“Yousaid tomorrow.”
“What happened?” I ask, unable to help myself. “What did he do?”
Leo props his pillow against the wall behind him and sits up, a look of annoyance flashing across his face. “Why do you assume it was him?”
“Because you’re you,” I say, expecting to draw a smile out of him, but instead his expression darkens.
“Yeah, well, I’m not sure Max would agree anymore.”
I’m afraid to hear whatever’s coming next, but I ask anyway. “Why not?”
“Because,” Leo says in a small voice, “I’m the one who broke up with him.”
“Oh,” I say softly, the word landing heavily between us.
“It was inevitable,” he says with a shrug, almost eerily calm now, as if he’s talking about someone else entirely. “All we’ve been doing is fighting about next year. Then I go up there, and I see him with his new friends and his new band and his new life, and I realized we’ve been holding each other back.”
“But you love him.”
“I want to go to art school,” he continues, as if he hasn’t heard me. “I just do.”
“Okay,” I say. “So go to art school.”
“Whenever I thought about Michigan, I started to feel claustrophobic, like I was being pushed into it. And that’s because I sort of was. And I just didn’t want to go.”
“So you told Max that?”
He lowers his eyes. “No, I told him about how I never applied.”
“What?”I stare at him. “But I thought—”
“No,” he says flatly. “I couldn’t do it.”
“Leo…”
“I know,” he says in a tight voice. He speaks slowly, as if trying to keep the words from spilling out at once. “I filled out the application. I just never sent it. It was like, as soon as I decided not to, this huge weight came off me. But I didn’t want to lose him—”
“Because you love him.”
He ignores this. “So I was gonna wait to tell him. I wanted to have one more week together without having to think about all this, but then I got up there, and he was so excited to show me around campus, and after a while, I just couldn’t keep lying to him.”
“Because you love him.”
“And then we got into a huge fight about all of it, and I realized that everything had been building up, and it just felt like too much.” He looks down at his hands, blinking a few times. “So I ended it.”
“But you still love him.”
“It’s not that easy.” He shakes his head. “I messed everything up.”
“Yeah, but you—”
“Yes,” Leo snaps, and something seems to crack in him, his eyes filling with tears. “I love him, okay?”
“That’s not nothing,” I say softly, unable to keep from thinking of Teddy. “To love someone and have them love you back.”
“I don’t think it’s enough.” He takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes with the heel of his hand, and it strikes me how sad it is, the way a relationship can be so unexpectedly fragile. If two people who love each other as much as Leo and Max can fall apart so easily, what hope is there for anyone else?
“I was reading about the curse of the lottery on the bus ride home,” Leo says, slipping his glasses back on. “Do you think it extends to friends and family too?”
