Childhood best friends to enemies to lovers.
Alina wants nothing to do with the rebellious bad boy, Liam Somner.
Which is difficult, because he goes to her school. And lives on her street. And keeps showing up at her apartment, and sitting in her ki...
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The cold never surprises me, but the darkness does. Emerging from my ASL classroom after school, I am caught off guard by the night that has descended rapidly while I was practising my sign language in a brightly-lit classroom.
It's like stepping out of a movie theatre and back into the world, and realising that life has continued while you were absorbed for three hours in someone else's story. It's the small disorientation as you realise that the earth keeps rotating, hurtling through space, even while you were standing still.
My grandmother has been moved into palliative care, and now it's night time. I've stopped talking to Liam again, and he's stopped visiting our apartment. Today at school I saw him sitting with Gracie at lunch, while I sat alone. And the earth keeps turning.
But Oscar has left the house three times this week - to visit our grandmother, to see a movie, and to get pizza with an old friend - and I'm overjoyed at those small things. Nothing else seems to matter when I know that my brother is okay. Winter could be depressing, but I find it heartening.
"Your father wants you to go to California for Christmas," Mom tells me when I walk in the door. Oscar is sitting at the kitchen counter, flipping through a recipe book.
"And he said you should call him back," Oscar says.
I dump my schoolbag in the doorway of my bedroom and then slip into the seat beside Oscar. "I just haven't had a chance," I say, which is a lie. I could have called Dad on my way home but instead I listened to a podcast. "Do we have to go to California?"
"I'm not going," Oscar says, resolutely.
"You're going to California," Mom says.
"What about Oma Ingrid?" I ask her.
Mom places her elbows on the counter and leans on it. "She'll hold on, Leens. Your grandmother's a strong old bee. The doctor's say she could start talking again in the next few weeks."
"I don't want to be in California if she starts talking again," I say.
"Your grandparents in California also want to see you, Alina. They're even older than Oma Ingrid."
But I've never been as close to my dad's parents as I've been to Oma Ingrid. Ingrid lived with us until she moved into the aged care home, so she's practically been a third parent to me and Oscar. Whereas I've seen my grandparents on my dad's side less than once a year, so I've never really formed a strong connection with them.
"California sucks," Oscar says.
I look at my brother. I personally would much rather be in the grey sludgy streets of New York than in California for Christmas, but it surprises me that Oscar's taking this stance. He usually complains about the tourists descending on New York at Christmas time. He hates the cold, he hates the horse-drawn carriages going around Central Park, and he hates the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree like it's personally offended him. He usually loves escaping to California.
