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“Me too,” I say, surprising myself. Although I haven’t been able to repeat Adina’s plan to anyone, maybe I could have told Zack, and even if he didn’t have any magical solutions, he could have at least shared the weight of it.
He lowers his voice then and flicks his eyes around the room to ensure we’re the only two people here. “I’m sorry about what happened at my house.”
I sigh. “Yeah. That.”
“Your mind was a hundred different places that day,” he says. Not an accusation. A fact.
“I—I know,” I admit. “It was. I’m sorry too.”
“Is it cliché to say that I want our first time to be perfect?” He brushes my knuckles with his thumb. “I don’t want us to have to rush in between parents getting home. I want us to not be thinking about anything else except each other. I want to have plenty of time because”—he blushes—“well, whenever I’ve imagined it in my head, it lasts a long time.”
My heart flutters at those last words. “That . . . sounds extremely good to me.”
“Yeah?” He brightens.
I force myself to say what I’ve been thinking since I said yes to the University of Washington a couple days ago. “But we only have a few more months before college, and you’re going east for school, and I’m staying here.”
“You’ll be great anywhere. I have no doubts.”
I swallow this down, trying to believe it. Wanting to believe it. “Even though I have no idea what I want to do? Or who I am?” It feels like I’m turning my brain inside out for him to examine. Waiting for him to diagnose me.
“Maybe you’re not supposed to know what you wanna be in high school,” he says, like he and my mother discussed this together beforehand.
“But you with art? And my sister with viola? And everyone else who seems to have the rest of their lives mapped out?”
He shrugs. “I could change my mind, and that’s okay. Or I could never make any money and have to figure out something else. Who really knows for sure?”
I did. But everything I used to think has changed.
“I don’t want to force you to do long-distance,” I say, switching the conversation back to what I’m sure we’re both thinking about.
“Is that it? Or do you not want to do long-distance?”
I chew on this for a while. “I’m not sure. And I hate not being sure. It’s not that I don’t like you. You know how much I like you.”
“Yeah. I think I do.” He grins. “Hear me out a sec, because I have an idea.”
I lean forward, my heart twinging with hope. “I’m listening.”
“What if we agree to see where things go? If we’re still together by the end of the summer, well, we’ll figure it out. And if we’re not . . . then there’s not much to stress out about now, is there?”
I nearly open my mouth to protest. To say that we should have a concrete plan. Instead, what comes out is: “I like that idea. We’ll see where we are at the end of the summer.”
Beneath the table, his sneaker bumps mine.
“I’ve missed that,” I say softly. Across the table, we connect our fingers. “There’s one more thing I want to ask,” I add after a while.
“Fine, I’ll show you my mutant toes.”
I raise my eyebrows.
“Sorry,” he says.
I take a deep breath. “I love you. A lot. And I’m wondering if you’ll go to prom with me.”
The way he looks at me melts me from the inside. He isn’t smiling—this is a different emotion from happiness. It’s gentler. Softer. “I love you a lot too,” he says, inching even closer and putting his hands on my knees. “And yes. Of course we’re going to prom together.” He opens his backpack and pulls out a canvas board. “Before everyone starts coming in and ruins our privacy, I have something for you. Something I’ve been working on.”
The canvas is covered with a variety of found objects: the receipt he found the night of our first date (ginger ale, cold care tea, cough drops, beer), tickets from a science museum we went to, the stub from the movie at Rain City Cinema.
