Finally, another slow song plays, and this time Aimee doesn’t resist. She practically melts into my chest as we sway to the music. It’s so different having her in my arms compared to Cassidy. Cassidy brings something beautiful to me from the outside. Aimee brings something beautiful up from the depths of my insides.
“I can’t dance like Cassidy,” she says.
“Yeah, but you dance like Aimee. And that’s perfect.”
Chapter 51
Finally, that part of the prom arrives that I don’t have any use for—crowning the king and queen. We’re all kings and queens to my way of thinking. Why would you want to wreck the togetherness of the situation by holding two people above the rest?
To avoid the whole creepy deal, I take Aimee for a walk. The building is a cool place to check out, especially for a horse lover like she is. Pictures of racehorses and jockeys’ colors decorate the walls, and a really awesome horse statue stands in the foyer. There are also clubs and restaurants and a casino, all closed for now, but you can feel the ghosts of the gamblers haunting the corridors. I’ve been to the races a couple of times and explain to Aimee how the betting works.
“I’d probably lose all my money,” she says.
“That’s all right. It’s just part of the cost of coming out here. I mean, I don’t know a thing about horses myself, but that doesn’t matter either. I just pick the ones with the most pathetic-sounding names—like Fat Cat or Snickerdoodle-dandy—and bet on them. I figure they could use the support, you know?”
“What if there was a horse named Cassidy?”
“What do you mean? Cassidy’s not a pathetic name.”
“But would you bet on it?”
“Why would you ask a question like that?”
“It’s just, you know, I saw the way you were slow dancing with her.”
“Hey, she asked me to dance, not the other way around. And you said it was all right.”
“But you should’ve known it wouldn’t really be all right.”
Uh-oh. Here it is—we’ve finally reached the you-should-have-read-my-mind stage.
“How am I supposed to know that?” I ask. “You have to tell me these things. ESP isn’t one of my many talents, you know.”
We walk outside where the moon and the big lights shine on the precisely landscaped grounds. Neither one of us says anything for a while. Finally, I break the silence. “Look, I’m here with you. Cassidy’s with Marcus. She and I are just good friends. What do I have to do to get you to have a little faith in the Sutterman?”
We sit on a stone bench, and she gazes at the perfect garden in front of us and goes, “I was thinking of something you could do.”
“What? I’ll do anything.”
“You know how you keep telling me I need to stand up to my mom and quit the paper route and move to St. Louis with my sister? Well, I think I’m really going to do it. My grades have dropped a little lately, but that’s okay. It’s too late to apply for fall, so I can just go to the community college there for a year. I’ve already talked to Ambith and she said she can get me a job at the bookstore where she’s the assistant manager.”
“A job at a bookstore? That’s perfect for you.”
“It really is. Next to working at NASA, that’s pretty much like my dream job.”
“And you’ll get to take control of your own money.”
“I know!”
It’s weird. This is exactly what I set out to get her to do from the very beginning, but now that she’s actually talking about leaving, I don’t want her to go. I can’t tell her that, though. She needs to go.
“That’s great,” I say, working up a smile. “I can’t think of anything better. This situation you’re in right now is just, like, smothering. It’s unacceptable. St. Louis would be muy fantastico. If you want me to help you move, don’t worry. I’m your man.”
“That’s not exactly what I was thinking about.” She takes a deep breath. “I was hoping you’d say you’ll move there with me.”
“Move there?”
“You could go to the community college, too, and we’d both have jobs and we could get an apartment together.”
This isn’t what I expected, to say the least. Yes, I’ve become a lot more attached to Aimee than I ever thought I would, but you know me. I’m committed to absolutely avoiding the topic of future living arrangements. Sure, I’ve always thought eventually I might move in with a girl someday, maybe even get married, but that was always more like a kid thinking he’d be the captain of a big ship one day. I mean, it never had any concrete reality for me. Now, here’s Aimee hitting me right in the face with it like a frozen sea bass.
So I’m like, “Wow. Move in together, huh?”
“My sister said I could move in with her, but I’m sure if you’d come with me, we could get a place in the same apartment complex that she lives in. It’s not that expensive at all.”
“You’ve really done some planning.”
“I don’t even want to spend the summer here. I want to go as soon as school’s out.”
“That’s coming up pretty quick.”
She looks down at her fingers. “Don’t you want to go? I mean, you’re always telling me I should break away from my mom and go up there, but I don’t want to go without you.”
“Yeah, but moving in together? That’s big. Seeing as how my parents were these huge monumental failures at that, I don’t know if it’s such a good idea.”