“Wait.” I reached out and grabbed his arm. I wasn’t done talking to him. I hadn’t started talking to him. His eyes zeroed in on the hand I had locked around his arm. He didn’t flinch or try to shake me off. He stood there, hyperfocused on it.
Unsure of what to say, I let go and dropped my backpack to the floor. I unzipped it and pulled out the e-mail I’d stashed inside. “Here,” I said, and handed it to him. “I don’t know what it says. I was too scared to look.”
Josh took the paper from my hands and stared at it much the same way I had in the kitchen. I saw the slight tremor in his hands, knew that he was as anxious as I was to see what it said.
“This isn’t your e-mail address,” he said.
I pushed it back in his direction when he tried to hand it to me. “I know. It’s my mom’s. She got it yesterday and printed it off.” I left out the part about my mom not sleeping, about the circles under her eyes, the messy house, and the fact that I was quite sure she hadn’t showered or changed since yesterday. Josh liked my mom. He thought she was sweet, always cooking him food or asking to see his latest drawing. I didn’t want that to change. For either of them.
“So ask her what it says if you’re so curious.”
I took a step back at the harshness of his words. This was the plan. This was always the plan. We’d both dreamed about this since freshman year. We’d both applied early decision to the same school. We were going to open the replies together, each one reading the other’s letter. That was the deal.
“I’m not asking my mom. I’m asking you.”
He grunted something incoherent and started reading. My eyes tracked from the paper to his face, seeking any indication of what it said. I got nothing.
“Well? What does it say?” I inched forward to read it myself. He tilted the paper out of my view.
“You still planning on being Maddy?”
“What? What does that have to do with anything?”
“Answer the question. Are you still playing Maddy?”
I stared at Josh, tried to decipher the hatred behind his words. Josh and I had fought before, but this was different. This was intense. “Yeah, why?”
Josh shook his head and walked past me, stopping in front of my old locker. He smoothed the e-mail out and shoved it between the thin slots at the top.
I could get it out, but I’d have to open the locker. That hadn’t gone so well my first day back, and I wasn’t looking for a repeat performance of that spectacle. “What did you do that for?”
“Because Maddy didn’t get in.”
“Wait, you mean? Did they say no? They really said no?” I knew there was a chance, a strong possibility more likely, that I wouldn’t get into RISD, but I had kind of refused to think about that, was banking on the yes until I had definitive proof otherwise. “Did you get in?”
I watched a smug grin play across his face. It made my stomach churn.
“Yeah, I did,” he said. “Ella did, too, but there is no chance of me seeing her at RISD this fall, is there? So much for our plans.”
Ella … me … I had gotten in. And he had, too. A huge grin covered my face, and it took every ounce of control I had not to throw my arms around him and cheer.
“What are you smiling for? You buried that dream with your lie.”
No, I didn’t. I never gave up on that dream. I put it on hold. For a little bit. Crap, he was right. “No. I’ll fix this. I will.”
“Umm hmm.” Josh took a step closer, and I could see the challenge in his eyes, the challenge for me to come clean. “And how, exactly, do you plan to do that, Maddy?”
Josh’s head snapped up at the exact same time I felt two arms come around my waist. “Everything good here?” Alex asked.
Josh shrugged. “I don’t know. Ask your girlfriend.”