Discovered Read Free Page B

to my soul,” he said, tying the silver chain around her
neck. Layla never took it off. She felt it connected her to her father, wherever
he was.
    “Your father was a hero,” Jay said awkwardly.
    Layla laughed once. “My dad wasn’t in the
services. He was there as a private contractor. He and James were partners
actually, and they had some sort of business opportunity there.”
    “What did he do?” Jay asked.
    “He and James owned a small pharmaceutical
company together, which James still operates. But what my dad was doing in
Afghanistan, I couldn’t tell you. He never did explain it all that well. Even
mom is not quite sure what the job entailed. The funny thing is, now that James
is sole owner, he’s never mentioned it again, which is strange, now that I
think about it.” She turned to look at Jay. He was staring straight ahead with
a strange, unreadable expression on his face.
    He looked sideways quickly. “What’s your mother’s
boyfriend’s name?” he asked.
    “James…James Morganson,” Layla answered.
    Jay coughed suddenly. He banged his right fist
on his chest briefly and then leaned over to fiddle with the volume of the
radio.
    “Are you alright?” she asked.
    “Fine,” he replied, turning quickly to smile at
her. “I suffer from fall allergies.”
    “Oh,” she answered.
    The conversation seemed to stop in its tracks,
an awkwardness settling over both of them.
    “Listen, Layla,” Jay said, breaking the uncomfortable
silence. “I know I said I’d come to your house tomorrow night, but I was just
thinking…”
    Layla’s heart sank. He was about to back out of
their plans. She should have known it was too good to be true.
    “My parents are out of town for a while,” he
continued, “so maybe we could do it at my house instead. We would have the
whole place to ourselves…” he trailed off and pinched the bridge of his nose
with his free hand. “I’m so sorry, that didn’t come out right. I’m not going to
try anything funny with you…ugh…” He shook his head at his own pathetic
stammering.
    Despite the fact that Layla didn’t know if she
should be offended by his obvious lack of attraction to her, she giggled. “No,
it’s alright. You really don’t seem like the brutish type.”
    “Sorry,” he said again. “Truth be told, I
really don’t do well with parents.”
    “That’s fine,” she replied. “I’ll have my
mother drop me off.”
    “No, no, I’ll pick you up outside your house at
seven,” he said quickly.
    They pulled up in front of her driveway. As
Layla undid her seatbelt, Jay jumped from the car and sped around to open the
door for her. Layla was somewhat shocked by the gentlemanly and old-fashioned
gesture. Great; just what she needed: another reason to pine for the mysterious
Jay Logan.
    Layla ate dinner that night in nostalgic
reflection, her previous excitement from earlier in the day buried under
thoughts of her father. She wondered what had happened to him, and wallowed in
self-pity that he had been taken from her so young. She went straight to her
bedroom after eating, not bothering to offer to clean up the dishes as she
usually did. In a melancholy mood, she reached into her wardrobe and grabbed
the old shoe box off the top shelf and sat it on the bed. Sitting down next to
it, she pulled off the lid and rummaged through it for the last picture she and
her dad had posed for together.
    Flushing Meadow Park was a place that Layla’s
mom and dad had taken her to on many occasions when she was a child. She loved
the 1964 World’s Fair Unisphere—the borough of Queens’ most iconic
structure—that she and her dad had stood in front of every year of her
childhood to have a picture taken.
    She loved checking her growth progression by
lining the pictures up in age order and looking over them one at a time. The
last one was taken when she was thirteen, their final trip to that park
together. It was three days before he left for Afghanistan.
    Layla