Free Other Words for Love by Lorraine Zago Rosenthal

“We have blood from the Shawnee tribe and you know that, Del.” She looked at me again. “Del’s father and my mother are brother and sister. They’re from Georgia originally. The Shawnee used to be all over Georgia.”
    “Nobody gives a shit, Leigh,” Del said, and waved us over to a bookcase. He took her bracelet from a shelf and she locked it around her wrist. It was an ID bracelet, the silver one she always wore. It wasn’t meant for a girl, it was made for a man, with heavy links and the initials M. G .
    “Take it to a jeweler and get it shortened so it doesn’t fall off again. You might lose it in the street next time instead of in my car, and I don’t want that to happen,” Del said as I examined his face. I saw a ropy scar that began near the middle of his upper lip and weaved its way into his left nostril like a snake.
    A scar on his mouth, a cleft lip—Summer was so wrong. Leigh hadn’t already recovered from her dead boyfriend. The bracelet that meant so much to her was probably his. And she didn’t have a new boyfriend. All she had was a cousin.
    Leigh nodded and said that she and I should go, sounding raspy as usual. I’d recently figured out that there was never a cold or laryngitis, she was just naturally hoarse.
    She kept talking after Del shut the door behind us and we were heading down the staircase. Then we were on the sidewalk and Leigh was talking about Del. I’d guessed his age correctly, and she was telling me other things—that his mother had died twelve years ago, that he had a younger brother, and that he was a college dropout.
    “So many strings were pulled to get him into Northwestern,” Leigh said. “He didn’t exactly have the grades. Then he starts a fight with some engineering student over a parking space and gets himself expelled.… Del knocked out the guy’s front teeth, if you can believe it. My uncle had to fork over a lot of money to make that one go away.”
    “Oh,” I said, for lack of anything better.
    The wind blew Leigh’s hair across her face, long copper strands against freckled skin. “I shouldn’t talk badly about him. Everybody else does,” she said. “His name … it’s Native American, and it means ‘He is so.’ My uncle always says ‘He is so stubborn,’ ‘He is so angry,’ ‘He is so stupid.’ This whole thing about starting a business … Del bought that dump with some of the trust-fund money he got from his mother. I hope it works, because nobody has any faith in him and he needs something meaningful in his life.”
    “Oh,” I repeated, wondering why Leigh was telling me all this. But I was the only person she ever talked to at school, so I figured she was lonely and there was nobody else who would listen.
    Leigh’s apartment was in a modern building on East Seventy-eighth, with a doorman who ushered us through a glass door into a mirrored elevator that played Muzak as it carried us to a small but well-decorated and bright apartment on the twentieth floor. It had fashionable furniture, windows covered with sheer turquoise drapes, and silver appliances in the kitchen.
    We sat down at the kitchen table and pored over our library books, scribbling Picasso facts on loose-leaf. I was reading about one of his most famous paintings, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon , when I had to use the bathroom.
    “Through the living room and down the hall on the right,” Leigh said, pointing in that direction. She was too engrossed in Picasso to lift her head.
    I walked through the living room, past a heather beige sofa, an oak coffee table the color of sand, and a Georgia O’Keeffe painting on the wall—an abstract flower, a blast of pink and orange and a light shade of turquoise that matched the curtains. Then I was in the hallway and a door at the end opened. I saw a tall, willowy young woman with spindly limbs, hair the same color as mine, and a beautiful face. She wore a short nightgown that was practically transparent.
    “Hi,” she said.