"I don't always know how to be around people who really see me," he said. "I think you saw me."
The words landed in the car like a held breath finally released. No jokes. Pickle, raw and honest.
"What do you mean?" I asked. I didn't need to ask. I already knew. He was right about me seeing him.
"It's easier being the funny one," he said. "The disaster. The guy who's always on, you know? Because if I'm the entertainment, at least I'm... something." He shrugged.
"I watch Jake and Evan. Hog and Rhett. They found their people. They got picked." His voice cracked slightly. "And I'm happy for them—I am—but sometimes I'm in a room full of my favorite people, and I still feel like the extra. The one everyone loves having around but nobody actually..."
He stopped. Swallowed. "I'm a lot. I know I'm a lot. And I keep thinking maybe that's why. Maybe I'm just too much for anyone to stay past the joke."
The wipers beat. The snow fell.
I pulled the car over.
We were outside of his building, parked under a streetlight that turned the snow orange as it fell. I put the car in park, but didn't kill the engine. The heat kept running. The windows fogged.
"Pickle," I said.
"I know. I'm being weird. Sorry. I don't know why I said—"
"Maybe you don't have to work so hard."
He looked at me. "What?"
"You said you're too much, but I've been watching you for four days, and that's not what I see." I held his gaze. "I see someone who pulled Heath into the group before anyone else noticed he was drowning. Someone whose teammates look for him the second they walk into a room. Someone who—"
I stopped and recalibrated. "You're not too much, Pickle. You're not the extra. And whoever made you believe you have to shrink yourself to be picked wasn't paying attention."
Pickle stared at me. His lips parted slightly. Then he laughed, short and disbelieving.
"Easy for you to say."
"Why?"
"Because you're—" He gestured at me, a sweep that seemed to encompass my entire existence. "You're calm. You're controlled. You probably have a morning routine with, like, meditation and French press coffee and furniture that matches."
"I do have a French press."
"See?" He threw his hands up. "Unattainable. You're a person who probably folds his underwear and knows how to use a semicolon in the right way."
I thought about my apartment in Chicago. I'd left behind three days of dishes in the sink. I had a half-dead succulent I kept forgetting to water. There was a stack of unopened mail on my entry table.
"I don't fold my underwear," I said. "I also killed a cactus last month. Those are supposed to be indestructible."
He blinked. "What?"
"And my furniture doesn't match. I have a couch from IKEA, and a chair that I'm pretty sure has a haunted energy, but I kept it anyway because it was free."
"You have a haunted chair?"
"It creaks at 3 a.m. for no reason. I've made peace with it."
Pickle stared at me like I'd just revealed I was secretly three raccoons in a trenchcoat.
"You're—" He floundered, reaching for the right words. "You seem like you have it together. Like you know what you want and you just... go after it. Without making a mess of everything."
Our eyes met again.
