I gripped the glass in my hand.
His words spilled out, like he was trying to say them before he lost his nerve. “Which I guess means the you-and-David thing never worked out.”
My cheeks were burning. He was doing this again. We were picking up exactly where we’d left off. I squeezed the glass hard enough to make my hand hurt. “Even if it did,” I said quietly, “you’re the last person I would tell.”
Jamie didn’t back down. “So that means it didn’t.”
“Shut up!” I snapped, embarrassment ripping through me. “I don’t want to talk to you. I don’t even want to see you, Jamie. Not you or your ridiculous hat or anything. You should have stayed in the States another fucking week.”
Jamie looked up at me. His eyes were exactly the same, as green, as gold, as telling as they used to be. Meeting his gaze was like holding my hand over an open flame. I hated him. I officially hated him. For coming back, for making me feel this way, for turning me into this person.
“You need to leave,” I said. “Now.”
Something that might have been guilt flickered across his face, but was quickly replaced with a cool, blank expression. “Sure,” he said. “I’ll go.”
He walked to the kitchen door. And then turned right back around. He washed out his water glass in the sink and put it on the drying rack. I stood awkwardly to the side, waiting for him to get out. My throat felt so tight, I could hardly believe there was air moving through it.
And then he was gone.
When I heard the front door click shut, I ran to lock it. I even stood there for a minute, staring out the peephole, just to make sure he wasn’t coming back. The paranoia passed, and I went into Mika’s colossal bathroom to change and brush my teeth with the spare toothbrush I kept there. I placed Mika’s glass of water on her nightstand before crawling into bed.
When I flicked off the light, the glow-in-the-dark stars on her ceiling burned slowly to green. Mika must have put on music because Alanis Morissette Unplugged was playing from her computer.
“Mika?” I whispered.
“Hmmm.”
“Are you awake?”
“Mmmhmm.”
“Are you actually awake?”
“Hm.”
“I really don’t want this to end,” I said. “I really, really don’t want everything to change.”
Mika snored. She’d reached the final stage: Dead-Asleep Drunk.
I rolled onto my stomach and parted the curtains behind the bed. There were blinking lights everywhere—on the antennae on top of buildings, on an airplane passing across the sky, on the streets below in moving headlights. So many lights floating in front of me, a universe of infinite stars.
I really, really, really don’t want this to end.
The music stopped as I closed the curtains and lay down. In the quiet darkness, I thought about stars. The ones that aren’t stars at all, but memories of ones that burned out millions of years ago. I thought about the stars that had already collapsed and turned into black holes, places where even light can’t escape. Places where, from a distance, time seems to stop.
I held my wrist above my head and clicked the button on the side of my watch. The screen turned a bright blue—1:07 AM. I clicked the button again and the display changed to a countdown: 06:10:42:10, 06:10:42:09, 06:10:42:08…
I lay awake for hours, wishing I could grab the seconds and hold them between my fingers—but only watching as they fell away, and disappeared forever.
“It’s awesome!” I say to Dad.
“It’s pink,” Alison says. She’s ten years old and wearing her new Pokémon pajamas. “Mom does not let us wear pink.”
“It’s not pink.” I run my hands over the embroidered flowers on the wristband of my new watch. “It’s purple.”
“It’s purple and the flowers are pink,” Dad chimes in. “And it’s not just a watch.” He smiles and raises both his eyebrows. When Dad makes that face, he looks like a zany science teacher, which is exactly what he is. “Behold!” Dad takes the watch from me. “You press this button on the side two times and—ta-da! You have a countdown!”
“I love it!” I scrunch up my nose. “What’s it for?”
Dad jumps up and goes into his bedroom, which is also his study.
It’s never quiet in Dad’s apartment, not even when no one is talking. The Birds is playing on the TV, and there are church bells going off across the street and motorcycles vrooming below. Pigeons flutter by the window like Christmas doves.
When Dad comes back, he’s holding a calendar full of pictures of Japan. He flips through them, and I see cherry blossoms and shrines covered in snow and koi-fish kites, their colorful tails wriggling in the wind. Dad hands me the calendar. “The next time you two come to France, it will be May sixteenth. This watch tells you how many days and hours and minutes and seconds are left until May sixteenth. See? Not just a watch!”
“So it’s a time machine,” I say.
Alison makes a “gah” noise and rolls her eyes—Mom calls that her signature move.
Dad laughs. “Yes. It is. You just have to wait until it beeps and all the numbers are zeroes.”
“What happens then?” I ask.
Dad rubs his chin. “You can start another one. For next Christmas maybe. For anything you want.”
His phone starts to ring, so he jumps up again to answer it.
Alison leans toward me and hisses, “You better not let Mom see you wearing that. It is so not gender neutral, and she will totally kill you.”
“Shut up,” I say, cradling the watch against my chest. “I love it, and I’m going to wear it every day until forever.”
CHAPTER 6
MONDAY
WHEN MY PHONE ALARM WENT OFF, I lay in bed for a minute and waited for memories of last night to suck me into a vortex of embarrassment and self-pity.