I found my way to the elevators and hit the button for the first floor, then pushed myself back against the rear of the cubicle with my hands behind me and tried to breathe. It didn’t help that the piped-in music was a fairly psychotic rendition of “Carol of the Bells.” Repetitive, annoying, and shrill. The second the door opened, I flung myself into the hall and turned left. Christopher was standing at the door of his room, waiting for me.
“Hi!” he said brightly. But as I got closer, his face slowly fell. “You look like you’re gonna barf.”
“I might,” I said, pressing my phone between my palms. “Why did I decide to do this? I can’t sing in public. I can’t. It’s ridiculous. I can’t even do oral book reports. What made me think I could—”
“Okay, okay, calm down.” Keeping his crutches clamped under his arms, Christopher reached out and placed his two large, warm, hands on my shoulders. Every inch of me responded. Suddenly all I wanted to do in the world was sink against his chest and let him hug me. What would that even feel like? It was an acute sort of longing I’d never experienced before in my life, and now I was even tenser. Like, if I didn’t get him to hug me, I’d explode. “Take a deep breath,” Christopher said calmly.
I did. My lungs clenched.
“Now let it out!” he said, giving me the slightest shake. I blew it out through pursed lips, turning my head slightly sideways just in case my breath was bad. But then I kind of started to hyperventilate.
“Oh God. I think I’ve forgotten how to breathe!” I wailed.
“Right. What you need is a distraction. Something to do until it’s time to go to the dinner,” Christopher suggested. “We can’t have you not breathing for the next two hours.”
“Okay, but I tried that. Nothing worked.”
Christopher smiled. “Did you try paper airplanes?”
* * *
• • •
First, we had to find paper, which was harder than it sounded in a hotel where most people used text or email to communicate, and the gift shop had only small, gifty, journal-style notebooks. In the end, I wound up raiding my grandmother’s office again—luckily she was out at “a meeting with the legal team,” according to her assistant, Frank—and stealing a ream of printer paper. I brought it back to Christopher’s room, where he was propped up on his bed with his cast laid out in front of him and his laptop on his lap. He’d given me his spare key, so I was able to just walk in, and my heart caught a bit when I saw him there, his T-shirt pulled taut across his chest.
“What’re you doing?” I asked.
“Research.”
He smiled and turned the computer around. On the screen, a pair of hands expertly folded a standard piece of bright blue paper into an airplane that looked like something out of an air force textbook.
“Oh, cool. Now I wish I had something better than white.” I held up the package of paper dejectedly.
“Don’t worry. I don’t think it’s the color that makes it fly far,” Christopher joked. “Here. Sit so we can watch this together.”
Okay. Sure. Sit with him on his bed. That was something I could totally do and not be awkward about it at all.
“Where are your parents?” I asked casually, while simultaneously imagining them walking in to find a strange girl on their son’s bed with him and freaking out.
“Oh, I have my own room,” he said. “Also they had to go to a meeting. We’re not meeting up until dinner.”
“A meeting?” I asked.
His face reddened slightly. “It’s a long story. Even when we’re on vacation, my parents somehow find ways to attend meetings. They’re chill like that.”
Not that he was bitter or anything. I couldn’t blame him, though. My dad did travel for work a lot, but when we went on vacation together, he was always super focused on us—on making family time family time. Sometimes it was actually a little much. But seeing the look on Christopher’s face now made me glad my father was always so involved. At least I never felt ignored.
“You okay over there?”
It wasn’t until Christopher spoke that I realized I’d sort of frozen in place and was hovering next to his bed awkwardly.
“Fine,” I said, swiping my ponytail over my shoulder, all casual-like. I dropped the paper on the desk and walked around to sit down on the opposite side of the bed, my pulse racing. Christopher and I were entirely alone, in his private room, with the door locked and the shades half-drawn. And yep. I was about to crawl into bed with him.
Well, not exactly, I told myself. The bed was completely made. And all we were doing was sitting there to watch YouTube instructional videos. I had to think of it like it was a couch. And Christopher was just a friend. And we’d been assigned by old, smelly Mr. Walton back home to work on a physics project together. No big deal.
So, I sat. Well, perched, really, my feet still on the floor. Which meant I had to twist uncomfortably to face the computer.
“Can you even see from over there?” he asked.
I laughed. “Um, no.” It was a king-size bed. I was basically three feet away from him. I swung my legs up onto the bed and scooched over until we were so close our shoulders touched. His skin was so warm, even through the fabric of our shirts, and my face lit up like one of the Christmas trees in the lobby. I forced myself to stay still. To concentrate. To really listen to what the guy on the computer was saying about precise folds and even wings.
“This doesn’t look that hard,” Christopher said finally. “We can totally do this.”
Was he kidding? These paper airplanes were like tiny works of art. I remembered going to an origami party once in middle school and ending up in tears because I couldn’t get my corners precise enough. Type A me couldn’t handle not being good at something that required precision.
“Totally,” I echoed, lying through my teeth. “But where are we going to fly them from? He says finding a high throwing point is key.”
“We could go outside, I guess,” Christopher said. “Use one of the decks or balconies?”
I looked past him out the window, where the tops of the evergreen trees swayed.
“It’s too windy,” I pointed out.
“Okay, but if the wind catches it, it’ll fly really far,” he countered.
I gave him an admonishing look. “That feels like cheating.”
“Well, your family owns this place, right?” Christopher said, setting the computer aside and turning to look at me. I tried not to be distracted by the fact that he was so close. That his breath smelled like peppermint. That we were on a bed, and he was very ill-equipped to run away. “I mean, yeah, my family comes here every Christmas, but you must still know it better than I do. Is there anywhere indoors that we could use as a launching pad?”