Today Tonight Tomorrow

I want to leap fearlessly into whatever is next for me. I really do. And it’s not like I have a choice—I’m not going to sit on top of this Ferris wheel for the rest of my life. I mean, the guy said I’m the last ride of the night, so quite literally, it’s not an option. I’m just terrified of falling, of failing, of not being able to catch myself.

My car stops at the top. It’s so fucking beautiful, my lit-up city, that I’m going to be a tourist and take a picture. I unzip my backpack and reach for my phone, my fingers grazing a familiar hardcover.

My yearbook.

Slowly, I pull it out of my backpack, hands trembling as I turn to the back pages. He didn’t want me to read it until tomorrow, but fuck it, it’s tomorrow, and I’m desperate to know what it says.

I have to flip around to find it. Two pages in the back were stuck together, and that’s how he managed to find some space. There’s my nickname in calligraphy, and—woof, it’s long. My eyes dart around at first, struggling to focus on any single word. What I’m hoping is for some reassurance that I haven’t fucked things up beyond repair, though of course he wrote this before our fight. Still, it feels like a life preserver.

So I inhale the cold night air, and then I start reading.

Artoo,

I’m switching back to regular handwriting. Calligraphy is hard, and I didn’t bring my good pens. Or I need more practice.

Right now you’re sitting across from me, probably writing HAGS 30 times in a row. I know a little bit of a lot of languages, but even so, I struggle to put this into words. Okay. I’m just going to do it.

First of all, I need you to know I’m not putting this out there with any hope of reciprocation. This is something I have to get off my chest (cliché, sorry) before we go our separate ways (cliché). It’s the last day of school, and therefore my last chance.

“Crush” is too weak a word to describe how I feel. It doesn’t do you justice, but maybe it works for me. I am the one who is crushed. I’m crushed that we have only ever regarded each other as enemies. I’m crushed when the day ends and I haven’t said anything to you that isn’t cloaked in five layers of sarcasm. I’m crushed, concluding this year without having known that you like melancholy music or eat cream cheese straight from the tub in the middle of the night or play with your bangs when you’re nervous, as though you’re worried they look bad. (They never do.)

You’re ambitious, clever, interesting, and beautiful. I put “beautiful” last because for some reason, I have a feeling you’d roll your eyes if I wrote it first. But you are. You’re beautiful and adorable and so fucking charming. And you have this energy that radiates off you, a shimmering optimism I wish I could borrow for myself sometimes.

You’re looking at me like you can’t believe I’m not done yet, so let me wrap this up before I turn it into a five-paragraph essay. But if it were an essay, here’s the thesis statement:

I am in love with you, Rowan Roth.

Please don’t make too much fun of me at graduation?

Yours,

Neil P. McNair

12:43 a.m.

AT FIRST THE words don’t sink in. It doesn’t make sense. This has to be some elaborate joke, one final, twisted way for Neil to win by making a fool of me. So I read it again, lingering on the fourth paragraph, and the sixth paragraph, and the way my nickname looks in his handwriting. And then the seventh paragraph, the single-sentence confession:

I am in love with you, Rowan Roth.

There is too much care and sincerity in those words for it to be a joke. My pulse is roaring in my ears, my heart a wild animal.

Neil McNair is in love with me. Neil McNair. Is in love. With me.

I’m not sure how many times I read it. Each time, different words jump out at me, “crush” and “beautiful” and “in love,” “in love,” “in love.”

Something catches in my throat—a laugh? A sob? Valedictorian Neil McNair wrote “fuck” in my yearbook. I read it again. I can’t stop. “Shimmering optimism”—not head-in-the-clouds-ism. He likes that about me, enough to tell me when I’m so extreme about it that I’m standing in my own way.

Except. It would have been a mistake, he said when I asked about what happened on the bench.

He was bluffing. He had to be. This note is so heartfelt, he couldn’t have switched off those feelings in a matter of hours. I may not know much about love that I haven’t read in a book, but I’m sure it lingers longer than that. A simmer, not a spark.

This message, it’s sweeter than any romance novel.

It’s real.

Neil loves me.

Earlier today, I couldn’t picture him kissing anyone. Is it because I can only picture this happening with me, that Rowan plus Neil is this inevitability everyone has known except us? Kirby and Mara, Chantal Okafor in student council, Logan Perez who let us into the safe zone, my parents…