Openly, Honestly by Bill Konigsberg

Author:Bill Konigsberg [Konigsberg, Bill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.
Published: 2017-02-27T23:00:00+00:00

Once inside Alfalfa’s on Broadway, the market that made the best sandwiches in town, I hurried down the condiments aisle, past the jams and various nut butters. I turned when I was in front of the chutneys. A green stem just barely reached out toward me.

“How did you—how did you know someone wouldn’t take this?”

“It’s chutney,” she said. “Who buys chutney?”

“Hey, don’t hate on chutney,” I said, though in reality I’d never tried it. It was among my favorite words. “Chutney.” “Hydrangeas.” “Hygge,” which I’d learned playing Balderdash. “Hygge,” pronounced Hue-gah, is the cozy feeling one gets playing board games in a warm room on, say, Christmas Day, when it’s raining or snowing out. Ever since I discovered the word, I’d tried to use it as often as possible, along with “chutney” and “hydrangeas.” None of them were easy to put in a sentence, but I made sure to try every time Claire Olivia and I were together.

As I thought about it, I realized I was experiencing a little hygge right now. Even without the board games.

I reached for the stem and pulled out a single bluish flower. A withered, dead bluish flower, with another piece of paper attached to the end of it.

I held it up. “You got me a dead hydrangea?”

Claire Olivia looked mortified. “Shit. It didn’t even occur to me that a half day on a dark shelf would do that.”

I bit my cheeks and smirked. “And you’re sure I can’t be even a little bit snarky? Just for one moment?”

She shook her head, and we both laughed.

Claire Olivia glanced at her watch and then looked around.

“What?” I said. “More surprises?”

She tried to look aloof, but Claire Olivia wasn’t really so good at looking like she didn’t care. She glanced back at her watch, really stared at it, and suddenly the music got louder. The opening guitar chords sounded familiar, but it wasn’t until the drumbeat kicked in that I knew exactly what was going on.

I opened my mouth to speak, but Claire Olivia interrupted me.

“I’ve taken you to this awesome home of stupendous sandwiches and surrounded you with some of your favorite words because it’s time. And you have the length of this song to, like, feel everything. For a boy whose parents are so feely, you’re kinda wound tight, you know?”

I felt the store closing in on me. Like, people were watching. But when I glanced up and down the aisle, I saw that no one was even around. For a store that was usually so crowded, it was a little uncanny, actually.

She rolled her eyes. “I got them to guard the row for four minutes, okay? I told them we had a relationship emergency, a boy who wouldn’t cry over the loss of his first boyfriend, and they basically, like, insisted. So take the time, all right? Really, Rafe. Do you want me to go?”

By now the lyrics of the song that had plagued me for weeks were blaring. It was like a week

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