All Stories Are Love Stories by Elizabeth Percer Page B

I’d say it’s a bigger shame to just go with the flow, you know—go for the upgrade the minute the older model starts to break down.”
    Vashti felt her cheeks grow warm, then hot. She scrounged around in her bag for a cash tip and scurried out with a botched thanks. She had been there most of the afternoon, hadn’t she, but she was still not ready to leave. She ducked into the Grace gift shop across the hallway, idly drawn to the beautiful crystalline figures in the cases filled with hushed light. She reached out to touch one of them, a sheep or a lamb. Yes, a lamb. She picked it up off the shelf and held it gently in her hand.
    If only she hadn’t
seen
him before she’d seen him. If only he hadn’t looked so familiar. If only seeing him hadn’t immediately resurrected the sharp, thrilling kick of anticipation in her gut, brought the feel of him to her hands so that she clenched them now, brought the very smell of him back so that she felt almost stifled by a sense of rightness and desire. She had never been very successful at hiding love, though it seemed so simple to hide an invisible thing.
    Before February fourteenth was Max’s birthday, it was just another day on which she and Max had a friendship she refused to recognize as love. It had been going on like that forthe better part of the six months they’d known each other, but she had stockpiled reasons like swords to fend off love: she was not ready to date; Max was confusing friendship for a different kind of affection; her father would never allow her to date anyway, much less a boy with no roots. Maybe if Max had been a wealthy Iranian traditionalist who could take her off her father’s hands as soon as possible, he might have conceded to Max’s attentions. But to date simply because she wanted to? He’d never allow it. What she wanted was rarely a factor in what her father wanted for her.
    She was thinking about these things while standing in her kitchen and cracking eggs over a bowl as Max sat across from her on a stool, reading. His hair had grown longer, and he kept pushing it back off his forehead with his long fingers absentmindedly, making it stand on end. The eggs were warm in her hands, as was the butter—she’d left them out overnight, and by the time she and Max got home from school, they were perfect for the soft melding of fat and liquid and sweetness that could be baked into the miracle of cake. No matter how many times she did it, pulling confections from the oven always felt at least a little like drawing rabbits from the empty hole of a hat.
    â€œAre you sure your mom won’t miss you?” she asked again.
    Max shrugged, not looking up, the sharp bone of his shoulder showing through his T-shirt. “She has to work this afternoon. She’s glad I’m not alone, at least.”
    She’d been planning the cake for weeks but only worked up the courage to actually ask him over that day. Even though her father left to open Edible Apothecary at 8:15every morning, he liked to show up unannounced to check on his younger daughter. Yousef Shirah was proprietary about both his daughters, and Vashti suspected that although necessity took Javi into the store at an early age, her father found it to be the only remotely positive result of his wife’s death—having his older daughter under his watchful eye whenever she wasn’t at school or sleeping. As for Vashti, she was monitored until she was in high school by a hostile great-aunt when her sister or father wasn’t around. Then she was trusted to be alone, but only as far as they understood “alone” to mean that her father would drive her to school, have Javi pick her up, and drop by regularly and without warning in the afternoon. Other kid’s parents texted; their father appeared.
    It was true that even if her mother hadn’t died, Vashti might have always made her careful father nervous. But it was so