He clears his throat. “You know, all the things.”
“Like what things exactly?” I feel like I’m torturing him a little bit, but I can’t help it. I need to know.
“I was pretty into you, okay?” he says, pushing the words out.Then he snorts. “I mean, apparently I was so into you that even my mom was clocking it.” Mason’s face darkens. “But I never did anything about it. Not a single thing. And why? ’Cause I might look stupid? You might say no?” He’s combing his hands through his hair. “Doing nothing was the same as a no anyway. And now I can’t do anything. What a waste. What a waste of air I fucking was—am—was.”
Mason Leary was into me. Mrs. Leary tried to tell me when I was in her kitchen, but it was too easy to rationalize away as coming from an out-of-touch adult. But now he’s here in front of me, telling me himself. It’s real. The amount of dopamine or adrenaline or endorphins or whatever that floods through me finally drives home that I was also into him. I think about us sitting together on the picnic table in the campground, watching the sun come up, huddled close. God, I was so fucking into him.
“But you’re forgetting something,” I say.
He shakes his head. “What?” he says, like a stubborn child about to be corrected by a parent.
“Look, if you messed it up, so did I. I’m just as big a chicken as you. I did nothing, too.” My brain is catching up with the reality of it all the way a big file loads in chunks after you open it on your laptop. I pretended it wasn’t there, but part of me always knew he liked me. My mom said way back in fourth grade that when boys tease you, it’s usually because they like you. At the time, that idea just confirmed my general sense that boys were the absolute worst, because why would you beanything but kind to someone you liked, and who, theoretically, you wanted to like you? On the other hand, there was no denying that Mason knew how to push my buttons, because he always paid attention to what I said. He listened to me. He knew me like maybe no one else did.
It had scared me. It was too scary to be with someone who could really see me, who would make me be myself all the time. Mason paid such close attention that sometimes I felt like an insect in the science museum, pinned to a mat in a display case for examination. Twenty-four hours a day being myself seemed too hard then. And what if I had been able to do it? If I had let him in, given in to my heart utterly and totally, and then it went wrong? I would have fallen to pieces. But maybe it would have been the opposite. Maybe it would have been joy.
“No, I did worse than nothing,” I add now. “I kept space between us. I wish I hadn’t. More than anything.” The urge to bury my face in his chest is overpowering; I see now all the times he opened a romantic door for me to walk through and I stayed safely back on my side of the threshold. Like last spring, before the cotillion dance, when he kept saying I should ask him, but he did it so casually that I thought maybe it was a setup to prank me, and I was too scared to call his bluff. Or last Valentine’s Day, when he sent me a carnation through the dance team’s flower sale and I convinced myself he did it purely as a friend. I clench and unclench my hands over and over to release some of the helplessness that surges with the memory of each moment that I let slip through my fingers.
“Me too,” he says, his voice gravelly.
“I wish I could go back.”
“Why did you have to be so infuriatingly irresistible, Hattie?” He sits down next to me on the bed, and I try to stop my brain so that I can just feel him there, close to me. My eyes fill up and tears start to stream down my face.
“Do something for me,” he says.
“Anything.”
“Look up.”
“What? Why?”
He snorts. “Jeez, you just said anything.” I wipe my cheeks off and tilt my chin up to see my lumpy cottage-cheese-like ceiling.
“Okay, I’m looking up. For you.”
Suddenly, the lights go out and now I see nothing.
“Whoa, what are you doing? I told you I can’t see in the dark.”
Then I feel his words right next to my ear, and he whispers hoarsely, “Look.”
Is he teasing me? I strain my eyes. Then a jolt runs through me, a delicious electricity that feels like my bloodstream is coursing with sparks. When it settles, suddenly I can see the sky. Not just the sky. The stars. Galaxies upon galaxies of them. Points of light, some bright and piercing, some hazy and dim, in varying shades of white, yellow, even orange. Each is nothing special on its own, but there are so many, clustering in swirls and waves, arranged in ways that seem organized and random all at once. It’s infinity. And every point is twinkling, flickeringin an almost imperceptible movement that makes the whole sky alive.
“Wow wow wow,” I say.
“Everyone should see the stars at least once,” he says.
Suddenly, I know that this is the last visit, that I won’t see him again. The unending spirals I see are countless opportunities extending out forever, most of which will never be followed, like the relationship we never got to have, the love we never experienced. It’s alongside every other possibility that has existed or will exist. All together, mixing in an expanding universe.
“I’ll always love you, Mason. No matter what,” I say.
“Oh, Murph. Thank you,” he says.
I open my eyes, and he’s gone. And so is the little pile of green M&M’s I saved for him.
The heat hasn’t even kicked on yet when I head down to the kitchen on Saturday morning to get some protein in me before this 5K. I’m surprised to find my mom sitting at the island, holding her coffee mug in both hands, letting the steam rise into her face. This is highly unusual. My mom isnota morning person.
“You’re up early,” I say. “Everything okay?”
