I wake up in a hospital room. It’s probably the ER; every wall is a curtain, and I hear the shuffle of padded shoes, the murmur of families.

“Blake,” Mel says, smiling through tears as she squeezes my hand. My other arm, I realize, has an IV in it.

“Get me out of here.”

She blinks. “But...the doctors haven’t even been in to see you, yet. You passed out and—and you weren’t breathing right, your heart was beating super fast—”

“Get. Me. Out.”

Her voices trails. She looks like a kid who just got chastised, and I feel like a dick. She was only trying to help.

When the nurse comes back, Mel says I want to leave. “Now,” she adds, voice soft as snow.

“The doctor will be in shortly.”

“No. I’m leaving now.” I sit up, even though it makes the room spin, and start picking at the tape on my IV.

“Stop that,” the nurse chides, taking over. “If you insist on leaving, we won’t keep you. But at least let me get this out the right way, before you hurt yourself.” She finishes up and presses a cotton ball against the puncture. “Let me get your release papers.”

When the curtain swishes shut behind her, I look at Mel.

“Why’d you bring me to the hospital?”

“Wh— Are you seriously mad, right now? Why wouldn’t I bring you to a hospital? You passed out. Your heart was beating, like, two hundred beats a minute.”

I shake my head, ready to drop it. It’s done. “Whatever.”

“God. Next time I’ll just let you die, I guess.”

After a sheaf of papers, I’m allowed to leave. The sun is out. I flex my fingers open and closed in the light, trying to bring back the circulation.

“I’ll drive.” She holds out her hand as we approach my car.

“Like hell you will.”

“Blake, come on. I drove it just fine behind the ambulance. And look, you can’t even walk straight.”

I knew that already. I just hoped she wouldn’t notice. Wordlessly, I drop my keys into her palm.

“So,” she says, once we’re on the highway, the hospital just a speck in the rearview, “you’re scared of doctors now?”

No quips or sarcasm come to mind. I blame it on the fainting and look out the window.

Mel takes this as confirmation, which I guess it basically is, and grows serious. “Oh. Well...I’m not sorry I called an ambulance for you. You weren’t breathing well and you looked awful, and I was scared, so. Get over it.”

Despite myself, I smile. Maybe I’ve changed a lot the last three years, but Mel sure hasn’t.

“You’re afraid of what they’ll tell you.”

Blake picks at his food and shrugs. We decided—well, he did—on lunch at a Thai place. I’m almost done with my plate, while he’s got at least two-thirds left to go.

“I guess I am.”

“But isn’t not knowing worse?” I steal some of his bean sprouts, which he hasn’t touched. “I think it would drive me crazy. Not to mention the inconvenience of it, the safety…what if you were driving when you fainted?”

Blake rolls his eyes and takes a long drink from his beer, like he’s sick of me talking, or being here at all. That’s the thing needling at me most: one minute, he seems so angry at me, so done, and the next, he touches my hand or simply stares into my eyes, showing me how much I was missed.

“It’s just part of my life now,” he says. “I’ve learned to live with it. And today was a fluke. All the stress got to me at once. It’s really not that bad.”

“You don’t even know what it is. What if it can be fixed? Or…or what if it keeps getting worse and you die?”

“Then I die.”

“Blake.”

He gives me a flat expression. “I’m kidding.”

“It didn’t sound like you were.”

He puts down his fork and props his elbows on the table, rubbing his face with his palms. “Look,” he says, “I just haven’t gotten it checked out yet because, for one thing— like I said—it isn’t that bad. You saw the worst of it. Most of the time, everything’s normal.”

I wait for part two. He inhales. “And because…because heart doctors and hospitals, that was Dad’s deal. He was the one with the medical crisis, not me.”

“Maybe,” I say, biting my lip and pushing my food from one side of the plate to the other, “your dad had the same thing as you.”

“My dad had a heart attack, Mel. There was no ‘thing’ except fast food and getting older.” He finishes his beer and flags down the waitress for the check. When I pull out my wallet, he shakes his head.

In the parking lot, he takes his keys from me without a word, like we discussed it and decided together.

“Are you sure you’re okay to drive?”

“Positive.” He revs the engine and whips out of the space so fast, I hold my breath. “Where am I taking you?”

“My house. Josh was my ride, but I’m sure he’s already left your place.”

“My dad’s place,” he corrects.

When we pull up to the curb in front of my house, I catch his eyes roaming the façade. Probably reliving all those afternoons he spent here, like I did to his house, earlier.

“Remember when we tried to build a tree house in that dogwood, back there?” he asks. His voice has a sweetness to it, no edge. If it weren’t for the soreness between my legs, I’d wonder if I imagined all those backseat commands and roughness.

“When you broke your arm? Yeah. I remember.” I follow his eyes to the house. “My mom was so scared, she wanted to cut the whole thing down.” I undo my seatbelt. My hand brushes his on the shifter. “Would you like to come in? You know...visit with everyone?”

“Maybe some other time.”

“So...you do want to hang out again?”

“Wasn’t that the whole point of today? You wanted to reconnect, right?”

To be honest, I’m still not sure what the point of today was. I wanted to apologize, and I hoped we would catch up. I certainly didn’t think things would go as far as they did, though.

“Yeah.” My hand freezes on the door handle. “It’s funny,” I say, giving a nervous laugh, “all this time, I thought you hated me.”

“I could never hate you,” he whispers. He stares at the steering wheel.

The air outside his car feels weirdly oppressive, even though it’s cool and stirring with the late breeze. It seems to push down on me as I grab my purse, shut the door, and start across the lawn. My feet are on the porch when I hear his window roll down.

“The estate sale’s a two-day thing,” he calls, “but I don’t think I’ll stick around there for long. If you want to do something.”

A date? More car sex? My answer sits on my tongue as I try to figure out what “something” means to this new, confident—at least, on the outside—version of Blake.

In the end, does it really matter?

“Sure,” I tell him, already opening my front door and stepping through. “See you then.”

Caitlin-Anne tells me she’s pregnant that night, over text message.

I’m eating leftover pizza, watching television with the sound off, when my phone pings. My laugh echoes through the place as I read it.

“Sure,” I write back. Immediately, the typing icon pops up. She’s on the warpath.

“Two months late.”

“But you’re just now telling me. Right after breakup. What a coincidence.”

“The pill can mess it up you idiot. I didn’t know.”

I’m an idiot? Coming from a woman who regularly pried bagels out of toasters with forks, and thought Elon Musk invented Facebook.

An attachment comes in. Cue the picture of a pregnancy test, two crisp pink lines.

“Google Images,” I write.

Another picture: her holding the test beside her face, looking pissed and smug. In the background, I see her friend Gillian pouring two glasses of wine.

“Could be anyone’s test. They sell them online.”

A pause. “Fine don’t believe me, idc. See you in court I guess.”

“Yep. Have fun drinking that merlot Gill just poured you.”

“Not mine,” she sends. The typing icon pops up a few times, but no more messages ping through for the rest of the night.

Caitlin-Anne’s like that. Spiteful as shit, but too ditzy to make her schemes work. Like when her dad first threatened to cut her off unless she got a job, so she stole her friend’s uniform and went to a family dinner, pretending she’d just gotten off a shift. Only problem: she left the other girl’s name tag on.

I have a friend request from Mel, which I accept right away. The messenger window opens. “Hey, you.”

When was the last time a girl made me smile this much—made me forget I’m alone in my apartment, the news on mute, eating cold pizza?

“Hi,” I write back. I want to add more, maybe tell her about Caitlin-Anne’s stupidity and have a good laugh over it, but decide that’d be classless.

“So,” she types, “my boss gave me tickets to this show at the planetarium tomorrow, before it closes down. You in?”

You in? So many times, she asked this same question, stretching out her hand to me and beckoning me to follow. Part of me is happy to find our dynamic hasn’t changed—that she hasn’t. The rest of me wants to cling even tighter to the changes I’ve made.

I won’t go back to how I used to be. I can’t.

As angry as I still am over what happened, I have to admit that she was right about one thing: I should have told her how I felt. It wasn’t all on her. Today, when she apologized, I could tell she expected one back.

I had one, too. I rehearsed it for years.

But in that moment, all I could remember was the day she left. I finally dared to be vulnerable, and it blew up in my face. I gave her everything, and I lost it all.

That night, I finished the tequila in the pitch-black darkness of my bedroom and swore I would never let someone see so much of me, ever again. I wouldn’t give anyone the chance to gut me. To take everything and leave.

I was done getting trapped in friend zones and second tiers. It wasn’t just Mel. As the alcohol seeped into my muscles and sped my heart, I lay back in my bed and thought of all the ways I let the world push me around: guys in school threatening me for answers on tests, girls flirting over the hood of my car for free rides. Neighbors who paid me a dollar or two an hour, for entire weekends of pulling weeds and mowing lawns.

My dad, calling to tell me he’d be working late again, while the chatter of a woman or hotel bar buzzed in the background. “Don’t worry,” I told him, every time, until he couldn’t be bothered with the courtesy of calling, anymore. “I’ll be fine.”

So I’m tempted to take my time replying, like I’ve done to every girl the last three years. I discovered a strange thing after Mel left: the less I cared, the more women wanted me. So many of them secretly liked the little mind games. So many loved that distance. I didn’t have to put my feelings out there. I didn’t have to have them at all.

But Mel is different. She always has been.

“Yeah,” I type, almost right away. “Sounds fun.”

Maybe I’m being petty again, but I make sure all my replies after that have punctuation. I answer promptly, but I don’t echo her smiley faces and exclamation points. And when the conversation winds down, I make sure I’m the one who says goodnight first, so she’ll know the deal: Sure, I’m in, just like old times.

But I’m still not the guy I used to be.

Call it a compromise.

* * *

When I pick up Mel the next day, her mom basically sprints out of the house. There’s a Christmas tin in her hands, loaded up with cookies. I smell them when she hugs me hard enough to crack my back.

God, I missed this.

“These are for you.” She forces the cookies into my hands. Heavy beaded bracelets clack up and down her arms, her soundtrack. “Double chocolate chip, with extra vanilla.”

“You remembered,” I smile, and kiss her cheek. “Thanks, Mrs. Thatcher.”

“Come in for a minute, have some coffee!”

“Mom.” Mel steps between us and pushes on my chest to grow the gap. “We can’t stay. We’ll be late.”

“Next time,” I promise Mrs. Thatcher, over Mel’s head. She grins again and waves us off from the porch. By the time we’re in the car, Mel sinking into her seat with an embarrassed mutter, her mom is only halfway in the door. Still smiling, still waving.

“I should have just met you at the planetarium. I knew she’d get all…” Her hand flutters towards the house. “…ahead of herself.”

“Huh.” When I crack open the cookie tin and take two, the rich scent of vanilla fills the car. I pass her one. “Like what, assuming we’re together?”

Her chewing slows. “Sort of. More like…assuming you and I are totally fine again, best friends forever. She doesn’t get the nuance of reconnecting.”

“Why would she? I’m betting you didn’t tell her what happened, with us.”

Mel brushes her cookie crumbs onto the floor. I never eat in my car for that exact reason. Maybe I made the exception because of this three-year embargo on Mrs. Thatcher’s double chocolate chip, extra vanilla cookies. Maybe I made it for Mel.

“Don’t worry about it,” I tell her. I close the tin and pass it to her. “I love your folks. They aren’t nearly as embarrassing as you think they are.”

“Easy for you to say,” she laughs, and then freezes with the tin in her hands. As she bends down to place it at her feet, her hair muffles her apology.

“It’s okay.” The gears grind as I pull away from her house. Surprisingly, I mean it: until now, I didn’t really grasp that both my parents are gone. Probably because I didn’t think of Dad as a parent, after Mom died.

“Is it weird?” she asks, when we get to the science museum. The planetarium looms in front of us like a blacked-out biodome. I take my flask out of my jacket and offer it to her.

“What, being an orphan?” I laugh, but is it really a joke?

Mel takes the flask. The way she taps her pinky against it, not taking a sip yet, shows me so much sympathy for such a tiny gesture. It’s weird, how easily this language comes back to us, how we can speak in silences and incompletes, even finger taps, and the other still understands.

“It felt...inevitable,” I answer, finally. “I knew he wasn’t going to be around much longer, the way he didn’t take care of himself after Mom died.”

“When you think about it,” she says, wincing at the burn from the flask, “he wasn’t around, anyway. Not to speak ill of the dead, but...who leaves their kid alone every day, from—what was it, five in the morning to eleven at night? Midnight? He didn’t even make it to our graduation.”

I take the whiskey, picking up a hint of her lip balm on the mouth. “He just never got over her,” I say, my lips on fire, but numb.

“I wish I could’ve met her. Everything you’ve said about her, the pictures I’ve seen—I bet she was a really cool person.”

“She was.” I pass the flask back and silently thank God for the buzz settling in my bones, that glow in my stomach. “This is going to sound terrible, but I used to wish my dad had died, instead of her. Like, if I had to lose one of them, I would’ve picked him.”

Mel puts her hand over mine on the gearshift. “You never told me that.”

“Because I felt like shit for even thinking it. I still do.”

“Well, don’t. It sounds like a normal thing to wish, given how your dad acted. And you were just a kid, anyway.”

Her fingers brush across my knuckles. I think about how the smallest touch from Mel makes me feel a hundred times more emotion than anything Caitlin-Anne ever did to me. Than anyone did.

We drink and talk until the whiskey’s gone and our words slur into stutters, hers more so than mine. I have to loop my arm around her waist as we head inside. The ticket taker must know we’re drunk, or at least that Mel is, but he doesn’t say anything.

We sit in the back row, away from everyone else. In the darkness under all those swirling fake stars, I kiss her.