Chapter Seventeen

August 26

I don’t know which of us pulls away first, only that we separate. His fingers leave my chin and I let go of his arms. And

now we’re staring at each other. He’s closer than he’s been since I got back—maybe closer than he’s ever been. Even in the

shadowy parking lot, I could count his eyelashes and the bright pinpricks in his eyes from the distant football lights. I

can hear him breathing and my heart hammering. I can feel his warmth.

And then he takes a step back, letting go of me. Something crosses his face that I can’t read.

“I should go back,” he says.

Wait. What?

But he’s already retreating, moving away from the truck, from me.

“Michael,” I say.

He turns away, shoulders hunching up to his ears. And he keeps walking, weaving through the cars in the parking lot, heading

for the bleachers.

What just happened?

I stare after him, my mind spinning, and I can’t decide whether I should yell at him or run after him, but I can’t come up

with anything to yell and my feet are rooted to the asphalt. How did he go from giving me bug spray to kissing me to abandoning

me in the span of five minutes?

But now it’s too late, because he’s gone. Disappeared around the corner of the bleachers, and I’m alone.

What am I supposed to do now? I can’t just go back to the bleachers and climb up and sit next to him again like nothing happened. I can’t imagine getting through the rest of the football game, hanging on the edge of the conversation with Natalie and Rebecca and Cody and Brendan, pretending to be fine.

I bite my lip, and it still tastes like him—a little salty, a little like popcorn.

I press my fingers to my eyes under my glasses. And then I pull out my phone. But I don’t text Michael. I text my mom.

I’m sorry, I know the game isn’t over yet, but can we go? I’m in the parking lot.

I swallow, blinking, because the corners of my eyes sting. My heart won’t slow down.

MOM

On my way.

Michael drove me to school on the last day of junior year, just like he had all week because his bike needed a new tire. But

when he parked, we just sat there, staring at Plainview while a warm, early summer breeze wafted through the open windows

of his dad’s white pickup. Neither of us wanted to get out of the car.

“First thing you’re going to do tomorrow,” Michael said.

I blearily rubbed my eyes. “Sleep?”

He glanced at me with an expression somewhere between vague concern and deep judgment. “Did you go to bed in your clothes

again?”

I looked down at myself. I was wearing cargo shorts and my Veronica Mars T-shirt, and they were both wrinkled. “I changed clothes before I got in bed,” I said defensively. “It’s not like these are

yesterday’s clothes. Ten extra minutes is ten extra minutes.”

Michael sighed. I’d recently started going to sleep in the clothes I was going to wear to school the next day so I could sleep

in a little longer in the morning. Sure, I woke up rumpled, but I didn’t care; the extra sleep was worth it.

Of course, the only reason I needed those few minutes of extra sleep was because I was staying up way too late reading fanfiction. Which I hadn’t told Michael. And I wasn’t going to. It wasn’t that I thought Michael would be pretentious about fanfiction or something. I had a feeling that if he knew there was Marvel fanfiction he’d start reading it immediately.

It was more that the fanfiction I was reading was... gay.

I’d only discovered fanfiction a few weeks ago, after Michael and I watched the episode of Buffy where Willow and Tara kissed for the first time. My heart pounded through the whole scene. They were just... kissing.

Like it was fine. Normal. Nothing to comment on.

Later that night, I went looking for fan art. I wanted to see that kiss again. I wanted to see it become stylized and beautiful.

And, I guess, I wanted proof that other people kept thinking about it too.

I found fan art. And then I found fanfiction.

“What’s the first thing you’re going to do tomorrow?” I asked Michael.

He chewed his lip, staring through the windshield at the front steps of the high school. People were already climbing them;

we’d have to get out of the truck soon or we’d be late.

“Go to the video store,” he said. He looked at me. “Want to rent the next Buffy DVD? We could do a marathon to kick off summer.”

My heart fluttered in my chest. We hadn’t watched Buffy in weeks—since the episode where Willow and Tara kissed. I was starting to wonder if Michael didn’t want to watch anymore.

I worried maybe it was the kiss. He hadn’t said anything when it happened. Of course, I hadn’t, either. It was too much. And

anyway, the whole episode was, aside from the kiss, a huge downer, so we kind of quickly moved on.

“What about my mom’s rules?” I said.

“Maybe she’d let you watch more than two episodes because it’s summer?” Michael wiggled the truck key until it came free of

the ignition. It tended to get stuck. “Like, we could say we’re celebrating the end of school.”

I shifted. It was warm enough that my T-shirt was sticking to my back, trapped against the ripped fabric of the truck’s bench

seat. “I guess I could try.” I checked my watch. “We should go.”

“Yeah.” Michael kicked open his door, grabbing his backpack from the middle of the bench seat, and climbed down from the truck. “We could hit up the bookstore too. When do you start working again?”

“Next weekend.” I slammed the passenger door, shouldering my own backpack. I’d worked occasional weekends for the last few

months, but Hank had let me take a few weeks off to get through the end of the school year. “Why?”

Michael gave me a look that I recognized as his I Want Comics face. He was very good at puppy-dog eyes and genuinely didn’t seem to even realize that’s what he was doing. It was unfair.

“Oh, come on, seriously?” I rolled my eyes. “Why is it so hard to ask Hank to get your comics?”

“I do ask Hank,” Michael said. “But Hank doesn’t understand comics. He has to repeat the title back to me five times and then gives

me this look like, What is this drivel ?”

I laughed. “This is the real reason you hang out with me at the store. You just want me to keep working there so you can get

your comics without talking to Hank.”

Michael pulled open the front door of the high school, holding it while I walked through. But before he could walk through

himself, Natalie Linsmeier and Rebecca Voss dashed in ahead of him.

“Thanks,” Rebecca said.

Natalie glanced at me, her eyes moving over my wrinkled clothes. She didn’t say anything to me. But I still heard her when

she said to Rebecca, as they walked away, “God, it’s so sad when pretty girls don’t get how many more guys would hold the

door for them if they just put in some effort .”

“Yeah,” Rebecca said.

Michael walked through the door and we started wandering slowly after them and everyone else, heading for homeroom. I think

we were both dragging our feet to let Natalie and Rebecca get farther away.

“I didn’t hold the door for Natalie on purpose,” Michael said.

I knew that, but somehow the fact that he felt like he had to say it—like I needed reassurance that him holding the door had

nothing to do with how pretty Natalie was...

It made me feel weird. Like we were both acknowledging that Natalie was pretty.

Like we were both acknowledging that guys probably did hold doors open for her.

Maybe that was why I asked, “Do you think I’m pretty?”

Michael’s shoulders rose to his ears. “Um. What do you mean?”

I stopped. So abruptly that he kept walking a few steps without me. “What do you mean, What do you mean? It’s just a question.”

Michael’s eyes skipped to my face and then away. “You mean, like, am I attracted to you?”

I felt embarrassed and disappointed and hurt, and foolish for feeling all of those things. “Never mind.”

We were silent for the rest of the walk to homeroom.

All Mom says when she meets me at the Jeep, Mr. Grumpy waddling along next to her, is “Ready to go?”

“Yeah.” I feel childish that I had to text her and grateful that she showed up in the parking lot in less than five minutes,

acting like nothing strange had happened. “Is that okay?”

“Oh, it’s getting late.” She hands Mr. Grumpy’s leash to me and unlocks the Jeep. “Grumpy’s ready for bed.”

Mr. Grumpy just blinks slowly at me, his ears dragging on the ground. I lean down and heave him into the back seat.

We’re quiet on the drive back to the house. The noise of the game fades and the darkness gets, well, darker, as we leave the

high school behind. I roll down my window, letting cool air hit my face. A few fireflies wink by the side of the road, and

the crickets are so loud that I can hear them even over the breeze buffeting my ears.

Mom pulls the Jeep up next to the rental car in the driveway. The motor sputters to silence, and then she looks at me. “Everything

okay?”

“Yeah.” I say it automatically, because it’s always what I’ve said. Except for when I called her from New York.

And maybe that should have broken down whatever barrier has prevented us from talking about anything real , but I still can’t bring myself to tell her what just happened. It’s too fragile. Too complicated. And anyway, I’ve never talked to my mom about anybody I kissed. Not the kissing part anyway. She met my college girlfriend and my grad school boyfriend. She’d ask how they were when we talked on the phone. And it stopped there.

And I don’t know how I would explain that this was Michael. This is Michael.

She runs into Michael at the grocery store. I don’t know what to do with that.

Despite saying it was getting late, Mom plunks down on the couch as soon as we get inside. It’s barely eight thirty, and she’s

clearly not actually tired.

“How about Marble Arch Murders ?” she says, picking up the remote.

“Yeah,” I say. “Sure.”

I fold up on the other side of the couch while she pulls up the next episode. Mr. Grumpy wanders over, and we lean down together

and lift him onto the cushion between us. I dig the fingers of one hand into Mr. Grumpy’s short fur and make myself stare

at the little old lady on the screen as the quirky music starts playing.

But I keep pressing my lips together, thinking of Michael’s mouth against mine, and the closeness of him, and the pull of

everything I wanted back.

I keep thinking of Young Darby in the bookstore, excited to go off to boarding school, with only a shrug at the thought of

leaving Michael and Oak Falls behind.

I keep thinking of the way Michael said, You mean am I attracted to you, that last day of junior year, and the curl of hurt and embarrassment in my stomach.

“Mom?”

She blinks, jerking her attention away from the TV. “Yeah?”

I take a breath, hesitating, because this feels dangerously close to talking about something real. “Do you think it was good

that I did that semester at boarding school?”

She glances back at the TV. The little old lady has just arrived in a scenic country village in the English countryside and

is wandering around, commenting how it’s not like London at all. “What do you mean?”

“I guess... sometimes I wonder if I missed something by leaving.”

She runs her fingers along one of Mr. Grumpy’s long ears. “Like what?”

“I don’t know. Something important.”

She hesitates. “I don’t know if I can answer that for you, Darby.” She looks at me again, and now her eyes are almost sad.

“You didn’t really talk to me very much.”

My chest tightens, because of course she’s right. And she still came right out to the parking lot when I texted her. She must

have known something was up. Just like I’m sure, looking back on it, that she knew something was up all those evenings we

watched reruns of Frasier together in the basement.

If she asked about school, I said everything was fine.

If she asked how my shift at the bookstore went, I said fine.

If she asked about Michael...

Well, she didn’t really ask about Michael. Not after those first few weeks. When I first got back, she asked every once in

a while if I was going to hang out with him soon. If I wanted to have him over and watch TV in the basement.

I kept saying no. I guess eventually she figured it out.

I wish, in this moment, that she would ask about Michael. Telepathically figure out, somehow, that she should ask. If she

did, right now—I might tell her. Maybe I wouldn’t tell her he kissed me, and I definitely, absolutely kissed him back. But

I might tell her that I didn’t get how Michael could just fit at that football game while I felt like a jumble of mismatched pieces, just like I did in high school.

Instead, all I say is “Sorry.”

Mom reaches over and pats my leg. “You don’t have to be sorry. And...” She sighs. “I think you wanted to leave, Darby.”

My stomach twists. I know what she means. That it doesn’t really matter if now, looking back, I wonder what I missed by going.

Because when I was sixteen, I wasn’t thinking about any of that. If I hadn’t gone, I would have spent the whole semester wondering

what I was missing by staying.

She means that I couldn’t see any other option except to go—and since I couldn’t, neither could she.

“Yeah,” I say.

She puts her feet up on the coffee table, and I lean my elbow on the arm of the couch and set my chin in my hand. We watch the rest of the episode, letting it fill the room while Mr. Grumpy snores. I try to focus on all the ways this is new and different—the two of us surrounded by boxes, in the living room instead of the basement, on the couch instead of an old futon—instead of all the ways this feels familiar, and I feel just as empty.