Our Year of Maybe

Peter’s shouting my name, or at least I think he is. I want to hope that he is, that the loss of our friendship means something to him. I fly out of the gym and down the hall, wiping at my damp face. The hallways are full of lockers slamming, everyone giddy with a surprise half day. Silver and green streamers and confetti are everywhere. I stomp on all of it, a streamer getting stuck to my shoe. With no energy to shake it off, I trail it all the way out to the parking lot, trying to rub away tears that keep coming.

Our lives have revolved around Peter always. He is the earth, and I am the moon. There was never enough I could do to get him to love me the way I wanted, to see me as more than just a moon.

I have never been enough, and he has always been too much.

CHAPTER 32

PETER

NUMBLY, I TRIED MY BEST to clean up the mess we made. I chased after the balls and shoved them back into the closet, but unlike Sophie, I couldn’t race out of the gym. I walked slowly, with leaden feet, because I had no idea where I was going, nowhere I wanted to go, no one expecting me.

I hate who I am when I’m with you.

“Peter, school’s out for the day,” Mr. Lozano told me when our paths crossed in the hall. He chuckled. He’d become my favorite teacher, and I couldn’t bear to let him see me like this. “We can’t get rid of you, can we?”

I tried to laugh, but I might have growled instead. Then my feet remembered what to do, and they carried me out of the school and to the first bus stop I found, where I got on the first bus that arrived.

Now I’m headed south, past the Space Needle, into downtown.

I hate who I am when I’m with you.

It bangs around in my brain, warping the memories of our friendship. Every time she comforted me, was she secretly cursing me as well? For so long, she was my only person. I must have given in to her some of the time. I must have let her have her way. I can’t have been the guy she described, not one hundred percent of the time—otherwise she wouldn’t have loved me.

It’s a selfishly heartening thought.

A message from Chase blinks on my phone. Band practice? is all it says. My mind was too all over the place to think to ask Chase about this on Saturday night. I wasn’t sure if I’d be welcome at band practice, or if our breakup was a Fleetwood Mac situation and I’m Lindsey Buckingham.

Can’t today.

I shouldn’t be having fun, playing music. But I feel bad about the brevity of the text, so I thumb out another one. Can we talk later this week?

A few minutes later, his okay comes back, but it doesn’t lift the heaviness in my chest as much as I thought it might.

Hours later, after a half dozen more aimless bus rides throughout the city, I arrive home to find my parents getting dressed up. My mom’s stabbing a pearl through her earlobe and my dad is straightening his tie. One of the nice ones, not one of the joke ones with teeth on them that I imagine all dentists own. Yes, he has more than one.

“Where are you going?” I ask, dropping my backpack on the living room floor. I collapse onto the couch.

“We have reservations at the new Maria Hines restaurant,” my mom says to her reflection in the foyer mirror. “It was supposed to be impossible to get a table, but one of your dad’s patients knew the right people and got all of us in.”

All of us.

“You and Sophie’s parents?”

My dad holds up his hands. “Who else?”

“Can’t you leave them alone for five seconds?”

“Peter,” my mom says slowly as she turns to face me. “Is something going on?”

If I were a dog, the hair on my back would be sticking up. I’m sure I’m red-faced still, not yet recovered from the fight with Sophie.

No, “fight” isn’t the right word.

Destruction.

Explosion.

Wreckage.