I look at her. “It is.”
She smiles. “I was right?”
“How did you know?”
She shakes her head, embarrassed. “It’s nothing.”
“What?”
“You said something in high school. Like, why have two if you only need one. I didn’t know if I was right. I just had a feeling.”
I lean up on my elbow and look at her. I let that sink in, and then I whisper softly, “You really remember everything about me?”
I give her the moment. I want to tell her — I remember everything about you too, I remember every time you wore blue, every time Mila didn’t come to school so she hung out with other friends, what her handwriting looks like, how she wears her hair, the smell of her shampoo — but I don’t mention it. I let her have the moment.
She says quietly, “I’ve been wanting to apologize for how I was in high school.”
I laugh. “You?”
She nods. “It’s so embarrassing, Blue. I knew I freaked you out, and you don’t need to apologize. You were just reacting to how I was acting.”
I shake my head. “No, Melly.” I sit up a little. “I owe you an apology. A big one.”
Her eyes stay on mine, and I cannot, for one full second, breathe. There is something in her face — a small careful waiting — that’s making my chest do the thing again. She’s bracing for it. The bracing is a painful thing to witness because I am the boy who hurt her.
“I’m sorry for how I treated you back then.”
She blinks, giving me a small smile. “And I’m sorry too.”
I nod once.
She smiles openly. “That feels good to get out of the way.”
“Yeah,” I say, following her lead. The room falls quiet. I can hear the building. The radiator clicking somewhere down the hall. A car going by on Linden Street outside. The soft far-away hum of the refrigerator from the kitchen.
I look at her.
“What else do you want to get out of the way?”
She takes a moment to think. “I did not tell Chris that we hooked up. I didn’t tell anyone.”
I blow out a long breath. “That wasn’t your fault.” I look up at the ceiling and smile a little. “You were worried about that?”
“I was worried about a lot of things.”
I look back at her. Her finger is back on the thread.
“I thought,” she says, “for a very long time that I was actually crazy.”
I don’t move.
She thought she wascrazy. And I’m the reason she thought she was crazy. I know it before she has even finished the sentence. I know it in my whole body. I spent years telling a girl with my eyes that I loved her and then telling her with the rest of me that I didn’t want anything to do with her, and I made her think she made it up. I made her think she invented us, that she was the crazy one. I want another fist to my face.
I keep my voice low. “Why?”
She shrugs. Her shoulders move under the hoodie, but it’s too big, so the gesture is lost inside it. “I don’t know. It just felt like everything was —” she sighs. “I don’t know.”
I look down at her hands. “Like what?”
