“Do you need to talk?” He shrugs, refusing to look at me. “Meet outside in five?”
He nods after a second. I close my window, throw on my shoes, and run downstairs, stopping to make a mug of hot chocolate.
Careful not to spill it as I step outside, I watch Sammie pull himself up and over the brick wall dividing our yards. It’s ridiculously low near the back, but neither house has ever minded the lack of privacy, considering how well we get along with the Nasar family.
He stumbles toward the closest rosebush to the wall, fingertips grazing a vibrant yellow rose, following the lines of the veins until he hits the red edges of each petal. I suppress an embarrassing shiver at watching the intimacy of his movements.
“I’m doing well this season.” He plucks a petal off the rose and rubs it between his fingertips until it turns to mush. “Very hardy.”
“You won’t be for much longer if you keep picking off the petals like that,” I scold, and pass him the hot chocolate. “Drink.”
Last year, after the Valentine’s Day dance fiasco with Lindsay and Wesley, Sammie was a mess. For a week, he was either eerily quiet or snapping at anyone who tried talking to him. On a particularly bad day after his attitude caused a fight with one of his sisters, he stumbled into my yard while I was gardening and sat, silently watching me while visibly fighting back tears.
He was so attentive and quiet that I decided to confess I’d started “assigning” different rose breeds to each of our friends. It was the one thing I’d ever kept hidden from him, Ags, and my parents, but something about his gentle vulnerability made me want to share the secret.
I took everything into consideration: flower shape, fragrance, disease resistance, ease of growth, blooming season, etc. Any information I could find about the rose was noted before I made my final decision.
Sammie had been a Tequila Sunrise rose before I’d even decided to assign the flowers. They were one of the first roses I’d ever learned about, even though they’re a newer breed. A stunning blend of rich sunshine yellow and deep red, bold and reliable, lightly fragranced like the mist of cologne always lingering on Sammie’s lanky frame. Average resistance against diseases—sturdy but not invincible.
His eyes trace his Tequila Sunrises before shifting to Lindsay’s Fragrant Clouds—intense, coral-red roses that bloom easily with glossy, heavily scented petals. They’re easy to handle when you get past the intimidation of their beauty.
He moves past my fenced-in roses to sit on the concrete bench bordering the lawn. I sit down beside him as he sips the cocoa, the surface cold on my bare legs. I hug my knees to my chest and lean my head on his shoulder. “Do you want to talk about it?”
He shrugs, knocking my head off his shoulder before I roll back into place. We’ve spent many a night sitting just like this while he’s cried about Islamophobia from kids at school, his relationship struggles, his worries about his future in academia, and more. And I’ve cried to him about diaspora-baby problems, mean boys with pretty smiles but ugly words, floating between identities and cultures that always feel two steps away from fully being mine. We become open books with each other, but right now he’s slammed completely shut.
“Would it help you talk about it if we made fun of my bad romantic encounters first?” I say, and feel his shoulders relax with the relief of postponing his vulnerability. “We could talk about Jamie from fifth grade, how I cried for two hours when he refused to sign my yearbook because he was ‘dating’ Jen Russell.”
“I prefer remembering him crying for two hours when I pushed him in the mud for not signing your yearbook,” Sammie laughs, rocking me slightly.
“And then you signed my yearbook so big that you took up the entire page.” Sammie exhales with the memory.
He scoots off the bench and drops onto the grass, patting the space beside him. I join him, jealous of his jeans and long sleeves as the grass prickles against my skin. We lie back at the same time, twisting our necks to look at the minimal stars visible in the sky. Chirping crickets fill the otherwise silent moment.
I clear my throat. “Sammie, what happened tonight with you and Lindsay?”
“I think I missed my chance,” he says quietly, like he’s afraid of me hearing him.
“Was your nondate really that bad?”
“No, that’s the worst part,” he groans, throwing his arm over his eyes. “It was completely fine, completely normal.”
I sit up on my elbows. “Then why are we lying in wet, cold grass at nearly one A.M.?”
“Because nothing’s changed between us! Nothing! We didn’t talk about anything important, not like I do with you or like she probably does with Wesley. We talked about her sisters, my sisters, what grades we got on the English test last week … nothing that actually mattered. I just thought maybe now that we’re getting ready for prom with graduation just around the corner, I don’t know, that we’d click somehow. That we’d have some super deep, important conversation, and at the end of it she’d just smile and say, ‘Sammie, please be my boyfriend.’” He pauses, then groans. “What kind of weirdo gets this hung up on someone they’ve never even hooked up with?”
I smile tightly and point a finger at myself. To be fair, given their individual track records with hookups, it is kind of wild that their intimacy with each other has never gone beyond a tight hug.
“Ugh, I’m turning into you,” he whines.
“Sammie, Sammie, Sammie,” I sigh, and lie back down, ignoring his dig. “You were basically on a date already. Why didn’t you just finally tell her how you feel?”
“Because I’m scared. It’s always been like this weird tightrope walk with us when it comes to our feelings. I know we’ve been at this for years, but if I fuck up and scare her off…” His voice trails off. The backyard feels so still. He takes several shaky breaths and pulls at his hair. I tell myself it’s because it’s late, this time of night bringing everyone to their most vulnerable. Because the alternative, that he’s really fallen this deeply for Lindsay when this whole time Agatha and I have been treating their flirtationship like a joke, is too heavy to accept right now. Maybe I just haven’t been paying close enough attention. Maybe Sammie didn’t want me to.
He clears his throat, and when he speaks again, his voice sounds deeper. “Whatever, I’m probably just being a little bitch about this,” he says, falling swiftly back into his role as my cool and collected best friend.
“Hey, be overemotional all you want, but don’t drag us actual little bitches into this,” I reply. He takes the out and rolls his eyes, wiping them quickly as I pretend not to notice their dampness.
“Whatever. Did you finish your DBQs?”
“No,” I say, my heart beginning to pound. “I actually went to get grad pics done … with Talia.”