Our Year of Maybe

by Rachel Lynn Solomon

  I clutch the bracelet on my wrist, sigh, release my grip. Something about its presence, and those two tiny charms, soothes me. My room is nothing like Peter’s, but I wouldn’t exactly call it messy. Sure, there are clothes on the floor, draped over the back of my desk chair, under my bed. But my desk area is clutter free—I can’t focus if it isn’t—with a giant whiteboard mounted on the wall next to cutouts from the Twyla Tharp calendar Peter got me years ago, an array of folders to organize my assignments, the rainbow pens I use to mark up my notes.

  My teachers let me record their lectures because I have a lot of trouble listening and taking notes at the same time. I sort the past week’s audio files into folders on my computer. Then I download an audiobook for English and curl up in bed with my headphones and heating pad and imagine Peter next to me, warm and solid. His hand on my back, tracing the ridges of my spine. I don’t always think about kissing him. Sometimes it’s enough to imagine him holding me.

  I dance my thumb along his name in my phone, though if I really wanted to see him, I could go across the street. Right now putting on a coat, slipping into shoes, walking seems like too much effort. The lights are off in his room anyway.

  Playing with him always feels incredible. But tonight was different, maybe because it had been so long or because I was keenly aware of the scars connecting us. This time when we played, we had more in common than we ever had before. Instead of feeling like the surgeons stole a part of me and gave it to Peter, it feels like that missing piece stitched us closer together.

  I wonder if he felt—feels—it too.

  When my feelings for him changed, it wasn’t because of a singular romantic moment between us. It was gradual, a side effect of the music we made and the hours we spent together. I started noticing how cute his smile was, how much I liked his eyes, the warmth that flooded my body when we hugged or leaned against each other while watching a movie. When I made him laugh, something deep inside me rumbled along with him. Something that said, Do that again.

  After his declaration of love, the one in hindsight I wish I could have returned, Peter went out of his way to ensure I knew he didn’t feel that way anymore. I don’t think we hugged for a full month. So I decided I’d wait for a sign. The problem is, anything can be a sign if I wish hard enough.

  Over the years, it gradually dawned on me that if he didn’t get off the transplant list, he might die. And I would lose not only my best friend, but someone I was starting to love in a completely different way. That was when I vowed that if there was any chance I could help him, I had to try.

  At dinner, I was surprised by his sudden interest in Judaism. I wear my Star of David necklace every day, the one my parents gave me for my bat mitzvah, but to me it’s more a symbol of belonging to something than a statement of religious devotion. Plus, my dyslexia made my Torah portion really freaking hard, so this necklace is sort of a reminder that I did it.

  To me, “being Jewish” isn’t the same as “practicing Judaism.” I’m pretty sure there’s a difference, that I can feel part of something, that I can like that it makes me unique even if I don’t like going to temple. I’m Sophie Rose Orenstein and I have red hair and freckles and I dance and I’m Jewish. It feels like a defining quality, though it’s not the only quality that defines me.

  Someone knocks on my door. I’m positive it’s one of my parents, so I’m surprised when Tabby enters.

  “Luna’s asleep,” she says quietly, “and Josh went home. Can I come in?”

  “You mean he doesn’t live here?”

  Tabby lifts her eyebrows.

  I dial back the bitchiness. “Sorry. That was uncalled for.”

  “Yeah. It was.” She steps inside, fidgeting with her hair. “I can’t imagine how hard this is for you.”

  “You’re suddenly so smart?”

  “I’ve always been smart.”

  It’s true. Tabby was seven months pregnant when she took the SAT. She scored in the ninety-eighth percentile.

  My bed creaks as Tabby sits down. “I’m sorry,” she says.

  “Me too,” I grit out. If she can be mature, I can too. “I . . . didn’t mean to take that out on you. You’re a good mom.”

  “Thanks. What you did was amazing. Complicated, but amazing. And . . . I know the way you look at Peter. I see what’s there.”

  “You don’t—” I shake my head. “There’s nothing there.”

  “Remember when I said I’ve always been smart?” She taps her temple. “Does he know?”

  “I don’t think so.” I take a deep breath—and then I let her in. “I’ve been hiding it for the past three years. Gahhh, it feels like I’ve been suffering forever.” I mash a pillow over my head and groan into it.

  “Oh my God, that long?”

  I nod. We are sisters sharing secrets. The kind of sisters we’ve never really been.

  “Why haven’t you said anything? Done anything?”

  “It never felt like the right time, I guess. And now, with the transplant . . . I don’t want him to feel like he owes me, or something.” I want him to love me because he wants to, not because he feels like he has to. “I never told you this, but . . . we kissed once.”

  Tabby’s eyes widen. “You did? Shit, when?”

  I have to laugh because this new Mama Tabby doesn’t swear nearly as much as she used to. As though a one-year-old would pick up on it. “Yeah. A few years ago. We were sort of . . . experimenting.”

  It was my perfect first kiss with Peter. Tentative and sweet and searching. It was full of curiosity, each of us wanting to know what it felt like to press your mouth to another person’s. I’ve thought about our perfect second kiss a hundred, a thousand times, and all that matters to me is that it lasts longer than the first.

  “He might be waiting for you to say something. To make a move. What would be the worst-case scenario?”

  “He doesn’t like me back.”

  “And then what? You’re still best friends. The awkwardness would go away after a while, right?”

  I want to believe that it wouldn’t be gutting to learn he doesn’t feel the same way. That’s why uncertainty is so safe: I can wrap myself in this potentially unrequited love and never risk getting shut down.

  And as much as I hate to admit it, Tabby knows significantly more about romantic relationships than I do. I wonder what it would’ve been like if she’d confided in me about Josh when they started dating. If, when she got pregnant, I’d been a confidante as opposed to a mess of confusion and shock.

  “Maybe you’re right,” I say, and then add: “Thanks.”

  She yawns. “It’s past my bedtime. God, I’m old.”

  I whack her with a pillow. “Go to sleep, Grandma.”

  After she leaves, I lift up my shirt and trace the jagged scar on my abdomen. It will fade, maybe one day even disappear, but I’ll always know what happened beneath my skin. I wonder how long I’ll be nervous about changing in front of other people. Peter is the only one who would understand how I’m feeling, but I can’t burden him with this, too.

  I mull over what Tabby said, imagining all the different ways I could tell him how I feel. If I could hug him and have him not only hug me back, but bury his lips in my neck and tell me I’m beautiful, amazing, his. We could belong to each other, tied together in the most intimate pas de deux.

  I have been imagining us together for a long, long time. Sometimes we are sweet and gentle. Sometimes we are wildly acrobatic. Sometimes we reenact scenes from movies I’ve seen. I don’t know exactly what sex is supposed to look like, but it’s probably much messier than it is in my mind. Still, it is my fantasy: We can be as skilled as I want.

  I slink over to my dresser. I keep the vibrator in the back of a drawer, wrapped inside a too-small sweater with dreidels on it. I bought it at a sex toy shop in Capitol Hill when I turned eighteen in March, one of those places owned by women, with a focus on women. Most of all, I was curious. Maybe it’s the dancer in me that wanted to know everything m
y body could do. And tonight I want to prove I control my body, that I can still make myself feel good.

  Once I wear out the batteries, I lie in bed for a while, staring up at the ceiling.

  Hiding my feelings for Peter kills me sometimes, and the vibrator takes the edge off for only a little while. This time of night is when my feelings are most dangerous. When I ask myself questions like, if he loved me, wouldn’t something have happened between us by now? Or is he as scared as I am? Is he in bed across the street thinking of me?

  Maybe my sister is right: It’s time to take the leap and finally tell him. Not for the first time, I wish I were more in real life like my onstage self. My body has the courage my mind and mouth never seem to have.

  I message Peter good night when what I really want to say is I’m in love with you and I want you and Is there any chance you want me the same way?

  The pain dulls but never quite goes away.

  CHAPTER 10

  PETER

  TWO WEEKS INTO THE SEMESTER, I still haven’t gotten a chance to play piano in band. Eleanor Kang’s bound to catch an autumn cold sometime soon, though. I’m hopeful.

  I’m in the school library, getting a head start on my homework before tonight’s football game. Sophie’s performing at halftime, and we’re going to a party afterward. I’m sure it has nothing in common with the two-person parties Sophie and I used to have on Friday nights. Movies and records and early bedtimes. For me, at least.

  I’m not sure I even know the rules of football. My parents aren’t interested in sports, and I’ve never seen it played. I click out of my Word document and google it—but someone in the carrel across from me is humming. Loudly. Too loudly for a library, and yes, I’m going to be That Person and say something about it. I push out my chair and peer around.

  “Excuse me—” I start.

  “Hey,” says Chase Cabrera from my English class. The hummer. “You’re in the Friday-night nerd club too?”

  “I—uh—what?”

  He leans back in his chair. Flexes his arms above his head. “We’re doing homework in the library on a Friday because we’re both extremely cool?”

  “Yes. That’s exactly right.”

  He taps his laptop. “This Dante essay is slowly sucking the life out of me. Have you finished it yet?”

  “Yeah. I actually read the book last year. For, uh—for fun. So you’re going to have to let me be president of the Friday-night nerd club.”

  “I could settle for VP. Seriously, though, you read Dante for fun?”

  “I . . . had a lot of free time,” I say. “No offense, but why’d you take the class?”

  He groans, then rubs at his eyes, jostling his old-man glasses. “My mom wanted me to take as many APs as possible so I have a chance at scholarships. My sister basically got a full ride—thanks, Carlie—so it’s a lot of pressure sometimes.” He stretches out his legs. “I can’t remember the last book I read that wasn’t for school. In my family, it’s like, get into a good college or else.” He runs his hands over his face, like it’s all too much.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, wishing I could understand, even a little, what it feels like for people to want too much from you.

  He shrugs. “Nah. It’s fine.”

  “I could help you. With the book.” This is how my first non-Sophie friendship starts: with Dante Alighieri. “As nerd club president, it might even be my duty.”

  One half of his mouth pulls up into a smile. His glasses sit on his nose tilted slightly to the right, and his smile goes slightly to the left. I like the opposite symmetry of it. I like that no one else in our year wears the kind of glasses he does.

  “Thank you. Thank you. If you can get one one-hundredth of your knowledge into my head, maybe I won’t be totally screwed.” He swivels his chair over to my alcove. “You’re . . . on the Wikipedia page for football?”

  “Oh.” My face heats up, and I chew on my bottom lip before explaining: “I’ve never been to a game. Figured I should probably know how it’s played before tonight.”

  “You’ve never been to a football game?”

  “I . . . haven’t done a lot of things.” I didn’t want to get into this, but he’s clearly waiting for an explanation now, one eyebrow raised. If Chase and I are going to be friends, he might as well know why I’ve been a hermit. “So, when you asked if I was new . . . I’ve actually lived here my whole life. But I’ve been homeschooled for the past few years. I have chronic kidney disease, and my parents are really overprotective. I’d been on the transplant list for years. Until a couple months ago. My friend Sophie donated a kidney.” I push back my sleeve, showing him the medical ID bracelet.

  Chase’s dark eyes widen. Clearly, this is not what he was expecting to hear. When he speaks, his voice is softer than usual. “That’s . . . wow. How are you feeling? Is that okay to ask? My mom has a friend with chronic pain who told us to stop asking because she was never going to have a happy answer. So—please ignore me if I shouldn’t have asked that.”

  “I’m kind of the same way, actually. Or—I used to be. But I’m a lot better now. I don’t have to—” I break off, realizing I was about to talk about the exchanges I no longer have to do. Peter. No. “Anyway. Inferno.”

  “Only if you’re sure I’m not keeping you from your very serious Wikipedia research.”

  “I’m sure.”

  Chase rolls up his sleeves, as though we’re about to embark on something more strenuous than discussing medieval literature.

  “First question, then: Why couldn’t a book about hell be more interesting?”

  I flip through Chase’s copy of the book. “It’s an epic poem, an allegory about man’s spiritual journey. Dante dies, and in the underworld, each person’s sin is punished in a really poetic way. Like, fortune-tellers have to walk with their heads on backward so they can’t see what’s ahead.”

  “That’s clever. I like that.”

  “He’s guided by this Roman poet, Virgil, through the nine circles of hell, and as they get deeper, the sins people have committed grow worse.” I point at the diagram in his book.

  Chase examines it. “Where do you think you’d be?”

  I consider it. “Anger.”

  “Fifth circle? You’re bad.”

  Before therapy, I used to be angry all the time—about my first donor kidney failing all those years ago, about my life as a shut-in. I banged out songs on the baby grand that made my parents invest in quality earplugs.

  “I’m not nearly as angry as I used to be. Maybe I’d be stuck in limbo. What about you?”

  “Hmm. Heresy? I’ve never been very religious.”

  For a moment I ponder that. I still have no idea how religious I actually am. Clearing my throat, I decide to trudge onward. “So, Dante descends further and further, ultimately winding up in the ninth circle, where Lucifer is condemned for having committed the ultimate sin against God, treachery. He has three faces, three mouths. They’re each chewing on a traitor: Brutus and Cassius, who killed Julius Caesar, and Judas, who betrayed Jesus.”

  Chase pulls his computer onto his lap and types a few notes. “Aside from the fact that we get to read something about Satan eating people, why do you like it so much?”

  “I guess it, like, spoke to me or something.” I emphasize the word “spoke” like I know what I’m saying must sound ridiculous.

  But Chase doesn’t seem to think it’s stupid. He’s watching me intently, waiting for me to say more.

  “Part of it is that I like how poetic the punishments are. Gruesome, sure, but it’s the ultimate karma. I also like the idea that when you die, things aren’t over. Even if you’re damned to an eternity of suffering. I’m Jewish, but on some days I’m convinced I’m an atheist, and on others I’m more agnostic, so most of the time I don’t really believe in any kind of afterlife. So I guess I wondered, because I was sick . . .” I trail off, because anything else is too deep, too dark for this nascent friendship. Chase probably hasn’t had to confr
ont his mortality like I have.

  Also: I realize I said “Jewish” as opposed to “half Jewish.” It might be the first time. Well, half Jewish, I nearly feel compelled to add. But I don’t.

  He’s quiet. I’m worried I’ve said too much and consider brushing it off when he says, voice serious, “I can understand that. Like I mentioned before, I’m not very religious either, so I have no idea what it feels like, but it . . . it makes sense.”

  “Have you ever read a book like that?” I ask. “I mean, not about death, necessarily, but something that spoke to you?”

  “Not a book,” he says. “But music, absolutely. There are some songs I’m positive just had to be written about what I was going through.”

  I nod vigorously. “I get that. I feel that way about most of Regina Spektor’s songs . . . except the really weird ones.”

  “There are a lot of those.”

  “You know Regina Spektor?”

  “A couple of her more recent albums, yeah.”

  “You have to listen to Soviet Kitsch. And 11:11—that’s her self-released one. What she can do with the piano, it’s incredible.” I’m rambling. “I, uh, I play piano, so most of what I listen to is pretty piano-centric.”

  “That’s cool,” he says, then scrunches his face. “Just don’t tell me you’re a Coldplay superfan. We’d have to end this friendship right now.”

  “Definitely not. I mean, Chris Martin’s a good pianist, but they’ve got to be the most overplayed band of the 2000s.”

  “Agreed. Thank God.”

  “What are you into?”

  He lets out a breath, as though about to begin a very long story. “Some classic rock, some punk, a lot of newer stuff.” He lists names of bands, a few I’ve heard of, many I haven’t. “I’ve been really into this one lately.” He opens a music player and quietly, quietly, so the librarians won’t hear us, clicks on a song by a band called Shovels & Rope. He glances at me expectantly, waiting for my judgment. Like he’s worried I’ll hate it and think he has shit taste in music.