Finding Cinderella Maybe Someday

MILES
Six years earlier
Ian knows.
I had to tell him. After the first week of school, he knew
everything became Rachel.
Rachel knows Ian knows. Rachel knows he won’t say
anything.
I give Rachel my room when she moves in, and I take the
spare bedroom. My room is the only spare bedroom with its
own bathroom. I want Rachel to have the better room.
“Do you want this box in here?” Ian asks Rachel. Rachel
asks what it is, and he tells her it’s all her bras and
underwear. “I thought maybe I should just go ahead and put
it in Miles’s room.”
Rachel rolls her eyes at Ian. “Hush,” she tells him. He
laughs.
He likes that he’s in on such a private thing. That’s why he
would never tell. He knows the power of secrets.
Ian leaves after all the boxes are unloaded. My father passes
me in the hallway and pauses. His pause means I should

---

pause, too.
“Thank you, Miles.”
He thinks I’m okay with this. With the fact that he’s allowing
another woman to push out the last reminders of my
mother.
I’m not okay with it.
I’m just pretending to be okay with it, because none of it
matters. Rachel matters.
Not him.
“No problem,” I say.
He begins walking, then pauses again. He tells me he
appreciates that I’m being nice to Rachel. He says he wishes
he and Mom could have given me a sibling when I was
younger.
He says I make a good brother.
Words are awful when they come out of his mouth.
I walk back to Rachel’s room. I close the door.
It’s just the two of us.
We smile.
I walk to her and wrap my arms around her, then I kiss her
neck. It’s been three weeks since the first night I kissed her.
I can count the times I’ve kissed her since then. We can’t
interact like this at school. We can’t interact like this in
public.
We can’t interact like this in front of our parents. I can only
touch her when we’re alone, and we haven’t been able to be
alone much in the last three weeks.
Now?
Now I kiss her.
“We need a few guidelines so we don’t get ourselves in
trouble,” she says. She separates herself from me. She sits
at my desk, and I sit on my bed.
Well . . . she sits at 
her
desk, and I sit on 
her
bed.
“First,” she says, “no making out when they’re home. It’s
too risky.”
I don’t want to agree to that rule, but I’m nodding my head.

---

“Second, no sex.”
I’m not nodding anymore.
“Ever?” I ask her.
She’s nodding. Oh, I 
really
hate that nod.
“Why?”
She sighs heavily. “Sex will make it that much harder when
our time is up. You know that.”
She’s right. She’s also completely wrong, but I have a
feeling she’ll figure that out later.
“Can I ask what rule number three is before I agree to rule
number two?”
She grins. “There is no rule number three.”
I grin. “So sex is the only thing off limits? And we’re talking
penetration, right? Not oral?”
She covers her face with her hands. “Oh, my God, do you
have to get so specific?”
She’s cute when she’s embarrassed. “Just clarifying. I have
a lifetime of things I want to do to you and only six months
left to do them all.”
“Let’s leave the specifics up to the situation,” she says.
“Fair enough,” I say, admiring the blush in her cheeks.
“Rachel? Are you a virgin?”
Her cheeks grow even redder. She shakes her head and tells
me no. She asks if that bothers me.
“Not at all,” I say, being honest.
She asks if I’m a virgin, but her voice is timid when she asks
it.
“No,” I say. “But now that I’ve met you, I kind of wish I was.”
She likes that I said this to her.
I stand up and prepare to head to my new bedroom to begin
rearranging. Before I walk out, I lock her bedroom door from
the inside, and then I turn around and smile at her.
I slowly walk to her.
I take her by the hands and pull her up. I wrap my arm
around her lower back and pull her against me.
I kiss her.

---

chapter eleven
TATE
“I have to pee.”
Corbin groans. “Again?”
“I haven’t been in two hours,” I say defensively.
I really don’t have to use the bathroom, but I do need to
get out of this car. After the conversation I had with Miles
last night, the car feels different with him in it. It feels like
there’s more of him, and every minute that passes and he’s
not talking, I’m wondering what’s going through his head.
I’m wondering if he regrets our conversation. I’m wondering
if he’s going to pretend it never happened.
I wish my dad would have pretended it never happened.
Before we left this morning, I was seated at the kitchen
table with him when Miles walked in.
“Sleep well, Miles?” he asked as Miles took a seat at the
table.
I thought he was going to flush with embarrassment, but
instead, he regarded my dad with a shake of his head. “Not
too well,” Miles replied. “Your son talks in his sleep.”
My father picked up his glass and lifted it in Miles’s
direction. “Good to know you were in the room with Corbin
last night.”

---

Luckily, Corbin had yet to sit down and hear that comment
from my father. Miles was quiet through the rest of
breakfast, and the only time I noticed him speaking after
that was when Corbin and I were both in the car. Miles
stepped over to my father and shook his hand, saying
something that only my father could hear. I tried to read my
father’s expression, but he kept a tight lid on it. My father is
almost as good at hiding his thoughts as Miles is.
I really want to know what Miles said to my father this
morning before we left.
I also want to know about a dozen other answers to
questions I have about Miles.
When we were younger, Corbin and I always agreed that if
we could have any superpower, it would be the ability to fly.
Now that I know Miles, I’ve changed my mind. If I had a
superpower, it would be infiltration. I would infiltrate his
mind so I could see every single one of his thoughts.
I would infiltrate his heart and spread myself around like a
virus.
I would call myself the Infiltrator.
Yeah. That has a nice ring to it.
“Go 
pee
,” Corbin says with agitation as he puts the car in
park.
I wish I were in high school again so I could call him a
butthole. Adults don’t call their brothers buttholes, though.
I get out of the car and feel a little more like I can breathe
again, until Miles opens his door and steps out of the car
and into the world. Now Miles seems even bigger, and my
lungs seem smaller. We walk together into the gas station,
but we don’t speak.
It’s funny how that works. Sometimes not speaking says
more than all the words in the world. Sometimes my silence
is saying, 
I don’t know how to speak to you. I don’t know
what you’re thinking. Talk to me. Tell me everything you’ve
ever said. All the words. Starting from your very first one.
I wonder what his silence is saying.

---

Once we’re inside, he spots the sign for the bathrooms
first, so he nods his head and steps in front of me. He leads.
I let him. Because he’s a solid and I’m a liquid, and right
now, I’m just his wake.
When we reach the bathrooms, he walks into the men’s
restroom without pause. He doesn’t turn and look at me. He
doesn’t wait for me to walk into the women’s first. I push
the door open, but I don’t need to use the restroom. I just
wanted to breathe, but he’s not letting me. He’s invading. I
don’t think he means to. He’s just invading my thoughts and
my stomach and my lungs and my world.
That’s his superpower. Invasion.
The Invader and the Infiltrator. They pretty much have the
same meaning, so I guess we make one screwed-up team.
I wash my hands and waste enough time to make it seem
like I actually needed Corbin to stop here. I open the door to
the bathroom, and he’s invading again. He’s in my way,
standing in front of the doorway that I’m trying to exit.
He doesn’t move, even though he’s invading. I don’t really
want him to, though, so I let him stay.
“You want something to drink?” he asks.
I shake my head. “I have water in the car.”
“Hungry?”
I tell him I’m not. He seems slightly disappointed that I
don’t want anything. Maybe he doesn’t want to go back to
the car yet.
“I might want some candy, though,” I say.
One of his rare and treasured smiles slowly appears. “I’ll
buy you some candy, then.”
He turns and walks toward the candy aisle. I stop next to
him and look at my options. We stare at the candy for way
too long. I don’t even really want any, but we both stare at it
anyway and pretend we do.
“This is weird,” I whisper.
“What’s weird?” he asks. “Picking out candy or having to
pretend we don’t both want to be in the backseat right

---

now?”
Wow. I feel like I really did infiltrate his thoughts somehow.
Only they were words that he willingly spoke. Words that
made me feel really good.
“Both,” I say steadily. I turn to face him. “Do you smoke?”
He gives me the look again. The look that tells me I’m
weird.
I don’t care.
“Nope,” he replies casually.
“Remember those candy cigarettes they sold when we
were kids?”
“Yeah,” he says. “Kind of morbid, if you think about it.”
I nod. “Corbin and I used to get those all the time. There’s
no way in hell I’d let my child buy those things.”
“I doubt they make them anymore,” Miles says.
We face the candy again.
“Do you?” he asks.
“Do I what?”
“Smoke.”
I shake my head. “Nope.”
“Good,” he says. We stare at the candy a little bit longer.
He turns to face me, and I glance up at him. “Do you even
want any candy, Tate?”
“Nope.”
He laughs. “Then I guess we should get back to the car.”
I agree with him, but neither of us moves.
He reaches down to my hand and touches it so softly it’s
as if he’s aware he’s made of lava and I’m not. He grips two
of my fingers, not even coming close to holding my entire
hand, and gives them a soft tug.
“Wait,” I say to him, tugging back on his hand. He glances
at me over his shoulder and then turns to face me
completely. “What did you say to my father this morning?
Before we left?”
His fingers tighten around mine, and his expression
doesn’t deviate from the poignant look he’s perfected. “I

---

apologized to him.”
He turns toward the door once again, and I follow him this
time. He doesn’t release my hand until we’re close to the
exit. When he finally does let my hand fall, I evaporate
again.
I follow him toward the car and hope I don’t really believe
I’m capable of infiltration. I remind myself he’s made of
armor. He’s impenetrable.
I don’t know if I can do this, Miles. I don’t know if I can
follow rule number two, because I suddenly want to climb
into your future more than I want to climb into the backseat
with you.
“Long line,” Miles says to Corbin once we’re both inside
the car. Corbin puts the car in drive and changes the radio
station. He doesn’t care how long the line was. He wasn’t
suspicious, or he would have said something. Besides,
there’s nothing to be suspicious of yet.
We drive for a good fifteen minutes before I realize I’m not
thinking about Miles anymore. For the last fifteen minutes of
the drive, my thoughts have just been memories.
“Remember when we were kids and we wished our
superpower could be to fly?”
“Yeah, I remember,” Corbin says.
“You have your superpower now. You can fly.”
Corbin smiles at me in the rearview mirror. “Yeah,” he
says. “I guess that makes me a superhero.”
I lean back in the seat and stare out the window, a little
envious of both of them. Envious of the things they’ve seen.
The places they’ve traveled. “What’s it like, watching the
sunrise from up in the air?”
Corbin shrugs. “I don’t really look at it,” he says. “I’m too
busy working when I’m up there.”
This makes me sad. 
Don’t take it for granted, Corbin.
“
I
look,” Miles says. He’s staring out his window, and his
voice is so quiet I almost don’t hear it. “Every time I’m up
there, I watch it.”

---

He doesn’t say what it’s like, though. His voice is distant,
like he wants to keep that feeling to himself. I let him.
“You bend the laws of the universe when you fly,” I say.
“It’s impressive. Defying gravity? Watching sunrises and
sunsets from places Mother Nature didn’t intend for you to
watch them from? You really are superheroes, if you think
about it.”
Corbin glances at me in the rearview mirror and laughs.
Don’t take it for granted, Corbin.
Miles isn’t laughing,
though. He’s still staring out his window.
“You save lives,” Miles says to me. “That’s way more
impressive.”
My heart absorbs those words on impact.
Rule number two is not looking good from back here.

---

chapter twelve