She glanced at him, then looked across the harbor at the bay, where the water was starting to take on the color of the sun.
“So I’m not allowed to become the high school quarterback that dates the cheerleading captain?”
“I’m going to throw up this bubble tea right in your face.”
He bumped her lightly with his shoulder, thrilled as always at the weight of her next to him, the warmth of her skin beneath the plaid shirt. “I don’t think you have anything to worry about. You couldn’t be a cliché if you tried.”
Julia smiled at that, tucking a strand of hair back behind her ear. She grabbed the bottom of the bench with her hands and leaned forward a little, stretching, and the brown tress slipped back in front of her face. She kicked at the backpack by his feet. “You have any paper in there? I have an idea.”
PART 1
DAVE
ALMOST
FOUR YEARS LATER
THE KIDS WALKING past Dave seemed to be in some other universe. They moved too quickly, they were too animated, they talked too loudly. They held on to their backpacks too tightly, checked themselves in tiny mirrors hanging on the inside of their lockers too often, acted as if everything mattered too much. Dave knew the truth: Nothing mattered. Nothing but the fact that when school was out for the day, he and Julia were going to spend the afternoon at Morro Bay.
No one had told him that March of senior year would feel like it was made of Jell-O. After he’d received his acceptance letter from UCLA, high school had morphed into something he could basically see through. When, two days later, Julia received her congratulations from UCSB, only an hour up the coastline, the whole world took on brighter notes, like the simple primary colors of Jell-O flavors. They giggled constantly.
Julia’s head appeared by his side, leaning against the locker next to his. It was strange how he could see her every day and still be surprised by how it felt to have her near. She knocked her head against the locker softly and combed her hair behind her ear. “It’s like time has ceased to advance. I swear I’ve been in Marroney’s class for a decade. I can’t believe it’s only lunch.”
“There is nothing in here I care about,” Dave announced into his locker. He reached into a crumpled heap of papers on top of a history textbook he hadn’t pulled out in weeks and grabbed a single, ripped page. “Apparently, I got a C on an art assignment last year.” He showed the drawing to Julia: a single palm tree growing out of a tiny half moon of an island in the middle of a turquoise ocean.
“Don’t show UCLA that. They’ll pull your scholarship.”
Dave crumpled the paper into a ball and tossed it at a nearby garbage can. It careened off the edge and rolled back to his feet. He picked it up and shoved it back into the locker. “Any notable Marroney moments today?”
“I can’t even remember,” Julia said, moving aside to make room for Dave’s locker neighbor. “The whole day has barely registered.” She put her head on Dave’s shoulder and let out a sigh. “I think he ate a piece of chalk.”
It was pleasant torture, how casually she could touch him. Dave kept exploring the wasteland of his locker, tossing out a moldy, half-eaten bagel, occasionally unfolding a sheet of paper with mild curiosity, trying not to move too much so that Julia wouldn’t either. He made a pile of papers to throw out and a much smaller one of things to keep. So far, the small pile contained two in-class notes from Julia and a short story he’d read in AP English.
“Still on for the harbor today?”