Althea and Oliver by Cristina Moracho Read Free Book Online

could coax it out of her given sufficient time, the idea is suddenly exhausting. If she wanted to tell him, she would—it’s the fact that she doesn’t that he finds unsettling.
    Later, after Althea has finished catching him up on the last three weeks with her sketchbook, after she’s made him turkey burgers and another batch of popcorn and they’ve watched a movie, Oliver stands up and announces he’s going home.
    â€œYou could just sleep here,” Althea says.
    â€œI’ll be okay.” A fragment of popcorn has nestled in Althea’s collarbone. He plucks it off her and pops it into his mouth, salt dissolving onto his tongue. Briefly, he reconsiders her offer to stay over, but in the last few months a new restlessness has made it harder for them to sleep in the same bed. He hears her weighted sighs in the middle of the night when she thinks he’s asleep, feels her rolling over and over until she finally comes to rest with her nose buried in his neck, a shaky hand alighted on his hip. And he’s afraid to spoon her now, or assume any of their chaste cuddling positions, for fear she’ll brush against him and he’ll be revealed in the most basic way a teenaged boy can betray himself. So instead, he zips his sweatshirt in a gesture of finality and pulls up his hood. “See you in the morning?”
    She looks down at the spot where he touched her. “I was saving that for later,” she says.
    Back at his house, Nicky is asleep on the couch underneath one of her books, an aromatherapy candle flickering on the coffee table beside her—chamomile and peppermint, for rejuvenation. They cost something like thirty dollars at the spa, but Nicky gets them at a discount.
    â€œMom?”
    She mumbles something and rolls over, the book slipping off her chest and onto the floor. He shuts off the lamp over her head and blows out the candle.
    Nicky has changed his sheets, but still the idea of returning to bed, knowing he has spent the last three weeks there, is deeply unappealing. He sits at his desk, leaning back and staring up at the ceiling where those cheap plastic glow-in-the-dark stars form a random constellation. Althea put them there, one winter years ago. Standing on his bed, balanced on the toes of one foot in a rangy arabesque, she slapped them up one at a time, following his directions to create a haphazard version of Gemini, their star sign, before she lost patience and just pasted the rest on. He had been complaining about the weather, about how he missed camping and hiking, about how he was sick of being trapped in her basement playing board games.
    â€œYou can sleep under these stars until spring,” she had said.
    Inspired, he grabs his telescope—an old Christmas gift from Garth—and sleeping bag and slips out the back door into the yard. He trains the lens on the clearing of sky untouched by trees and the neighbors’ satellite dish, and is reassured to see the stars are where they should be, Hydra still snaking its way across the heavens, Ursa Major and all its galaxies firmly in place. He tries to get a fix on the Owl Nebula, but it’s not dark enough.
    When they were ten, Oliver had somehow happened upon the unfortunate piece of information that in approximately five billion years the sun would run out of juice, ending life in the solar system. He’d been so pissed; it seemed so unfair. Althea assured him that by then space travel would be no big deal—everyone could just ship off to another solar system. When Oliver heard scientists claim that someday the entire
universe
would end, either tearing itself apart or collapsing in on itself—the theories varied—Althea had no answers, and Oliver was inconsolable. At night he lay in bed and tried to imagine it, the end of everything. Some scientist suggested it was possible that eventually, if humanity could last long enough, a wormhole could be found that would lead happily