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I don’t move to change that, and neither does he.

This bed is definitely not a queen. I feel breathless all over again from the heat coming off him, just inches away from me. Suddenly, I’m deliriously warm.

I know his eyes are on me. I can feel them, icy blue, searching for a read on this whole mess.

I don’t have a fucking clue.

The mattress shifts, and he rolls away from me.

I exhale a little too loudly, knowing how little sleep I’m going to get tonight.

Chapter 9

I don’t dare turn to lie on my back until I hear his breaths deepen and I know he’s asleep. I feel like I’m back in high school, insomnia paving the way for intrusive thoughts and romantic delusions.

Only this time, instead of replaying the perfect little moments we shared that made me so certain he felt the same way I did, my brain won’t stop showing me flashes of then.

Henry was always my friend. Always, always. But there was also a part of me that longed for it to be something more, even before I had the words for that.

It all came to a head at the beginning of our senior year, when our school announced a trip for students to tour colleges in New York City. Laketon Academy had done this before based on where students were applying—there had been past trips to Boston, Philadelphia, Los Angeles—but Henry and I were thrilled that this one would land us in the place we’d always dreamed of ending up. I think I probably made him watch You’ve Got Mail and When Harry Met Sally a thousand and twelve times growing up, and we were both in love with the idea of New York City. We had this plan to go to NYU together, and the more we talked about it that summer between junior and senior year, the more real it felt. I kept thinking, If we can just get out of Laketon together, maybe we’ll finally get our chance for more.

We sat next to each other on the flight to New York, and that recurring wish of mine started to feel more tangible. We argued, as we always did, but it felt…more. Charged, somehow. When his arm brushed mine on our shared armrest, every hair on my body stood up against my will. I felt a swoop low in my stomach. He didn’t move, and neither did I, and we stayed like that, arms pressed, for the remainder of the flight. It was such an innocent gesture in retrospect, but I felt like he was watching my hand the whole time, just as I was watching his. Waiting to see which of us would lock our fingers together first as we made the descent into what could be our new home.

We made so much sense, in my head at least, and in that moment especially, I felt so certain that I couldn’t be imagining this. That he must’ve felt it too. Henry was always gangly and awkward, but as soon as hormones hit, I could no longer read what he was feeling at all times.

Of course, neither of us ever made a real move, but that was the dance we always did with each other. Instead, we distracted ourselves with talk about how “adult” we were for being unleashed upon NYC in this way, basically left to our own devices.

That night, after the teachers did a half-hearted curfew check at the hotel, the majority of our twenty or so classmates on the trip reconvened in Henry and Trevor’s room—per Trevor’s request, of course. I was surprised Trevor had even come on this trip—the likelihood of him ever leaving the Midwest, or even our town, seemed slim, but maybe he just wanted to have a good time. He’d procured a surprising amount of beer from his older sister’s friend who was in college nearby, and the logical next move was for him to throw a party. I remember Henry being stressed at first because he and I had our NYU interviews the following morning, but Trevor’s easy nature always had a way of wearing Henry down.

Soon, Henry had a red Solo cup in hand just like the rest of us, careful to mask any bottles or cans in case there was photographic evidence. I’d never had beer before, and I was pretty sure Henry hadn’t either. Our friend group was not usually the partying type, and the only alcohol I’d tried up until this point was a little bit of wine during the Jewish holidays, under my mother’s supervision. If I close my eyes, sometimes I can still taste the room-temperature piss-liquid on my tongue. Maybe this is why, to this day, I still don’t care for beer.

As the night wore on, someone started a game of Truth or Dare, and things quickly devolved from there. During a dare that involved some sort of clothed lap dance on the bed, someone knocked an entire beer onto Henry’s phone, which was plugged in on his nightstand. The phone went dead almost immediately, and Henry completely flipped out.

“The interviews are tomorrow,” he said to me, his hand gripping the back of his neck so tightly that I could see the strain on his forearm. “I can’t miss it, Norah. I can’t.”

I assured him that I would act as his replacement cell phone, both serving as a personal alarm system to make sure that he was awake and to navigate us to the NYU campus. Because our names were early in the alphabet, we were the only two students slated for our meetings there the following morning.

I sat next to Henry at the foot of his bed as classmates whose names I can’t even remember admitted crushes and revenge plots. As make-out dares became more and more unprompted. Frankie, the only person who knew about my all-consuming crush on Henry, kept eyeing us, giving me a look that clearly said Now is the time. I remember a silent conversation between us through raised eyebrows and glares across the room, and my slow resignation that my best friend was definitely about to stir the pot for my own good. She leaned over to her new boyfriend, Kevin Chen, who was oddly enough my accidental first kiss during an ill-fated middle school Spin the Bottle game (an unfortunate side effect of Laketon Academy being fairly small). When it was Kevin’s turn to pick the next victim of the game, he turned his attention to Henry.

“Truth or dare?” Kevin asked, and I swear I didn’t imagine the sideways glance Henry gave me before reluctantly deciding on a dare. “I dare you to kiss Norah.”

In the moments that immediately followed the dare, I felt relief. It was my Spin the Bottle ploy all over again, only this time, I was sure that I would finally get some answers. Back in middle school, I had plotted to make Henry my first kiss at that sixth-grade party, but he opted not to play. A low-stakes kiss would finally tell me how Henry really felt about me. My seventeen-year-old self was convinced that this was a genius idea on Frankie’s part, especially for enlisting Kevin as the darer so it didn’t come from my best friend directly. She was helping me get exactly what I’d needed to know for so long. If he didn’t share my feelings, we could laugh it off as part of the game, but I felt pretty certain it wouldn’t go that way. I was sure that this would be the moment that changed everything.

In a way, it was.

Henry stood, the bed shifting under the abrupt change in weight. He took a giant step away from me, looking at me with disgust in his eyes that had never been directed at me before in the fourteen years that I’d known him.

“No. Nope. I’m not—pick something else.”

Confusion washed over me from Henry’s sheer panic at the thought of kissing me.

“Come on, man, it’s just a game,” Kevin started, but Henry began pacing the room.

“I don’t want to play some meaningless game. I’m not kissing her.”

The last word launched itself out of Henry’s mouth like a grenade. I was the target.

“Actually,” Henry continued, “we should call it. Everyone out. This is over.”