“And so you let me tag along, and I sat in front of the lingerie store for an hour waiting for you and your mom, reading The Perks of Being a Wallflower and pretending I wasn’t mortified.” I laugh, though I’m unsure where she’s going with this. “I’d forgotten that.”
“Only you would remember exactly what book you were reading. I’d never seen your face that red,” she says, then stares up at me from beneath her lashes. “Except for now.”
At this I’m sure I blush even deeper. “You—you should probably have some water,” I croak out. I hand her the bottle I’ve been slowly peeling the label off of for the past hour, and her mouth stains it burgundy. The plastic crunches as she sips.
After she swallows, she bounces a fingertip on the end of my nose. “You’re too good, Peter. I love you. You know that. I one-hundred-percent adore you.” She leans in closer and puts a hand on my arm. Brushes it gently. “You look so good tonight.”
My heart can’t be controlled. It’s manic now.
“You do too.” It comes out shaky.
Sophie scoots even closer to me on the bed. The box spring squeals beneath us. She pulls up one of her legs, crosses it. Tugs her dress down. Her knee settles against my thigh, and I can’t help grazing it with a few fingertips. “It feels like something’s changed between us. Do you feel it?”
“Yes,” I say, voice breathier than I’m used to hearing.
Something does change. A shift in temperature. A quickening of my heartbeat. The wind outside bending a tree to tap against the bedroom window, which makes Sophie whip her head toward the window, then quickly back to me. The force of it tugs the silver chain from beneath her neckline. The small Star of David dangles in the space between us.
“Peter. I don’t just love you,” she says. “I like you. I like you so much.”
She leans in first, but I meet her there.
It’s not a shy peck like before. Her mouth is warm, sour from the alcohol. Teasing me with a life I’ll never have. Kissing Sophie is a strange mix of familiar and foreign, familiar because this is Sophie and foreign because this is Sophie.
This time when we break apart to catch our breath, Sophie is grinning wilder than I’ve ever seen. We wait a few beats before going for each other again, and I capture her Star of David charm between my thumb and index finger.
And it’s good. Great, even. I move my hands to her hair, which is thick and coarse and feels incredible. No wonder she’s always playing with it. But a warning light flashes in my mind. This is Sophie, who made a sacrifice I can never repay. Sophie, whom I love—and maybe more-than-like.
It’s the “maybe” that makes me hesitate. It settles against the uncertain thud of my own heart.
Her hands are on my collar, and then they’re suddenly fiddling with a shirt button. That mental warning light goes off again. WARNING. WARNING. That’s when I wake up, realize what we’re doing and that we shouldn’t be doing it. I have no idea how much she drank, but she’s definitely impaired, and this has to stop.
“Wait,” I say, holding a hand between us. I touch my mouth, and my fingers come away stained with her berry lipstick.
“What is it?” Her pale-blue eyes are dreamy, as though still lost in the kiss. The necklace at her throat swings back and forth. Then she giggles a little, a drunken hiccup of a giggle, as though she can’t quite believe what happened either.
Before I can start to explain—if I even have the words—the door bangs open, and a guy wearing a backward baseball cap says, “Sorry, kids—wait, hey, you’re Peter Rosenthal-Porter, right?”
“Yeah . . .” I glance at Sophie, who looks as puzzled as I am. Her face is flushed, and I can only imagine mine matches.
The guys turns and yells to someone in the hallway. “This is the guy I was telling you about!”
It happens fast—partygoers rush the room, almost like they rushed the field at the game. I spring up from the bed, and Sophie copies me, readjusting her dress and dabbing at her mouth.
A football player in my chem class—I think his name is Ty—grabs my arm and says, “This dude is a fucking miracle! He beat cancer or some shit!” Then he takes Sophie’s arm too, holding us up like we are two prizes he won at a county fair. If I look scrawny next to him, Sophie looks like a doll. “And this girl is a fucking hero. She gave this guy a kidney. A fucking kidney!”
Apparently, kidneys cure cancer—who knew? I open my mouth to correct him, but it’s too loud in here.
Everyone whoops, and someone gives Sophie a shot glass with something blue inside. I’m about to warn her not to drink it because what the hell is it, but before I can, she downs it in one gulp. More cheers. She’s wobbly on her feet as she waves, smiles at everyone, basking in this unusual attention.
“Are you serious? That’s what you were doing this summer?” one of the dance team girls asks Sophie, who nods and holds up her ID bracelet as proof.
“That’s amazing,” someone else breathes.
Ty hoists her up onto his shoulders and races out of the room with her, the rest of the party chanting her name like she is the winning team. I’m the miracle, but Sophie . . . Sophie is the hero.
CHAPTER 13
SOPHIE
LAST NIGHT’S DRESS IS BUNCHED up around my hips and my head is pounding. I roll over in bed and groan, the party coming back to me in flashes. Shots with Montana and the rest of the dance team. Football players who’d never before spoken to me shouting my name. Tugging Peter into a bedroom.
Kissing him.
I told Peter I liked him, and we kissed. And it was brief, but it was still something, still progress. The attention I got from the rest of the party isn’t nearly as groundbreaking as this. Suddenly I am so, so awake, all my nerve endings electrified. I swing my legs out of bed and—
“Ow!”
I draw my legs back up to the bed. “Peter?”
He’s sleeping on the floor next to my bed, a blanket tossed haphazardly over him.
“Hey,” I whisper, trying to soothe my heartbeat, which starts racing when I notice the stubble on Peter’s jaw, his wrinkled shirt, his feet sticking out of the blanket. Morning Peter is too much for me to handle, especially after last night. I resist the urge to touch my lips. “Sorry for kicking you.”
He pushes himself to a sitting position, rubs the sleep out of his eyes. “What time is it? I didn’t mean to fall asleep here.”
More of the night comes back to me. We got home around two a.m. He helped me inside because he wanted to make sure I was okay, I remember him saying. He must have been too tired to walk across the street.
“It is . . . almost eleven.”
“Guhhhh . . .” He reaches for his phone, scrolls through his messages. “At least I was lucid enough to tell my parents I might crash here.” He stands up, stretches. His shirt lifts up, revealing a slice of his stomach.
“About last night,” I start, feeling my face flame.
“Right . . .”
“I wasn’t . . . fully myself.”
He cracks a small smile. “That’s a good euphemism.”
In that moment, it strikes me how easy it would be to brush this all away, forget it ever happened. But I want more from this friendship, and I’ve never been this close to it.
Maybe I was more myself last night than I thought—a version of myself who was unafraid to reach for what she wanted.
“I don’t want it to be something that happened that we never talk about again.” I force myself to make eye contact with him, needing to know that he knows exactly what I mean. His middle school declaration of love. Our virginity pact. Those mismatched feelings that I thought, last night, were finally happening at the right time. The way he kissed me, I was convinced he felt the same way. “What if . . . ? What if we tried this for real? You and me, I mean.”
Peter leans against my dresser, pulling his lower lip between his teeth. I wish he didn’t look so perfect in my room, all morning-rumpled, his hair wild. He waits a few moments before responding
. Each moment feels like a sudden stop in a song—when your breath hitches and you’re waiting for the music to kick back in.
“I . . . I think I need some time to think about it,” he says finally.
It’s not the worst response.
But it’s not the one I wanted.
“I know people say that dating can ruin friendships, and I’m sure it does sometimes, but definitely not all the time, right?” I’m desperate to fill the silence between us, to persuade him. Tip him over the edge so he can fall with me. “And—what if it made our friendship better?”
“How?” He asks it softly, earnestly. It’s not a combative question, but one that comes from a place of real curiosity. “What would be different?” His eyes are on his bracelet, his thumb tracing the engraving there. “Aside from, I guess, kissing . . . and . . . other things.”
Those would be the main differences.
There’s a limit to how much you can love someone as a friend, and Peter and I have hit that limit. The only way I can love him more is by actually making love. That has to be the reason it’s called that.
I try to imagine Peter with someone else, a girl with the patience to grow her hair long, one who has no freckles and no scars. They’re in college in a tiny dorm room bed, and he’s on top of her, and he’s whispering to her things he should have whispered to me. Even in my imagination, it’s brutal.
“Have you thought about it?” I ask, pulling the sheets around my bare legs. “About . . . us?”
“If I’m being completely honest, yeah, I have.” He fiddles with the knobs on my dresser drawers, pushing one of them out and then back in. His mouth curves in a sheepish smile. He’s blushing, and it gives me a buzz of satisfaction that this conversation is as intense for him as it is for me.
I wonder what we look like in his imagination, if we look any of the ways we do in mine. If we’re laughing or if we’re serious.
Why he stopped imagining us.
“I mean . . . we made that pact,” he continues.
It’s the first time either of us has acknowledged it out loud since we made it.
“Right.”
“I—I’m sorry. I need some time. To think about it,” he repeats.
My room is too small. Too warm. Too disappointing. “Okay.”
By now I should know this is what happens when I try to get something I want from Peter.
He shuts my dresser drawer too loudly. “I should, uh, probably go.”
“And I have to pick up my car.”
I throw on a hoodie and Peter jams his feet into his shoes. I follow him downstairs—where, much to my shock, my parents are calmly eating breakfast with his.
“I hope you like scones,” Peter’s mom is saying, holding up a big box. “We got these from that new bakery on Stone Way.”
My mom takes a bite and lets out a horrifying moan of contentment. “Mmm, mmm, MMM. So good.”
“What’s . . . going on here?” I ask.
“Breakfast,” my dad says. I take a scone. “Sophie, Peter, can you take a seat for a moment?”
We slide into chairs at the kitchen table, my heart an increasingly panicky thrum inside my chest.
“We’ve been talking,” my mom says, “and we think you two are probably a little old for sleepovers.”
Apparently, I hadn’t been embarrassed enough for one day. It’s not even noon, and I would definitely like this day to be over, or at the very least for our parents to stop talking. They do not.
“We’ve been so lax about it,” Peter’s mom continues, “and of course we’re thrilled you two are such close friends, but it can’t happen anymore. Okay? You’re still welcome to spend as much time together as you want, but you’ve got to sleep in your own beds, in your own rooms.”
I open my mouth to say Peter slept on the floor and not my bed, but that seems beside the point.
Peter’s nodding. “Right. Of course. Sorry.”
Maybe the strangest part of this is that Peter’s parents have always let him get away with just about anything.
We eat quickly, silently, before Peter mumbles something about homework and I follow him to the door.
“So . . . no more sleepovers,” I say as we step outside.
“Yeah.” He shoves his hands into his pockets. “I’ll see you later? Unless . . . unless you want me to take the bus with you to get your car from the party?”
I shake my head. “No. It’s okay. You have a lot to do. Homework.”
“Yep.” He makes this clicking sound with his jaw that he used to do all the time. I found it so annoying, but I never said anything. It’s amazing the things that stop bothering you when you’re in love with someone.
“Okay,” I say, and I wave at him, which I cannot recall ever having done in my life. But he returns it, and then he retreats across the street.
Montana and Liz are in the front yard cleaning up stray cups and other party debris. Montana waves when she sees me approach the house. She’s wearing pink leggings and a gray hoodie, her dark hair slicked up in its usual ballet bun. Liz, who’s as tall as Montana but curvier, is in a puffy black coat and slippers.
“Hey,” I say. “I’m picking up my car. I hope I wasn’t too embarrassing last night.”
“No. You were actually really fun,” Montana says. “It was unusual for you.”
“Thanks, I think?” I spin my keys around. Drunk Sophie equals fun Sophie. That makes me sad for some reason. The alcohol must have loosened me up, made me more like the shiny lightbulb person I am with Peter.
Liz ties the garbage bag she’s carrying into a knot. “That guy you were with, Peter? He’s in my Latin class. Is he your boyfriend?”
“Not exactly, but . . .” I want him to be, I could say. And I thought we were finally making some progress. But now I’m even more confused. Montana and Liz started out as friends, and they must have thought dating was worth risking that friendship. The words dissolve on my tongue. If I were talking to Peter—and not about Peter—I’d have no shortage of things to say.
“It’s complicated?” Liz says. At practice, she wears her blond bob in a stubby ponytail, but this morning it’s pushed back with a yellow headband. Her face is free of its usual winged eyeliner, the kind I’ve practiced myself but never have been able to get right. It’s odd seeing them outside of school like this, even odder than at the party last night. They seem about 150 percent less intimidating than usual.
I let out a breath. “Very.”
They must assume I don’t want to talk about it, because Montana says, “Do you want to work on your choreography?”
“What?”
“Do you want to come in. Work on your choreography.” It’s not a question this time. She keys in a code on the side of her garage that opens the door, and she beckons me to come inside with them.
“Oh . . .” I search for an excuse and can’t find one. “I don’t want to interrupt if you two are hanging out. . . .”
“Just come inside,” Montana says with a roll of her eyes. She tosses the garbage into a bin and leads me down into the basement we did shots in last night.
“I can’t believe your parents let you throw parties like that. My parents aren’t super strict or anything, but I still can’t imagine them giving us free rein with alcohol. And Peter’s parents are really overprotective. It would never happen.”
“They think if we drink in a ‘controlled environment’ that we’ll be smart about it. And hey, I guess it’s true. You left your car here last night.”
Montana pushes the sofa against the wall. Liz hooks her phone up to the speakers and finds a warm-up song, something by Imogen Heap. The three of us start stretching.
“I’m glad you decided to come,” Montana continues. “To the party, and right now.” The genuine way she says it makes me wish I hadn’t resisted hanging out with them before, although I can’t imagine having traded any of my Peter time.
I need some time, he said this morning. And I need to put that out of my mind so
it doesn’t torture me until that extremely vague length of time has passed.
“You’re so good with the team,” I tell Montana. “I mean. You’re a good captain.”
“The best,” Liz says.
“Suck-up.” Montana smiles, still in her lunge. To me, she says: “Thanks. I try to bring out the best in each dancer. I went to this choreography workshop in San Francisco last summer. It was the best eight weeks of my life.” She switches legs. “You should apply.”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I’ve never been away from home for that long.”
“It was incredible. And you have a technical background, so you’d be great. I stayed in a dorm, too. It was basically like college.” She rolls her neck. “I can’t wait for college. I applied to a bunch of schools in New York for dance. And Liz wants to work in publishing.”
“Fingers crossed, we’ll end up in NYC together,” Liz says.
I feel a flash of something unfamiliar—awe, maybe? I can imagine them there. We’re in the same grade, but they seem so much older, more experienced. I’ve barely thought about what happens after this year. I’ll be in community college and Peter will be here, and the year after that, we’ll be together again. Somewhere.
I tuck my necklace inside my shirt like I usually do before dancing. “I’ll think about it. I’m not sure what Peter’s summer plans are yet.”
Eight weeks in San Francisco. Eight weeks without Peter—if I even got in. I’ve only been away from Peter for a week at a time on family vacations. I always worried something awful would happen while I was gone.
“Where are you applying?” Liz asks, and for a second I think she’s talking about the workshop too.
“Oh—I’m not. I’m going to go to Seattle Central for a year. I have no idea what I want to study, so I might as well save a few grand.” I don’t mention waiting for Peter to graduate, though saving money has always felt secondary.
“Smart.” Montana gestures to the space in front of her. “Show us what you have.”
“It’s not much more than last time. . . .”
Our Year of Maybe Page 9