something special.

Years later Eli will tell me that he fell a little bit in love with me right then, and in this movie-like memory I always see it—the dilation of his pupils when we can’t quite break eye contact, the flush along the delicate shell of his ear when I sit next to him on the couch minutes later, the way his eyes linger on me when Adam and I bicker over control of the TV, the steady bounce of his knee. The beautiful, shy smile he gives me over the pizza we have for dinner later.

He’ll hold on to it for years, but eventually that spark will become a wildfire.

And then we’ll burn it all down.

One

Thirteen years later

This wedding is cursed

Oh, god, not again,” I mutter.

To the untrained eye, this text message probably looks like a joke. A prank. The beginning of one of those chain emails our elders get duped into forwarding to twenty of their nearest and dearest, lest they inherit multigenerational bad luck.

In actuality, it’s been Adam’s mantra for the past nine months.

Adam is the brother I never had and I’m truly honored to be part of his wedding celebration. That said, had sixth-grade Georgia anticipated I’d be fielding no fewer than forty-seven texts per day from my more-unhinged-by-the-day best friend, I would’ve thought twice about complimenting hisHannah Montanashirt our first day of middle school.

The silver lining: I’ve taken a screenshot of each text and filedthem away so I can present them to him via a PowerPoint-presented roast once his wedding is over.

My Spidey senses tingle with this text, though. It hasn’t been delivered in aggressive caps lock, nor is it accompanied by a chaotic menagerie of GIFs (my kingdom for a Michael Scott alternative). Whatever has happened now might actually be an emergency.

Then again, the wedding is ten days away; at this point, anything that isn’t objectively awesome is a disaster.

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