By the time Dylan drops me off in front of my house, we’ve suffered through five minutes of awkward silence, punctuated only by the sounds of the rain pounding on the windshield, the wipers swishing, and the hard-hitting guitars of whatever heavy rock music he has playing on the stereo.
Dylan keeps asking if I’m okay, to which I repeatedly respond, “I’m fine.”
I feel like I’ve been saying that for the past month. When Mr. Fitz told me he was worried about me. When Sequoia told me she was worried about me. Even when I woke up in Nurse Wilson’s office and she insisted I wasn’t, I still repeated it.
“I’m fine.”
“I’m fine.”
“I’m fine.”
Like a parrot who’s only learned to speak one phrase.
But I’m starting to wonder if that’s really true. Am I fine? My face looks like it’s been left out in the rain for too long. My body is always tired. I’ve been renting out space in my brain to a permanent headache that doesn’t want to leave no matter how much coffee I drink. My teachers think I’m going to crack. Dylan thinks I’ve been brainwashed and turned into a zombie. Three people who are important to me have told me that they think I’m capable of cheating my way through life.
Am I really fine?
Is that what Lucinda told everyone before she did what she did? Is that what the Windsor Academy trains you to say no matter what?
The song on the speakers kicks into a final chorus as the main singer croons something about trying to figure out the mind of a girl.
Yeah, good luck, buddy, I think. We can’t even figure ourselves out.
“Who is this?” I ask, nodding toward the radio.
Dylan immediately lowers the volume, as if interpreting my question as a dislike for the song. “Some new band I just discovered online. They’re called Whack-a-Mole.” He shrugs. “They’re pretty good.”
I give Dylan directions to my house from the main road and he pulls up to the curb and puts the car in Park.
I reach for the door handle, fairly desperate to get away from the awkward energy of this car. “Thanks for the ride.”
“Wait,” he calls out. And suddenly his hand is on my arm. Even through the thick fabric of my blazer, I feel a tingle shoot through me. The kind of tingle I haven’t felt since Austin McKinley kissed me in that movie theater lobby. The kind of tingle I never thought I’d ever feel again the second I saw him kissing someone else.
And yet there it is. Scorching through wool and cotton and skin. Traveling up my arm, spreading across my skin, rushing right through my heart.
Originating from the least likely of places.
I glance down at his hand and suddenly find myself wondering if this happened before. Three and a half years ago. Did he touch me then? Did I feel what I just felt? Did it scare me away?
Dylan notices me staring at his hand and quickly pulls it away, taking that glorious rushing, heart-skittering sensation with him.
“I—” he starts to say, but he stumbles over the words. Starting and restarting like an Olympic sprinter who can’t manage to synchronize his feet with the sound of the gun. “I’m not good at this.” The sentence finally tumbles out.
Despite everything, I manage a thin smile. “Not good at what?”
He rubs his hands on his pants. “Um. You know…” He gestures ambiguously between the two of us. Back and forth, faster and faster. “I’m not good at…”
“Finishing sentences?”
He laughs. It’s a genuine one. Not the sarcastic chuckle that I’ve grown accustomed to over the past few weeks.
“I think I owe you an apology,” he finally says.
My forehead scrunches in confusion. “Excuse me?”
He blows out a breath. “I’ve been kind of a jerk to you lately.”
“Kind of?”
He laughs. “Okay. I’ve been a big jerk. But you haven’t exactly been a picnic either. I mean, sometimes you’re just so infuriating and rude and—”
“Whoever taught you to apologize did a horrible job.”
He looks at his lap. “Sorry. You’re right. I’m just trying to say that I might have misjudged you. I…” He stops and restarts. “For a while, I suspected … I mean, I’m in the library a lot. I see things. And you’re at the top of the class. You seemed like the most obvious choice. So I thought … well, the point is, I was mistaken. And I’m sorry.”
I squint at him through the darkness of the car. “What are you talking about?”
He shakes his head. “Nothing. I’m rambling. It happens when I’m nervous. I was trying to say that I was wrong about you.”
I’m not exactly sure what he means but I still feel a squeeze in my chest. I look down at my lap. “I think I’ve been wrong about a few things, too.”
He flashes me a toothy grin. It’s kind of adorable. “Does that mean you don’t think I’m the perp anymore?”
“I didn’t say that,” I correct.
He chuckles, then falls quiet. “It wouldn’t be so bad, you know.”
I squint. “What?”
“If I was guilty. Maybe then I could get out of here.”
I’m suddenly no longer interested in leaving the car. I train my eyes on him. He runs his hands anxiously over the steering wheel. “What do you mean?” I ask.
“Never mind,” he mutters. “Just forget it.”
“No. What?”
He sighs. “I don’t exactly love it at Windsor.”
“Tell me something I don’t know,” I joke.
He gives me a thin smile. “My dad is the only reason I’m there. He thinks if he can put me on the right track, I’ll stay on the right track.”
“You’re ranked in the top 20 of our class. I’d say that’s a pretty good track.”
He shakes his head. “Not for him. Until I agree to go to business school and follow in his footsteps, he doesn’t take anything I do seriously.” He glances out the window with a sigh. “He thinks writing as a profession is a joke.”
I chuckle. “Then I guess we’re both screwed.”
He pulls his questioning gaze back to me.
“I’m a writer, too,” I tell him.
He looks extremely dubious.
“I know. I know,” I say. “I’m in the Robotics Club and the Investment Club and the National Economics of Boredom Club. But actually, I want to study journalism.”
He barks out a laugh. “So this newspaper thing, you’re serious about that?”
“Yeah,” I say earnestly, then I turn and face out the window, as though I’m no longer talking to him. As though I’m announcing it to the whole world. The whole universe. “I’m a writer. It’s what I do.”
He’s quiet for a moment, like he’s digesting this new piece of information. “I think I remember you saying something about that. About loving to write.”
“On our date?” I ask, finally voicing the word that has seemed off-limits for so long.
“Yeah,” he says quietly, looking away. “On our date.”
I want to ask him for more details—Where did we go? What did we do? What else did we talk about?—but I know that admitting to him I don’t remember any of it will only make things worse. So instead I just say, “We had fun, didn’t we?”
He laughs to himself, like he’s reliving a memory I will never be able to share with him. A moment in time that I will never experience. “Yeah. We did. I mean, I thought we did. I asked if you wanted to go out again and you said yes, but then…”
“I never responded to your texts,” I finish, an ugly knot forming in my stomach. An ugly truth forming in my mind.
“Yeah,” he replies distantly. Then, as though pulling himself out of a trance, he shakes his head and adds, “Anyway, I remember we talked about writing. How much we both loved it. I always wondered what happened to that. Why you never pursued it.”
I glance down at my pristine Windsor uniform with the single dark streak on the skirt. Suddenly it feels like more than just a smudge of chocolate. It feels like a stain on my whole life.
I know the answer to his question. It’s obvious to me now. This world—this choice, this place—it changed my priorities. It changed who I thought I was.
“Do you believe in the multiverse theory?” I ask him.
“Is that the one that states that every decision we make creates an entirely new universe?”
I nod. “Yeah.”
“It’s a cool theory, I guess.”
“Do you ever wonder about all those other versions of you out there? What they’re doing. Where they are. If they’re happy. Is this really the best possible version of your life?”
He scoffs. “I will now. Thanks a lot. As if I didn’t have enough to worry about.”
“Sorry,” I offer.
He smiles to let me know he was joking. “Do you? Think about that stuff?”
What if I had just broken up with Austin years earlier?
What if Dylan and I had gone on that second date?
What if I’d never applied to the Windsor Academy to begin with?
“Pretty much every day.”
“And?” he prompts. “What have you come up with? Is this the best possible version of your life? Are all those other Kennedys Crushers, too?” I don’t miss the sarcasm he places on my nickname.
I let out a sad little laugh. “The truth is, I’m not even sure this Kennedy is.” Then I reach for the door handle and step onto the curb. “Thanks for the ride.”