Olivia leans against the bookshelf’s other side, messing with the frayed edge of her T-shirt. She has long fingers, covered in rings. “You going to talk to them about it?” she asks.
“I don’t know. It’s hard to do anything, you know? I’ve just been sitting in my room for, what, five years on and off, listening to them scream at each other about jack shit, and I feel like I’m stuck there now. I feel like it doesn’t make sense to break the pattern or to . . . yeah.”
“No, I know,” Olivia says. “Breaking patterns. Not easy. But it’s never too late to try fixing them.” She half smiles, and her voice turns dry. “In any case, you know somebody who’s missing a parental figure, and she’s turned out semi-okay, I think.”
I look down at the cover of the book—the sword and shield of the heroine—then back up at Olivia, watching me with her usual calm good humor. “She’s turned out sort of amazing, I think,” I say, a scared, stupid thrill running down my arms into my fingertips. And then the most incredible pink tinge lights up in Olivia’s cheeks, and she laughs, her fingers pulling harder at the edge of her shirt, and as she examines her dirty sneakers, I let myself look at the contours of her face, the wide, high expanse of her forehead and the uneven arches of her eyebrows that give her that careless expression and the slight cleft of her chin and the roundness of her cheeks. Every tiny thing that makes her herself. She’s twisting her rings around her fingers now, and she takes a step closer, and she’s hardly shorter than me, but with that step, I’m looking down into her eyes, and it’s like looking down into a deep well at the very center of her, and something in there is glowing and pulsing and so alive, it swallows me like boiling water. Her thick brown hair falls over her forehead, and I see a bumpy patch where she’s spread concealer over an acne breakout above her right eyebrow, and I see the clots in her eyelashes from her mascara, and I love every detail, because it means I’m close enough to know these tiny secrets. I wonder what she’s seeing on my face, too, and I swallow nervously and glance down at her mouth, and God, the way her lips glimmer makes me want to lean in and kiss her until I taste what she’s tasting. I want to tuck her hair behind her ear and run my thumb down her jaw and cradle the side of her face in my hand—Jesus, I want to touch her.
“I’m, um,” she says, “I’m sort of,” and I say, “Me too. Nervous?” and she says, “Yeah, that’s the, yeah.” And I laugh, and then we’re both laughing stupidly and looking anywhere but at each other, and then like a light switch flicking off, we’re both silent again, and our eyes are locked, and she says, “Look, I know that—”
Then the door opens, and a voice goes in my head, Are you fucking kidding? and we move back from each other so fast that I barge into the chair I was sitting in. García, heading for his desk, says, “Hey, Matt. Is that Black Glass Monarch?” And I say, “Yeah,” trying not to sound too filled with rage, even though I want to take García and shove him bodily back out the door. Could the guy be any more inconvenient these days?
He says, “That’s a fun one. You can borrow it if you want to,” and I say, “I . . . thanks.”
As other kids bustle in, I look back at Olivia. Her blush has turned a brilliant red. She says, “Um, I’ll text you later,” and hurries back to her desk, her brown hair swishing from side to side. Every muscle in my body is still tense from her proximity.
TO-DO:
? Make sure everyone knows it’s not true. None of my friends were in their usual spots during break.
? Eat lunch with Valentine. Valentine was not by the trailers today. He is not texting me back. Figure out why.
? Place at swim meet.
I CRASH OUT OF THE WATER WITH A GASP. THE WORLD roars back into sound around me, and cool air slaps my cheeks. My heart pounding, I check the clock.
Third. I came in third—and I’ve beaten my old best time by two seconds.
I gulp breaths and fight back a smile. As I clamber out of the pool, my muscles tremble. The team claps, some of them, and echoes ring off the arched ceiling. My toes squelch through puddles on the tiled floor. The announcer yaps on, deafening.
I shiver my way into a towel. Usually the guys would be clapping me on the back, but they’re keeping their distance today. Doesn’t surprise me. I gather they’re not taking the innocent-until-proven-guilty approach. If I’d been accused of being with Dr. Meyers, the very hot, very female econ teacher, would this be happening?
The meet closes well. Coach swaggers out of the building as if he swam every event himself. He whistles out of the auditorium onto the bus for the forty-minute drive home.