Page 96 of All the way home

“I’m gay, probably.”

The scribbling stopped. Zach didn’t dare move an inch.

Mara laughed, a tight squeeze of a noise. Then she whispered, “Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Same.”

That had been a surprise. Initially, anyway. Zach remembers deconstructing it slowly, carefully, pulling apart what she’d said about her crushes on boys until it was comically obvious she’d been lying through her teeth.

What Zach doesn’t remember is why he was so nervous to tell her. Maybe it’s all this hindsight that’s erased the initial terror, but he still remembers how it had felt to lie on that carpet, like he was raising the pH level in his body just by thinking too hard.

The blurry chatter of the airport has intensified to the point that, ordinarily, it might make Zach’s skin crawl. But right here, it feels like he’s in a protected bubble.

Just him, the tangle of extremely weird and explosive feelings hanging out in his chest, and . . . Kieran.

Chapter Thirty-One

Rena

Change happens whether we like it or not.

Those were her own words.

Uncertainty roils. She hasn’t felt like this since the night of Siobhan and Oscar’s high school graduation two and a half years ago, when she’d caught them sloppy drunk and making out in the janitor’s closet. That night—and the following morning—was the first time she’d had to examine the way change sent her off-balance.

“I don’t know what I am,” Oscar had told her when she accosted him the next morning. “Does it matter?”

“It matters if you’re—if you’re just testing out something on Siobhan,” she told him from her perch on the barstool in his kitchen.

“I’m not testing anything out.” He winced and knocked sunglasses down off his forehead, clearly hungover.

“This is Siobhan we’re talking about,” she reminded him. “It’s not fair to her if you’re not—”

“I’m in love with her, probably.”

Rena’s elbow slipped off the counter. “You?”

Oscar flipped her off. “Shut up. I’m serious.”

It had never—not once—crossed her mind that Oscar might be the least bit interested in Siobhan, although this revelation explained the sudden upswing in one-on-one study sessions and his vested interest in their mutual acceptance to Queens. And then there’d been all the late-night driving they’d been doing recently without her . . .

“How long?”

“A couple of weeks,” Oscar admitted, evidently aware that there wasn’t any point in denying it.

“You didn’t tell me.”

“We didn’t know if it was going to work out,” Oscar explained. “Besides, it was weird. I didn’t know how to.”

She took a moment to decide if she was angry, and determined that she was, but not at Oscar. “Is Siobhan in love with you?”

“No. I don’t know.” Oscar scowled. “And you can’t tell her I said I was.”

Rena nodded.

There was a long stretch of silence.