Chapter 53 Bree Says It First

Chapter 53 Bree Says It First
Juni

Bree doesn't call unless something actually happened.

I picked up before the second ring.

"I told him," she said.

I sat up straighter on my bed. "When?"

"This morning. Before second period. In the parking lot."

"How?"

"I just said it." A pause. "Like you said it to Declan at the diner. I went there and I said it."

"What exactly did you say?"

"I said: I've been in your orbit for eight months and I keep calling it analysis and it's not analysis."

I waited. This is what Bree has given me all year, the specific gift of the right question at the right time and I was going to give it back to her now.

"And?" I said.

"He said he knew."

"He knew," I repeated.

"Since September." Her voice had that specific quality it gets when she's feeling something she hasn't finished processing yet... a little faster than usual, a little less precise. "Bree," I said.

"The essay," she said. "I corrected it and then apologized because I thought he'd be annoyed and he..."

"He noted it," I said.

"Since September." She said it again, like she needed to hear it twice. "Eight months."

"He was waiting," I said.

"For me."

"For you."

She was quiet for a moment. I heard her exhale. Then she said: "Okay." One word, but I knew exactly what she meant by it. I'd said it the same way in a parking lot not long ago... the word that doesn't mean everything is fine, it means I know this is the right thing and I'm choosing it anyway, which is different and harder and better.

"Okay," I said back.

"How did you know?" she said. "When it stopped being analysis and started being the other thing."

"For me?"

"Yes."

"Session four," I said. "He argued with me about Gatsby."

"And for me it was an essay correction." She almost laughed. "That's... that seems smaller."

"It's not smaller," I said. "The brave thing comes in different shapes."

"I hate that that's true."

"I know."

Here's the thing about Ethan Park that I have been watching since September without saying anything, because it wasn't mine to say: he is exactly the kind of person Bree needs and exactly the kind she would never have looked for on purpose. She looks for people who match her energy... quick, connected, present in the room in a visible way. Ethan is none of those things. He is slow and unhurried and makes art that is exactly right in ways that are hard to explain, and he has been in Bree's orbit for eight months without pushing his way in, just existing there quietly until she was ready to notice him properly. I noticed him noticing her in October. I said nothing. She wasn't ready.

She's ready now.

"I'm happy for you," I said.

"I know."

"Real happy. Not the supportive version."

"I know," she said. "I can tell the difference." A beat. "You're also a little smug."

"A little bit."

"Because you did it first."

"I had a harder starting point," I said.

"You had Marcus," she said.

"And you had an essay correction."

"My situation was also very difficult," Bree said, and the specific dignity she put into it made me laugh, which she clearly intended.

"It really was," I said. Not sarcastic. Genuinely.

"Thank you for not pushing," she said. "This whole time. You had opinions and you kept them."

"I learned from you," I said.

"I pushed constantly."

"You asked the right questions," I said. "That's not the same as pushing."

She was quiet for a second. Then: "Juni."

"Yeah."

"I'm happy for you too. The whole Declan thing. All of it." Her voice shifted... still Bree, still precise, but softer. "You're different this year. You know that?"

"I've been told."

"Better different," she said. "You take up more space now and it doesn't push me out. It just makes the room bigger."

I opened my mouth. I didn't say anything.

"Don't cry," she said.

"I'm not."

"You sound like you're going to."

"I'm not." I was a little bit. I pressed the heel of my hand to my eye. "That was a good thing to say."

"I know," Bree said. "I've been saving it."

After she hung up I sat with my phone on my knee and didn't move for a few minutes. My room was quiet. Through the window the light was the specific grey of late November afternoons, the kind that arrives early and makes everything feel slightly internal.

I thought about September. The first week of school, the library table, the arrangement just beginning. The version of me who sat in a council meeting a few weeks later and said nothing about the budget discrepancy.

I picked up my journal from the nightstand. I turned to a blank page near the back. I wrote one sentence. It was short. It was the first thing I had written in this journal about myself rather than for someone else.

I read it once. I closed the journal.

Downstairs my mother was at the kitchen table. She looked up once when I came in, the way she has been looking at me lately.

"Good day?" she asked.

"Yeah," I said. "Really good."

"Bree?"

"Bree and Declan both."

She nodded and went back to her book. I put the kettle on. The kitchen was warm and the light was amber from the under-cabinet strips and my mother was three feet away reading something she'd been meaning to finish for a month, and it was a Wednesday in late November and everything that needed to happen today had happened.

I made two cups. I set one next to her without asking if she wanted it. She picked it up without commenting.

We sat there for a while. She read. I thought about the sentence in my journal and the corridor at St. Mercy's and Bree saying okay the way I said okay, the word meaning: I'm choosing this, fully, even though it's the scarier option.

The room was quiet. Outside the window the light was almost gone. Inside, everything was exactly right.