Having gone pretty much straight from the hotel to her parents’ house, they hadn’t had a lot of time to look around Beacon Hill yet, but she was more than happy to show him the streets where she’d run around as a kid. The fascinated excitement on his face was so sweet to her, and she couldn’t stop smiling. “You should see it around Christmas, everything’s straight out of some Hallmark movie. I think that’s what I miss the most about living here.” At least she usually came back home for the holidays, which had only given her a newfound appreciation for the neighborhood. The summer in Boston wasn’t too bad either, and getting to share it with Matt only made it better. She laughed as he mentioned Newark, wrapping an arm around his waist when his went across her shoulders. “I’ve literally never been so I’m actually excited to see your ugly hometown. It better be as bad as you say, or I’m gonna be really disappointed.” She was mostly being sarcastic, but despite all of Matt’s warnings she was still genuinely excited to see where he grew up and even meet his parents, horrible as they apparently were.
“Don’t know why you’d assume I smoked weed,” she said with a joking pout as she steered them around a street corner and toward the river. “We’d actually just sit in our backyard a lot whenever my parents were at the restaurant all night. Or we’d hang out on the esplanade. If you go at night it’s really quiet and no one really bothers you. Guess I’m gonna show you.” It was already part of the plan for where they were headed, but having the added memories of going there as a teenager definitely only made it better, even if it was the wrong time of day to be fully authentic. Though with Matt being Matt, she was sure he at least had some weed on him, so that was good enough. “I’ll take you to the frog pond too on the way back. I hung out there a lot, and I ran around chasing frogs all the time as a kid, so we should do that. My mom’s literally gonna kill me if I start bringing frogs home again, but it’d be totally worth it.”
“My mistake,” Matt said dryly, “I forgot you are and always have been straight edge.” He might have believed Mia hadn’t smoked weed when she was in high school, at least, but her little pout made him positive that wasn’t the case. He tried to imagine her back then, fresh-faced and seventeen and hanging out with her friends by the river at night, and the funny thing was that he could picture it perfectly. It wasn’t actually that different than the Mia he knew now, who was not unlike a teenager still in all of her uninhibited effervescence and shameless fangirling. Maybe that was why the revelation that she used to bring frogs home against her mom’s wishes didn’t surprise him in the slightest. “God, of course you did,” he said with a roll of his eyes, ruined by his grin. “Did you try to kiss them too? At least they don’t sting, I guess.”
When they got to the river’s edge they found the esplanade about as crowded as he’d imagined it would be, so they started off around the perimeter instead, the whole thing as beautiful and picturesque as her neighborhood. And, choosing a tree near the water where it was a little quieter, he pulled her over to sit down beneath it on the grass. “Why did you move?” he asked as he pulled out a joint, probably not the best idea but he wasn’t all that concerned. “I mean this is really beautiful. Don’t misunderstand me, I love LA, but it’s...it’s not this. It’s inauthentic, it’s self-referential. I mean leaving Jersey, that’s a no-brainer,” he joked. “But this? Your awesome parents? Was that hard?”
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