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“What, you don’t think I’d be a good mind molder?”
“I actually think you would be. If you could get over your distaste for the classics.” He passes it back to me, and I’m both relieved and disappointed he didn’t say anything about the perfect boyfriend thing, if only because I’m curious what he would have said. “It’s not a bad list. I don’t know if it’s realistic, but… do you still want any of these things?”
The thought has crossed my mind a couple times today—before I’ve soundly dismissed it.
“Some of the ones it’s still possible to achieve, yes. It’s not something I think about very often, but I’d love to be fluent in Spanish,” I say. “My mom is, and her whole family is, and I’ve always wished I learned it when I was younger.”
“It isn’t too late, you know.”
I groan with the knowledge of him being right.
“And there was a reason you stopped taking Spanish.” When I shrug, he says, “Because your interests changed. Other things became more important for a while. It’s the same reason you don’t want to be a teacher anymore. You can’t tie yourself to this list you made when you were fourteen. Who still wants the same things they did at fourteen?”
“Some people do.”
“Sure,” he says. “But plenty don’t. People change, Rowan. Thank God they do. We both know I was an arrogant little shit at fourteen, though it didn’t stop you from crushing on me.”
“Twelve. Days.”
He smirks—funny he thinks the arrogance is a thing of the past. “Maybe this version of you would have been cool,” he says, tapping the paper again. “But… you’re kind of great now, too.”
Kind of great.
The compliment turns my heart wild. I slide down the bookshelf, settling onto the carpet, and he mirrors me, so we’re facing each other.
“I just wish it didn’t have to end right now,” I say, though part of me would love for him to elaborate on all the specific ways in which I’m kind of great. “I wish I had more time.”
It’s not until I say it out loud that I realize it’s true. Time. That’s what I’ve been chasing all day, this notion that after tonight, after graduation, none of us will be in the same city again. The things that mattered to us for the past four years will shift and evolve, and I imagine they’ll keep doing that forever. It’s terrifying.
“Artoo. Maybe you didn’t do everything on this list, but you did a lot. You were president of three clubs, editor of the yearbook, copresident of student council…” The smirk returns as he adds: “… salutatorian.”
But it doesn’t bother me anymore. I tug up my knee socks, which are damp and muddy. Howl has wreaked havoc on my perfect last-day outfit.
“It’s strange, though, isn’t it?” I say. “Thinking about our specific group of seniors all spread out next year? Most of us will only be home for breaks, and then less and less after that. We won’t see each other every day. Like, if I see you on the street—”
“On the street? What exactly am I doing ‘on the street’? Am I okay?”
“You’re probably selling your signed collection of Riley Rodriguez books for pizza money.”
“A whole signed collection? Sounds like I’m doing great, then.”
I stretch across the aisle to swat his arm with my hoodie sleeve, which is, well, his hoodie sleeve. “Fine, if I run into you, how are we supposed to act? What are we to each other when we’re not fighting to be the best?”
“I think it would be kind of like how we are tonight,” he says
softly. He taps my ballet flat with his sneaker, and while my brain tells my foot to shift away from his, for some reason, the message doesn’t quite get there, and my shoe stays put. “Kind of like… friends.”
Friends. I’ve competed with Neil McNair as long as I’ve known him. I’ve spent so much time wondering how to beat him, but I’ve never considered him a friend.
The truth is, I’m having more fun with him than I’ve had in a while. Here he is, this secret source of deep conversations and adventures and fun. I was so sure I’d be sick of him by now, but the opposite is true. We only have three clues left. Finishing the game means severing whatever connection we’ve forged. It means graduation and summer and getting on two different planes at the end of it. Maybe that’s why I’m reluctant to leave the library—because, of all the things I’ve learned about him today, at the top of the list is that I genuinely enjoy spending time with him. I thought beating him would feel incredible, but all of this feels so much better.
It makes me wish, again, that I’d realized sooner that we could have been more than rivals. I wonder if he feels it too, this desire to have had more talks like this over mediocre pizza. And whether that makes us friends or just two people who were supposed to meet somewhere but got lost along the way.
“Yeah,” I say, ignoring this weird flip my stomach does that must be caused by this after-hours heart-to-heart. I should move my shoe away from his. Rowan Roth and Neil McNair, even as friends, don’t do shoe-to-shoe contact. I don’t know what they do. “I guess we could be that.”
I lean back against my stack of books, feeling less comforted by the biographies of incredible women quite literally backing me up than I thought I might. Neil and I have been in close proximity in too many dark places tonight. It’s rearranged my molecules, made me unsure of things I thought I was certain about.
Example: how much I like not just his arms or his stomach but him, and the way he looked at me when he told me I was “kind of great.”
