But now that Jonas wasn’t messaging her back, she didn’t know what to do. Messaging him was good; that was fine. She could usually think of something to say, and she didn’t have to make eye contact. Now that everything was going wrong—
She took a breath. In. Out. Anxiety is a wave. It will recede.
Another breath. This would be as much of a leap of faith for her as it would be for Jonas.
She typed quickly, not giving herself time to second-guess the words. If you decide that you want to do something other than mope around in your room, come to 418 W Westmor Drive tomorrow morning at eight.
She hit send before she could reread it.
JONAS
Later that night, Jonas scrolled back up to see what the message from Brennan that he hadn’t read had said. If you thought it would matter. You know, that you’re an amputee. If you thought it would matter to me, I just wanted to let you know that it doesn’t.
The internet revealed that 418 West Westmor (a street name that was somewhat comic, in Jonas’s opinion) was just about a block away from the library on the north side of town. Was it her house? He couldn’t imagine she’d have any reason to send him any other address, but even sending her own felt like a leap, since they hardly knew one another.
Jonas spent the rest of the evening debating whether or not to actually show up. Why could she possibly want him to? Why does she care so much about this?
He changed into his pajama pants and a T-shirt and turned the light out, lying on his back and looking at the texture-speckled ceiling. There were still glow-in-the-dark stars stuck there, from when Rhys had put them up as a child. Before Jonas’s Great Tragedy. Before he was a teen with one and a half legs. Jonas hadn’t taken the time to remove them; now, with the plaster specks, they were their own constellations.
He stared at them, the only pinpoints of light in his otherwise pitch-dark room. To go or not to go?
Most everything in him said not to go. He hardly knew Brennan, anyway. He’d run into her a couple of times, yes, and she’d messaged him, but did he really know anything about her? Enough to trust her with the most vulnerable part of himself?
He finally fell into a restless sleep.
13
brennan
Brennan woke up at seven, unable to sleep. She wondered if Jonas would come. She wondered how she’d feel if he didn’t, which was the more likely outcome. She put that one at 90 percent, and the odds of him showing up at 10 percent, lessening by the moment.
Still, she tried to prepare herself for what she’d do if he did show up.
She didn’t really know how to act around him. So far, their in-person encounters had only managed to make her look like a bumbling idiot (she had the irrational worry that he might think she was on drugs or something) and had probably served to make him think she was crazy.
She pictured herself making eye contact with Jonas and frowned. She wasn’t good with eye contact. She worried that she glanced away too many times when she was involved in conversations. Back and forth, never sure where to direct her gaze.
And then there was the awkward laugh thing. Jonas had probably already noticed that from their other meetings. Brennan had a bad habit of laughing awkwardly at things that weren’t funny to either:
Fill awkward silence. (Her brain had this annoying habit of trying to fill any silence it came across.)Or
Make up for a lack of response to a comment she had made that she thought was witty. (As if her laughing at her own joke was less embarrassing than no one laughing at it.)
Brennan glanced at the clock: 8:03 a.m.
She sighed. He wasn’t coming. In a way, she was disappointed. But in a different way, she was relieved. It took a lot of pressure off of her, at least.
She picked up the stack of library books she had to return, and headed downstairs and out the front door. She had just turned around to lock the door when she heard a car pull up along the street behind her. The van was a familiar dinged Honda Odyssey.
Brennan froze.
She watched in silence as Jonas got out of the passenger side, retrieving his crutches. He said something to whoever had dropped him off, and the van departed. For a few moments, Jonas just stood there, staring at her house with a frown on his face.
Then he seemed to notice her.
The frown didn’t go away. If anything, she imagined that his expression soured.
“Um, hi!” she said awkwardly, doing the laugh thing, and a slight wave (she wasn’t sure what to do with her hands). Stop it, Brennan! her brain scolded her. Idiot.
Jonas didn’t return her greeting, choosing instead to continue frowning at her. “Well,” he eventually said. “I’m here. Now would you consider telling me what I’ve dragged myself out of bed early and come halfway across town for?”
“To go to the library with me,” Brennan blurted. Word vomit. It was about as attractive as it sounded.
She hadn’t really thought about what they’d do if he did come. At the moment, it was just a half-formed plan to get him to walk somewhere. She had thought that could be a good start, especially since it was so close that she could see the building from her house.
Jonas’s frown deepened. “You’re kidding me, right?”
“No,” she said, a little more firmly. “I’m not. You’re going to walk to the library.”
He scoffed. “Yeah, good luck with that,” he said, turning back to the street. “I told Rhys to drive around the block to make sure I wasn’t going to need a ride home immediately,” he muttered.
“Come on!” she begged, feeling a little desperate. She had to fix this. Had to fix the version of her in his mind that, right now, was no doubt very poor. “Just give it a shot. And if you don’t like how you feel afterward, then you never have to do it again. And I’ll—” She hesitated. “I’ll never bother you about it again.”
He turned around slowly and raised an eyebrow skeptically. “You’ll never bother me about walking again? If I walk to the library.”
Brennan bit the inside of her cheek and nodded, anxiously awaiting Jonas’s response. He seemed to be considering this. Finally he nodded slowly. “Okay,” he said flatly. “I’ll walk to the library. On two conditions.” He gritted his teeth, a muscle twitching in his jaw. “One, you keep your promise to never bother me about the whole walking thing again. And two, I don’t have to walk back.”
“That’s fair,” she said. “Walking there would be enough. You can’t wear yourself out on the first outing, anyway.”
The silver minivan drove back down the road. Jonas waved it on. “First and last,” he immediately corrected her before frowning again. “All right,” he said slowly, as she came to stand next to him on the sidewalk. Up close, she could see how tense he was in the clench of his hands around the crutches and the set of his jaw. “I guess—I mean—” Brennan recognized the expression on his face—the I’m-about-to-internally-combust look—as the same one she wore when she started running scenarios in her mind, trying to find the out.
Jonas met her gaze for a few moments, and she found that she couldn’t look away. She briefly wondered if she should look away, reduce the awkwardness between them. As quickly as it began, it ended, and Jonas looked away, frowning, before carefully extending his left foot—the one Brennan now knew was a prosthesis—to rest on the ground next to his right.