Our Year of Maybe

Her silver bracelet glinted in the light, and a terrible thought gripped me: What if we broke up and she regretted ever having gone through with the transplant?

I couldn’t let that happen. Friends can’t hurt each other the way more-than-friends can, and being friends with Sophie is so much safer than being “more.”

That terrible thought hasn’t left me all day, and it’s why I couldn’t bear to sit with her at lunch. I have to figure out a way to tell her without hurting her. My mess of feelings for Sophie has been invaded by something else: gratitude. And I’m no longer sure if what I feel is true attraction or love or if I’m just thankful beyond words.

She deserves certainty from me. If anything were to happen between us, I’d want to be all in. I’d want to know it wasn’t just my emotions about the transplant warping my feelings.

“More than friends” is such an odd phrase. It seems to suggest there’s something beyond friendship that’s even better, a bliss that can be achieved only by linking hands and locking lips. It’s as though friendship isn’t enough—not when there’s the potential for “more.”

We’ve never needed “more.”

Sophie is driven and talented and soft and understanding. She’s confident when she dances, this sureness she doesn’t have in any other part of her life. She always smells good, sometimes like citrus and sometimes like lavender and sometimes like vanilla. She’s beautiful; I’ve always thought that. But above all that, she has this reliability to her that’s meant so much to me over the years.

I can’t lose that, and I want to believe she wouldn’t want to either.

The piano keys are worn. They’re not the perfect weight of the baby grand in my living room, but they’re also not the manufactured weight of the keyboard in my room. It’s a good piano. I wish I had a chance to play it more in class. Playing alone is fine, sure. But I’ve always believed the piano was meant to be more than a solo instrument. It’s why I like the Terrible Twosome. I’ve spent so much of my life alone that I don’t want to be alone with the instrument, too.

I warm up with some scales and then start Rufus Wainwright’s “Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk,” one of my all-time favorite songs, humming the lyrics, stumbling over a tricky part at the bridge until I finally get the fingering right.

Someone sneezes.

I whip my head toward the door, where Chase Cabrera has a hand over his mouth, an expression of pure horror on his face.

“Sorry!” he says. “I didn’t want to disturb you.”

My face heats up. “It’s fine. I was just messing around.”

He takes a few steps into the music room. My hands wander around the keys, and I squint as I remember the notes for a song I learned long ago.

Chase starts laughing a few bars in. “You are not playing ‘Clocks’ right now.”

I stop playing the infamous Coldplay song. “It’s, like, the first song you learn on piano when you realize you don’t have to only play Beethoven. That or ‘A Thousand Miles.’?”

I slide into that song’s agonizingly catchy opening, and Chase groans.

“Seriously, though,” he says, “you said you played piano, but I didn’t realize you played piano. You’re really good.”

“Thanks,” I say, trying to sound solid, like I deserve the compliment.

“What were you playing when I was, uh . . . spying on you?”

“Rufus Wainwright.”

“I’ve heard of him, but I haven’t heard him.”

“Start with Poses. That’s my favorite album. The bonus track is this incredible cover of ‘Across the Universe.’ It miiiight be better than the original Beatles version.”

Chase slides into a chair next to the piano,

the place I usually sit when Eleanor Kang, who has a shockingly strong immune system, is in my spot.

It’s only then that I notice what he’s wearing. At first I’m not sure he’s wearing a costume at all. He has on a white T-shirt with the words GO CEILING! inked in blue.

“And you are . . . ?” I ask.

He grins. “A ceiling fan.”

I mash a hand into my forehead. “That’s so bad. But also so good.” I gesture to my lack of costume. “Forgot it was Halloween.”