I hate thinking about the way it ended, but sometimes I think about the way it began: with me walking through the door of someone else’s house without knocking.
This has always been a typical move of mine, wandering latchkey kid that I was in my early years. But in every other way, the beginning was an atypical day.
When I let myself go there, I watch it in my head like a movie. I let it feel like it’s happening now instead of thirteen years ago, where the real moment belongs, where fifteen-year-old me is turning the doorknob on a house I’ve burst into hundreds of times before. I find no resistance, because by my sophomore year of high school—when this memory takes place— my open invitation into the Cooper-Kims’ home is implied.
My best friend, Adam Kim, is somewhere in here, probably still sweaty and gross from cross-country practice. At least I went home and showered.
I greet Adam’s three rescue dogs, Gravy, Pop-Tart, and Dave, my ears perking at the dulcet tones of a video game played at full volume, two voices rumbling below it. The dogs trail me as I make my way to the den, the tags on their collars jingling. It’s a sound as familiar as my own heartbeat.
Adam’s house is warm and sun-filled, often noisy, with a lingering, faint citrus scent. The first time I walked in, something unraveled in my chest; it felt like home, not a place where two people lived with sometimes intertwining lives. My house is quiet and often empty, just as it was all the years between when my mom left when I was three years old and now.
The times my dad and I do sync up are great; he asks tons of questions and tells me what a great kid I am, how easy I’ve been, how proud he is of my grades and the extracurriculars that keep me busy. He listens to every story I can get out of my mouth, his phone facedown on the dining room
table while it buzzes and buzzes and buzzes. Eventually the phone wins, and I’m left craving more time.
It’s why I’ve made a habit of making other people’s houses my home, and why I love the Cooper-Kims’ house best.
In this memory, I’m nearly to the den, wondering who Adam has over. I sincerely hope it isn’t Jared; I keep telling Adam what a dick he is.
With the power of hindsight, I know what’s going to happen seconds before it does, so I always hold my breath here—
Right when I turn the corner and run face-first into a broad chest. It has so little padding it makes my teeth rattle.
“Whoa,” a voice breathes above me, stirring the hairs at my temple.
Warm, strong hands grip my arms to keep me upright.
I look up…and up, into a face fifteen-year-old me has never seen before. Whoever this is, he’s beautiful. He’s tall (obviously) and broad- shouldered, with limbs he hasn’t grown into. In this moment, I don’t know that he’ll fill out in a painfully attractive way—his chest will broaden to become the perfect pillow for my head. His thighs will grow just shy of thick, mouth-wateringly curved with muscle, the perfect perch for me when
I sit in his lap.
But the eyes I’m looking into won’t change. They’ll stay that hypnotic mix of caramel and gold, rimmed in deep coffee brown and framed by sooty lashes and inky eyebrows that match the hair on his head. They’ll continue to catch mine the way they are in this movie moment—like a latch hooking me, then locking us into place.
“Oh. Hello,” I say brilliantly.
His mouth pulls up, which is wide and meant for the toothy smiles I’ll discover he doesn’t give away easily. He’s prone to quiet ones, or shy, curling ones, like he’s giving me now. “Hey.”
I step back, my heart flipping from our crash and the warmth his hands have left behind on my skin. “Sorry, I didn’t know Adam had someone over.”
“Never stopped you before, Woodward,” Adam calls distractedly, his eyes glued to the TV screen.
I roll mine, turning back to this stranger. “I’m that doofus’s best friend, Georgia.”
“Like the peach,” he says, his voice lifting at the end. It’s not a question, but a tentative tease. In my life, I’ve heard that joke a million times and hate it, but here, I like the way he says it, as if he knows how ridiculous it is and is in on the joke.
I grin. When I’m watching this, I think about how open my expression is, how hopeful and full of sunshine. “Good one. No one’s ever said that to me before.”
His eyes narrow, like he’s trying to figure me out. I make note of how quickly he does, a tendril of belonging curling around me when he laughs. “You’re joking.”
“Yes,” I laugh back.
He pretends to look disappointed. “So I’m not the first?”
“More like lucky number ninety-nine,” I shoot back, and he grins. A toothy one. “Should I call you by the number or do you have a name, too?”
“That’s Eli—motherfucker,” Adam shouts.
My gaze slips from the stranger—Eli Joseph Mora, I’ll find out—to Adam, whose tongue is sticking out while he furiously pounds on a game controller. A second one lies next to him, a decimated bag of Doritos next to that.
When I direct my attention back to Eli, our eyes click. I hear it in my head, feel it in my chest, both in the memory and for real. Whenever I let myself think about the beginning, I want to get out of this moment as much as I want to wallow in it.
Fifteen-year-old me smiles up at fifteen-year-old him. “Hey, Eli. I hope
you’re not the motherfucker.”
“Not that I’m aware of,” he says. His eyes spark with amusement and other things, and the spark transfers to me, burrowing somewhere deep. It’ll wait there for years while we go from strangers to friends to best friends. It won’t catch fire until our junior year of college, when he joins me at Cal Poly after two years at community college.
“Who are you, then? Other than a stranger until”—I look down at my watch, a Fossil one I bought with the Christmas cash my dad gave me because he didn’t want to get the wrong one—“three minutes ago.”
“The new guy, I guess?” I notice his nose is sunburned along the bridge when he scrunches it. “I just moved from Denver, started at Glenlake two days ago.”
He doesn’t tell me now, but later he’ll divulge that his parents moved him and his two younger sisters to Glenlake, a city in Marin County just north of San Francisco, to live with his aunt. His dad lost his job as a mortgage broker when the economy crashed, starting a relentless financial slide until they lost their house. At fifteen, Eli’s sleeping on a pull-out in his aunt’s rec room; later, when we buy our first bed together, I talk him into splurging for a king.
I always notice the way his shoulders pull up toward his ears, maybe wondering if I’m going to ask questions. He doesn’t trust me with his heavy stuff yet, but eventually he’ll trust me with a lot of it, before we both start hiding ourselves away.
“Adam’s already got you in his clutches?” I raise my voice. “You work fast, Kim.”
Adam grins, but doesn’t spare us a glance.
Eli looks over his shoulder at his new friend, then back at me, rubbing the back of his neck. “Yeah, I think he kind of adopted me.”
“He does that,” I say, remembering that fateful day in sixth grade when Adam and I met, a month after my best friends of three years, Heather Russo and Mya Brogan, unceremoniously dropped me. Halfway into our inaugural year of middle school, the friends I thought were forever suddenly decided I was too needy, that my desire to hang out at their houses all the time was burdensome, and my occasional emotional moments were supremely irritating.
In the end, Adam saved me from my loneliness. It makes sense that he’d save Eli, too, though I don’t know yet that he’s also lonely, or that Adam’s house will become his home as much as it is mine.
“All right, Eli,” I say, looking him up and down. He’s wearing scuffed Nikes, gym shorts, and a T-shirt with a tear near the neck. I can see a sliver of collarbone pressing sharply against his golden skin, the glint of a fragile gold chain. “I guess I’m kind of adopting you, too.”
His eyes move over my face. “Probably a good idea, since I’ve already got a nickname picked out for you and everything.”
“Does Adam have one?”
“Slim Kim,” Eli says automatically, and I laugh as Adam scoffs. He’s all elbows and knees at fifteen. “Still workshopping it, though.”
It’ll morph over the years—Slim Kimmy, SK, Kiz, or Kizzy. I’ll watch him test versions of nicknames with other friends, but mine will only ever be Peach. When I eventually ask him why, he’ll tell me it’s because he knew exactly who I was to him from the start.
I glance at Adam. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I think I won the nickname portion of this adoption process.”
My chest warms at the way Eli’s grin widens. It’s an addicting feeling, knowing I’m in the middle of meeting a person I’ll get to hang on to.
Adam looks at me over Eli’s shoulder, his mouth pulling up, and I know he feels it, too: the three of us are going to be friends. Something special.
Years later Eli will tell me that he fell in love with me right then, and in this movie-like memory I always see it—how we can’t quite break eye contact, the flush along the shell of his ear when I sit next to him on the couch minutes later, the way his eyes linger on me when Adam and I bicker over control of the TV, the steady bounce of his knee. The beautiful, shy smile he gives me over the pizza we have for dinner later.
He’ll hold on to it for years, but eventually that spark will become a wildfire.
And then we’ll burn it all down.
