Our Year of Maybe

by Rachel Lynn Solomon

  “This is the coolest,” I say as I marvel at all the album covers. It’s a huge compliment, saying you like someone’s room, the one cube of space they have in this world that’s wholly theirs.

  “Thanks. Carlie and I did it last summer. I spent months collecting CDs and records until I was sure I had everything I wanted. More than a hundred, at least.”

  “Wow. I love it.”

  Then I’m momentarily stunned into silence, distracted by the heat of his body behind mine, much closer than normal. His hand grazes my arm as he shifts so we’re side by side.

  “The band really likes you,” he says, staring straight ahead at The Dark Side of the Moon. “I’m—we’re—uh, glad you joined.”

  I have to bite back a smile. “I like them too.”

  “You guys ready?” Chase’s mom calls from downstairs, and I snag one more glance around his room before we join the rest of his family in the living room, where his sisters are deliberating in front of a cabinet overflowing with games.

  “What are we playing?” Chase asks, swiping a slice of pizza for me before taking some for himself.

  “Taboo!” Chloe announces.

  “You always want to play Taboo,” Carlie says with a groan.

  “Because it’s the best.”

  “I’ve never played it,” I say, and then even Carlie agrees that I must.

  We settle onto the couch and chairs, eating our pizza over the coffee table. Chloe is clearly the most competitive, whining when our conversations distract us from the game. Chase and Carlie talk about a recent Marvel movie I haven’t seen, and Jess is eager to regale me with Fun Facts about Chase.

  “I like to think his musical talent is genetic,” she says. “I played a little guitar growing up, and Chase’s dad played the drums.”

  “Hey, I played flute!” Carlie says.

  “In middle school,” Chase says. “And you hated it.”

  Carlie shrugs. “I was good, though.”

  “Humble, too,” Jess says.

  “Our dad was great.” Chase’s eyes go dreamy, lost in memory. “He played in a band in Argentina when he was in college. Mom, do you have the tapes?”

  “I have the tapes!” she says, rocketing out of her armchair. “And by tapes, we do mean literal tapes.” She rummages through the cabinet unit, pulling out a tape and placing it into a sound system. “Oh—this was Ernesto’s twelve-minute drum solo.” She eyes Carlie. “That must be where you get your humility.”

  It feels almost like a betrayal, being so at home with this family that isn’t mine and isn’t Sophie’s.

  I can’t help loving it.

  “Who knew you were so good at Taboo?” Chase says.

  “Beginner’s luck?” We decided to go for a walk around his neighborhood after putting the game away because I wasn’t ready to go home yet. And I don’t think he was ready to let me. “I really like your family.”

  “They’re a little too much.”

  “They’re exactly the right amount,” I say. “I . . . was sort of surprised by how much your dad came up.”

  “It was a long time ago. We all just thought we’d be miserable if we only cried when remembering him. We didn’t want it to ever feel like we couldn’t say his name in our house.” A smile crosses his lips. “I remember bits and pieces of him. Mostly his drumming. He had a kit in the garage, and you heard him on the tape—he was good. He was the one who got me into music.”

  “I’m sure he’d have loved Diamonds.”

  Chase laughs. “He’d have a lot of constructive feedback.”

  We pass a bar. A restaurant. Another bar. Chase hums a song I don’t know, a sound I’ve gotten used to. It’s not at all grating. It’s completely endearing.

  “I can’t wait until I’m twenty-one,” Chase says. “We could get into so many more shows. It’s not even nine o’clock and we can barely go anywhere.”

  I point. “That bookstore’s open.”

  He smirks. “How convenient.”

  Inside, I inhale the musty scent of old books. The store’s deserted except for a woman reading a fantasy novel behind the cash register and two orange cats curled in a plush bed next to a bin of bargain reads.

  I find myself drifting toward the section marked PHILOSOPHY. I run a finger over the peeling-apart spines of the books. Aristotle, Aquinas, Bacon, Böhme, Comte. When I land on Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy, I pull it out and open it.

  “The ending in that one is kind of a letdown,” Chase says from behind me. He brushes my arm with a few fingers.

  “Descartes is considered the father of modern Western philosophy. Have you heard the phrase ‘I think, therefore I am’? Or in Latin, cogito, ergo sum?”

  “I have not. Explain it to me?”

  His nearness makes my heart race. Staring down at the yellow-gray page, I say, “Descartes was trying to find a statement that couldn’t be doubted. He’d already disproved everything he used to believe in, but the fact that he was able to think meant that he existed, and that couldn’t be disproved.”

  “You’re so cute geeking out over all this,” he says. “You don’t even know.”

  My heart leaps into my throat, making speaking a serious challenge. “When I first read that—cogito, ergo sum—I felt . . . reassured somehow. That no matter how terrible I felt, I existed. I could think. God, I probably thought way too much. I still do.”

  “Not a bad thing,” Chase says. He backs up a bit, and my body misses his closeness already.

  We continue to wander.

  “I went to services last night,” I tell him.

  “Services?”

  “At temple.”

  “Ah, so have you gone full Jew?”

  Gently I shove his shoulder. I’m not entirely sure if non-Jews can say the word “Jew.” It’s something I’ve wondered myself. It’s a weird word, one that sounds offensive depending on tone of voice, yet is merely a description, like “redhead” or “guitarist.”

  “I liked it a lot. Being there.” After services, my dad and I talked about college and the band and how I do want to go to Israel one day. “What do you think you’ll do after high school?”

  “Oof. That’s a real capital-Q question.”

  “Sorry. It’s been on my mind lately.”

  Chase pauses in the middle of an aisle. “I’d love to go somewhere with a good music program. I might want to be a music teacher or something, but I don’t know yet.”

  “I don’t think I want to go to school in Washington.” As soon as I say it out loud, I realize it’s true. Out of this state, away from my parents: That’s the only way I’ll be truly independent. “Sometimes I worry I like too many things to narrow them down to one major.”

  He steeples his fingertips beneath his chin. Points them at me. “Ideal world: Where are you, and what are you doing?”

  I ponder this for a moment. “I’m in another city, a quaint college town or a bustling metropolis with a university smack-dab in the middle of it. I’m studying music and literature and philosophy and history and everything. I imagine myself up late in this spectacular library that’s an architectural marvel, and I’m surrounded by books, and I have so much homework to do but I don’t even care because the library is so incredible.”

  “Where am I?” he asks. He inches nearer, his hand coming up to rest on my arm.

  I draw in a breath. “You’re . . . Maybe you’re there too. Maybe we’re studying together. Friday-night nerd club, college edition.”

  “And what are we, in this ideal world?”

  “I—I don’t know,” I admit, my voice scratchy in a way I’ve never heard it before, distracted by the warmth of his hand through my jacket. “What are we now?”

  He’s so close that what happens next is both inevitable and somehow entirely unbelievable: We both lean in, lips meeting for the first time. His hand tangles in my hair, and I reach up to cup his face, pulling him toward me. He’s not close enough. I wonder if he’ll ever be close enough. His
mouth opens against mine, and then there are tongues and teeth and his hips pushing me back against the bookshelf. It’s the closest to delirium I’ve ever felt. I’d be convinced I was having an out-of-body experience if I weren’t so aware of my body, at least every place he’s pressed against it.

  A first kiss in a bookstore has got to be the best kind of first kiss.

  I move my hands from his face to his chest to the hem of his jacket. He sighs, and I might like the sound of it more than Rufus Wainwright’s Poses. I could put it on loop and turn it into my favorite song.

  “The band really likes me, huh?” I say when we take a breath.

  “Shut up,” he says, laughing, which is fine because I have no words left. All the books in the store have stolen them from me.

  I’m not sure how long we stand there in the corner. The bookseller kicks us out at closing time—but she’s smiling as she does it—and we each buy a book because we feel guilty about staying in there so long. We don’t even look at the titles until we’re outside in the dark, holding them up to streetlamps. What to Expect When You’re Expecting for Chase, and Bunnicula for me. We laugh and we kiss and we laugh some more, and then we link our hands together. It’s raining, but we don’t care.

  If this is life, I’ve missed out on so damn much. I’ve missed that being kissed beneath the earlobe is the most fantastic feeling in the world. I’ve missed that someone tugging you close, pressing their body against yours, turns your stomach inside out. It’s like the world is saying, Welcome to your new life, Peter. We have a surprise for you. And suddenly I love surprises.

  PART III

  CHAPTER 23

  SOPHIE

  “I’VE NEVER SEEN SO MANY leg warmers in my life,” Liz says as we enter the college’s performing arts building, and it’s true. There’s no shortage of leotards, leggings, and leg warmers here, most in shades of pink and black, with a few patterns thrown in. Everyone’s stretching, comparing schedules, chattering about our upcoming classes.

  We’re split into groups: beginner, intermediate, advanced. Montana strides confidently toward the advanced group, while I eye the intermediates. Liz glances between the two groups before joining me.

  Montana spins around, noticing we’re not with her. “Seriously?”

  “You’re way better at technique than I am,” Liz says with a shrug.

  The performing arts building has a long hallway, multiple studios, and a massive auditorium. There must be several hundred dancers here from high schools all around the state. In a way, it’s a trial run for this summer’s workshop—if I get in.

  Saturday morning is devoted to technique classes, with the afternoon open for electives. I’m taking a choreo workshop and an experimental modern class, and then more choreography tomorrow morning.

  My enjoyment of a technique class hinges on the teacher. Growing up, I had one teacher who rarely even played music in class because she wanted us to focus on keeping time with each other, not the music, and it frustrated me so much. Most classes, you warm up as a group, do a couple steps and phrases across the floor, with time for some choreography at the end. I was always waiting for the choreography. I wanted to master the steps, sure, but more than that, I wanted to string them together and create something new.

  After my ballet and jazz technique classes and sandwiches in the college dining hall for lunch, it’s time for choreography.

  The teacher is a curvy woman with dark skin and a mass of black spiral curls, a professor of dance who introduces herself as Collette.

  “Welcome, welcome,” she says as we shuffle inside. Montana’s in this one with me. “Let’s start with a dance icebreaker, since we don’t all know each other. I’d like us to stand in a circle and introduce ourselves along with the first style of dance we ever learned and a short phrase that represents that style.”

  My very first class was a toddler tap class, so when it’s my turn, I do a shuffle-ball-change with my bare feet. I liked tap, but it’s the kind of class, sadly, most dancers swap out for advanced ballet and jazz as they get older. That’s what programs want to see when you’re auditioning. Most other dancers say ballet, but some say jazz or modern, one hip-hop, and one who surprises us all with merengue. When it’s Montana’s turn, she executes a flawless double pirouette.

  “Wonderful. So you’re all here to learn about choreography,” Collette says. “Choreography isn’t just about being a technically good dancer. Not all the best dancers are the best choreographers. It’s a very special skill set, and while a lot of us might start out imitating other choreographers, it’s all about finding your voice as an artist.

  “Who are some of your favorite choreographers?” Collette asks. “No need to raise your hands.”

  “Martha Graham,” Montana says immediately. “Of course.”

  “Of course,” Collette agrees with a smile. “But why?”

  “She revolutionized modern American dance. She’s an icon.”

  “Who else?”

  Other dancers offer up names: Alvin Ailey, Merce Cunningham, Katherine Dunham, Bob Fosse.

  “Twyla Tharp,” I say softly, surprising myself. I never volunteer answers in groups like this, and definitely not without raising my hand. I am a new kind of Sophie this weekend.

  “My favorite too,” Collette says. “They all have a distinct style, yes? Their own voices. You could probably describe them using a single word or phrase. By the end of today’s class, I want you to come up with a word or phrase for yourself. You’re not married to this for the rest of your life, of course,” she adds after a few nervous giggles pass over the group. “But I do want you to be thoughtful about it.”

  Collette breaks us into four-person groups, and at first I’m anxious that Montana and I are separated. We all get the same song, and each person is charged with choreographing sixteen counts. It’s meant to test our teamwork abilities with people we’ve just met and our cohesion as a group. Collette circles the room, offering advice.

  At the end we perform our pieces, and she asks us to write on a whiteboard a word or phrase we’d use to describe our voice.

  Unexpected, I write.

  This workshop makes me want the summer program so much more, a want that scares me a little. I am so accustomed to not getting what I want that it’s terrifying to think it could actually happen.

  Maybe my onstage and offstage selves aren’t as different as I thought—because right now I feel like the best version of me.

  When we pile back onto the bus on Sunday, my muscles are sore but happy. I throw my head back and sing along with everyone else. I don’t care that I can’t carry a tune. I know this song and this is my team and right now I love all of them.

  I open Instagram to post some photos from this weekend, but first my thumb lands on a post from Peter.

  It’s a photo of his band, all of them sitting in a booth at the Early Bird Diner. It’s Peter and Chase and four people I’ve never seen before, and all of them look extremely cool. That’s the only word for it. It’s not even a recent picture, thanks to Instagram’s bonkers algorithms. That’s even stranger, that Peter was in this picture a couple weeks ago and I didn’t even know about it.

  The hashtags, though. The hashtags are what kill me.

  Diners Are Forever

  #diamondsarefornever #latergram #dinersofinstagram #grease #bandbffs #amidoinghashtagsright

  I have to stare at them for a while, waiting for my mind to unscramble the letters. My stomach rolls over. This weekend I’ve been so consumed by the workshop and these people I didn’t think liked me but really do that I’ve barely thought about him. Suddenly, though, I wish I could reach into the screen and grab him and hold him close. These strangers—that’s what they are to me even if he’s hashtagging them #bandbffs—don’t know him, cannot possibly know him.

  The photo makes this very separate part of Peter’s life feel so official. It summons back the ugly thoughts, the ones that make me wonder why he doesn’t feel the tug of the invisib
le thread between us, whether he’s with them right now, and whether he’s having more fun with them than he ever has with me.

  I hate myself for thinking that, but I can’t make myself stop.

  Liz gives me a ride home after I hug everyone in the school parking lot where the bus dropped us off, and they tell me for the hundredth time that my phone call was the funniest thing they’d ever seen. I’m not sure if that Sophie followed me home.

  My phone lights up with a text from Peter while I’m kicking off my shoes.

  Peter: Something happened last night. With Chase.

  Peter: Are you home? Can you come over? I’ve been dying to tell you.

  Not now. I want to linger in my weekend a while longer.

  Sophie: I’m wiped. Tell me tomorrow on the way to school?

  Peter: Sure. Okay.

  A lamp is on in the living room, and my dad has his headphones on.

  “Hey, kiddo,” he says quietly, so as not to wake anyone up. “How was your weekend?”

  “Exhausting, but good. How’s the murder podcast?”

  “Murdery.”

  “Can I sit and listen with you again?” I’m not sure I’m ready to be fully alone, and I love that my dad and I can sit in silence.

  “Of course.” He pats the couch next to him. “You’ve been with people all weekend. Was it too much?”

  “Too much social. Sophie on overload,” I say robotically.

  “We can just listen,” my dad says, as though understanding I don’t feel like talking right now.

  But my mind wanders. Something happened with Chase. They declared their love for each other. They kissed, and it was much better than either of the two questionable-circumstance kisses Peter and I have shared. My kidney stopped working and Chase offered up one of his own.

  Surely it was something good, something that made Peter happy. After my dad goes to sleep, I leave my still-packed bag on my bed and turn on my computer. My curiosity is stronger than my exhaustion.