“So we keep it a secret. For how long?”
“I don’t know. Until I’ve got enough of a foothold that it can’t destroy me. Until we figure out how to tell him the right way.” I rub my face. “I just know that telling him right now means losing everything. And I just got you back. I can’t lose everything in the same week.”
I can see her working through what I’m actually asking.
“Okay,” she says. “Secret.”
“You sure?”
“No. I hate it. I hate lying to my dad and I hate that you have to pretend you barely know me and I hate everything about it.” She wipes her eyes with the sleeve of my hoodie. “But I like you more than I hate the rest of it. So.”
“So.”
“When do you get back?” she asks.
“Sunday night.”
“Can I come over?”
“Yeah. Please.”
She exhales, and I hear the shakiness in it. “Okay. Okay. And we should go on a real date. Not somewhere close. I’ll make a list of places where no one from the team would ever go—diners, dive bars, movie theaters where we can sit in the back. There’s an arcade bar about forty minutes from downtown that?—”
She stops mid-sentence and takes a breath.
“I’m really glad you called,” she says quietly.
“Me too.”
“I was scared you weren’t going to.”
“I know. I almost didn’t. I had this wholespeech prepared about why ending it was the smart decision and I couldn’t get past the first sentence.”
“What was the first sentence?”
“‘Mackie, I’ve been thinking’—”
“God, that’s a terrible opener. If you’d started with that I would’ve hung up on you.”
“See? The universe knew.”
She laughs softly and plays with the hoodie strings. We sit there for a minute, just looking at each other through our screens, not saying anything. Her eyes are still swollen and her nose is still red and she’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
“Okay,” she says. “I should let you sleep. You have a game tomorrow.”
“Yeah.”
Neither of us hangs up.
“Zach.”
“Yeah?”
“Hang up the phone.”
“You hang up.”
“We’re not doing that. We’re not those people.” She laughs softly. “Goodnight. Eat something. Drink water.”
