But it doesn’t bother me anymore. I tug up my knee socks, which are damp and muddy. Howl has wreaked havoc on my perfect last-day outfit.
“It’s strange, though, isn’t it?” I say. “Thinking about our specific group of seniors all spread out next year? Most of us will only be home for breaks, and then less and less after that. We won’t see each other every day. Like, if I see you on the street—”
“On the street? What exactly am I doing ‘on the street’? Am I okay?”
“You’re probably selling your signed collection of Riley Rodriguez books for pizza money.”
“A whole signed collection? Sounds like I’m doing great, then.”
I stretch across the aisle to swat his arm with my hoodie sleeve, which is, well, his hoodie sleeve. “Fine, if I run into you, how are we supposed to act? What are we to each other when we’re not fighting to be the best?”
“I think it would be kind of like how we are tonight,” he says softly. He taps my ballet flat with his sneaker, and while my brain tells my foot to shift away from his, for some reason, the message doesn’t quite get there, and my shoe stays put. “Kind of like… friends.”
Friends. I’ve competed with Neil McNair as long as I’ve known him. I’ve spent so much time wondering how to beat him, but I’ve never considered him a friend.
The truth is, I’m having more fun with him than I’ve had in a while. Here he is, this secret source of deep conversations and adventures and fun. I was so sure I’d be sick of him by now, but the opposite is true. We only have three clues left. Finishing the game means severing whatever connection we’ve forged. It means graduation and summer and getting on two different planes at the end of it. Maybe that’s why I’m reluctant to leave the library—because, of all the things I’ve learned about him today, at the top of the list is that I genuinely enjoy spending time with him. I thought beating him would feel incredible, but all of this feels so much better.
It makes me wish, again, that I’d realized sooner that we could have been more than rivals. I wonder if he feels it too, this desire to have had more talks like this over mediocre pizza. And whether that makes us friends or just two people who were supposed to meet somewhere but got lost along the way.
“Yeah,” I say, ignoring this weird flip my stomach does that must be caused by this after-hours heart-to-heart. I should move my shoe away from his. Rowan Roth and Neil McNair, even as friends, don’t do shoe-to-shoe contact. I don’t know what they do. “I guess we could be that.”
I lean back against my stack of books, feeling less comforted by the biographies of incredible women quite literally backing me up than I thought I might. Neil and I have been in close proximity in too many dark places tonight. It’s rearranged my molecules, made me unsure of things I thought I was certain about.
Example: how much I like not just his arms or his stomach but him, and the way he looked at me when he told me I was “kind of great.”
But that’s absurd. Isn’t it? Of all the things on my success guide that I got wrong, Neil is definitely not the perfect high school boyfriend. It’s just that it’s hard to remember that when our shoes are touching or when a streetlamp outside catches the softest angles of his face.
“Now that we’re friends,” he says, “can you tell me more about your book?”
His words remind me how close I was to meeting Delilah Park. She’s probably back at her hotel at this point. Off to her next tour stop tomorrow.
If I can’t be brave there, maybe I can be brave here.
“You really want to know?” When he nods, I take a deep breath. Anything to take my mind off whatever’s happening with our shoes and what I may or may not want to happen with the rest of our bodies. “It’s… sort of a workplace romance. Between two coworkers.”
Hannah and Hayden. Two made-up people who’ve lived in my head since the summer before junior year. Hannah came to me first, a free-spirited, smart-mouthed lawyer with a mix of traits from my favorite heroines. Then Hayden, the uptight attorney with a hidden soft side, challenging her for a promotion. Opposites attract is my favorite trope, so it made sense to start there. Because, of course, the thing about opposites: they always have a lot more in common than they think.
Sometimes I think about them before I go to sleep, then dream about them. Telling Neil about them feels like I’m telling him about my imaginary friends. In a way, I kind of am.
“Was that so hard to say?”
“Yes! It was,” I say, but now that it’s out there, it doesn’t feel nearly as terrifying.
“Isn’t the whole point of being a writer for someone to read your stuff?”
“I mean—yes, ugh, but I haven’t gotten there yet,” I protest. “It’s… complicated. No one’s ever read anything I’ve written that wasn’t for school.”
Theoretically, I want to share my work. I want to fully own this thing I want to spend my life doing. I want to not care when people call it a guilty pleasure, or have the courage to convince them why they’re wrong. Or even better, the confidence not to care what they think.
“You want to, though,” he says.
I nod.
“Let’s say you’re not instantly perfect at this. You keep trying. You get better.”
“I don’t know, that sounds like a lot of work,” I say, and he rolls his eyes.
“I have an idea. But you might hate it.” When I lift my eyebrows at him, he continues: “What if… you let me read it? Just a page or two? What could be scarier than me reading it, right?”
Surprisingly, I don’t hate his suggestion. His expression is soft, and I’m convinced he wouldn’t laugh at it. What’s more surprising is that I want to show him. He loves words as much as I do—I want to know what he thinks.
“You wrote a fucking book. Do you know how many people wish they could do that, or how many people talk about doing it and never do?” He shakes his head, as though he’s impressed by me, and I want so badly to be that impressed with myself. “You saw Vision in White in my room. I’m not the guy I was freshman year. And you can tell me to stop whenever you want, okay? I’ll put it down as soon as you say the word.”
He’s being so sweet about this. I want to tell him how much this lack of judgment means to me, but maybe it’s easier to show him.
“I—I know.” With trembling hands, I find the file on my phone and pass it to him. I shut my eyes, my heart pounding. I can’t see him, but I can sense him right next to me, hear the softest swipe of his thumb on the phone screen.
“Chapter one,” he starts.
“Oh my God. Please don’t read it out loud.”
“Fine, fine.” He goes quiet, and I last only a few seconds before I lose it.
“I take it back. The silence is worse.”
He laughs. “Do you want me to just not read it?”
I let out a shaky breath, wiggling my shoulders to release the tension there. “No. This is good for me. Keep going, and I’ll tell you when to stop.”
“Okay,” he says. “Chapter one. Hannah had despised Hayden for two years, one month, four days, and fifteen—no, sixteen—minutes.…”