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I’m so flummoxed, I’m sweating. Under my bra, along my hairline. If my skin were paler, I’d be sporting a bright red blush. But it isn’t, and I’m grateful for that.
“Nice guy or asshole.” He repeats it slowly, like he’s tasting every word. “Lots of polarity there.” And now he’s smirking. Smirking, and he’s so right here that it makes me feel ill.
“You could do percentages.”
“Oh, like ninety percent asshole, ten percent good guy?” He grins, like it’s the funniest thing he’s ever heard.
I wonder if I’m blushing hard enough now for it to show. “Yes. So…” I blink quickly, urging him to answer.
He laughs. “I don’t know. You said you don’t expect me to be honest, but I feel some pressure to be at least sort of honest.”
His eyes on my eyes, pulling my soul up into my throat, where it gets stuck so I can’t breathe. I smile and grab a tiny breath. When I was little, my mom had a parakeet. One time I held it, and its little heart beat just like mine is beating right now. “Try to be as honest as you can.”
He sits up again, biting the inside of his cheek and then his lower lip. He runs a hand back into his hair. Tired eyes, his dreamy smile—a snapshot that I save in my head.
“I’d say at least sixty percent asshole. Maybe more like seventy.” His teeth on his lip again, that luscious lower lip. His brows are thoughtful. “Maybe sixty-five. No…that puts the good at thirty-five percent. But maybe thirty-five is right. I think thirty’s not enough, maybe. I’m more like thirty-five percent good guy.”
“I’d like it to be sixty-forty, at least,” he tells me. “But I think it’s really sixty-five bad guy/thirty-five good guy.”
“Why is that?”
“Why…what?” He blinks, and I can feel his whole attention on me, like an anvil I’d love to be crushed by.
“Why are those your numbers?”
He smiles, fleeting. “I don’t know. I’m not sure it’s a choice. What do you think?”
“I say of course it’s a choice.”
“Is it, though?” He’s frowning again.
“We do have free will. I mean, at least somewhat,” I offer. “Or our illusion of free will is compelling enough that I think we’re safe to call it that.”
“Is it?”
“What?”
“Compelling?”
“I think so.”
“So we choose who we are. Is that it?” He tilts his head, and now he’s all professor—but a nice professor. One who cares about your answers, one who wants to understand you. There’s this moment where he seems a thousand years older than me. Which makes no sense because if any one of us is so old, it’s me…isn’t it? Is he lying awake at night as I am, thinking of ways to tell his dying loved one to contact him from the stars? My sister probably won’t be here by winter, and it’s made me feel at least nine hundred years old. My heart weighs twelve tons all the time, and there is nothing I can do to change that.
“Maybe we don’t choose. But…I think we do—somewhat.” My voice wobbles. I swallow. “We don’t get to decide everything. Maybe not even a lot of things. But the parts we get to decide, those are the parts that are important. And so if I get to choose, I want to be a certain kind of person.”
“What kind?” His eyes tell me I can fall in if I want to.
“A good one. Someone who does the right thing, even if it’s hard.” I think of my mom pulling so far back from Becca. “Maybe especially if it’s hard. I think it matters even more then.”
There are tears in my eyes again, turning all this sunlight into prisms. I blink and a tear falls down my cheek, but I’m not really embarrassed. Maybe because none of this feels quite real.
“I don’t need to talk about it,” I say, swallowing again because my throat is aching.
I wipe my face as he says, “Okay.” His face is gentle…like an angel.
He gets to his feet and holds out a hand, and I take it, letting him pull me up. For a heartbeat, he just looks at me—assessing. His hand squeezes mine.
Then he checks his watch and glances back at my face. “So you don’t—need to. But I need to walk around. To wake up. I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night, and I can’t stay awake today. Why don’t we walk, and you can hold my hand. I wear contacts, but I lost one. This one.” He gestures to his black eye. “Fell out in first period. And now I’m dizzy.” His smile is crooked, and I’m dizzy. “You don’t need to talk. I need to walk. But you could talk, while we’re walking.”
I say nothing as we walk through the grassy field toward the orange-red track around it. I feel nothing. I’m a robot, not a human, my chest locked behind a plate of metal, every part of me attached with screws. I breathe deeply a few times, and his big hand shifts around mine, like he’s giving me a hand hug.
