“Makes sense wanting to rewind things, though.”
Her silent understanding rings through the phone. Me, I’d go all the way back to elementary school, before permanent lines settled between my parents’ eyebrows.
“But also, fuck middle school,” I add, and she laughs.
Silence settles carefully, like ashes. “This is weird,” she says after a minute, and I say, “Yeah,” and she says, “I hate to, like, ruin your night—”
“You’re not—”
“Let’s just . . .”
“Yeah,” I say. “So, Saturday? My house? I can pick you up.”
“Okay, sure. I’ll send you my address, and . . . yeah, great.” Her voice is uncertain, tense with the weird anxiety I’m feeling, too, and I get this image of her eyes bleary and her long dark hair draped over her shoulder, and it startles me a little, the reminder that she’s a real, physical person, someone I’ll see in the flesh tomorrow at school. What will it be like, meeting her eyes after saying all this? I’m going to mess it up, won’t I? The easy slide of this conversation will disappear, and I’ll be back to my usual awkward mumbling.
“I’ll read Inferno,” I blurt out, without knowing why. Somehow, even though I haven’t done any required reading since I was twelve, it doesn’t feel like a straight-up lie.
She chuckles. “I’m holding you to that. See you tomorrow?” And I say, “Yeah,” and she says, “Bye, Matt.”
When she hangs up, it feels as if I’m surfacing from a deep dream. I draw a long breath, dazed, and carry Russ upstairs to tuck him in. As I shut myself back in my room, easing myself into bed, I can hardly believe that somewhere across town, Olivia picked up the phone and something happened—I don’t know what the hell it was—over the line.
A nervous voice creeps into my head, whispering, You should pull back before this inevitably goes sour. After all, twelve hours ago, I barely had the nerve to look her in the eye. But something else bounces around inside my head, louder than the creeping worry: the hesitant sound of her saying my name. I want to keep hearing it. I want to keep handing my voice back in reply. I grip my sheets tight at the thought and stare up at my ceiling, my jaw a little stiff and my heart a little fast.
The sound of her voice pins itself to my eardrum, echoing until I fall asleep.
ON FRIDAY MORNING, I HURRY THROUGH THE JUNIOR lot, counting cracks in the asphalt as my tightly knotted sneakers hit them. Twenty-three. Twenty-four. Twenty-five. I don’t look up for anything. Unexpected eye contact is one of my least favorite things. What do you do if you’re acquainted with the person? Nod? Smile? Stare blankly? Know thyself, said the Greeks, and knowing myself, the blank stare is all I would be able to manage.
The passing conversations bore me in three-second increments: grades and teachers, sports and scores, pop music and celebrity breakups. As if any of that matters. Why is everyone around me so vapid? I’m starting to think they should rename so-called intelligent life.
“Freeeak,” a voice drones at me. I glance up, narrowing my eyes at the group walking by. It’s half the swim team, uniformly tall and muscular, chuckling like one self-satisfied organism.
“Incredibly original,” I call after their retreating backs, in as scathing a voice as possible. I don’t know why I’m engaging. I’m better than that. I’m better than them. I’m certainly better than vindicating their juvenile behavior with a response.
The one in the center of the pack, a curly-haired kid with a long nose, shoots an apologetic look over his shoulder. I glare at him. If he were sorry, he would say something to his douchebag teammate. It must be nice, being surrounded by an army of friends who’ll be complicit in your behavior, no questions asked.
The swimmer guy looks at me a moment longer before turning back to his friends. He doesn’t say a word.
That’s what I thought.
I glance back down at my feet, but I’ve lost count of the asphalt cracks. Sighing, I look up. A girl leaning against a nearby car—Izby Qing: short, slender, hair dyed pink—catches my eye. She stands, laughing and hair-twirling, next to a freckled boy, transparently reveling in his attention.
For a second, I wonder what it would be like to have somebody’s eyes fixed on me like that—or to look at someone the same way.
Soon enough, though, I fall back into dispassion at the idiocy of it all. It horrifies me that kids our age spend so much effort on this stuff. I thought we were all aware that the vast majority of high school relationships are fleeting and meaningless, but apparently not. People spend a huge percentage of their lives playing into this perpetual cycle of interdependence. They’re all wasting their time, and on something with zero long-term benefits. God knows why.