Read You Are Here for Free Online

said. “I’m going back to New York with him tomorrow.”
    “Really?”
    “Really,” Emma said, then grinned. “He just doesn’t know it yet.”
    Peter ducked his head and kicked at the tall grasses as they crossed the lawn. “Can I come too?”
    She laughed, though he hadn’t really been joking. “You don’t even know how long I’ll be away.”
    “I don’t mind staying awhile.”
    Emma frowned and shook her head. “I’m not sure when I’ll be back. I’m probably going somewhere else after New York.”
    “Where?” Peter asked, quickening his pace to keep up with her, but she didn’t seem to have an answer to this, or at least not one worth mentioning to him. “If there’s no room, I could always take a car from the lot,” he said, thinking of the small patch of asphalt behind their house that served as a makeshift lot for impounded or abandoned cars. “We could caravan.”
    “You wouldn’t do that.”
    “I might,” he said. “I know how to jump-start them.”
    Emma rolled her eyes, but Peter thought he could detect the faintest trace of interest even so. “Maybe another time,” she said absently, already striding out ahead of him, her shadow long across the grass, leaving him there to watch her go.
    The next morning, though he suspected she was already gone, he found himself standing in front of her house, wondering if it was okay to bother her parents so early on a Saturday. Much to his relief, the barbershop where he occupied himself five to six mornings a week for minimum wage was closed for the holiday weekend. It was a job he found nearly unbearable, pushing the broom in figure eights around the old-fashioned chairs, holding his breath against the fruity smell of the shampoo, and worst of all, disposing of the hair clippings, the flakes of dandruff still clinging to them determinedly.
    Other summers, his jobs had been somewhat better. In fact, in his sixteen years in this town, Peter figured he’d done odd bits of work for at least three-quarters of the shops, everything from bussing tables and washing dishes to serving slices of pizza and bagging groceries. He’d once even worked as a janitorial assistant up at the college, which was just another reason he felt he could never go to school there: How could you attend classes at a place where you’d picked sludgy cigarette butts out of the fake plants in nearly every building on campus?
    The lights appeared to be on in the Healys’ kitchen, and so after a moment, he found himself following the flower-lined path up to their blue front door.
    “This is a nice surprise,” Professor Healy said, and his wife appeared in the doorway beside him, the two of them both dressed in khaki pants and navy sweaters, unwittingly matching in the way of long-married couples. “We’re just about to have breakfast. You brave enough to try Katherine’s eggs?”
    Peter grinned. “That would be great.”
    He followed them into the dining room, and took a seat at the large oak table, which was seemingly engaged in a mighty struggle to stay upright beneath so many piles of papers and books. The surface was littered with reading glasses and pens, random pieces of day-old fruit and two mugs of coffee that had left permanent ring stains in the dark wood. He spotted a ruler and a calculator, sheaves of typed pages and others decorated liberally with red pen, and not for the first time, Peter wished that he lived in a place like this, a dust-filled room that smelled of books.
    Mrs. Healy poured him a cup of tea, and Peter added some milk, watching the white liquid cloud his mug. Part of what he loved about coming here was this: the way they treated him like a colleague, a grown-up, a fellow intel lectual. There were never any silly questions about school unless he brought up a certain paper he’d written or a subject he happened to be enjoying. He liked how they never assumed he was there to see Emma either; in their minds, it was just as likely he’d arrived