“What can I do, though?” Diego asked helplessly. “Do I just ask her out? Like, hey, I know we’ve been friends for years but let’s go on an awkward date now?”
“Maybe it wouldn’t be awkward,” I said. Buoyed by hope, I walked out to the line and tried to do that thing Diego had done where he just turned and threw in one motion. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t go anywhere near the basket. “H-O-R-S,” I said. “Prepare to win.”
“Not necessarily.” Diego caught the ball and dribbled past me. “Weren’t we just discussing how I’ve got no game?” He took a balletic jump shot and sank it.
“Fuck you,” I laughed.
“Sorry,” he said.
“No, it’s OK,” I said. “I’ve definitely got no game. I can admit it.” I looked up at the hoop, glinting silver in the floodlights.
“Moment of truth,” Diego called. “No bricks!” I paused my dribbling to give him the finger.
Moment of truth, I thought. If Diego was willing to risk his friendship with Joy, then I could definitely risk my friendship with you, and my nonexistent friendship with Ethan, right? It seemed like it should have been an easy choice, but it wasn’t. Diego felt a ticking clock? Well I felt the opposite: like I was floating aimlessly in a lazy river that slowed everything to half-speed and kept me from making any decision that might possibly move my life forward in any way.
Enough stalling, I told myself. If I make this shot, I make a move.
I held my breath and listened to the sound of the ball on the pavement, a thick, muffled smack followed by a sharp, ringing recoil. On the next bounce, I shifted my weight and palmed it into my right hand, springing up and extending my arm and pushing it off my fingertips with the tense focus of every muscle in my body.
If I make the shot, I make a move. But if I miss, I let her go.
The ball sailed into the hoop—and then spun right back out.
I missed. Not a brick, but a so-close-I-could-almost-taste-it miss, which felt even worse.
I walked back to get my stuff, the weight of the promise I’d just made to myself crushing me deeper with each step.
“Sucks, man,” Diego said, shoving the ball into his duffel. “You were robbed.”
I pulled my bag over my shoulder and looked up at the floodlights. Inside the beams, tiny snowflakes were starting to fall, dancing, almost—swirling in circles so tight they were almost touching before melting invisibly into the pavement.
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “You were right. I wanted it too much.”
“Forget about it,” Diego said, patting my shoulder. “It was just one shot. We’ll do a weekly scrimmage, turn you into a baller in no time.” We flipped our collars up against the cold and cut across the court back to Amsterdam, where taxi tires were already grinding the new snow to brown slush that splattered silently against the curb.
After Diego broke off to go to the train, I kept walking, all the way home until my legs went numb. I felt more depressed than ever, but I didn’t know why. I mean, I hadn’t really needed a game of HORSE to tell me that going after you would be a bad idea; I already knew it. Which, I guess, was the problem.
Just because you know something is wrong doesn’t mean you won’t do it anyway. I know you know that feeling. I think all of us did.
By the end.
Chapter Ten
February 11
91 days left
I PRETTY QUICKLY ACCEPTED that not wanting you was an impossibility—or, at least, an idiotic plan that was both painful and completely futile, like that guy from Greek mythology who pushed the boulder up the hill and had to watch it roll back down, over and over. Ethan probably knew his name, not that I would have asked. With each passing day I resented him a little bit more. I couldn’t help it. He had brought me into the group, introduced me to you, and then cast us together in the fucked-up period piece fan fiction he had written about you—for you—which culminated in my sitting next to you every day for two hours, trying to make real feelings seem pretend and building to a climax that would never, and could never, happen. Wasn’t that Greek guy being punished by Zeus for something? I guess that would have made Ethan a god. Based on how hard he was power-tripping, it wasn’t such a stretch.
“OK, everyone owes me thirteen bucks for their ticket,” he said. We were huddled in front of Film Forum at 7:30 on a Saturday night to see Jules et Jim, a French New Wave movie from the 1960s that Ethan claimed was “mandatory viewing” to understand what he was “trying to accomplish” in Boroughed Trouble.
“What?” Diego bounced from foot to foot, his high-tops a few inches deep in snow. “You begged us to come, man. I thought this was a freebie.”