Her parents showed up to things. They told her stories. They’d probably post proudly on iLive later about Emma’s victory—but if I’d won, mine would never have done that. Instead they’d demand ratios: Questions answered versus questions asked. My ranking on the team. They’d find ways for me to improve, because it was never enough. I was never enough.
Emma stepped out of the way of the players taking their seats for the next match. “We were going to go out for a victory meal. Er, sorry—um, a post-match meal. Want to come? Who doesn’t like spaghetti Bolognese?”
Curtis approached, subtly holding out his hand for mine. Merri appeared with a water bottle. Emma asked, “So, lunch? You in?”
I rejected all of their offerings, and instead turned toward the wings of the stage. Then, I ran.
29
My lung capacity hadn’t changed. The molecular makeup of the air hadn’t altered to include less oxygen. Yet my chest felt tight and my breaths were shallow as I pushed out the auditorium’s doors. It had started to snow. The flakes were fat and lackadaisical as they drifted in the cold air. Two guys were laughing, holding hands, tilting open mouths at the sky. A girl rushed past me, phone to her ear. “Definitely cocoa weather. Meet you there. Five minutes? Save me a seat.”
I glared at their good moods and frivolity. Didn’t they need to be shut up somewhere studying? They were at an Ivy League school—did they really have time to waste on cocoa or ingesting pollution-laced snowflakes?
Even when I made it here or MIT or Stanford or Harvard or Cambridge, I wouldn’t get to frolic. My parents would know my professors by name. They’d hear about my progress or lack thereof. They’d be the standard I was measured against.
I paused outside a large stone building, hiccupped, then sank onto the snow-dusted steps. Even when I was a toddler, my parents hadn’t tolerated crying. “Use your words, Eliza. Throwing fits accomplishes nothing.”
What would they say if they could see me now? Sitting in snow and salt and cinders, sobbing so hard my breath caught. Use your words—I should’ve. It only would’ve taken three: “Prince Edward Island.”
Footsteps crunched up the sidewalk. I didn’t look up, not even when my jacket was draped across my shoulders. I’d known Merri would find me, so when she settled beside me, I leaned into her for the hug that would be waiting.
It was . . . not the hug I’d been expecting. This embrace dwarfed my shoulder and drew me into a firm chest. A big hand offered me a crumpled napkin. “It’s only the first match. We’ll get them next time.”
“You don’t understand.” The words were thick and gummy. I scrubbed the napkin across my face. “We lost. I knew that answer—I . . . failed.”
Curtis threaded my hands through my sleeves like the toddler I probably resembled, gathering my hair out of the way before zipping my coat. “I did too. I knew that answer. It’s okay to fail every once in a while.”
My laugh was wet and bitter. “In what world is failure acceptable?”
“This one.” Snowflakes were catching on his eyelashes, melting in his blinks as he studied me earnestly. “You don’t have to be perfect. No one is going to love you less if you make an occasional mistake.”
I shifted, feeling the grit of salt snag on my damp tights. “No. No one expects you to be perfect. They won’t love you less.” I meant for it to come out as critical, but it sounded wistful. His parents had been in the audience, cheering so loud that he should’ve been as embarrassed as his twin siblings sitting next to them, but he’d grinned and waved. “You don’t get it. That girl from the other team? My parents know hers. I disappointed them. I embarrassed them.”
Curtis picked up the fist I’d been pounding on the step. He brushed off the debris and cradled it in his hands. “So? That’s their problem.”
“They’re all I have!” The words were a gasp, coming on the crest of a new wave of sobs. I never should’ve asked to switch novels, not when Frankenstein was so accurate. I never should’ve joined a team—because then I couldn’t have let them down. I was meant to be a solitary creature. Doesn’t work well with others, my elementary school teachers had indicated on all my report cards. My parents had asked, “Why should she if they’re intellectually inferior?” But it was more than that; I didn’t fit with my parents—or my peers. Like Frankenstein’s monster, I didn’t fit anywhere.
“Come with me.” Curtis stood and opened the door of the science building. It was so warm inside that I nearly cried again as the coldness of my fingers and nose and thighs began to register. In the lobby, he dragged two overstuffed chairs so we were practically knee-to-knee, then draped his coat over me like a blanket. “Okay, now that you’re not an Eliza-sicle, let’s talk. Your parents are not all you have. You have Merri and the rest of the Campbells and Fielding and Sera and Hannah and Lance. I know you and Toby fight, but I also know you’d step into traffic for each other. You have me.”
I bit down on my lip to stop it from quivering, wishing I could stop the spill of tears from my eyes. “That’s just ridiculous. Why would stepping into traffic ever help?”
“I don’t know, but there’s not one of us who wouldn’t do it. Missing a question on quiz bowl isn’t going to change that. You’re stuck with us.”
For now. Until I said the wrong thing at lunch again. Or messed up during a bigger competition and was cut. Or beat him in the science fair. Or he got fed up with my mixed signals and awkwardness and realized I wasn’t worth it. I bet I was a lot less attractive with snot in my snarly hair and my face all blotchy.
“We both knew the answer,” I whispered. “I never should’ve let you talk me into this not-dating farce. I said it’d be a distraction and destroy my focus. I was right.”
“One quiz bowl competition isn’t going to keep you out of the Ivy Leagues.”
What had Mom said? “Patterns start with one anomaly.” I dropped my chin. “It starts here. First it’s one question, then it’s one test, one class . . . No. This isn’t working.”
“Then we review and revise.” My hands were fists and he pried them open, sliding his thumbs inside. “We form a different process. You don’t throw out the whole experiment.”
I flinched back against the seat, pulling away from him.
“What?” he asked. “What did I say?”
“I don’t want to be an experiment. Not with you.”
Comprehension settled across his lowered lashes. His mouth thinned. “Is that how you think your parents see you?”
“They—they just leave me. After Brazil—they just left. If I don’t follow their rules, if I don’t live up to their standards . . .” I was grateful for his coat across my lap, because I tucked my feet up, pulling my knees to my chest, like that could stop it from feeling hollow, cover up everything raw and vulnerable that was leaching into my words and leaking out my eyes. “In Brazil—I almost got abducted. I broke the rules. I wasn’t supposed to leave the lab. They brought me back to the US. And left . . .” I hiccupped and finished in a wet whisper. “What if they don’t come back?”
Curtis swore under his breath and passed a hand over his eyes. “We’re circling back to the Brazil thing. But first, do they know you feel this way? Because if they don’t . . .”
In spite of tears, blotchiness, and a runny nose, I made myself meet his eyes. “I’m their daughter. Shouldn’t they miss me? Why don’t they miss me? Why am I so easy to leave?”
“Oh, Firebug.” He was out of his chair and in mine, sliding my legs across his lap so we were hip to hip. He put a hand on each of my shoulders and met my eyes. “In case you haven’t noticed, I don’t scare off so easily. And Merri isn’t going anywhere. It’s their loss. You’re amazing and it’s—as Anne would say—‘tragical’ that they’re cheating themselves out of the chance to know you.”
I lowered my head to his chest, and he patted my back with one hand. The other clutched my shoulder like I might disappear. We were a graceless tangle of limbs and furniture. Nothing like I’d seen in any o
f Merri’s favorite movies. I was dripping on his blazer, there were runs in my tights, one sleeve of his coat was dangling into the puddle our shoes had left on the floor. The chair smelled faintly of cleaning products.
It didn’t match any definition of romance I’d seen. But it was ours, and the grip I had on him was as tight as his on me. “I know I’m bad at this, but please don’t give up on me.”
His breath was warm against my hair. “We’ve already had this conversation, and you’re not bad . . . But I also never wanted perfection. I want you. I have since the first time—”
I shut my eyes. The obvious ending to that sentence was the absolute wrong one. —I saw you on campus. Saw me, and wanted me, because I was a thing to obtain.
“—you told me off at our lunch table.”
I laughed. That answer was the exact right one. The absolutely Curtis one. I pressed my cheek harder against his chest, feeling the hammer of his heart.
“I want you covered in sweat after a run. With frosting on your nose that I put there. Doused in flour because I dared to tell you what to do. Right now, when you’re letting me know how you’re feeling—I want you more than—”
“Kiss me,” I whispered, my voice strange and breathless, but I didn’t care. “Please? Kiss me.”
“Anytime,” he answered, lowering his mouth to mine. “All the time.”
30
It could’ve been two or twenty minutes later—time ceased to function in a linear fashion when I was engrossed in discovering how Curtis’s mouth moved against mine and how his skin felt beneath my hands—but when I heard someone whisper-shout “Oh—Oh!” I reluctantly disengaged my lips from his neck.
“Uh. Hey, Merri.” Curtis’s voice was deep and startled but not embarrassed.
It’s possible I nipped his neck—accidentally—before whirling to see my best friend taking backward steps with her hands over her eyes. “Um, don’t mind me. Carry on. But heads-up, the van leaves in ten minutes.” She bumped into a chair, then almost sprawled over a table.
“Merri, uncover your eyes before you end up in the ER,” I said.
“Is it, um, safe?” she asked. “Are all hands where I can see them?”
I tugged mine out from under his shirt. I’m not sure when they’d gotten there, but I was going to go ahead and blame that on needing his body heat to warm up my fingers. Curtis untangled his from my hair and folded them in his lap.
“All clear,” he said.
Merri lowered her hands. Her eyes were enormous, her smile bigger. “I didn’t mean to interrupt. We can talk later. Like, I’ll give you five more minutes to . . . whatever, then I’ll still have five minutes to interrogate Eliza before the van!”
Curtis looked between my beet-red face and Merri’s happy dance. He grinned. “We can ‘whatever’ another time—why don’t you take the whole ten minutes.” He squeezed my hand. “That okay?”
I nodded and sat up, straightening my skirt so I could return his coat without flashing my torn tights.
He stood. “I guess I’ll go find my family so Win can mock me about his school beating mine.” He looked at me. Looked at Merri. He patted her shoulder, then squeezed mine. “Uh, good luck?”
“Goodbye, Curtis.” Merri’s wave looked more like a shooing motion as she plopped onto his chair.
When he and I had been knee-to-knee it had been comforting and sweet—but Merri in that same spot made me claustrophobic. The strategic move would be to go on the offensive—take control of the conversation before she could—but my mind was a whirl of panic.
Merri crossed her arms and tried to look stern. “Just so you know, I’m reserving the right to be angry at some future date—but we only have ten minutes! So let’s skip the part where I yell at you for lying to me and get to the part where you tell me all the heart-squish swoony details.”
I laughed. If there was a better person on this planet than Merrilee Rose Campbell, I’d never met them and had no interest in doing so. No one could ever replace my best friend.
“Wait!” She held up a hand. “But maybe first just explain why you didn’t tell me?”
My laughter choked to a halt and I studied my hands. “You know how you always say we have friendship ESP?”
She stuck out her tongue. “And you always tell me it’s not a real thing.”
“I know—but I’ve been wishing it was. Hoping-slash-dreading you’d guess what was going on with Curtis. Almost resenting that you didn’t, because I couldn’t figure out how to tell you. I know it’s not fair.”
My words and emotions were so contradictory, but Merri didn’t seem fazed. She nodded thoughtfully. “I have five magic—yes, magic—words for next time.” She smirked, I chuckled.
“Go ahead.”
“Merri, I need to talk.” She shrugged. “I’m sorry I didn’t guess—but I would’ve listened.”
My eyes filled again. “I know.”
She handed me a tissue printed with bulldogs from a pocket pack and waited for me to wipe my eyes. “Okay, there’s only six minutes left. Start with the good stuff.”
“I guess it’s maybe, slightly possible I rushed to judgment when it comes to Curtis and what you just saw.” I was mumbling, and I hated mumblers. “Or something like that.”
“I believe that’s what we call”—Merri did an offbeat drumroll on her lap—“being chicken-lickin’ wrong.”
“No. We absolutely don’t call it that.” I scrunched up my nose. “Don’t use the phrase ‘chicken-lickin’’ ever again. It sounds like a revolting way to catch salmonella.”
“Fine, but how long have you two been secretly dating? That’s so romantic! I wish Fielding and I had secretly dated before telling everyone. Does it make things extra steamy?”
She was starry-eyed and clasping her hands beneath her chin. I was shaking my head and pressing back against my chair. “We’re not dating. And you can’t tell anyone.”
Merri dropped her hands. “Of course I won’t if you don’t want me to—but why not? And what are you doing?”
“We’re . . .” I shrugged, because the whole “not-dating” thing was going to get lost in translation. “I don’t know what I want. I’m still figuring that out.”
“You need to trust your instincts.”
I stared at the dregs melting off of Merri’s shoes, puddling on the floor. Curtis and I were like those snowflakes—we’d hold together only under perfect conditions. Alter the temperature even one or two degrees and we’d phase-change—go from solid to liquid, from not-dating to not-anything. I wasn’t allowed to date, and secrets could stay secret for only so long. Like ice crystals when they reached zero degrees Celsius, we were doomed. I looked away. “I trust science.”
“But you are more than science.”
I stood, melted snow dripping off my coat as if to prove my point. “I am precisely science. Everything I am from the sub-cellular level is science. I know what you’re saying, but there’s science to emotion, and it often contaminates rational thought.”
“You don’t always have to be rational.” Merri stood too. “What you were doing in here wasn’t rational—and that’s okay. You can be angry and disappointed and frustrated and happy and silly and besotted—you don’t have to analyze the facts behind your feelings and decide if you’re permitted to feel them.”
“Maybe you don’t.” But the last time I’d dared to raise my voice at my parents was in the airport leaving Brazil, and it turned out to be the last trip they’d taken me on. And when I’d used the word “feel” on the phone ten days ago, they’d shot me down.
“Eliza—” The timer on Merri’s phone went off, and she grimaced as she mashed the button. “We need to get to the van, but seriously—there’s so much you’re going to miss if you don’t let yourself take risks. If you don’t let yourself feel.”
But risks meant risking failure. Today, I’d failed . . . and while I didn’t yet know the fallout with my parents, failure had brought me here, to the building I was exiting w
here I’d had the most captivating who-knows-how-many minutes of my life. It had brought me to honesty with Merri about my something with Curtis and her impossible and wise advice. It was even a failure on a math test—fine, technically a B plus—that had brought me to the quiz bowl team and thus to Curtis and cupcakes and half-marathons and not-dating.
Merri linked her mittened hand through my arm while Ms. Gregoire’s words from a week and a half ago replayed in my head: Sometimes we don’t ask for what we want because we’re scared of being told yes.
I think Anne Shirley would agree with my conclusion: Some risks were worth it.
31
Exhausted with relief that Merri knew and accepted me-plus-Curtis—even if she didn’t quite understand the secrecy—I slept during the van ride back to school. It was a good thing too, because I spent the drive to her house fending off a barrage of Curtis questions. I let her hug me before she got out of the car, and I held on to that loved feeling as I entered my sterile, silent house.
Nancy wasn’t home. I could’ve sprawled on the floor or eaten cookies on the taupe couch—not that there were any cookies in the pantry. I could’ve cranked the volume of the TV and danced around. Called Curtis on speakerphone and practiced my flirting while he walked me through some baking project.
Instead I turned off the kitchen lights and headed to my bedroom. Merri and Curtis had both said the obvious: If I wanted my parents to know how I was feeling, I needed to tell them. How they responded—that wasn’t my choice or responsibility.
Hi Mom and Dad,
I had my first quiz bowl competition today. We were paired against Emma Williams’s team.
I gritted my teeth and forced my fingers to keep typing.
Unfortunately the match came down to one question and the other team answered faster. Though now I have a better sense of what to expect in a competition; I’m confident we would beat them if we face off again.
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