“If I had known that you had feelings for Harrison, I wouldn’t have—”
“It’s fine.”
“I thought you were in love with Fitz, and Harry was stuck on Kate—”
“I am, and he is. I’m not mad, and it’s not your fault. I want you to be happy, and if Tyson makes you happy, well, that’s cool.”
She smiles and takes my hand. “Tyson’s still working on Harrison, but we’re hopeful.”
“Where is Harrison?” I ask as Fitz walks into the room holding a bag of sour gummy worms. We make eye contact and he pauses, a question in his eyes.
“Did you buy those for my funeral?” I ask, recalling the night on the water tower when his reaction to my potential death was to serve candy. Fitz shakes his head with a small smile and walks in.
“Harrison’s at home with his dad,” Mom says.
“He stopped by a few times, though.” Fitz chooses his words carefully, but he can’t hide what’s written all over his face. He hates Harrison. This realization gives me a small thrill.
“Oh. Okay,” I say, trying to imagine a scenario with the two of them in the same room. It’s too weird. I prefer to keep them in parallel universes. I wonder if Harrison quoted Kierkegaard. I wonder if Fitz quoted Ephron.
“Do you want to text him?” Mom asks, handing me my phone. “I’m sure he’ll be relieved to hear from you.”
“I don’t have his phone number.” I can’t help but laugh. It’s a small thing, but it feels like we might have skipped a few steps on our way to getting to know each other. Maybe I skipped all the steps in my quest to be a different version of myself.
I open my phone anyway, and am bombarded with dozens of messages from Clover. She doesn’t hate me after all. I blink the tears out of my eyes and lock my phone. I’ll read them when I don’t have an audience, and then I’ll apologize at least a hundred times.
Mom fusses over me, smoothing my blanket and checking my water cup and wringing her hands. Fitz sets the candy on my bedside table and takes the chair, eyes scanning me, as if he can’t quite believe I’m real. Like I’m a shadow version of myself and he doesn’t know what to say to me because—
Oh. Oh yeah. He read the letter, and now he doesn’t know how to exist in my orbit. Everything is terrible and life is trash. Or something like that. SIM knows the deal. “Why are you here?”
He ducks his head, his cheeks turning pink. “Uh—”
“I mean, how did you get here?”
“Darcy transferred her plane ticket to me, and I rode the train in from Boston.”
“Wow. I must have been on my deathbed for you to go to all that trouble.”
Fitz hesitates, his eyes flicking to my mom. He couldn’t be more obvious if he tried. She kisses me on the top of the head for the fiftieth time before announcing that she’s going to run to Tyson’s to take a shower and change her clothes.
“Wait!” I scramble, desperate for her to stay, because as soon as she leaves, Fitz and I are going to have to deal with the letter, and I’m still not sure how to do that. “When do I get to leave?”
“You’re staying another night or two for monitoring. But the doctors say it’s a miracle you don’t have more injuries. We won’t be here long.” She smooths the hair out of my eyes, blinking away more happy tears.
“Can I leave now?” I sit up, wincing in pain.
She places a hand gently on my shoulder and urges me back down. Her eyes follow mine to the beautiful boy waiting to talk to me alone. “We’ll talk later. And you need to call Dad. He’s worried sick.”
“I will. Can you bring me clothes and stuff? From the apartment?”
She nods. “I’ll be back soon.” Then she leaves, and Fitz and I are alone.
Lines from the letter come rushing back to me, so vivid it feels like I wrote it this morning. My face burns with embarrassment. I play with the oxygen monitor on my finger, clipping and unclipping it, when I notice a blue sticky note fastened to the plastic rails by my bed. I reach for it, gasping at the pain in my side. “Where’d this come from?”
“Harrison,” Fitz says darkly.
Huh. It must have fallen from my pocket. Or maybe he took it when his hand was in my pocket in the elevator. My face goes miserably hot. “Did you snoop?”
“Wouldn’t you?” He’s right. I would. “Lots of options on that website,” he says.
“Yeah, well, I’ve still got a few months to decide where I’m going.”
Fitz grimaces. He looks so uncomfortable; I have to put him out of his misery. “I kissed Harrison,” I say, hoping to relieve him of the pressure he’s feeling. No need to let me down gently, Fitz Wilding. I’ve already moved on.
He makes a face. “Yeah, I figured that out, somewhere between Socrates and Nietzsche.”
“He didn’t.” I groan into my hands, which makes Fitz smile.
“ ‘You cannot step in the same river twice.’ Heraclitus. I googled it after he left.”
“That’s kind of beautiful,” I say. “But hang on, am I the river in this scenario? Is that his way of breaking up with me?”
“Sorry to deliver the bad news.”
“We weren’t even together! And if we were, I broke up with him first!”
“Why?”
“’Cause I didn’t want to see the snow with him.”
Fitz leans forward, his face intensely serious. “Go on.”
“He’s not a bad guy,” I start, which makes Fitz scowl. I bite back a smile and continue. “A bit pretentious and surly, but I had a good time touring the city with him.” The scowl deepens. “But then I had a panic attack and his reaction wasn’t anything like—” You, I almost say. I try again. “Anyway, it started snowing, and I realized I didn’t want that experience to be with him. I wanted it—” Ugh. Did it again. Fitz opens his mouth to say something so I keep talking.
“Can you believe I was hit by a car? All that careful planning, all that painstaking deliberation and Magic 8 and the what-ifs and the endless lists and my brain whispering all the ways it could go wrong. All of it, basically, to make sure that I don’t either blow my life up with a nuclear bomb and or get in a horrible accident, and I did both anyway. I’m never going to be a different version of myself.”
“Why would you want to be?”
I slant him a look.
“What’s Magic 8?”
“It’s a thing I did to avoid dealing with my own problems. It worked until it didn’t anymore.”
“And the nuclear bomb?” He leans toward me, elbows on his knees. Even here, in hospital lights with rumpled clothes and sleep-mussed hair, he’s the most beautiful boy I’ve ever seen.
“The letter.”
So much for avoidance.
Fitz pulls a worn, folded-up piece of paper out of his pocket.
“No. Don’t. It’s too embarrassing.”
“Paige—”
“Please. Just forget about it. I shouldn’t have written it! I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“Saying that I hate you. Why’d you come here anyway? I told you to stop talking to me.” I’m in agony. This has to be the worst moment of my whole life.