But—and it’s a bigbut—I don’t know West. He might be the kind of guy who forces me to defend my taste. “Kind of,” I say at last.
“Cool.”
That’s it? No defense necessary?I narrow my eyes in suspicion. “Have you read it?” Now that the movie franchise has taken over the world, everyone has either read the book or made it a point not to.
“Should I?”
I tilt my head, wondering if I’m about to make my first friend at college. The tall, skinny boy from my writing class. I could do worse. “You can borrow my copy if you want.”
He nods his head. “Okay. Maybe I will.”
West sits acrossfrom me on the bench after our next class. And the one after that. Before long, he sits next to me in class, too, and we walk out the back doors together every Tuesday and Thursday.
Two months afterwe first meet, West enters Dr.B’s competition with a funny but heartbreaking short story about a kid growing up in small-town Arizona. In the story, the boy wants a bike for Christmas and instead gets a maybe-magical Chia Pet that becomes his best (and only) friend. It makes me cry on my dorm bed.
Moments before Dr.B announces the winner, West turns to me with a smirk on his lips, and that’s the first time I see therealWest Emerson.
I feel violently sick.
Dr.B says West’s name, but West is still staring at me. “I loved your story. You’re not half bad, Mars.”
I blink at him in shock. I didn’t win?
I didn’t win.
“I know,” I snap. I don’t need his half-assed compliments.
West winces. “I wish you were going to be in his workshop, too. What am I going to do if I hear the word ‘heartsick’?”
“You’ll figure it out.”
“Right.” He turns back to the front of the class, but as I look at his profile, all I’m thinking is that I failed, and he beat me, and there are forty-five thousand people in this school, and I might never see him again.
Before him, no one was ever better than me. At writing,anyway. At sports, math, public speaking, making friends, clapping on beat, juggling, and anything else that can be qualified as a skill, the line of people better than me could reach the moon. But as luck would have it, the only thing I’ve ever really cared about also happens to be the only thing I’m any good at. So the fact that West Emerson is better than me?
It’s a problem.
3
Present Day
West Emerson looksat me, and for a long, breathless moment, I feel trapped, held in place by gravity or inertia or premonition. He pushes his curls back from his eyes, and it triggers a flood of relief.
Thank god for the strength I had not to give Fox Caldwell curls.
It helped that back then West straightened his locks within an inch of their life. If his hair looked back then like it does now, twenty-one-year-old me wouldn’t have stood a chance.
West’s eyes are wide with horror, matching my own dismay. “Mars?” He takes half a step toward me.
I take half a step back. “West.”
“Mars. I…” He shakes his head, as lost for words as I am.
Good. This is normal. We’ll just keep saying each other’s names, as if we didn’t use to be…whatever we were. As if I haven’t seen him standing in this exact same spot hundreds of times. We stare at each other for a beat, and my obnoxious, hyper-fixated brain can’t help but compare him to the skinny kid I knew more than a decade ago.
The multicolored eyes and the crooked nose are the same, but nearly everything else is different. West’s wild curls now brush his cheekbones and the collar of his button-up, and his face is covered in a dark scruff he could only dream of at nineteen. He’s always been tall, but now his height seems impossible, and his shoulders have broadened to a stupid degree. It’s almost suspicious. Writers don’t look like that; writers have bad posture and eye strain from too many hours at the keyboard. We have sallow skin and mismatched socks and Cheetos dust on our fingers. If West were a character, he’d be a gravedigger. A lumberjack. A professor moonlighting as a hit man.
A five-hundred-year-old fae king.
