Just when I think we’re making some progress, beginning to open up to each other, he shuts it down. Except—something’s wrong. His face has gone ashen, and he has a hand against the wall, as though he can’t remain steady without it.
“Hey. Are you okay?”
“I’m—not feeling great,” he says as he sways, pressing his head into his elbow. “Dizzy.”
“All the red?” I ask, and he nods. He looks miserable. Some instinct I wasn’t wholly aware of kicks in. “Come on. Let’s get you out of here.”
Before I can overthink it, I place a hand on his shoulder and guide him out of the Red Hall and into a chair near the elevator. He may not be my favorite person, but that doesn’t mean I want him to feel like this.
He cradles his head in his hands. “I haven’t eaten anything today except for that slice of pizza,” he says. “I know, I know, bad idea, but I was dealing with my sister, and I ran out of time, and…”
“Stay here,” I tell him. “I’ll be right back.”
His sister. The family emergency. One answered question and about a hundred more.
From a scrap of paper wedged between the windshield wipers of Rowan’s car
You may have noticed the white lines on the street indicating you are currently taking up two parking spots. I wanted to do you a favor and let you know that your car can actually fit just fine in one spot.
Sincerely,
A concerned citizen
4:46 p.m.
NEIL PICKS UP a packet of saltine crackers. “Did you open this for me?”
“No,” I lie.
In a minimart across the street, I found a bottle of water, a can of ginger ale, and the crackers. It’s possible I overdid it.
“You didn’t have to do all of this,” he says, taking a slow sip of water. “Thank you. I’ve always had kind of a weak stomach. Road trips with me are a real blast.”
I nod, remembering. When we took the bus to school events, like last year’s field trip to the Gates Foundation, he told teachers he had to sit in the front. Bus law dictates the front is for the painfully uncool among us, and for whatever reason, I felt such extreme secondhand awkwardness on Neil’s behalf that I took the seat across the aisle from him (not next to him; everyone knows you take your own seat if there’s enough space) and argued with him for the rest of the bus ride.
We’ve been together for a couple hours now—the most time we’ve ever spent just the two of us—and McNair’s been strangely normal. Dorky and occasionally annoying, sure, but not exactly hateable. I’m not sure if the end of school flipped a switch, or whether we’ve never been in a situation where we didn’t immediately pit ourselves against each other.
I lower myself into the chair next to him in a little alcove on the fourth floor, fiddling with a bottle cap. We sit in silence for a while, the only noise the crunch of the plastic bottle or McNair chewing. He even offers me a cracker. Every so often, he rakes a hand through his hair, messing it up more. We must share that nervous habit.
His hair, though—it doesn’t look bad when he does this. And it’s there, on the fourth floor of the library, watching my nemesis take slow slips of ginger ale, that I have a horrifying realization.
Neil… is cute.
Not in an I’m-attracted-to-him way. Just, like, objectively nice-looking. Interesting-looking is maybe more accurate, with his red hair and wild freckles and the way his eyes are sometimes deep brown and sometimes almost golden. The curve of his shoulders in that T-shirt isn’t bad either, and neither is the definition in his arms. Even that smirk of his is kind of cute. Lord knows I’ve seen it enough times to make that assessment.
Cute. Neil. Unexpected but true, and it’s not the first time I’ve thought so.
“I could tell you something to cheer you up.” It must be the still-mostly-miserable look on Neil’s face that makes me say this.
“Yeah?”
I’ve never told this to anyone, not even Kirby or Mara, because I knew they’d never let me forget it. “Do you remember freshman year?”
“I try not to.”
“Right. Right.” I bury a hand in my bangs. They really are too short. This is probably a terrible idea, but if it’ll take his mind off the Red Hall, it’s worth it. Maybe. I charge forward before I can reconsider. “Before the essay contest winners were announced and you revealed your true self, I… had a crush on you.”
Nope, that was definitely a terrible idea. Regret fills me almost instantly, and I squeeze my eyes shut, waiting for the laughter. When it doesn’t come, I tentatively open one eye.
Neil meets my gaze, no longer nauseous-looking. Now there’s amusement on his face: a deeper curve to his mouth, like he’s trapping a laugh in his throat.
“You had a crush on me.” He turns it into a declarative sentence. He’s not asking for clarification; he’s stating a fact.
“For twelve days!” I rush to add. “Four years ago. I was basically a child.”
He doesn’t need to know what, exactly, I found so appealing about him back then. At first I was mesmerized by the sheer number of freckles he had, thought they were beautiful, really. I nodded along with the insights he shared in class, offering my own and feeling a spark of pride when he agreed with me.
He doesn’t need to know that every so often over the course of that year, I found myself wishing he hadn’t turned out to be the worst kind of lit snob so I could resume my English-class daydreams, the ones where we lounged beneath an oak tree and read sonnets aloud to each other. I was so disappointed he wasn’t the guy I’d dreamed up. He doesn’t need to know that a couple times, when our shoulders brushed in the hall, I felt this flip in my belly because I was fourteen and boys were a mysterious new species. Touching one, even by accident, was like passing your hand through a flame. I wasn’t proud of it, but my body hadn’t quite caught up with my brain. And my brain had decided twelve days into freshman year that Neil McNair was to be despised, his destruction earning slot number ten on my success guide. By sophomore year, all those belly-flips were gone, and I could barely remember having a crush on him at all.
He also doesn’t need to know about the dream I had a few months ago. It wasn’t my fault—we’d been texting before bed, and it had screwed with my subconscious. For all I know, his subconscious gave him wacky dreams too. We were at a fancy restaurant eating math tests and lab reports when he took my face in his hands and kissed me. He tasted like printer ink. My logical side intervened and woke me up, but I couldn’t look him in the eye for an entire week after that. I’d dream-cheated on Spencer with Neil McNair. It was horrifying.
Neil’s full-on grinning now. “But I was like… the dorkiest fourteen-year-old.”
“And I was so cool?”
“You were,” he insists. “Aside from your inability to acknowledge The Great Gatsby as the quintessential American novel.”
“Ah, yes, The Great Gatsby. A feminist text,” I say, though my mind stumbles over his profession of my coolness. “Nick is a piece of white bread. Daisy deserved better than that ending.”