With that half-assed wisdom, his best mate drove off to his own simple life.

Chapter Twenty

Rico didn’t care that Ash was hiding him. At seventeen, the one thing he knew for sure was that there was no connection between being hidden and being loved. His father had hidden him and his mother his entire life. Even after the car crash that killed both his pai and mãe, the press had only reported that Pablo Silva had died and that a friend had been in the car with him. They were buried separately, his pai in his family’s plots, where his wife had joined him a few years later, and his mãe by herself. Rico didn’t care. Once you were dead you were dead.

“Hindus are cremated. Thank God,” Ash had said when he’d told her that his parents were buried separately. “So no one can keep my ashes from being sprinkled over your grave.”

It was a bit crazy for teenagers to talk this way, but it had made him laugh. It was the first time anything about his parents had made him laugh since the accident.

It didn’t matter that Ash had never introduced him to her tangle of cousins—all of whom he knew she loved with the kind of intensity that made her her. Meeting her parents or her aunt and uncle was out of the question. The idea of meeting anyone’s parents made the memory of his parents in caskets come alive. He could barely stand to be in the presence of his own aunt, and he lived in her house.

He had never been to either of Ash’s homes—not the one she lived in during the week and not the one she went to over the weekend. He had never been to her father’s restaurant either.

None of that mattered.

They had been together for a year. They had met in the middle of sophomore year, and junior year had gone by in a strangely alive haze. All Rico knew was that his need for Ash was constant. She was with him even when she wasn’t with him. Sometimes it felt like everything he did was just so he could recount it for her and make her smile, or be outraged. Because her caring about things, about him, made him matter again, made him alive. Rico liked feeling alive again.

He hadn’t joined the football team, but between Ashna and the coach, they had convinced him to help with training. He assisted the coach during soccer season, mostly because he liked coaching her. Ash had convinced Coach Clarence that if he stopped badgering Rico to play, he could at least get him to help the team this way. Rico had never had to tell her that he just couldn’t play, not when his mãe and pai would never get to watch him.