He scans it quickly, his frown deepening. “Okay. We’ll start with the tree. Ready to go?”
My stomach clenches. Be braver. Be different. But yesterday went so badly, and I still don’t trust myself at all.
I angle my body away from him and ask the phone. My heart scatters as the ball spins, and I’m not entirely sure what I want the answer to be.
Yes.
Yes, go with this boy I haven’t seen in eleven years. Yes, go see New York. Yes, I failed once, but this is my chance to try again.
“Sure.” I match his indifference with a shrug of my own, despite the foreboding tightening in my stomach.
All the things that could go wrong if I get on the back of Fitz’s ATV:
He crashes into a pine tree and we die.
He crashes into the train and we die.
I put my arms around him while we drive, and the contact sends me into early-onset cardiac arrest.
Somehow, some way, Fitz realizes that I’ve been desperately in love with him every day for the last two years and life as I know it is over.
These thoughts and a dozen others race through my brain as I climb the basement steps and open the back door. Icy air assaults me, and my heart freezes.
But not because of the cold.
My heart freezes because Fitz was built to sit on the back of an ATV in thirty-degree weather, and I’m not prepared. His brown hair was made to curl out from under his beanie, his face sculpted to be a perfect frostbitten pink. He must not have shaved this morning, because a faint shadow of stubble has appeared on his jaw. It does dangerous things to my stomach. When did my best friend become a guy with a five o’clock shadow?
He’s never been so achingly, frustratingly, stupidly attractive. He bounces up and down as his body hums with energy. It’s similar to the version of Fitz in his baseball uniform at third base, only ramped up one thousand notches.
He fixes me with that same intense and excited stare he had inside, the expression that means he’s planning something, the dimple that will break a thousand hearts before he even considers breaking mine. I’ve waited years and months and days and hours and seconds and eternities for this moment.
Which is why I hate the words that come out of my mouth.
“I’m not coming.”
He deflates like the off switch has been triggered on his own personal generator. “Don’t do this to me again.”
I open my mouth to protest, but nothing comes out. He’s right. I’ve bailed on him before.
Once upon a time, Fitz asked me on a date.
Once upon a time, I ruined everything.
* * *
It was the end of sophomore year, Fitz and Ivy were recently uncoupled, and it was already murderously hot. It was the kind of hot that makes you want to lie in front of an industrial fan with your clothes off and never move again. The kind of hot that anchors itself to your bones, weighing you down until it’s hard to breathe.
And it was only May.
“I need another snowstorm, stat.” I slurped my melting Fudgsicle before it could drip on the trampoline.
“We could go inside. There’s air-conditioning inside. I hear good things about it. I think it’s gonna catch on,” Fitz joked.
“And risk getting handed one of Jane’s scripts? No way.” Fitz’s aspiring playwright sister was already home from college for the summer and liked to force us to run lines with her.
Fitz threw his arm over his eyes to block out the sun. “I’m just saying, there are better places to hang out than this black, heat-sucking canvas.”
“Too hot to move.” I flipped onto my stomach and placed my cheek against the warm mat. Fitz’s arm was still over his eyes, meaning I could gaze at him without feeling awkward and guilty, two emotions I’d felt a lot lately. Awkward for being secretly in love with my best friend (and hoping he wouldn’t notice). Guilty because he was dating someone else.
But he’d dumped Ivy last month, and I was full of unexamined emotions about that.
Fitz’s arm fell and he squinted into the bright sunlight. When he turned to face me, his forehead was damp with sweat. Last year, it would have grossed me out. Now I had to resist the urge to scoot closer. When did I turn into such a creep?
“If I could conjure a blizzard for you right now”—he snapped his fingers—“you know I’d do it, right?”
Oh yeah. That’s when.
The butterflies in my stomach danced, but I didn’t trust them. Fitz had never given me a reason to believe he saw me as anything other than a friend. “Don’t waste your superpowers on me. Wait for the next girl you need to impress.”
“If you say so.” He pushed himself to a standing position. “It’s too hot. Let’s go inside.”
“No. Come back.” I hooked my foot around his ankle, not caring that I sounded needy and transparent. In the house, I had to share him with his sister or his cell phone or one of a hundred other distractions. Out here, it was only us.
Fitz smiled and lay back on the tramp, close enough that his arm rested against mine. “Do you want to go to the end of the year carnival with me?” he asked.
“What?” I turned, and his face was startlingly close to mine. I was not prepared for the eyelashes or the dimples or the way my cheeks flushed when his eyes found mine. In the span of a single blink, my overactive brain went from zero to fifty. Why would he ask me that? What does it mean? Is it a date? Is he going to drive? Hold my hand? Pay for my ticket? “You mean, like—are you going to—are we going to—”
“I’ll pick you up and we can drive together. Just the two of us this year. No Clover, no guys from the team. Sound good?”
“Sounds good.” I turned so he wouldn’t see my grin. I had chocolaty fingers, a hot trampoline below me, a blazing sun above me, and a date with my best friend.
Oh, I realized with a start.
So this is what happiness feels like.
But if happiness is sticky fingers and sunshine, panic is greasy pizza and the sharp tang of nail polish.
“I can’t go,” I said the next day; Fitz was supposed to pick me up for the carnival any minute.
“Yes. You can.” Clover capped the nail polish and leaned over to blow on my toes. The strap of her black swimsuit slipped from under her sundress and fell down her shoulder. It was supposed to be another warm night, and the end of the year carnival always had water slides and dunk tanks.
That morning, I felt fine. Fine-ish. Fine-adjacent. Not terrible, is what I’m saying. By the time Clover arrived to help me get ready, my insides had shifted ever so slightly. Not so much as to be noticeable from the outside, but enough that my whole world felt misaligned. The anxious wrongness I felt in my chest was the sum total of a dozen frustrations. Swimsuit shopping with my mom. A bad grade on my English final. Registering for junior-year classes, and all the choices that came with it. “I don’t feel good.”
“Mm-hmm. Very convincing,” she said.
“No seriously. My stomach hurts. I don’t think I can go.” I leaned against my bed, legs splayed in front of me on the carpet while my toes dried. I wasn’t lying. My stomach did hurt. But what I didn’t say to Clover was that I was freaking out about going to the carnival with Fitz. Which was stupid. I went with him last year too. Well, him and Clover. His mom drove us, and we met up with the guys from his team. But! The basic elements were the same. Me and him and a couple of snow cones.