I wait for Caleb near the school’s entrance, stand idly by the stairs. He said we should meet at three o’clock, and now it’s three-fifteen, and I pretend not to be nervous that he won’t show. I stare at the screen of my phone as if I’m deep in thought, as if my life depends on this text I’m typing. But I’m not really texting anyone, because the person I normally write to at times like this is Caleb. So I’m just thumbing over and over with my fingers: Please don’t stand me up. Please don’t stand me up. Please don’t stand me up. I wonder how long I’m supposed to wait and at what point it will become obvious to me that I’m an idiot.
Gem walks by, because of course if there must be a bystander to witness my humiliation it will be her. For a moment, my stomach drops with the thought that SN may be Gem, that he has been a joke all along at my expense, but then I catch myself and let the thought go. No, Gem has better things to do than to text me late into the night as part of an elaborate practical joke. My friendship with SN is real, even if Caleb is not yet ready to face me.
“I wish you’d just go back to where you came from,” Gem says as she skips down the stairs, words thrown over her shoulder as sharp as darts.
“Me too.” I say it low enough that she can’t hear.
“Me too, what?” Caleb says, and now he’s next to me, and I can’t help but grin from ear to ear. He didn’t stand me up. He’s here, car keys dangling from his long fingers, ready to go. We will have coffee and finally talk and it will be as easy as it is with my fast-moving thumbs. As strange as it is to trust him, I do. Three things, I start writing in my head: (1) You understand me. (2) Tell me about Kilimanjaro. (3) Were you scared up there?
“Nothing,” I say. “Just talking to myself.”
“Do that often?”
“It’s been known to happen,” I say. Caleb is so tall that I need to look up to talk to him, my neck arched back at an unfortunate angle. Maybe later I’ll take a selfie to see what I look like to him from way up there, the entire plane and slope of my face. All chin and eyebrows. It can’t be pretty. I’m not Barbie to his human Ken doll.
“Listen, about coffee,” he says, and the disappointment hits me full force, even before he says the words. This is what you get for being ballsy. Ridiculous of me to be so optimistic and open, to assume this was going to happen. I keep letting myself be lifted and dropped, like a stuffed animal in an old-fashioned claw machine. I’ll never actually be chosen, especially by someone who looks like him. “I think we shouldn’t.”
“Have coffee? Okay.” I want to pick up my phone again. IM SN. Write what is too hard to say: Why not? Why aren’t I good enough for you in person?
I think of the whitehead on my chin, which I covered with makeup in the bathroom just a half hour ago. I think of my arms, flabby and pasty, not browned and toned like Gem’s. My eyebrows, which, no matter how long I spend in front of the mirror, always come out just slightly mismatched. My clothes, which are almost as nondescript as Caleb’s, but girls, I guess, are not supposed to aim for nondescript. The width of my nose—which has never bothered me until right now—my chipped fingernail polish; even my earlobes, too loose, like long hanging fruit. And of course my forever-disappointing chest, which somehow manages to be both small and floppy at the same time: stupid, sad, flat funnels.
Caleb will not see my disappointment. I mirror his casualness. Shrug, like it’s no problem. Keep the smile from dripping down. Act like I don’t feel the small, hard knot in my intestines, as if someone has reached into me and plucked them into a hideous bow. I grin through the pain—an actual, literal, visceral pain.
“You know, because of Liam,” Caleb says, and now he’s gone fuzzy and I don’t understand at all. He’s speaking a foreign language I’ve never heard before. One overly punctuated and aggressive, nasty simply because of the sounds of its hard, cruel letters.
“Liam? I mean…Wait, what?”
“I just think he’ll get the wrong idea. And he’s my best friend, so, you know,” he says. But I don’t know. What does Liam have to do with my getting coffee with Caleb?
“I still…I mean, I’m confused. What wrong idea? What does Liam have to do with anything?” Again, my brain is stalling. Maybe Caleb is right after all: let’s keep everything in words on a screen, where they are so much easier to let out. Where they are clear and can be saved so they can be returned to later in case of a misunderstanding.
“You know he broke up with Gem, right? Because of you.” Caleb’s tone is so matter-of-fact, as if this is basic Wood Valley knowledge. And also as if it has little to do with him.
“Um, no. I didn’t know they broke up, and if they did, I had nothing to do with it.” I swallow, start again, hear that I sound defensive, though I don’t know what about. “I mean, she’s a huge bitch, and maybe he saw that she’s been, you know, so mean, so indirectly, I guess it could tangentially have to do with me. But wait, what?” I’m rambling because I’m nervous. I stop, let my brain play catch-up. He’s not saying what I think he’s saying, is he? No. Liam couldn’t have broken up with Gem because he likes me?
No, that’s not possible.