Chapter 13

Chapter Thirteen

MARA

The two weeks before the semester exam were the best two weeks I'd had at Westbrook in two years.

I didn't say that out loud. Saying things out loud had a way of making them fragile, like naming something gave the universe a target. So I just lived inside it quietly — the Wednesday sessions, the texts that had stopped being about bio somewhere around week six, the way he found me between classes now without making it obvious and somehow that made it more obvious to everyone. Jess had stopped commenting. That was how I knew it had become a real thing. Jess only went quiet about things she'd accepted as permanent.

I let myself be happy about it. Carefully, the way I did most things, but still. Happy.

Which was exactly when it went wrong.

It was a Thursday, the week before the exam. I'd stayed late in the lab finishing a titration that had taken three tries to get right, and by the time I packed up it was past five and the school had gone to that particular quiet it got after hours, emptied out and echoing. I took the shortcut through the gym corridor because it was faster and I was tired and I had a calc problem set waiting at home.

I heard his laugh before I saw him.

I knew that laugh. I'd catalogued it without meaning to — the real one versus the performed one, the quiet version he used when something actually got him. This was the real one. I slowed without deciding to.

They were in the alcove by the gym doors. Cole and a girl I recognized from the varsity cheer squad, not Brianna, someone else — Maya something, a junior, pretty in the effortless way that made everything look casual. She had her hand on his arm and she was saying something and he was laughing and leaning against the wall with the loose, easy posture he had when he was comfortable.

He hadn't heard me. I was still twenty feet away and the corridor was dim and his back was mostly turned.

I watched for four seconds. That was all. Four seconds and then I turned around and walked the long way home.

The thing was, nothing had happened. I knew that. She'd touched his arm and he'd laughed — those were not crimes, they were just two people in a hallway, and I had no claim over hallways or arm-touching or the way he laughed at things. We hadn't had a conversation that included the word exclusive or the word girlfriend or anything that constituted an actual agreement. We had kissed in my kitchen and at a taco stand and I had let myself feel things I hadn't budgeted for and that was my fault, not his.

That was the part that sat in my chest the whole walk home. Not anger. Worse than anger.

I should have known. Not because Cole was a bad person — I didn't think he was a bad person. But because this was what happened when you let yourself stop being careful. When you started counting Wednesdays and smiling at texts and thinking words like permanent. The universe didn't warn you. It just waited until you'd built something and then showed you the window you'd forgotten to close.

I did my calc problem set. I ate dinner with my mother and answered her questions about my day and helped clear the table. I did not look at my phone.

At nine-fifteen it buzzed.

Cole: ready for Saturday? last session before the exam

I looked at it for a long time. My thumb moved over the screen without typing anything. Saturday was two days away. Saturday was the last session, the one I'd told him was the end of the textbook between us, the one I'd let myself mean something about.

I typed: yes. six o'clock.

He sent back a single: can't wait.

I put the phone face-down and looked at my ceiling and had a very quiet, very private conversation with myself about what I was doing. The answer was not flattering. I had built an entire architecture of feeling around two months of Wednesday sessions and a boy who was kind to my mother and remembered how I took my tea. I had done this while telling myself I wasn't doing it. And now I was lying in my room feeling gutted over four seconds of a girl laughing in a hallway and I hadn't even given him the chance to explain something that probably didn't need explaining.

But that was the problem with knowing yourself. It didn't stop you from doing the things. It just meant you had to watch yourself do them.

Saturday came. I was at the kitchen table at five-fifty with the books out and my face arranged into something normal. He knocked at six. My mother let him in. He came to the kitchen and sat down and smiled at me and it was the real smile, the full one, and something in my chest did the thing it always did and I hated it.

"Last one," he said.

"Last one," I said.

We worked. I made myself focus on the material — enzyme kinetics, membrane transport, the full review — and he was sharp, ready, the sharpest he'd been all semester. He was going to pass the exam. I was certain of that. Whatever happened after, that was real, and I'd done that, and it mattered.

At seven he leaned back and looked at me. "You're quiet."

"I'm always quiet during sessions."

"Different quiet." He watched me. "What happened."

"Nothing happened."

"Mara."

"Cole, I'm fine."

He was still for a moment. Then, quietly: "Did I do something?"

The question landed too accurately. I looked down at the textbook. "No."

"You sure?"

"Can we just finish the review."

He didn't push. We finished the review. But when we closed the books and the session was over and the moment came that I'd been counting toward for two weeks, I picked up the notebooks and stacked them neatly and didn't meet his eyes.

"Good luck Tuesday," I said.

The silence that followed was the worst kind. The kind that knew something had shifted and couldn't find the edges of it.

"Mara," he said softly.

"You're ready," I said. "You've got this."

I said it like a goodbye.

I didn't mean to. But I did.