“You’re tearing a bagel into subatomic particles and analyzing a breakup like it’s a math problem,” she pointed out.
I looked at the decimated bagel.I hated that she was right.
“He was ashamed, Maya.That wasn’t about the team knowing.That was about him knowing.He couldn’t look at his dad and choose me.”
“I know,” she said, standing up and brushing crumbs off her jeans.“And that sucks.He panicked.But don’t sit here and pretend you left forhisgood.You left because it hurt too much to stay.”
She grabbed her backpack.
“I’m going to the library.If you want to come be grumpy in public, you’re welcome.”
“I’ll stay,” I said.
She nodded.“Okay.But check your equation again, Austen.I think you’re solving for the wrong outcome.”
She left.
The door clicked shut, leaving me alone with the silence and the cold, hard realization that I couldn’t calculate my way out of this.
Solving for the right outcome.
The outcome I wanted was stability.Safety.A life where I didn’t have to wonder if I was a temporary placement.
But looking at the empty room, I realized something terrifying.
Stability without him felt exactly like the foster homes.Safe.Clean.Ordered.
And completely, devastatingly lonely.
I couldn’t stay my former room.The walls pressed in.The silence was too loud.
I grabbed my coat.
I didn’t go to the library or Ridgeway.
I walked toward the edge of campus.I walked past the science buildings, past the darkened arena.
I walked until the pavement turned into the steel grating of the footbridge.
The wind was brutal out here, whipping off the frozen creek below.It stung my face.It made my eyes water.
I stopped at the midpoint.
I gripped the railing, the cold metal biting through my gloves.
I closed my eyes.
Constants are named.
I had named him.Even if he hadn’t named me back, I had named him.
Standing in the wind, I realized that I couldn’t un-name a constant.You can remove it from the equation, but the math will never balance again.
I stood there, shivering, waiting for a logic that would fix this.
But there was no logic.There was the wind, the dark, and the crushing realization that I was waiting for a variable that wasn’t coming back.
Headlights swept across the far end of the bridge.
