There was a tiny skip in his voice when he saidI think.Maybe I imagined it. The tiniest millisecond of hesitation.
Maybe I’m just desperate to believe I’m somehow connected to Maggie because I might have a crush on her based on the exactly one conversation we’ve had, in which the only sentence I can remember her uttering is the one where she insisted we have never been romantically involved.
“Yeah,” Lincoln says. “If it makes you feel any better, I hear she’s annoying.”
“What? Annoying how?”
“I don’t know. Just, like, annoying.”
“Who said that?”
“People. Who I know from Ridgedale.”
“People. Huh. Okay.”
Lincoln shrugs. “Yeah. Anyway, I should get back to work. I have lots to read and an a cappella rehearsal in an hour.”
For the billionth time, I’m completely in awe of how mature he seems. The Lincoln I remember was this shy little dweeb. Quietly hilarious and bighearted, but a definitive dweeb. The guy on my screen, though, is like... cool. A confident college kid. Comfortable in his own skin. I’m proud of him, but I alsowant to smash the screen and scream so loud it makes my throat ragged.
“Cool,” I say. “Thanks for taking a minute to talk, Link.”
“Always. Love you, brother. Byeeeeeeeee.”
“Love you.” We hang up, and I punch my pillow three times so hard I briefly see spots. I know I’m supposed to shower and head downstairs, but I go back onto Instagram. I pull up Shana’s profile again in the hope of seeing more Maggie pictures. Maybe there’s nothing between us, maybe I’ve constructed this narrative out of thin air and Maggie’s just a friend I kind of know.
But I cannot deny that I want to keep looking at her.
There’s a photo of her from September wearing a paper tiara, arms in the air, melty ice cream sundae in front of her. Underneath it, Shana has written:happy 17 to the funniest and most beautiful bad-choice-maker I know.Setting aside the fact that rubbing a seventeenth birthday in my face like this seems incredibly rude, I have to wonder: Is it possible I’m one of Maggie’s bad choices?
I go back to Shana’s grid. The most recent post is black-and-white with text overlaying it; I thought it was a random meme, but I see it’s actually a poster for a gig Shana’s band is playing. They’re called Angry Baby. And there, sitting on some steps with Shana and another bandmate, all of them glaring at the camera, is Maggie. She’s in the band. I didn’t even know she played an instrument. Maybe she doesn’t. Maybe she’s the singer. Either way, it’s pretty hot.
The gig is next Thursday at a place called Bean-Age Dream, opening for a musician named Linda Schweitzer.
Maggie can continue to dodge me and say we have no historyand hang out in a different room than me at parties, but she can’t tell me not to come see her band.
I mean, every concert needs an audience.
Right?
Lincoln
The Fourth Loop
A couple of months into your fifth time being sixteen, I made the mistake of telling you about the breakup that had happened the night before you first looped. That, plus a new desperation inspired by my being a full year and grade ahead of you—the creeping sense that you were being left behind—meant you were dead set on finding a way to reverse your situation.
“So you’re saying I was a dick, right?” you asked, going over the facts of the breakup as you drove us home from school in our new old car, Toro. “A jerk?”
“I mean,” I said, “I think you just didn’t want to be in the relationship anymore, but yeah, the timing was unfortunate. She was like, ‘I love you,’ and you were like, ‘No, thanks.’”
“And then the next day, here we are.” You shook your head and gritted your teeth. “Loop Town. Loop City. Loop-de-loop.”
“Well,” I said, squirming in my seat. “I don’t actually think that’s what—”
“I should try to reverse it, right?” you asked, as if you’d just stumbled upon the idea for an app that would reshape society as we know it. “Unloop myself?! By being the kind of boyfriend who isnota jerky dick!”
I tried to talk you down, but you were unflappably obsessed. In March, you started dating this senior girl, Nina Chen. She was really cool—played volleyball, obsessed with horror movies—butI felt worried that you were just going through the motions more than anything else, determined to be the Best Boyfriend Ever. You wrote Nina notes, brought her tulips at school, took her out to eat at that Italian place Vincenzo’s that serves homemade pasta. Alas, Nina eventually saw through it, could feel that you weren’t really in it, and dumped you in July. I was relieved.
But you more or less gave up after that, descending into a funk that was exceedingly unpleasant to be around. Come December, on the night before your birthday, you rallied whatever enthusiasm and drive you had left and attempted to break the cycle by pulling an all-nighter. “If I never sleep,” you said, again with the fervor of an overworked scientist fumbling madly for an epiphany, “there’s no way to send me back to sixteen, right?” Except there was because, around 6:00 a.m., you closed your eyes for a moment, which turned into five minutes of sleep.
