“You’re freaking me out right now.”
She rolled her eyes, and that, at least, was familiar.
“I apologized. Accept it. I won’t do it again.”
“Okay,” I said. “I accept.”
But my brain was running in overdrive in a thousand different directions. Was she admitting that my being into Ruby bothered her? Had she already known I liked Ruby before I said it? I wasn’t completely sure I’d realized it before I said it, so how could she? And if it did bother her, what did that mean? Could she really be over me if she still got jealous? Did I want her to be jealous, and if I did—let’s be clear: I definitely did—did that mean I still wanted to be with her?
Stop, I thought. Just stop. I dipped underwater, hoping all these unwelcome and unproductive thoughts would somehow slip out of my ears and nose and mouth and into the ocean and stay there.
I knew what I had to do to move on. To chin up. To get my head back on, like Robyn sang in one of my favorite songs from the Moving On—I Mean It This Time playlist I’d made recently.
I had to go home and have a good final cry. Yes, I’d had other “final” cries. But those other times didn’t count. This time was different. I was reborn in the ocean that day, baptized, not heartbroken but a heartbreaker. I wasn’t going to spend my senior year moping over Jamie. I was going to spend it winning over Ruby.
Which was why the second thing I had to do when I got home was text her.
In retrospect, what are you up to wasn’t the ingeniously, slyly seductive message I thought it was when I sent it at 10:48. On a Sunday night. Probably the answer was sleeping, or going to bed soon, or something similarly unlikely to lead to a flirtatious back-and-forth. But we had to start our text rapport somewhere, and everything else I’d thought of was even stupider. For longer than I’d like to admit, I’d entertained the idea of texting her my favorite picture of Ashlyn Harris, in which she’s sitting with her teammate and partner Ali Krieger on the pitch, her hand on Ali’s shoulder—I guess as a way to be, like, See anything here that interests you?
Ordinarily I’d have been devastated that Ruby didn’t text me back within two and then five and then ten hours, but luckily I’d become a very laid-back person over the weekend. And then, presumably as an award for my unprecedented chillness, my phone buzzed on the table at lunchtime the next day. Just thirteen hours later. I felt all eight of our eyes on my phone until I picked it up.
“Who’s texting you? We’re your only friends,” said Ronni.
I was too excited to come up with a retort. Ruby was texting me. That was who.
Sensing potential gossip, Alexis perked up. “Wait, who is it?”
I ignored her and reread Ruby’s message, again and again: hey, sorry, just saw this.
It wasn’t Shakespeare, but it was a response. It was an acknowledgment that I’d texted her, that texting her was an okay thing for me to do. As I watched the screen, the typing bubble appeared, and I gasped.
“Wait. Really, though,” said Alexis. “Like—”
“It’s Ruby,” said Jamie.
That snapped me out of it. I locked eyes with Jamie, and hers narrowed, daring me to deny it. So I decided to put Alexis out of her misery, and I nodded.
“Omigod,” she said, not altogether surprised by my confirmation. Interesting, I thought. I hadn’t talked to Alexis about my crush on Ruby at all, and if I knew Ronni, it had never even occurred to her to relay that information to anyone either. Which meant Jamie must have said something to Alexis. “What did she say?”
I looked at the screen but the bubble was gone.
“Nothing, honestly,” I said.
“Let me see.” Alexis reached for my phone, and I swatted her hand away.
“Really, it’s nothing. Last night I asked her what she was up to, and she just responded now.”
“Interesting,” said Alexis. She drummed her fingers together like a mad fortune-teller.
“Not really,” I lied. I risked another peek at Jamie, but she’d returned to her salad. She scraped the bottom of the Tupperware with her plastic fork, which made a horrible noise she knew I couldn’t stand.
“What are you going to write back?” Alexis continued. “I can help you if you want.”
If she’d had it her way, Alexis would have drafted every email, text, and Instagram caption the rest of us ever posted. It wasn’t that she thought we were incapable of communicating. She just thought everyone could afford to communicate a bit more like her. She had a lot of feelings about punctuation and emojis.
“I don’t think I should text her again right now,” I said. “But thanks.” I gave the screen another quick glance—no bubble—silenced the phone, and threw it in my backpack. If Ruby did text me again, I wanted to keep it to myself.
“Smart,” she said. “Give it a few hours.”
“So are you guys, like…?” said Ronni. She glanced at Jamie, unsure what was kosher to say in front of the person who really shouldn’t get to have any opinion on the matter, if you asked me. But Jamie didn’t look up. She just scraped. Ksss click kssssss.
“We’re just friends,” I said. And then, unable to resist, I added, “For now.”
“Yeahhhh. That’s what I thought,” Ronni said, grinning. She gave me a captain-ish clap on the back. Across from me, Alexis clutched her hands and wiggled her shoulders in delight.
My face was fire-truck red. I could feel it. I shouldn’t have said anything in front of Alexis, I thought. I didn’t want it getting out that I thought I was capable of seducing Ruby Ocampo. I only wanted everyone to know when it had already happened.
Jamie threw her plastic container back in her backpack and got up.
“Quinn, you ready?” she asked.
“Oh! Uh. Yes. Yeah, I should go.” I shoved the remaining quarter of my sandwich into my mouth and hoisted my backpack over my shoulder. “Bye, you guys.” Ronni waved, and Alexis mouthed, Text me later.
Once we were out of earshot I muttered my thanks to Jamie for helping me escape before Alexis could keep interrogating me.
She shrugged. “They were being annoying.”
“Agreed.”
We walked without talking until our routes to class diverged, and then we saw each other off with a nod. I loved Ronni a lot, and Alexis, too, but even now I felt more comfortable around Jamie in the tensest silence than I did around my other friends. I wondered if I’d ever feel that at ease around anyone else, friend or more. It was almost impossible to get to that place with someone, and when it did happen, it took such a long time. And even then, cruelly, there was no guarantee you’d both stay there.