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Theo wasn’t sure. He didn’t really want to, all things considered. His pride was still wounded, and the more noise he made the more likely it was that Karl and Tiffany would wake up. And taking the screen out wasn’t exactly quiet. “Depends. How sorry are you?”
For the first time all evening, she looked stricken. “Theo, of course I’m sorry,” she breathed, and his heart did the painful lurch it had done every time he’d thought about her in the last month. “I have felt like crap every time I have thought about you ever since our last fight.”
He wanted to say good, but he also knew he wasn’t entirely blameless, and didn’t really want to do this whole apology through a screen at his bedroom window. “Why did you throw pebbles? Why didn’t you just text me?”
“So you could ignore me again? I’m not stupid, Theo, I’m just a dick.”
Theo snorted, and the tension between them shattered. She grinned wryly, and he grinned back, and he was about to suggest sneaking her into the house when there was a soft knock at his door. “Theo?” Karl called quietly. “Everything okay in there?”
Avery ducked down out of sight in a panic. “Yeah, just—watching some videos,” Theo lied to his door. Karl tended to respect his privacy so he wouldn’t open it without Theo telling him it was okay, at least.
The pause that followed told him Karl did not believe him in the slightest. “I just don’t want you to wake your mom up on a night when she actually gets to sleep at a normal hour and I got a call to go back out with the plow tonight.”
Theo glanced over his shoulder at Avery, who had popped back up, but just enough to peer over the windowsill, and made a face. “How long will you be out?”
“Depends on how long this lasts, but I think maybe you should, um, watch videos somewhere else, if you get my meaning?”
“Got it. Night, Karl,” he said, and waited for his stepfather’s feet to retreat back down the hall.
“My place,” Avery whispered.
“Aren’t your parents home?”
“They left for Florida already,” she hissed. “I’ll explain later. Just meet me there, okay?”
“Okay.”
“And Theo?”
“Yeah?”
“I really am sorry,” she said, with just the barest hint of nervousness.
That more than anything melted the last remaining shard of ice in his heart. “I’ll wait for Karl to leave and then head over,” he said. “See you soon, Aves.”
And with a tiny grin, she set off back into the night.
Chapter Forty-One
Avery
“You wanted to talk, so let’s talk,” Theo said, closing her bedroom door behind him. Avery turned on the white Christmas lights she’d hung up around the perimeter of the room. Her room had almost no other personal touches—it could have come straight out of a magazine, and in fact mostly had. When she was fourteen, she told her parents she wanted to redecorate her room in dark, moody colors, but her mom was too worried about “resale value” and so she was stuck with icy-blue walls and stark white furniture. Avery had put up the Christmas lights yesterday before as almost a sort of rebellion, a way of making the room hers, not just a place with “stuff she sort of liked.” And she did like the way the lights made the room glow, bringing the walls closer in, wrapping her in their warmth.
She wanted to point out that the house was empty except for them, so the door could stay open, but she also didn’t want to start things off on a contentious note. And she had been the one to initiate this conversation in the first place, so she owed it to Theo not to be snarky right off the bat.
“Like I said at your house, I’m sorry,” she said, and clasped her hands together. Her nerves were running riot, like they did during her interview at Hilleboe to get into the Scholars’ Program. Which didn’t make sense because in the end, this was Theo.
He looked down at her hands, frowning. His face was hard to read, the same way it had been when she was staring at him through the screen on his window. Is he mad? Disgusted? Bored with me? She couldn’t figure out what would be worse, but she leaned toward bored. Anger she could fight, but if Theo was done with her in every way, even as a friend, she was cooked.
“Okay,” he said flatly.
She swallowed her temper again. “I shouldn’t have flipped out on you like that. I hated feeling like I was the reason you lied to Izzy, and I just—you know being lied to is a trigger for me.”
“I do, but I also don’t know why. Like, c’mon, Aves. You get why I didn’t say anything. I know you do.”
“I do,” she sighed, and sat down on her bed, one leg bent under her, the other resting on the floor. “And I think I can explain it.”
Theo sat in the ridiculously stuffed chair next to her bed. (Seriously, it had more stuffing than most couches, which made it very comfortable but not practical for doing homework, as she usually fell asleep in it.) He looked faintly stupid, his otherwise long frame dwarfed by the proportions of the chair. “Explain,” he said, forearms braced on his upper thighs.
