For the first time, I realized we weren’t arguing, bantering, or—whatever it was we had done before. We were just talking, his voice low in my ear. I felt some of my nerves relax. “Are you in bed?” I asked him.
“Yeah. Where else would I be?”
“I don’t know. It’s a stupid question, I guess. I’m just curious about you. Your life.”
“It isn’t very interesting,” Andrew said. “Ask me anything you want to know.”
“Anything?”
“Sure.”
“Okay. Are you in pain?”
He paused, as if the question was something he didn’t usually think about. “Not really. Not like you think. The muscles in my back and my hips can get knotted. The injury itself doesn’t hurt anymore.”
“Anymore?”
“Not after the first two years.”
Two years? He’d had two years of pain? “Okay. Are you in your wheelchair all the time?”
“When I want to get around, so usually yes. Otherwise I’m on my couch or in bed. Or in the shower.”
“And your legs don’t work at all? There’s nothing the doctors can do?”
He surprised me again with his honesty. “I have sensation to mid-thigh, then nothing. My hips move but not my knees or my ankles. They can’t do anything about it now, but by the time I’m old they’ll probably be able to do amazing shit. Make a spine in a 3D printer or connect the nerves with nanobots or something. Some guy a hundred years from now is going to think I lived in the Dark Ages.”
“That’s an optimistic view.”
“I’m the least optimistic guy you’ve ever seen.”
I smiled at my ceiling. “I want to meet you. Can I come over?”
“You really don’t, and no. It’s the middle of the night.”
“I’ll be quiet.”
“No. Now it’s time for you to answer personal questions,” Andrew said. “Why are you in Michigan and not L.A.?”
So I told him. I told him about my hippie parents, my grandmother, my life. I told him how I’d ended up in L.A. modeling, but when I inherited this house I’d packed my bags and left.
“Sounds like you didn’t like it much,” he said when I finished.
“I don’t know,” I replied honestly. “I left home at seventeen. I just needed to be gone. I was used to being on my own, anyway. L.A. and modelling seemed like it would be glamorous and fun. Instead I lived in dives and dated jerks and went on soul-crushing auditions. I didn’ttellmyself I didn’t like it. Yet when I got the opportunity to leave, I did.”
“Michigan, though,” Andrew said. “Seriously. Michigan.”
I laughed. “It isn’t so bad. The neighbors are nice, when their kids aren’t being little shits on Halloween.”
“Yeah, about that. Can I confess something?”
“I might regret this, but yes.”
He paused. “The Hi cake was fucking delicious.”
I laughed again, louder this time. “I knew you liked my cake. I knew it!”
“Okay, fine,” he said. “You’ve said hi. So hi.”