Sometimes he’d text me in between classes, from down the hall, where I could see him standing with his group of friends. He’d look up and smile at me, and then I’d feel my phone vibrate. I didn’t even have to check—it would say: I didn’t do my homework. I’d write back: me neither. He’d write: library? And we’d meet there for study hall. I was pretty sure we were both purposely not doing our chemistry homework just to have an excuse to hang out during study hall.
But nothing ever happened. He kept his girlfriend, and our homework always sucked. And then we were failing. And that’s when I got bold. Because everything suddenly felt so frantic, so urgent. We couldn’t get our year-end project to work. The test tubes kept fizzling out and dying. So we stayed after school, and Dylan scribbled in his notebook and squinted at a calculator. Finally he said, “You don’t want to know how many decimal places we were off by.”
Then Dylan measured things out, and I leaned too close to the dropper, like I expected to remember any of this after the final exam, and finally our solution bubbled over, spilling out the top.
I leaped off my stool, spun around, and high-fived him.
Then I started laughing and said, “Oh my God, did we just high-five? Over a chemistry experiment?”
And he’d said, “No way, you misinterpreted my raised hand. I was waving at someone in the hall. And then you slapped it. Very uncool, Mallory. Your social status is plummeting as we speak.”
I perched on the stool beside him. “Am I ruined?”
He smirked. “I could be convinced not to tell.”
I didn’t wait for him to elaborate. I leaned in and kissed him.
He didn’t kiss me back. I mean, he didn’t push me away or anything, but he didn’t really put forth the effort. It was like he was undecided about the whole thing. And then there were footsteps in the hall. He’d glanced toward the door and said, “I’m supposed to meet Danielle.” Right.
I thought maybe they’d break up, once he had time to think about it, but the next day they were walking down the hall together. The day after that too. Weeks of them walking down the hall together and kissing by her locker. Until school let out for the summer. And one day, I saw this guy on the boardwalk. I could’ve sworn it was Dylan. But it wasn’t. This was an older version with a broader smile, and something else in his eyes. He saw me staring. And the first time he looked at me, I knew. He’d kiss me back.
He was a way to forget.
Forgetting wasn’t really an option anymore.
Everyone had already left for Preview at least an hour earlier—even the stragglers were gone. My eyes were closed, not that I was sleeping. Not that I could ever sleep on my own anymore. But I could feel that thing coming. The way the room suddenly felt alive and charged. So I kept my eyes closed. Something grazed my arm. I opened my eyes and jumped up.
“Sorry.” Reid was standing back, his hands held out innocently. “Didn’t know if you were awake.”
“I’m awake,” I said, waiting until I couldn’t hear my heartbeat pounding in my head anymore. I pushed the hair out of my face and scanned the empty room. Just me and Reid. I stared at my arm, where he had touched me, and wondered how long he’d been standing there. Wondered why, if he wanted to see if I was awake, he didn’t just say my name.
“You’re waiting for someone?”
“No,” I said, checking out the room again. Then I looked at Reid again and said, “No, no one.”
“Oh, I just figured since you were sitting out here, and, you know, you weren’t there . . .” Reid was still standing on the other end of the couch. He was dressed up, I assumed. Hard to tell at a prep school.
“I wasn’t where?”
“Fall Preview.”
I sat back down and pulled my legs underneath me. “Wasn’t really in the mood to preview. Or to be previewed. What, did you think I got lost in the woods or something?”
“What? No . . .” Reid’s eyes jumped from bare wall to bare wall. “I said I’d see you later. You said ‘later.’ But you weren’t there.”
I started to smile. I couldn’t help myself. I stood up and pointed my finger at his chest. “You did. When I wasn’t there, you thought I got lost.”
“I did not—”
I tilted my head back and laughed. “You thought you were gonna get in trouble.”
Reid threw his hands up. “Okay, fine. Fine. I wanted to make sure you got back okay. Happy?” But he was laughing too.
I cleared my throat. “Well, look,” I said. “I’m here and I’m alive. Your reputation as a responsible tour guide remains intact.”
I walked past Reid, pushed open the hall door, and heard the buzzing of the fluorescent lights in the ceiling. And I paused because it reminded me of that feeling that was following me, waiting for me. Reid took a quick look toward the stairs on the other side of the lounge and then scanned the empty room. “Can I come in?”
“Does that line usually work for you?” I asked over my shoulder.
“That’s not what I . . .” I couldn’t see his face, but I imagined it turning red during the pause that followed. “Do you remember my dad’s funeral?” he asked a moment later.
I kept myself turned away from him because I did remember. I remembered everything about it. It was the first funeral I’d ever been to, and I’d felt oddly detached from reality. Like time was moving slower, or faster—like what happened there didn’t have any effect on the outside world. I had the feeling that if I’d wanted to run, I wouldn’t have been able to. Like a dream where your legs never really touch the ground.
“Do you remember?” Reid asked. “You knocked on my door and said, ‘Can I come in?’ I said no. But you came in anyway.”
And now I was too embarrassed by the whole thing to look him in the eye. “So you’re going to come in even if I say no?”
“No,” he said. “That would be creepy.”
I felt him coming closer, in the way the air got thicker, warmer. “You know, you were the only one who came in my room that day.” It felt like we were back there, two years earlier, exactly where we’d left off.
I turned around. He was coming closer. Like the moment was unfinished, and he needed to finish it. “Because your uncle told everyone you wanted to be left alone.” I put my hands up, and he stopped walking. The whole thing was mortifying.
“And you’re the only one who didn’t listen. God, you were so bold . . .” Reid stared past me, down the hall, like he was remembering this other version of me and not the me who was standing in front of him.
I stepped into the hall, the door balancing against my hip. “Is that a yes?” he asked.
I thought about my room, and the emptiness, and the thing, and Brian’s mom somewhere nearby. I thought about all the reasons I should say no, but all the reasons I wanted to say yes outweighed them. I turned back for a moment, and caught him looking at me like he did that day in his room. My stomach flipped, same as it did that day. “No,” I said, as the door slammed shut behind me.
Because I remembered the next part too.
After he told me not to come in, and after I went in anyway, I sat beside him on the floor, our backs resting against the side of his bed. He threw a rubber ball against his wall and caught the rebound. I reached my hand across and intercepted the next bounce. Then I threw it against his wall, back to him. We did that for minutes, or hours, with nothing but the rhythm of the ball hitting the wall, then the floor, then our palms, filling the room.
Until Reid pulled his feet closer and flung the ball against the wall. He meant it to go nowhere. Anywhere. Straight through the wall, maybe. But it bounced back and smacked me in my upper cheek.
“Oh, shit,” Reid said. He was on his knees in front of me, pulling my hand away from my face. It hurt, but the tears were from the surprise, and I swiped at them with the back of my other hand. “I didn’t mean—”
I started to laugh, or I pretended to laugh, so he wouldn’t think I was crying. “Girl, fourteen,” I said in an official voice, “injured by rubber ball at funeral.”