Autoboyography
Page 65

Sebastian has traveled outside of Utah for school trips and family vacations, but never like this. His publishing house arranges a car and driver to pick him up from the airport and drop him off at his hotel, he has a handler to get him to and from events, but the rest of the time is his.
His next signing is in Denver, and though it’s obviously not as big as the one back home, it’s still pretty crowded. There are only a handful of empty chairs during his talk. What a surreal awareness to catch, like a whiff of something delicious, that the strangers in this room even know who he is.
The line is mostly girls, but there are a few guys scattered in. Sebastian knows Tanner isn’t coming, but it never stops the way his pen runs off the page at the sound of a deep voice near the back of the line, or his eyes snap up in the hopes of a head of dark hair above the crowd.
Sometimes he can’t believe Tanner was actually there. His parents certainly didn’t want to acknowledge it. There was no one he could turn to after Tanner and Autumn left to ask, “That was Tanner, right?”
He’d wanted to tell him how much he loved the book, how reading it had changed something inside him, and how he’d printed it out the very next morning, knowing he’d take it on tour with him. But he couldn’t, not there. He hadn’t wanted Tanner to leave, but he had nothing articulate to say because the words “I miss you” were shoving their way to the front, boisterous and shrill.
It’s the missing that keeps him up at night—in Denver, in Austin, in Cleveland—and that’s always when he reaches for it, searching through his bag to pull out Tanner’s book. He can open it anywhere—page twenty, page eighty—because on every page he’ll find a love story that shines a light into the dark, dusty corners of his self-loathing, that remind him something did happen, that it was real. And it was right.
Sometimes he thinks about what he wrote in Tanner’s copy of Firestorm, and wonders whether Tanner even opened the book to see it.
Yours always,
Sebastian Brother
Sebastian is hit with a wall of heat as he steps out of the Salt Lake City International Airport, and wishes he had changed out of his shirt and tie before leaving JFK.
“I can’t believe you got to go to New York,” Lizzy says, clutching a small glittery Statue of Liberty to her chest. She’s back to her old self, and it makes him wonder whether it’s because everyone expects he’s back to his, too. “Was it as cool as it looks on TV?”
“Cooler.” He wraps an arm around her shoulder and pulls her in, pressing a kiss to her hair. It was nice to get away, but he can’t believe how much he’s missed her. “Maybe we can go there sometime,” he says. “When the next book is out.”
Lizzy pirouettes her way along the crosswalk. “Yes!”
“If Lizzy gets to go to New York, then I think we should go to San Francisco and visit Alcatraz. Did you go there?” Faith asks, looking up at him.
“I didn’t, but I saw it from the pier. My handler took me to dinner at this seafood place, and we walked along the water. I didn’t know you wanted to go or I’d have sent you a picture. I think I have one in my phone.”
Faith forgets any possible insult when Sebastian scoops her up to carry her over his shoulder. Her delighted squeal is deafening in the cement parking structure.
Mrs. Brother unlocks the doors, and the question sits like a stone in Sebastian’s chest. “Dad and Aaron couldn’t come?”
“Your father took Aaron along to a couple of house calls today, but he said he’ll see you at dinner.”
Sebastian spoke with his dad a handful of times over the last two weeks, but there’s a knee-jerk reaction to him not being here. His father’s absence from this return is a heartbeat in the tip of a cut finger. He feels it so acutely, so constantly, because it’s wrong.
Fortunately, he doesn’t get to dwell on it because as soon as Lizzy sings that dinner is a surprise, Faith—unable to keep the secret any longer—shouts, “It’s pizza!”
Lizzy clamps a hand over Faith’s mouth and delivers a loud smooch to her cheek. “Way to blow the surprise, dweeb.”
Sebastian leans forward, helping Faith with her seat belt. “Pizza for me?”
She nods, her giggles still muffled behind the weight of Lizzy’s hand.
Sebastian loads his bag into the back.
“And before this one blows it,” his mom says, buckling her seat belt as he climbs into the passenger seat. “There’s something else.” She grins over at him. “I sent your papers off.”
He nods, giving her a pleased smile, but words don’t immediately come because the wind has been quietly knocked out of him. Time away was good. He misses church, and the kinship of being surrounded by like-minded people. He misses Tanner, too, but knows the mission is still the best path for him.
It’s just that he thought he would send off his mission papers himself when he got home. He’d hoped sending them off himself might solidify the decision, make it real and set his path in motion.
Her grin slips, and he realizes she’s been anxious about telling him. She was worried she would get this exact reaction—uncertainty.
He does everything he can to wipe it from his face, replacing it with the smile that seems to move across his mouth with the reflex of an inhale. “Thanks, Mom. That . . . makes things so much easier for me now. One less thing to worry about.”
It seems to have done the trick. She softens, turning back to the wheel. They drive down the ramp, navigating the maze of construction cones as they go. Pulling up to the kiosk, she slips her parking stub into the machine and turns to him. “I was wondering how you’d feel about doing it with everyone together.”
“Do what together?”
“Opening your letter.” She turns back to the kiosk to pay, and in that ten-second reprieve, Sebastian struggles to bury the panic that follows the reality of those three words. She means his mission call.
A voice in the back of his head screams no.
It’s like living with a split personality, and he closes his eyes, inhaling slowly. It was so much easier to be away. The impending mission was palatable from a distance. The constant imposition of his mother, the weight of expectation—coming back home is overwhelming even ten minutes in.
He can feel the engine rumble and realizes she’s done paying and they’re moving forward. When he looks over at her, her jaw is tight, eyes hardened.
Sebastian feigns a yawn. “Oh my gosh, I am so wiped. Yeah, Mom, that sounds amazing. I assume Grandma and Grandpa would come too?”
Her shoulders relax, smile returns. “Are you kidding? They wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
An hourglass has been tipped over in his stomach, pouring lead. He takes a shallow breath.
“But I don’t want Sebastian to leave again,” Faith calls from the backseat. “He just got home.”
“He wouldn’t leave yet, honey,” his mom says, meeting her eyes in the rearview mirror. “Not for a couple months.”
Sebastian turns and gives his baby sister an encouraging smile, and he can’t even explain it, but he has the urge to reach for her, pull her to him. Two years. She’ll be almost thirteen when he gets back. Aaron will be learning to drive, and Lizzy will be ready to start college. He’s homesick and he hasn’t even left yet.
“So you’d be okay with that?” she asks. “It wouldn’t be too nerve-racking to have everyone there?”