“Cleo? What are you doing here so early?”
“I could ask you the same question,” I said.
He grinned. “Touché. My dad’s going to do some relief work in Cambodia today, so we all got up to have breakfast with him before he had to head to the airport. My mom was afraid if I went back to bed I wouldn’t get up in time for school, so she made me leave.”
I laughed. It felt strange to laugh, but it was nice.
“She’s probably right.” I looked in my wallet. I had ten bucks. “Can I buy you a coffee?” I asked him.
“Oh God, yes,” he said, reaching out to pull me up.
Inside one of the only open coffee shops, Jase and I found a small table with two chairs. We slipped out of our coats and sat close together as steam from our drinks spun into the air between us. I couldn’t decide if I felt older because I was up early, because I was sitting in a coffee shop with a boy, or because something about me was fundamentally changed by my parents’ announcement the night before, and I was having to deal with it all on my own. But whatever it was, I felt like a more grown-up version of myself: tougher, more serious, and a little more alive.
“So, you haven’t told me why you’re here so early,” he said.
I shrugged. “Just couldn’t sleep.” I looked over my shoulder at the slowly filling streets, still trying to decide what the rest of my day would look like.
“Cleo,” Jase said, kind of seriously. I turned back to look at him. “We’re okay, right? Like, we’re cool?”
I smiled a little. “I just bought you coffee, Jase. We’re fine,” I said. I took a sip of my tea.
“Okay, good.” He sipped his own drink, but as I watched the way his dimples appeared and disappeared when he lifted and lowered his cup, I wanted to ask him something.
“Why did we break up?” I asked. I saw him tense, but with everything my parents were saying last night, I genuinely wanted to know if his perspective of our downfall was the same as mine.
“I don’t mean it in an accusatory way. I mean, like…” I tapped the table as I tried to figure out the word I was looking for. “Objectively. Scientifically. I think we broke up because you were going to soccer camp, and I would have missed you too much to stay together, and because we just worked better as friends. But I’m wondering if you felt the same way.”
His shoulders inched back down. “Oh. Well, I do think we’re better as friends, but it wasn’t just about soccer camp for me.”
I kept watching him, taking in the line of kohl along his lower eyelids. He smiled a little, his dimples sinking in and staying put.
“I guess it was like this: you’re this super-cute girl, right?”
I shrugged and blushed a little. “I guess I am pretty cute,” I said, looking at how his big hands wrapped around the small coffee cup.
He rolled his eyes. “Right. And so, before I knew you, I made up all these things about you. Like, I bet she likes comics, or I bet she watches reality shows, or I bet she loves animals.”
“One out of three isn’t bad, considering you were just going by how I looked,” I said. “And actually—”
“Jesus, Baker. Let me finish.”
I laughed. “Sorry.”
“So,” he said. He ran one of his hands through his thick black hair. “In my head you were a different version of yourself, right? Like…‘Brain-Cleo.’ ”
I grinned and pressed my lips together. I thought about Gigi saying I was spinning stories whenever I made things up about people in my head.
“But then I started talking to you, and Real-Cleo was super-cool in a bunch of different ways, but not the ways I had imagined.”
“Okay,” I said, lifting my cup.
“So at first I was like, ‘Real-Cleo is even better than Brain-Cleo,’ right? But here’s the weird part: There is a Brain-Jase too. In my brain, not just yours. So not only did I think, ‘This is how Cleo will be.’ I also thought, ‘This is how I will be with Cleo.’ But the problem was, the longer we dated, the less either of us lived up to those versions of ourselves.”
I looked at my hands and bit my lip, but I understood what he meant. He wanted us to be these romanticized versions of ourselves and we just weren’t—we never could be.
“Damn,” I said.
“Maybe I got too caught up in the idea of us. I don’t know. You were unpredictable—I never knew what you might want, how you might be. I was too, I guess. I know what to expect from soccer—what everyone wants and how we’re all going to be. I know how to do the whole jock thing, but I didn’t really know how to be a good boyfriend. If that makes any sense.”
“I get that,” I said, thinking about how my parents told me that feelings change. But maybe it’s expectations that change more than anything else.
Jase sips his coffee and we’re both quiet for a beat before he says, “You know Dom asked me about you, right? Like, asked if I’d be cool with him getting to know you.”
I looked up at him and Jase was smirking. “Really?” I asked.
“Yup.”
A too-long pause followed, and I punched his shoulder. “And? What did you tell him?!”
“I said he better not be shitty to you or I’d kick his ass.”
My jaw dropped. “Jase Lin!” I squealed, and he laughed. I covered my face because I could feel it heating up and I didn’t want Jase to see me blushing. He gently pulled my hands away.
We talked for a while longer about everything. I told him about the Shakespeare program and showed him photos of the Globe Theatre. He told me about soccer, about his dad’s charity work, and how he might go to Cambodia with him this summer. We talked for so long that we were almost late to school.
We pulled our jackets back over our shoulders and he laughed at me when I stood up too quickly and almost knocked over my chair after I realized what time it was. We pushed our way back outside and despite our rush, he stopped me on the corner.
“Seriously, though. You sure we’re okay?” he asked again, and I allowed myself to miss his dark serious eyes looking at me like I was the only person on earth, but only for a second.
Then I smiled.
“I’m sure,” I said. “We’re good.”
ANYWHERE BUT HERE
I decided to go to school after all. And just as I thought she would, Layla ignored me. In homeroom, she didn’t even look in my direction. At lunch, she sat with the Chorus Girls. Jase found me sitting alone and asked what was wrong, but I couldn’t bring myself to be completely honest. I was dying to tell someone what was happening with my parents, but the only person I wanted to talk to was my best friend.