Today Tonight Tomorrow

by Rachel Lynn Solomon

  That swipe deserves its own romance novel.

  “Okay?” he asks, and I don’t know if he’s asking if I’m okay, if what we’re doing is okay, or okay as in am I ready to go, and I’m not. I’m not. It’s cold, but I could light a fire with how it feels to be this close to him. Yes, this is okay, but it’s also not nearly enough.

  All I can do is nod. Suddenly his hoodie feels too warm. I’ve mourned what we lost by not being friends, but what if we’d become friends and then something else? Maybe we’d have shared all our firsts. Learned together, explored together, and beyond the physical, we’d have helped each other on those rough days. This entire night, I’ve been defending my emotions because I couldn’t admit the reality: that I have real feelings for this boy. There are so many things I didn’t know about him, like that he is a fan of children’s books and his favorite word is ‘tsundoku’ and he alters his suits himself. He cares about his mother and his sister. He cares about me, Rowan Roth, the girl he’s been trying to destroy for four years.

  I’ve never experienced something earth-shattering, like Neil said. But I have a feeling that if something happened with us… it might be.

  And that possibility is what pulls me like a magnet toward my former nemesis, Neil McNair, who is looking at my mouth like he has just discovered the perfect synonym for a word that doesn’t have any.

  And maybe it’s what pulls him to me too.

  “Rowan, right?”

  A voice shatters the darkness, and Neil and I spring apart before our lips meet.

  “Hey, girl, was that you onstage at Bernadette’s?” A girl who looks to be in her midtwenties is standing a few feet from us, a beanie hiding her hair, the lamplight glinting off a septum piercing.

  “H-hey,” I croak out. “Yes. Yeah. That was me.”

  My cheeks are ablaze, as though I’ve been caught doing something I wanted to be private. If she saw what we were maybe about to do, she didn’t notice or isn’t letting on. I can’t even look at Neil, who’s frozen next to me.

  A foot of space has suddenly materialized between us on the bench. Like he was worried about getting caught too.

  She breaks into a grin. “I loved your piece. I’m addicted to romance novels, but none of my friends really get it. And there you were, reading a romance novel at an open mic and owning it.”

  Wow, I’d love to have this conversation literally any other time.

  “Thank you. Thank you so much.” Thank you for ruining what might have been the most romantic moment of my life.

  “I just had to tell you,” she says. “Hope I see you at the next one!”

  “Yeah. Hope so.”

  She waves and skips off into the night.

  The left side of my body is cold, and I’m shivering again. I want that Neil softness from five minutes ago, but now he’s a statue, iron spine and concrete shoulders. We were about to kiss. I didn’t just imagine it.

  Finally, Neil comes to life. “We should go,” he says, leaping to his feet, dusting off his pants. “We have to be at mini golf by eleven thirty.”

  “Right,” I manage. I stand on wobbly legs.

  Neither of us says a word the entire walk to my car.

  HOWL CLUES

  A place you can buy Nirvana’s first album

  A place that’s red from floor to ceiling

  A place you can find Chiroptera

  A rainbow crosswalk

  Ice cream fit for Sasquatch

  The big guy at the center of the universe

  Something local, organic, and sustainable

  A floppy disk

  A coffee cup with someone else’s name (or your own name, wildly misspelled)

  A car with a parking ticket

  A view from up high

  A tourist doing something a local would be ashamed of doing

  An umbrella (we all know real Seattleites don’t use them)

  The best pizza in the city (your choice, but you will be judged)

  A tribute to the mysterious Mr. Cooper

  11:26 p.m.

  WE’VE HAD A lot of awkward car rides today, but this one is silent. Neil is staring out the window, chin propped on one hand. I want to play my melancholy music. I want him to tell me the etymology of the word “heartbreak.”

  The ache in my chest has only intensified since we left the bench. He learned to hide so much of himself after what happened to his dad, and based on the way he’s turned stoic, he’s still excelling at it. And fuck, it’s crushing. I don’t like it at all, not the tightness in my chest or the pressure building behind my eyes.

  I swear he was leaning toward me too. Unless, now that we have distance from the open-mic adrenaline, he’s realized what a colossal mistake we nearly made. Maybe he’s glad we were interrupted. Regrets what almost happened. Six hours ago, I would have been horrified by it too—or would I have been? When did this really start for me? Because I’m pretty sure it wasn’t today. When I dreamed about him? Has it been dormant since that short-lived freshman-year crush? No, it couldn’t have been. This is something new, the way I feel about him, but it’s old and familiar too. I tease him about his suits, but I love them, don’t I? And the freckles. God, the freckles. I am trash for his freckles.

  He keeps glancing between his watch and the clock on my dashboard.

  “It’s three minutes fast,” I say.

  “We’re going to be cutting it close.”

  What he doesn’t say: if we hadn’t gone to the open mic, if we hadn’t lingered on that bench, if we hadn’t almost kissed, then we wouldn’t be threatening our Howl status.

  “There was a spot back there,” he says as I make a loop around.

  “It was too small.”

  My driving is safe but frantic, especially after the fender bender this morning, but I swear, we get hit with every red light, which blesses us with more time to sit in silence. Neil sighs, then coughs, then sighs again, seeming to prepare himself to say something he never finds the words for.

  “Late,” he says under his breath when I put my car in park near the downtown mini-golf course.

  Don’t cry. “We can’t be.”

  “You can’t exactly argue with time. If we’re late, we’re late. It’s just a fact.”

  This snippiness catches me off guard. This isn’t even how we spoke to each other the past four years. There was always a respect there. I don’t know what this is, but it makes a hard pit settle in my stomach. He regrets what almost happened. I’m sure of it.

  Logan Perez is at the door, armed with her clipboard. “You two are late,” she says, shaking her head.

  “Only two minutes,” I say feebly, but I’m a rule-follower to my core. Late is late, whether it’s two minutes or two hours.

  “Logan.” Neil stands up straighter. “It’s my fault. I made us take this weird route, even though Rowan didn’t want to. Eliminate me, if you have to. But let her stay.”

  My face immediately heats up, and that pit in my stomach softens. I’m not exactly sure what he’s trying to pull here. He didn’t outright say he’d take the money if we win, but if I were the only one left, we’d be reducing our chances pretty significantly.

  Logan’s gaze flicks between the two of us. “I shouldn’t do this,” she says, “but as the incoming president, I imagine I have some kind of executive power. In general, I consider myself pretty hard-hearted. But what you’re doing, Neil, is really sweet. It makes me feel something right in this general vicinity.” She holds a hand over her heart and grins. “You can both stay in the game, but you speak nothing of this to anyone else.” We nod, and she steps aside to let us through. “Enjoy your safety.”

  Once inside, he’s suddenly fascinated with the straps of his backpack.

  “You didn’t have to do that,” I say, still not entirely sure how to interpret it.

  He shrugs. “You were right. We shouldn’t have taken so many detours.”

  That makes me feel about two feet tall. “I guess I’ll see you in half an hour?”<
br />
  He nods back his agreement and once again disappears with his friends. I have never been so relieved to see mine. Mara waves, and Kirby, a little more tentative, offers a smile.

  “Hi,” I say, unsteady on my feet. If I’m going to cry, at least my friends are here. “I think I need to talk.”

  * * *

  In a darkened corner of an indoor miniature-golf course, after I apologize a hundred more times for being sour about the Chelan trip, I confess to my friends what they’ve suspected for all these years: that my feelings for Neil McNair go deeper than rivalry.

  I tell them everything else, too, about the books I read and the book I’m writing and Delilah Park.

  “Go ahead,” I say, pressing my back against the wall, bracing myself. “Make fun of me.”

  “You’re writing a romance novel,” Kirby says slowly. “You showed it to Neil.”

  Miserably, I nod, waiting for them to insist I could have shown them. But I feel better now, knowing I’m not hiding anymore.

  “You didn’t think we’d be supportive?” she asks. There’s no amusement on her face. I think she might be hurt.

  “It’s a romance novel. You’ve made it pretty clear what you think about them.”

  “Yeah, but…” Kirby shakes her head. “I didn’t realize you loved them, loved them. I was always joking. It wasn’t meant to be mean. You never gave the impression that you were that into them, just that you had them lying around.”

  “Because I was afraid,” I say in a small voice. “And I don’t want to be. Maybe I’m not the most amazing writer yet, but I think I’m okay. And I have plenty of time to get better. I don’t want to be ashamed of what I like.”

  Mara’s been quiet the whole conversation, which isn’t entirely unusual for her. “I like Harry Styles,” she finally says, which surprises both of us.

  Kirby turns to her. “Really? You’ve never told me that. I mean, I can admit he’s a good-looking guy.”

  A blush creeps onto her cheeks. “No. I like his music.”

  “Oh,” Kirby says. “I’ve never heard it.”

  “It’s good,” Mara insists. “I’ll send you some songs.”

  Then Mara and I both stare at Kirby, as though waiting for her confession.

  “Okay, okay,” she says. “I love reality TV. But not even the shows that require talent, like singing or fashion design. The really bad stuff that’s just hot rich people yelling at each other. I started watching it ironically with my sister a few years ago before she went to college, but then I sort of started liking it for real.”

  “I love Harry Styles!” Mara shouts, in a move that’s completely out of character for her, and then giggles as a few classmates glance our way with raised eyebrows. “And I don’t care who knows about it!”

  I adore her.

  “Maybe you could recommend a couple books to us,” Kirby says, and my heart tugs.

  “I can definitely do that.”

  Recovered from her outburst, Mara places a hand on my knee. “So… Neil.”

  Even his name brings heat to my face.

  “For a while, I thought you guys just needed to hook up and get it out of your system,” Kirby says. “You really like him, though.”

  “God. I really do. But it was like what happened on the bench flipped some kind of switch with him, and now he’s acting even weirder than usual.”

  “It sounds like maybe he got scared,” Mara says. “I felt like that with Kirby at the beginning. That if we were going to do this, we couldn’t go back to how things were before. That it would change our friendship forever, for better or for worse.”

  “Fortunately, for better,” Kirby interjects.

  Mara threads her fingers with Kirby’s. “And school might be over, but you’d have to figure out what happens this summer, and in college, assuming you haven’t murdered each other by then. That’s terrifying. We’re going to the same place, and I’m still terrified.”

  Kirby blinks at her. “You are?”

  “Well… yeah. We’ll have new classes and will meet new people, and we’ll be halfway living on our own. We’re going to change.”

  “But I like myself,” Kirby says with a small whine, and Mara swats at her arm.

  I love them. I love them both so much, and maybe I don’t deserve them, but I am so fucking glad I have them right now.

  “I am so sorry,” I say again. “About everything with Neil, and for abandoning you.”

  “You can’t erase all our history in just a few months,” Mara says. “But if you really want to make it up to me, you could share a few of your Howl photos.”

  “Not a chance.”

  “And I’m not going to tell you ‘good riddance’ because we had one fight.” Kirby smiles sadly. “All I wish is that it would have happened earlier. The four of us could have hung out, double-dated.”

  There’s that pang of regret again, the one that makes me wish the past few years had been different. I can imagine it: late nights in Capitol Hill, taking up an entire booth at Hot Cakes, Mara taking ridiculous photos. I have to press a hand to my chest, as though the regret is a physical pain.

  “I don’t know what it’s going to look like, if anything happens with us.” It’s bizarre to acknowledge it as a possibility. Something might happen with us. “But I know I want you both to be part of it. Well, not all of it.”

  “I want all the McNasty details,” Kirby says, batting her lashes.

  I roll my eyes. “How do you tell the person you’ve spent four years trying to destroy that you have a crush on them?”

  “I would guess there’s a book about that,” Mara says. “And that you’ve probably read it.”

  “Make sure he knows that you’re serious and genuine. No sarcasm,” Kirby says. “You’re an overachiever. I have full confidence you can overachieve the shit out of this.”

  “I’ll try.” I’m so overwhelmed with emotion in this moment—for this entire night and for them. Then I get an idea. “Hey—could we take a picture? It’s been a while.”

  Mara’s already reaching for her phone. “I thought you’d never ask.”

  And I don’t care that my eyes are puffy and my makeup’s faded and my dress is, well, you know. Mara stretches out her practiced selfie arm, and we lean our heads together, and without even looking, I already know it’s perfectly imperfect.

  In the distance, a whistle blows, and then there’s Logan’s voice over the intercom: “Wolf Pack! You have three minutes until your safe-zone time expires. Everyone please proceed to the exit in an orderly fashion.”

  “Okay.” I get to my feet, renewed and reenergized. “I’m going to do it. I’m going to tell him.”

  I’m still feeling a bit like a newborn giraffe learning how to walk, but after I hug my friends, I’m more solid. Grounded.

  “Can you be proud of someone who’s the same age as you? Because I’m proud of you,” Mara says, and that makes tears back up behind my eyes for an entirely different reason.

  When I spot Neil, my stomach stages a revolt. If possible, he looks even cuter than before. All I want is to wrap my arms around him again, for him to tug me close, the way we hugged after Bernadette’s. I want to go back to that bench and climb into his lap. I want to kiss him like I’ve never kissed anyone else. I want him to lose himself in me the way I’ve never been able to imagine—or maybe it’s that I can’t imagine it happening with anyone except me.

  Hi. I might like you. Do you want to eat another cinnamon roll with me?

  So you know how I hate you? Turns out, I don’t!

  You. Me. Back seat of my Honda Accord. Now.

  “You ready?” he asks.

  I’m so stuck in my thoughts that what comes out is “Huh?” which makes him raise an eyebrow at me. I shake myself out of it. “Yes. Let’s grab the view clue at the place you insist is the best view in Seattle, then see if we can figure out who this mysterious Mr. Cooper is.”

  Logan blows another whistle, which means we have five minutes
to get as far away from this place as possible before we can start making kills again. Someone opens the door, and Neil and I run for it, racing toward my car in the murky darkness.

  We zigzag through the streets, ensuring no one who has our names can follow us. It’s gotten a lot colder, and I jam my hands into the hoodie pockets. I should give it back, I know I should, but I like it too much.

  We’re almost to my car when my fingertips close around a small slip of paper in the pocket.

  I skid to a stop and pull it out, my heart plummeting as I read and reread the name written on it. No. No, no, no. With my thumb, I trace the ink of the letters, trying to get them to make sense.

  Rowan Roth.

  12:05 a.m.

  NEIL HAS MY name.

  Neil has my name.

  Neil hasn’t killed anyone, which means he’s had my name since the beginning of the game.

  “Rowan?” he’s saying. Not “Artoo.” Because we’re not friends. We’re not whatever we almost became on that bench. “I keep wondering if Cooper was involved in the founding of Seattle somehow, or something else in Seattle history, maybe. I found this article about Frank B. Cooper, this guy who oversaw the building of new schools in Seattle neighborhoods. Could it be leading us to the first school in Seattle, or is that too circuitous? What do you think?”

  My heart is pounding and oh my God, oh my God, oh my God. I cannot think about Frank B. Cooper or Seattle schools right now. I rock back and forth on my heels, tugging at the straps of my backpack, my face on fire.

  It is all of a sudden so obvious: when he acted fidgety after I saved him, how he didn’t pursue Carolyn Gao. He did this just so he could best me one last time. He played me, letting me into his house and his room, telling me his secrets and listening to mine. Just to rub it in when he kills me, even after we allied ourselves.

  I can’t believe I was about to tell him that I had feelings for him.