“Still there too,” Teddy says with a smile.
I stand there looking from one to the other, then shake my head.
“You two,” I say, and I’m about to continue, to say something more, but I’m so happy to see them, to have all three of us together again—in spite of whatever circumstances there must be—that I simply leave it at that.
In the morning, there’s an email from Stanford admissions.
I’m still bleary-eyed from lack of sleep—we stayed up talking until nearly four—and I squint at my phone, letting my thumb hover over the message. But I don’t click on it. Instead I roll out of bed and stumble out into the hallway, but it’s not until I’m standing outside Leo’s room that I realize this might not be the best idea.
If it’s good news, it might just make him feel worse about everything. Though if it’s bad news, we’llbothhave an excuse to lie on the couch all day and eat ice cream in our pajamas.
Last night, after we’d come inside and made popcorn, which Teddy burned, then made a second batch, which Leo knocked over, then finally a third, which we managed to carry into the living room without incident, Leo broke the news.
“It’s over,” he said, but I’d known it even before then, since the moment he’d emerged from the darkness like some sort of melancholy ghost. Now, though, it was suddenly a fact, and the way he said it—the words set down like they were something heavy, like a suitcase he’d been carrying for far too long—broke my heart.
Teddy, who had clearly been too distracted to guess at this, immediately froze, his hand still shoved into the metal bowl of popcorn. Slowly, carefully, he extracted it, then shifted to face Leo.
“You and Max?” he asked in astonishment.
Leo nodded.
“But…why?”
“I don’t…,” he began, then paused, his eyes swimming. “I don’t think I want to talk about it right now.”
Teddy and I exchanged a look.
“That’s fine,” I said quickly. “Maybe tomorrow.”
And so we let it go. For the next few hours, we watched movies and ate popcorn and made Teddy tell us all about his big television debut and the hundreds of messages he’d gotten since it aired, including three marriage proposals. “I only considered one of them,” he joked, ducking as I threw a pillow at him. I told him about how Uncle Jake and I had started the boat, and he swore we’d finish it together now that he was back, and Leo promised to buy us floaties in case things went terribly wrong.
We didn’t talk about Max. Or Teddy’s dad. Or even Sawyer.
For a few hours we just ignored all the rest of it.
But now it’s morning; now it’s tomorrow. Teddy is probably still asleep downstairs, and Leo is just a knock away, and what was so easy to avoid last night no longer seems to make sense in the light of day.
I glance down at the phone in my hand once more, then I knock. On the other side of the door, there’s a grunt. “Leo?”
“Go away.”
I pretend not to hear him. “Can I come in?”
“No.”
“Great,” I say as I fling open the door. The first thing I see is his green duffel bag, which is lying in the middle of the messy floor, and I feel a pang of sadness when I remember watching him carefully pack it only a few days ago.
“What?” he asks, poking his head out from under the covers, and it’s hard not to laugh at his rumpled hair and grumpy expression. I sit down on the edge of the bed.
“I wanted to see if you were up.”
“Clearly I’m not,” he says, throwing the quilt back over his head.
“Well, now you are, so let’s talk.”
He groans and rolls over onto his back, reaching for his new glasses on the bedside table. “I don’t know if I can talk about it yet.”
“You said tomorrow.”
