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I drum my fingers on his window, and Peter glances up from his book and beckons me inside. I shake my head and beckon him over to me instead.
“You look like shit,” I say when he opens the window, instead of hello.
He bows, dark hair slipping past his eyebrows. “Thank you. I try.”
A long time ago he made me swear to always tell him the truth. Everyone lies when you’re sick. They say you look great when you do not, that things are going to get better soon; they just know it. Peter hates those platitudes.
Even when he isn’t feeling great, though, he is still beautiful. Full, dark eyebrows, strong jaw, hazel eyes that focus so intently on mine, that make it hard to look away.
And things are going to get better soon. That one is true.
“What are you reading?”
He flashes the cover at me: The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan. “I’ve got a paper due for my gender studies class.” Because he’s homeschooled, Peter often opts for advanced classes. They almost always sound more interesting than what I’m taking at North Seattle High.
“Learn anything interesting about me?”
“Oh yeah. I’ve got your mysteries allllll figured out.” He feathers his fingers as he says this. “You could always read it and learn for yourself.”
It’s probably Peter’s deepest desire for me to love reading like he does. Though I’m not as terrified of it as I was when a diagnosis of dyslexia illuminated why I struggled so much in elementary school, I don’t read much for fun.
“Maybe I will.” Glancing down, I say, “I see you’re wearing my favorite pants.”
It’s this ancient pair of navy sweatpants he basically lived in a few years ago. They’re threadbare at the knees, the seams on the sides nearly splitting apart. I don’t even think the elastic waistband is still, well, elasticky. But I only tease because I love him.
“Don’t pretend you don’t want to burn them.”
“Oh, I’m burning them. After the surgery. Don’t worry.” I clear my throat. No more joking around. “Are you okay to go for a walk, or do you have to do an exchange? I wanted to talk.”
As I say this, the half-moons under Peter’s eyes become more apparent, the sag in his posture a bit deeper. “I’m fine for another couple hours. I could do a short walk.”
He tosses some alfalfa into Mark’s cage and zips a North Face fleece over his plaid button-down. This boy is so Seattle it hurts. Then he climbs out the window and into the evening with me. I’m practically chasséing into his backyard, tugging on the silver chain of the tiny Star of David necklace I wear every day, my heart a wild thing inside my chest.
“Everything okay?” he asks.
It’s Wednesday, and we may not have a chance to talk like this until after the transplant Friday morning.
“Extra energy from practice. You’ll come see us perform in the fall, right?”
“Definitely. Hopefully I can go to every game.” The uncertainty hangs in the air. Hopefully the transplant will go smoothly. Hopefully no complications. Hopefully it will work. We are optimism soup. “Where are we going?” he asks as I lead him through the greenbelt behind his house and into the woods. We wind around trees that have been here longer than either of our families.
“Patience, ratty-sweatpanted one.”
He makes a tsking sound and pats the thighs of his pants. “I like these pants. I’m gonna be sad when you burn them.”
If Peter and I were together, we’d hold hands on this walk. I’d trace the knobs of his knuckles, lean in close, bury my face where his neck meets his shoulder. He’d press me up against a tree, kiss me until we both were dizzy with desire.
Sometimes being around him is agony, the gap between what we have and what I want too wide to ever cross.
After about ten minutes, we reach a clearing with a pond. We played here all the time as kids. In his portal fantasy phase, Peter was convinced that if we found the right rotting tree trunk or patch of grass, we’d tumble into another world. But we haven’t been here in years. The pond is an unhealthy gray-green, and the ground is decorated with crushed beer cans. It used to be the place we’d go to hide from our families, back when our parents said more to each other than “good evening” when they happened to take the trash out at the same time.
I hug my sweatshirt tighter around me, wishing I’d changed into something warmer than gym shorts after practice.
“Are you having second thoughts?” Peter asks suddenly, his voice threaded with panic.
“No!” I say quickly. It’s true—I’m not. It’s just that I’ve been anticipating our surgery for so long that it’s become impossible to imagine our lives on the other side of it.
His shoulders soften, and he lets out a long sigh. “Okay. Because. You know you don’t have to do this, right? I mean, of course I’m thrilled you’re doing it, and my parents are thrilled you’re doing it. But you don’t have to. You know that.”
