Comeback (29 page)

She had a point. I would never have gone to my father about a boy when I was their age, and it had nothing to do with his drinking. I gritted my teeth, determined to handle whatever was coming my way, and nodded at Elin. “All right. So what do you want to talk to me about?”

“It’s
É
tienne d’Aragon,” Elin said. Her eyes weren’t on me, though. They were on the door, just as they’d been while we were waiting for Maddie, and they were as wide as I’d ever seen them. She blushed as bright red as her friend.

I turned to look in that direction to find that Marc d’Aragon had just come in with his two teenaged sons. The daughter must have stayed home with Julianne. The three of them carried their gym bags over to join the rest of the guys and started putting their gear on, oblivious to the three of us.

“Which one is
É
tienne?” I asked cautiously, turning back to the girls. One of the boys looked to be around thirteen or fourteen—older than these two, but not
that
much older. The other boy was definitely old enough to be driving. I said a silent prayer that
É
tienne was not so very much older than them.

“
É
tienne’s the younger one,” Maddie explained. “Patrice is the oldest.”

I nodded, letting out a silent breath of thanks. “Okay. So what about
É
tienne? Is he bothering you?”

Elin shook her head vigorously. “He goes to our school. He’s a grade above us, but we have the same lunchtime as him. And he…” She was so red she was practically purple, and she’d completely clammed up.

“He used to sit with his friends at lunch, but he’s started sitting with us. Sometimes he flirts with Elin, but we never thought much of it because boys can be dumb about these things. But then…”

“But then?” I asked after she’d trailed off.

Elin reached in her pocket and pulled out a note that had been unfolded and refolded dozens of times. She handed it to me. “He gave me this at the Storm’s Christmas party.”

I started to open it, but Maddie’s eyes nearly bugged out of her head. “Not out here,” she hissed. “He could see.”

I turned at an angle so no one on the ice would be able to see what was in my hands and opened it. The handwriting was awful, but the note had been painstakingly written. Some words were blacked out and others squeezed in to fit into too small spaces. He had plainly put a lot of thought into whatever he wanted to tell her.

Dear Elin,

I’m sorry about your mom. I hate to see you so sad all the time now. I think you’re really pretty. I love making you laugh. I wish you would laugh all the time and not be so sad. Will you be my girlfriend?

Sincerely,

É
tienne

He had clearly tried three different closing lines before settling on
Sincerely
, scratching over them so hard that he nearly tore a hole in the lined notebook paper. I did my best to school my features into impassivity and folded the note again.

“So what did you tell him?” I asked, hoping to buy a little time to determine how I should respond.

“I haven’t told him anything!” Elin said. “He gave it to me at the party. He told me not to read it until I got home and that he’d see me here. I don’t know what to tell him.”

She looked so pitiful and conflicted. I wanted to wrap her in my arms and hug her and tell her that it would get easier with time. But could I really promise her that? I was having just as many boy problems as she was, at the moment.

She turned pleading eyes on me, as though I could give her an answer that would fix everything in one fell swoop. “This is what Maddie and I have been talking about so much. I had the note hidden in the book I ran back for the other night before the game. I needed to show it to her.”

The guys were starting to make their way out to the ice. I focused on Nicky, trying to glean what he would think about the whole situation just from a look, but nothing came to me. At the moment, I could only use my best judgment and hope he agreed with me later.

It was really sweet of
É
tienne, and at some point down the line, Elin was going to have her first boyfriend, her first kiss. Was she ready for it now? Was
É
tienne taking advantage of the situation with Elin grieving for her mother? If he was, he wasn’t smart, considering his father was one of Nicky’s teammates. I doubted either of them would let something like that slide. I didn’t know
É
tienne, so I wasn’t sure how intuitive or not he was. The odds were that he was just a boy with a crush on a girl, and he wanted to make her laugh.

“Well, let’s start with the basics,” I said. “Do you want to be his girlfriend?”

She ducked her head, but it didn’t do anything to hide how pink she was. “Maybe? But would it mean kissing? Like Uncle Nicky kisses you?”

“Well…” Hmm. This was getting dicey in a hurry. “Not necessarily. Do you want him to kiss you?”

“Maybe?”

Everything was coming out like a question, as if she was asking me to tell her how she should feel about things or what she should think.

“But you like him, right?” With as nervous and embarrassed as she was, I couldn’t imagine she didn’t have a crush on him, at least a little bit. But being that age, with hormones flying and peer pressure, not to mention all the upheaval she’d been through in the last few months, everything was bound to be confusing.

Who was I kidding? Even at my age and without all of those mitigating factors, everything was confusing.

Elin shrugged, but then she gave me a shy nod.

I stole another glance out on the ice, searching for
É
tienne. He was easy to find. Like his father and his older brother, he had blond hair. His was too long and hung down below his helmet. I remembered Julianne saying something recently about hounding him to get a haircut, but he liked his hair as it was. He was tall but way too skinny for all that height. He had the stretched-out look of a boy who’d just grown about half a foot in a single summer, and it was just too fast for him to have filled out his frame.

He and his brother had organized all the kids at one end of the ice. They’d split into teams and were playing a shinny game while the Storm’s players held a somewhat more organized practice at the other end. After watching for a minute, I realized that
É
tienne was paying special attention to Nils, who was the youngest and smallest kid out there. I didn’t know if he was doing that because he was just a thoughtful young man, in general, or if it was more because he wanted to impress Elin, but it didn’t matter. I liked him automatically just because of this small gesture.

“Well,” I said after a moment. “I think you and I should have a talk with your uncle later.”

“No! I don’t—”

“Not you by yourself. I’ll be there with you. I’ll help.” I smiled, hoping to calm her fears at least a little. “The thing is, we need to know what Nicky thinks about whether you’re old enough to have a boyfriend. Or maybe he’ll be all right with you having a boyfriend but not going on dates.”

“Dates?” Elin squeaked, eyes so wide they might burst out of her head at any moment.

“But what if he says no?” Maddie asked, waving off Elin’s newest source of panic.

“He might. We’ll deal with that if we come to it, but it’s not worth worrying about until we need to. No matter what, you can be friends with
É
tienne. Sometimes, it’s better to be friends first, anyway.”

“He might not want to be my friend if he can’t be my boyfriend.”

“If not, then you’re better off without him,” I said. “Either way, we’ll talk to your uncle tonight and find out what he thinks.”

“Can’t we do it another day?”

“He’s leaving tomorrow for a road trip. Do you really want to put it off until he comes back?”

She shook her head.

“I didn’t think so. And in the meanwhile, I think you need have a conversation with
É
tienne before we leave.”

“Talk to… But what do I say?”

“Tell him the truth. Tell him that you like him, and you want to be his girlfriend, but that you need to talk to your uncle first.”

“But what if—”

“Don’t worry about the what-ifs,” I said. “Tell him the truth. It’s always easiest if you just start with the truth and go from there.”

That was something I would have to keep in mind later when we talked with Nicky, particularly if I was going to be able to keep him talking to me afterward. I had every intention of trying. I only hoped that he would be open to listening.

ELIN AND I
need to talk with you after the boys go to bed.
That was what Jessica had said to me earlier, when we’d started getting the kids ready for bed. Ever since then, I’d been racking my brain, trying to come up with what could be wrong.

Was Elin missing her friends in Sweden? Was she having problems in school that she hadn’t told me about? Was she sick?

The last one hit me the hardest. Back when Emma and I had gone in for testing to find out if we carried the gene for ALS, I’d suggested testing each of Emma’s kids, as well. She’d flat out refused, saying they could make that choice when they were adults if they wanted to, but until then they were simply going to be kids. We weren’t going to put that kind of worry on them.

That meant I didn’t know if any of them might start showing symptoms at any point. Elin knew what the symptoms were, though. She’d gone through it with her grandfather and then with her mother. She knew what she needed to be aware of.

By the time I had finished reading the boys a bedtime story and left them to their dreams, I had thoroughly convinced myself that was what Elin needed to tell me. Needless to say, I was an utter wreck when I knocked on the open door to her bedroom. She was sitting cross-legged on the bed, and Jessica was in the chair by the window. Elin looked so nervous I thought she might throw up, but Jessica was as cool and calm as ever.

I crossed over and sat next to my niece on the bed, putting my arm around her shoulders and drawing her in to my side. “Are you not feeling well,
sötnos
?” I asked, using the endearment her father had always used with her.

Elin gave me a tiny smile and shook her head. “I’m all right. It’s just…” She trailed off and sent a desperate look over to Jessica.

I followed her gaze, raising my brows in question.

“It’s just that Elin wants to know if you think she’s old enough to have a boyfriend.”

“A boy—” I cut myself off, almost laughing. With all the awful things I’d come up with, this was the furthest thing from my mind. I looked down at my niece and brushed the pad of my thumb over the tip of her nose. “You want to have a boyfriend?”

She nodded, almost in tears. That only reminded me how young she was. Was twelve too young for a boyfriend? What would Emma and Gabe have thought? Emma and I had talked about seemingly everything before she’d passed, but this particular bit of parenting had never come up in all those conversations.

“I see,” I said. “And is there a particular boy you want to be your boyfriend?”

She nodded again.

“And do I know him?”

Elin looked over to Jessica for help once more.

“
É
tienne d’Aragon,” Jessica said after it became clear Elin wouldn’t speak up this time.

É
tienne d’Aragon. Danger’s son.

I didn’t know any of Danger’s kids very well, but what I did know, I liked. They were good kids, never causing their parents any real problems. I was pretty sure that Danger’s biggest complaint about
É
tienne, at least at present, was that he would never cut his hair. With everything considered, that wasn’t too bad.

But
É
tienne was a little older than Elin. Not a lot older, but still.

“Do you know if
É
tienne wants you to be his girlfriend?” I asked. She was bound to get her heart broken at some point. It was simply how things worked. But I didn’t want her to end up brokenhearted just because she had a crush on an older boy who didn’t even know she existed.

“He asked me,” she said softly. “I told him I had to talk to you first. He said maybe he should come talk to you, but I said I would.”

I had to hide a grin because I didn’t want her to think I was laughing at her. I was liking young
É
tienne more by the minute. “I think,” I said, glancing over at Jessica to gauge her reaction to my response, “it would be all right for you to have a boyfriend. But no dates unless there’s an adult present or in a group setting until you’re fifteen.” Was fifteen a good age for that? I wasn’t sure but Jessica gave me a tiny nod of approval. I supposed that was good enough for now, and I could always revise that particular ruling at a later time if it didn’t seem to be right.

“Really?” Elin asked. “He can be my boyfriend?”

“Is he nice to you?”

“He makes me laugh,” she said.

That was good enough for me, considering how rarely she laughed these days. “Then yes, he can be your boyfriend.” Out of all the choices she could make for her first,
É
tienne d’Aragon seemed as good an option as any.