When You Were Here

with her when he thought no one was watching.
    “You are the hottest mom in all of Southern California,” he’d say to her in the hallway.
    “Oh, shut up,” she said.
    “I mean it. I totally mean it. How could anyone be hotter than you?”
    I chimed in from my room. “Can you please stop referring to Mom as hot ? It’s freaking me out.”
    “Let’s freak Danny out. Kiss me now, Liz. C’mon, kiss me now, right in front of him.” He planted a kiss on her and pulled her tight, and at that point I closed my eyes and covered my ears.
    He was the first one I told that I had a crush on Holland, though he’d already figured it out.
    I was in third grade, and she was in fourth grade, and she wore some black-and-white-checked dress to school. It was the first time I noticed what a girl wore. Over the next few days I dog-eared all the pages in our elementary school yearbook with Holland’s picture on them. My dad saw me stretched out on my bed flipping through the pages. I slammed the little yearbook closed. He patted me on the back and whispered, “Don’t tell your mom, and don’t tell Kate, but I think you’ve got good taste.”
    “Dad!”
    “What? You think I didn’t do the same thing when I was your age?”
    “You did?”
    He sat down on the bed with me. “Of course. Girls are great. Just remember this: manners and a sense of humor. Those are the keys to winning their hearts. Oh, and there’s another thing. You have got to learn to save them from spiders. Girls just hate spiders. Like that one right there on your floor,” he said, and pointed.
    Then he showed me how to not kill a spider.
    There are so many things I had to learn without him. I learned how to deal with getting sidelined from baseball without him around. I figured out how to graduate at the top of my class without his input. I taught myself how to shave. There was no dad to ask, so I learned how to do it myself.
    He didn’t teach me how to get over a girl who breaks your heart either.
    Because last summer Holland and I talked about going to Tokyo together. She was lolling around in my pool, floating on a raft, a plastic cup of Diet Coke with a silly straw in her drink holder, her foot a rudder in the water, and she glided on over to me. I was hanging by the side of the pool, sunglasses on because it was high noon and it was bright and hot. The kind of heat that made your skin feel like it had been baking from the inside out. Plants were wilting, flowers were drooping, and the whole of Los Angeles was languishing in a heat wave. Sandy Koufax had flopped over on her side in the shade of a tree. Holland pushed my sunglasses on top of my head and said, “Let’s go to Fiji.”
    “Let’s go to Tahiti.”
    “Bali.”
    “How about the Cook Islands? It’s practically off the map.”
    “The Maldives.”
    “Seychelles.”
    Then she splashed water on me. “Now you’re just showing off.”
    “The Maldives? I think you might be showing off too.”
    “I was just trying to impress you with my geographical knowledge. Geography was my best subject. I can totally name all fifty states. Just try me.”
    I pulled her off the raft and brought her hot, wet body against mine. “It’ll just make me want you even more,” I joked, even though I wasn’t sure it was possible to want her more.
    She turned serious then. “Do you know how long I’ve liked you, Daniel Kellerman?”
    I shook my head. “No. How long?”
    She spread her hands as wide as they could go. “This long.”
    “That’s a long time to harbor a crush, Holland St. James.”
    “Not just a crush, Danny. I’ve been in love with you.”
    The girl I loved loved me. My greatest dream, my most intense fantasy—Holland and me—was coming true. “Me too,” I whispered as I placed a hand on the back of her neck and kissed her gently. “I’ve been in love with you for so long.”
    When we pulled apart, she had her hands on my chest, and she said, “I want to go all those places with you.”
    “I would take you there. I would take you wherever you want to go.”
    “But you know where I want to go most of all?”
    “Where?”
    “I want to see Tokyo with you.”
    “You do?”
    She nodded. “Yes. Because you love it. Because it’s like a part of you. The way you talk about it, the things you’ve done there with your family—your eyes light up.”
    It was like someone was seeing into me, knowing me, and I was a little bit scared but mostly happy out of my mind. “I would