My mom looks like she’d be more than happy to settle in and spend the rest of the evening with Gray watching Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED Talk, but thankfully, my dad lays a hand on her arm.
“We were just about to head upstairs,” he says. “There’s ice cream in the freezer, if you kids are interested.”
“Sorry,” Gray says, making a face once it’s just the two of us in the foyer. “Is this okay? I didn’t mean to get you in trouble or anything like that.”
“Oh no, you’re fine.” I shake my head. “They’re not those kind of parents.” They are, however, the kind of parents who are probably lurking around the corner hoping to accidentally-on-purpose overhear us, so I grab my coat off the overflowing rack, zipping it over my leggings and Bridgewater hoodie and leading Gray out onto the porch.
“So what’s up?” I say, tucking my hands into my pockets and shivering a little; January in Massachusetts is brutal, single-digit temperatures and the kind of shrieking wind that chaps your face and stings the insides of your ears. “Everything okay?”
“Yeah, totally.” Gray shrugs. “I just wanted to check on you, I guess. I mean, not that you can’t take care of yourself or anything, but I wanted to make sure you were hanging in there after . . .” He trails off, a little awkwardly. “You know. After.”
I raise my eyebrows and smile. “You could have done that over text,” I point out.
Gray nods. “I could have,” he agrees. “I didn’t want to.”
“Oh no?” I’m grinning for real now, I can’t help it. I’ve never met anyone like him before. “Why not?”
Gray’s fingertips brush the hem of my coat, just lightly. “You know why not.”
“Well. I’m glad you did.” I look down at my fuzzy slippers, suddenly shy. “I’m okay, I guess. I feel a little bit like I just made the biggest mistake of my life, possibly? But other than that, super.”
“It wasn’t a mistake,” Gray says immediately. “I mean, easy for me to say, right? But I don’t think it’s ever a mistake to tell the truth.”
It is easy for him to say, probably. Still, I appreciate the sentiment.
“Maybe not,” I allow. But then I think of the look on Chloe’s face this morning, the whispers that followed me down the hallway. “It just feels like the truth didn’t mean anything, you know? Like I put myself out there, I opened myself up to all this shit, everybody staring at me and making their judgments, and it didn’t even change anything.”
Gray considers that. “Maybe not,” he says. “But it kind of changed you, right?”
That stops me; I’m quiet for a moment, turning it over in my mind. On one hand, there’s no silver lining here—it’s not like I’m glad this all happened, but I guess it’s true that I’m tougher than I was a couple of months ago. It’s true that I see things differently now.
“Maybe,” I say again, shivering a little in the bitter cold.
“Come here,” Gray says; for a moment I think he’s going to kiss me, but in the end he just wraps me in his arms. We stand there for a long time in the glow of the porch light, the winter wind calling down the empty street.
Twenty-Four
I barely sleep that night, picking half-heartedly at an Eggo on my ride to school the following morning and letting my coffee go cold in the cup holder. I may have been ready to raise hell in the kitchen of my parents’ house last night, but this morning all I want is to run right out the door and disappear into the woods behind the football field. Forget switching classes, I think miserably. At this point I’m ready to try homeschooling for the rest of the year.
Gray finds me in the hallway before third period. “Hey,” he says, reaching for my hand and squeezing. “How you doing?”
“Me?” I paste the world’s fakest smile on my face, then realize it’s just Gray and let it melt into an exaggerated grimace, crossing my eyes and baring my teeth. “I’m super. Why, do I not look super?”
“Oh no, totally super,” Gray says grandly, bumping his shoulder against mine before we head inside and take our seats. I tell myself I’m imagining the low murmurs as I make my way down the aisle. Chloe, meanwhile, will barely look at me.
“Hey,” I try, kicking lightly at her chair from across the aisle; she offers me a smile even faker than the one I tried on Gray a minute ago, then turns back to her bullet journal. I sigh and pull my notebook out of my bag.
Bex isn’t in class by the time the bell rings for the start of the class period. For a second I let myself hope for dorky Mr. Haddock, but a moment later Bex strolls through the door with his reusable coffee cup in hand, like possibly he was lurking outside in the hallway just waiting for the exact right time to make his entrance.
“There he is,” Dean calls, slouched in his chair near the window. “Thought you abandoned us, man.”
Bex flashes the dimple in his cheek, easy. “Me?” he asks, all innocence. “Never.”
He’s wearing dark khakis and one of his signature chambray shirts, a fresh new haircut that makes him look even younger than usual.
“Now, tell me: did you guys manage to actually learn anything yesterday, or not so much?”
He takes attendance and asks if anybody’s read anything good lately, just like always, then opens up a detailed discussion of some Joyce story with absolutely no fanfare whatsoever. The weirdest part is how into it everyone gets—Dean Shepherd offers surprising insight into the story’s symbolism. Chloe raises her hand about a thousand times. I don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t this: it’s like he’s going to make things normal again through sheer force of will, and everybody has decided to go along with it. It makes me feel more than a little crazy. More than that though, I’m furious—the kind of anger that could light fires and power cities, the kind that laughs at the limits of my nice-girl self-control. Why doesn’t anybody care about what happened? I want to shriek, loud enough to rattle the windows. Why doesn’t anybody care about me?
I scribble in the margins of my notebook and pray he doesn’t call on me to make some kind of point about how fine everything is between us. It feels like years before the end of the period.
“All right, that’s it for today,” he says as the bell rings. “Marin, can you stay after for a sec? Yeah, yeah,” he says, shaking his head at the assorted snorts and snickers from the back of the room. “Get out of here, the rest of you animals.”
I startle at that, gaping at Bex as everyone files out of the classroom—everyone, that is, except Gray, who leans against the doorjamb, backpack slung over one broad shoulder like he’s waiting for the public bus.
“What are you doing?” I ask, my gaze darting from him to Bex and back again.
“I’m gonna stay,” he announces.
“I’m fine,” I lie. “Go.”
Gray shakes his head. He’s taller than Bex, and broader; he fills almost the whole doorway. “Nah, I’m good here.”
I know he means well, but it feels like he’s peeing a circle around me.