“What was it?”
He cleared his throat. “How I really feel. About you.” He took a breath as if the words had been choking him for months. “And how much it scared me, because for the last two years, I’ve been watching my parents turn into these two crazy people. I mean they used to love each other more than anything in the world, but now they can’t even be in the same room together. And I don’t know. Seeing them change so much made me scared when I realized how I felt about you. I guess maybe I thought it was too risky, or…God, I don’t know. I tried to figure it out from all those poems I read, but none of them gave me any answers. But Julia.” He paused. His voice was louder, as if the words, exposed now between us, were not so frightening after all. “I love you.”
“You do?” I whispered.
“More than anything.” Milo’s voice was steady. “I’ve loved you ever since the first day of senior year when I read that line of poetry out loud and I turned around and you were looking at me from the backseat of Zoe’s car.”
I closed my eyes. I remembered it, Whitman. “I am to wait…and to see to it that I do not lose you.”
“You had your hair pulled back,” Milo continued. “And you were wearing a blue shirt that made your eyes look like little pools of water. Except that I barely got to see them, because you looked away so quickly.”
I was speechless. I had been staring at Milo from the safety of the backseat, my eyes roving slowly over his hair, which hung down in little rivulets behind his ear, the blue denim of his shirt, and his baggy khaki pants. And when he had said that line—as he had done countless times before—I whispered it back, to myself, silently.
“Why didn’t you ever say anything?” I whispered.
“I tried to, I guess, after I gave you the Christmas card with the e. e. cummings quote. But you didn’t really seem like you were into it.”
“I have it taped to the top of my desk,” I said. “I read it every single night before I go to bed.”
“You do?”
“Yeah. I do. I love it, Milo.” I pulled on my bottom lip. “How could you not think I was into you after I kissed you on prom night? I mean…I’ve never done anything like that before. With anyone!”
“It couldn’t have been that terrible,” Milo said. “Especially since you were thinking of someone else.”
“Oh, Milo. No I wasn’t. I just said that so I wouldn’t look like such an idiot. There wasn’t anyone else.”
“And I guess I kind of freaked, thinking it was gonna be real.”
“But…” I pushed. “Isn’t that what you wanted?”
“Yes,” Milo answered. “Definitely. But I guess I was just kind of…Jesus, Julia, I don’t know. I think I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to live up to your expectations after that.”
“What expectations? I never put any…”
“The ones I imagined you’d have,” Milo interrupted. “I never really thought I had any kind of a chance with you. Cheryl and Melissa, well, they’re pretty, but that’s about it. But you…you’re such an amazing person. Smart. Beautiful. Kind. Smart. The valedictorian! I don’t know. I guess I just thought I’d never be enough next to you.” He coughed lightly. “It was stupid.”
“No,” I whispered, struggling not to cry. “It wasn’t stupid. I know what you mean.” There was a long pause. I lifted my hand up in front of me and stared at it. Then I put it down again. “What about Cheryl?”
Milo was quiet.
“At the party,” I insisted. “I saw you there, sitting with her, letting her touch your shoulder and everything…”
“I’m embarrassed to say this,” Milo answered. “But as long as we’re finally saying everything…” He cleared his throat. “The only reason I sat down next to her was because I knew she still liked me. I was betting on the fact that she would do something like that. I don’t know; I guess I wanted to make you jealous.”
“Jealous?” I repeated. “Why?”
“It was a crappy move,” Milo admitted. “I thought I needed to do something drastic, you know? Something that would tell me how you felt about me.”
“Letting your ex-girlfriend manhandle you was your idea of getting me to pay attention?”
“I know,” Milo’s voice was miserable. “It was dumb.” He paused. “But it worked a little. Didn’t it?”
“Yes,” I said reluctantly. “It did.”
“This is so much easier, isn’t it?”
“What is?”
“Just saying it like it is,” Milo answered. “Being straight with each other. It’s scary telling the truth.”
“It is,” I said. “But it’s worth it, don’t you think?”
“Absolutely.”
“I miss you, Milo.”
“I miss you too. When I think about the fact that you’re so far away, it actually hurts—physically. I must sound like a total dork, but it’s true. I hate that you’re not here. I think about you all the time, Julia.”