My head popped up and I met his eyes.
Fear of gondolas? Forgotten.
“That’s what I was thinking,” Walker said. “The whole time. I was thinking, ‘This is love. That’s what this is.’”
All I could do was stare at him. The wind fluttered his collar against his neck.
Walker kept going. “I think it had been love for a while—maybe a long while, but I hadn’t figured out the word for it yet.”
I tried out the words in my mouth. “You ... loved me?”
Walker looked so sad as he nodded.
I shook my head. “So ...” I shook my head again. “How did you get fromloveto ... study hall?”
Walker took a breath. “Ryan.”
“Ryan?” I frowned.
Walker nodded. “I don’t know if you remember, but only a couple of weeks before that, Ryan was diagnosed with bone cancer.”
“I remember,” I said.
“We used to walk to school together every day, but after he got sick, I started driving him in the mornings instead.”
“I remember,” I said.
“The very next morning, after you and I kissed, I picked Ryan up, and he looked different. He looked—brighter. More alert. It was the first time since his diagnosis that he didn’t seem completely shell-shocked. I asked him what was up, and he told me three things. One: They’d just given him a twenty percent chance for survival. Two: He’d been secretly in love with you since that day we all spent at the beach. And three: He was going to ask you to junior prom.”
I let all those pieces click together in my head.
“And then,” Walker said, “Ryan said to me, ‘I think she’s gonna be the thing I have to live for.’”
The rest of the gondola ride went by pretty fast after that.
“You ...” I tried to put it all together. “You pushed me away so that I would date Ryan?”
“I took myself out of the running.”
“But—like that?”
“I thought you could never like Ryan if you already liked me. So I decided I had to make you hate me.”
“Wow,” I said, shaking my head.
“At first I was just going to reject you loudly in study hall. But I could tell—even as it was happening—that wasn’t going to be enough. So I improvised.”
“Youimprovised?”
Walker looked really sorry, but he nodded. “I regretted the words even as I was saying them, if that means anything.”
“You improvised by reminding everybody about my eye—which was so much better at that point that nobody even noticed—and reigniting the nickname Patchy?”
“I didn’t know that was going to happen.”
“But it did.”
Walker nodded again. “I did routinely beat up anybody I heard saying it, if that’s of interest.”
