But that’s not what happened, exactly.
When I opened my eyes and tried to move my toes, as I did every morning—one of them did something utterly shocking.
It moved.
It wiggled.
The big toe on my right foot, to be exact.
Part of me thought I might still be asleep.
I tried again, and it moved again.
“Hey!” I shouted. “Hey!”
In seconds, all three of my lake housemates came bursting through the door in a hilarious potpourri of pajamas that made it clear I was definitely the first one up. Kit was in a hot-pink negligée, a sight I’d never seen before, and Fat Benjamin had a remarkable, gravity-defying bed-beard situation going on. Ian, I did my best not to notice, slept in blue cotton pajama bottoms. Only. Also, his hair was even more unruly than Benjamin’s beard—but to be honest, it just made him cuter.
None of that mattered, anyway. “Am I dreaming?” I demanded.
“The sun’s not even up,” Kit said, in her best big-sister voice.
“I need to know if I’m dreaming right now. Am I?”
Fat Benjamin ventured, “Of course, if you were dreaming, then we wouldn’t really be able to give you a straight answer.”
Ian stepped closer. “What’s going on?”
“Look,” I said, pointing at my toe.
Everybody looked.
I pushed it down, then pulled it back.
“No! You! Did! Not!” Kit shrieked, turning around to hug me.
“What?” Benjamin said. “I missed it.”
“Do it again,” Ian said.
I did it again.
“Does it happen every time you try?” Ian asked.
“So far,” I said.
“Can you do the other one?”
I tried. Nothing. I shook my head.
Ian did a little mini-evaluation right then, even though he didn’t have any of the right equipment. Or a shirt. We didn’t learn much, except to confirm that—one—the toe was, in fact, wiggling on command, and—two—I was not dreaming.
“What does it mean?” I asked Ian.
“It means there’s more information getting through than there used to be.”
It wasn’t an unreasonable answer, but it wasn’t what I’d wanted him to say.
Or Kit, either, apparently. “It means she’ll walk again!” She started jumping up and down. “Right?”
We all looked at my toe again.
I wiggled it, showing off.
But Ian wasn’t jumping. He stared at the toe somberly. “Not necessarily,” he said, like a buzzkill.
“But it’s not a bad sign,” I said.
“It’s a hell of a birthday present,” he said. “I’ll give it that.”
*
DESPITE THE TOE-RELATED excitement, I managed to have several childish and ungenerous thoughts about Ian on the drive home. What a downer he was, for example. How he refused to let himself—or anyone else—be happy. How he squandered opportunities for joy. Maybe I should work with a different trainer. Somebody who knew how to motivate and inspire. Maybe Ian’s intolerance for hope was holding me back.
Kit was absolutely spazzy with excitement about the whole outing.
“I never knew your toe was such a genius,” she said on the drive. “It’s, like, the Neil Armstrong of toes. Or maybe Abraham Lincoln.”
As far as she knew, the weekend had been better than perfect. She had many topics she wanted to cover, but number one, for sure, just as soon as we finished our discussion of which famous person from history best represented my big toe, was “What the hell was going on between you and Braveheart when we walked in on you last night?”
I wanted to tell her. Badly. I wanted to give her the slow-mo replay of every single significant moment and spend the rest of the car ride and even the next several days analyzing the data into submission. I could see many vastly different, totally contradictory interpretations of Ian’s behavior (and choices, and tone of voice, and facial expressions), and I had no clue which one was right.
But I couldn’t tell her.
Kit had no real sense of privacy. I tried to chalk it up to exuberance—if she had the goods, she just had to share—but she was a little gossipy, too. She also gabbed on the cell phone all the time with no sense of who might be nearby listening. And do not get me started on her issues with Instagram.
I did not doubt that Myles would try to take away Ian’s license if he ever got wind of what had happened. I’d seen him menacing Ian in the gym every day for weeks. I’d watch him trying to provoke Ian, needling him, pushing his buttons, hoping to goad him into doing something stupid, and I’d think, “That’s a lot of anger.”
I felt a little sorry for Myles, and the way something in his life compelled him to seek vengeance instead of just moving on. But I felt sorrier for Ian. Myles really was a revenge-driven prick.
Mostly, that was a problem for Ian, but it was a problem for me today, because it meant I couldn’t do the one thing I wanted more than anything in the world to do right then: tell Kitty everything.
She was waiting. “Were you hooking up, or what?”
“Sadly,” I said, “no.”
“No? What were you doing on the floor?”
“He tripped,” I said with a shrug, like, No big deal.
Kit squinted her eyes like she did not believe me at all.
I had to ramp it up. “You know those little rag rugs Mom has everywhere? He tripped on one at the threshold. And, seriously, then he managed to heroically catch me on the way down.”
Kit studied me out of the side of her eye. “Bullshit.”
“I swear,” I declared then, “on my wiggly big toe.”
That did it. “Okay,” she said. “So what was going on between you? Because the romantic tension was so thick you could wear it like a sweater.”
I told myself it wasn’t lying, exactly. It was just mushing up the truth. “At the bonfire, I confessed some feelings to him.”
“Yum,” Kit said. “I love confessed feelings.”
“I told him I had a huge, all-consuming, heart-wrenching crush and that he was basically the only thing I looked forward to all day.”
“Besides gourmet takeout with your sister.”
“Of course.”
“And what did he say?”
Now I was grateful to him. Because this shit was too good to make up. “He said: No, I didn’t.”
“No, you didn’t what?”
“No, I didn’t have a crush on him.”
Kit looked straight at me. “What the hell?”
“Eyes on the road, please.”
“Explain!”
“He said I only thought I had a crush on him, and that this kind of thing happens all the time, and my life has been pulverized and so I’m grasping at any straws of happiness I can, but once I get through this, I’ll realize that it was all in my head and I never had any real feelings for him at all. Not really.”
“He did not say that.”
“He did. Then he cited a whole bunch of studies from his training and basically told me that I was a teenage girl with Boy Band syndrome—thinking that some kindhearted prince was going to come in and take all my sorrows away.”
I was a better liar than I thought. Though that kind of was what he’d said.
“Is he right?” Kit asked.
“No!” I said. “Nobody can take these problems away. Unless this toe thing turns out to be a surprise miracle.”
“He didn’t return your feelings at all? Nothing?”
“Nothing,” I said. “He basically told me that I have all his best wishes as a healthcare professional, but to shut the fuck up and go to bed. Then he tried to make me do just that, tripped on a rag rug, and got crushed under my dead weight. Insult to injury.”
“He’s lying,” Kit said. “I see the way he looks at you.”
I couldn’t help it. “How does he look at me?”
“Like you’re a waterfall in a desert.”
Did he? The idea of it made my stomach flip. But I had to keep obfuscating. “Guess what else? He knew how I felt before I even told him because I’ve been mooning at him for weeks, and he didn’t discourage me because he thought it might help my recovery.”
“Narcissist!” Kit shouted.
“Yeah,” I said. “But the thing is, he wasn’t wrong. You know you always work harder for teachers you have crushes on.”
Kit nodded, and just from knowing her face almost as many years as I’d known my own, I knew I was in the clear. She’d bought it.