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“Same.”
Russell circled his feet in the water, brushing against my ankle for just a second. But that moment—his bare skin against mine—was enough to transport me back to the football field. I was about to touch his foot back, when something suddenly occurred to me, and I sat up straighter.
“Wait,” I said, shaking my head. “Do you have to let your mom know?”
Russell just blinked at me, a dull flush starting to creep up his neck. “Um. I wasn’t… um…”
“Oh—no,” I said, shaking my head quickly. “I just meant, did you have to tell her that you’re not going to be on the bus?” Russell was still frowning, and I suddenly wondered if I’d overstepped. “Sorry—it’s not my business.”
“No, it’s fine. I… was supposed to stay overnight with the friend I went to Silverspun with, that’s all. So she’s not expecting me to be home tonight.”
“The friend you had a fight with?”
Russell nodded and let out a short breath, eyes fixed on the water. “Yeah.”
“Was it Tall Ben?” I asked, mostly just to break the tension. “Or Actually Tall Ben?”
It worked, because Russell laughed. “No. Nary a Ben attended Silverspun with me.”
“How do you get to Ojai from Union Station?” I asked, realizing that for me, that was the end of the line, but Russell would still have a lot of travel to get home again. I would have thought there would be a way to get there without going through LA, but apparently not. “Do you take a train?”
“You can take a train. Or get a bus.… What about your dad?”
“What about him?”
“Is he going to be expecting you in LA tonight?”
I shook my head. “Thankfully, no. He’s with my uncle at his lake house. He’s not back until tomorrow afternoon. Hopefully I’ll be home by then, and he won’t have to know about this. He really wouldn’t be happy about it.” A second later, I realized what I’d just said and how this might have sounded to Russell. “I didn’t mean you,” I said quickly. Though if I was being honest, my dad probably wouldn’t have been super thrilled about me being at a hotel with someone I’d met in a bus station. “I just meant he wouldn’t be happy about the whole stranded-in-Nevada-with-no-phone thing.”
“See, my mom would probably be happy about it. She has all these stories about backpacking through Europe with no phones or internet. She believes that we’ve all gotten too soft and isolated. And that the only way we can actually connect with people, and be our true selves, is when we step away from our devices.” Russell said this with a kind of weariness, like he’d heard it a lot. He shrugged. “She always says that I need more grit.”
“Well, she is French,” I pointed out, and he laughed.
“Mais bien sûr,” he said, so easily, his accent so good. It was honestly almost too much to take.
Please keep it together, Didi sighed.
Make him speak more French! Katy swooned.
“It is funny, though,” Russell said after a moment of comfortable silence, our feet circling each other, coming into each other’s orbits but not quite touching. “About how the smallest things can make the biggest difference and we don’t even know it at the time?”
“What do you mean? Like the butterfly effect?”
“Kind of. I guess it’s like—what if we’d just picked another bus to get on? We’d almost be home now, and we’d have no idea that there was this whole other thing that could have happened. Or what if our bus had worked instead? We wouldn’t be here now. I wouldn’t… know you. And that feels impossible.” He turned to face me, more fully, his eyes searching mine. “Doesn’t it?”
I made myself keep looking back at him and nodded. It did feel impossible—that there was any other way this day could have gone. “I guess you just never know, except in retrospect.” I pulled my legs out of the pool, let the water drip off them for just a moment, then pulled them up in front of me. “Like, if I’d known what the result would be, I wouldn’t have gotten barbecue the night before my history midterm.”
“Oh no—what happened?”
It was only a second later that I realized I probably shouldn’t have brought up a food-poisoning story in front of someone who I really wanted to kiss me again. It was probably the same way Russell had felt when he realized he’d started to tell his un-fun fact about scabies. “Well—let’s just say nothing good. I was really sick, but I insisted on going in to take my test. It was, like, half our grade. I should have just waited, but I’d been studying before the evil brisket had come into my life, so I thought I’d do okay.”
“And?”
“And I did not.”
Russell laughed, but not in a mean way. “I’m really sorry.”
“Yeah.” I was about to leave it at that. But then I realized I could tell him the truth—even the stuff I normally kept hidden from other people. I felt in my bones that I could trust him—and more than that, I wanted him to see me, flaws and all, just like he was letting me see him. “It’s actually—” I started, then took a breath. “I’ve never actually told this to anyone else. But that one test—it really brought down my GPA. And… I don’t know if that was why, but I didn’t get into as many schools as I was hoping. Just two.” Even just saying it, I felt the shame flare somewhere in my chest, remembering the cascade of rejection emails while all my friends seemed to be swimming in acceptances.
