Our Year of Maybe

After she swallows, she bounces a fingertip on the end of my nose. “You’re too good, Peter. I love you. You know that. I one-hundred-percent adore you.” She leans in closer and puts a hand on my arm. Brushes it gently. “You look so good tonight.”

My heart can’t be controlled. It’s manic now.

“You do too.” It comes out shaky.

Sophie scoots even closer to me on the bed. The box spring squeals beneath us. She pulls up one of her legs, crosses it. Tugs her dress down. Her knee settles against my thigh, and I can’t help grazing it with a few fingertips. “It feels like something’s changed between us. Do you feel it?”

“Yes,” I say, voice breathier than I’m used to hearing.

Something does change. A shift in temperature. A quickening of my heartbeat. The wind outside bending a tree to tap against the bedroom window, which makes Sophie whip her head toward the window, then quickly back to me. The force of it tugs the silver chain from beneath her neckline. The small Star of David dangles in the space between us.

“Peter. I don’t just love you,” she says. “I like you. I like you so much.”

She leans in first, but I meet her there.

It’s not a shy peck like before. Her mouth is warm, sour from the alcohol. Teasing me with a life I’ll never have. Kissing Sophie is a strange mix of familiar and foreign, familiar because this is Sophie and foreign because this is Sophie.

This time when we break apart to catch our breath, Sophie is grinning wilder than I’ve ever seen. We wait a few beats before going for each other again, and I capture her Star of David charm between my thumb and index finger.

And it’s good. Great, even. I move my hands to her hair, which is thick and coarse and feels incredible. No wonder she’s always playing with it. But a warning light flashes in my mind. This is Sophie, who made a sacrifice I can never repay. Sophie, whom I love—and maybe more-than-like.

It’s the “maybe” that makes me hesitate. It settles against the uncertain thud of my own heart.

Her hands are on my collar, and then they’re suddenly fiddling with a shirt button. That mental warning light goes off again. WARNING. WARNING. That’s when I wake up, realize what we’re doing and that we shouldn’t be doing it. I have no idea how much she drank, but she’s definitely impaired, and this has to stop.

“Wait,” I say, holding a hand between us. I touch my mouth, and my fingers come away stained with her berry lipstick.

“What is it?” Her pale-blue eyes are dreamy, as though still lost in the kiss. The necklace at her throat swings back and forth. Then she giggles a little, a drunken hiccup of a giggle, as though she can’t quite believe what happened either.

Before I can start to explain—if I even have the words—the door bangs open, and a guy wearing a backward baseball cap says, “Sorry, kids—wait, hey, you’re Peter Rosenthal-Porter, right?”

“Yeah . . .” I glance at Sophie, who looks as puzzled as I am. Her face is flushed, and I can only imagine mine matches.

The guys turns and yells to someone in the hallway. “This is the guy I was telling you about!”

It happens fast—partygoers rush the room, almost like they rushed the field at the game. I spring up from the bed, and Sophie copies me, readjusting her dress and dabbing at her mouth.

A football player in my chem class—I think his name is Ty—grabs my arm and says, “This dude is a fucking miracle! He beat cancer or some shit!” Then he takes Sophie’s arm too, holding us up like we are two prizes he won at a county fair. If I look scrawny next to him, Sophie looks like a doll. “And this girl is a fucking hero. She gave this guy a kidney. A fucking kidney!”

Apparently, kidneys cure cancer—who knew? I open my mouth to correct him, but it’s too loud in here.

Everyone whoops, and someone gives Sophie a shot glass with something blue inside. I’m about to warn her not to drink it because what the hell is it, but before I can, she downs it in one gulp. More cheers. She’s wobbly on her feet as she waves, smiles at everyone, basking in this unusual attention.

“Are you serious? That’s what you were doing this summer?” one of the dance team girls asks Sophie, who nods and holds up her ID bracelet as proof.

“That’s amazing,” someone else breathes.

Ty hoists her up onto his shoulders and races out of the room with her, the rest of the party chanting her name like she is the winning team. I’m the miracle, but Sophie . . . Sophie is the hero.

CHAPTER 13

SOPHIE

LAST NIGHT’S DRESS IS BUNCHED up around my hips and my head is pounding. I roll over in bed and groan, the party coming back to me in flashes. Shots with Montana and the rest of the dance team. Football players who’d never before spoken to me shouting my name. Tugging Peter into a bedroom.

Kissing him.

I told Peter I liked him, and we kissed. And it was brief, but it was still something, still progress. The attention I got from the rest of the party isn’t nearly as groundbreaking as this. Suddenly I am so, so awake, all my nerve endings electrified. I swing my legs out of bed and—