Our Year of Maybe

I fall onto my bed, running a hand under my shirt, tracing the line of scar that matches Sophie’s, that will tie me to her for years and years to come.

If this is the point of no return with us, we can’t ever erase ourselves from each other’s lives.

CHAPTER 33

SOPHIE

I WASH MY SHEETS.

That’s the first thing I do when I get home. I sit cross-legged on the floor in the laundry room, watching them spin and spin.

I make my bed, struggling with the fitted sheet. I either accidentally shrunk them or am totally inept. Both are also possible. Nothing fits the way it should, and I collapse in a heap on top of my unmade bed, breathing hard, tears backing up behind my eyes.

I’m still there hours later, when someone knocks on my door. I assume it’s Tabby or my dad, so I’m shocked when my mom peeks inside.

“Peter’s parents canceled dinner,” she says. “Do you happen to know anything about that?”

That’s all it takes for me to start crying again.

Her face breaks open, reveals a concerned mother underneath. One I wasn’t sure I had.

“Sophie, Sophie, Sophie,” my mom coos in this voice I’ve never heard from her before. “What’s wrong?”

I can’t pick one thing.

“Peter” is all I croak out. “I love him so much, Mom. And I wish I didn’t. I hate that I feel this way.”

“Oh, kiddo,” she says as she rushes over to my unmade bed to hold me like she’d hold Luna. “I know.”

I shake my head, tears dripping off my nose and onto my sheets below. “Not just as a friend. I love him. I’ve been in love with him for a long time, and he—he doesn’t love me. Not like that.”

I’ve always felt sort of intimidated by my mom the corporate executive, like we had nothing in common. But the coloring books with Luna showed me another side of her. And I’m starting to think there’s so much more to my mom than I’ll ever know.

Her face doesn’t register surprise. Has she known this whole time? “It’s the worst feeling when someone you love doesn’t love you back.”

“You—”

She nods. She gets what I’m trying to say. “In high school,” she says. “Steve Rosso. He wasn’t Jewish, so your grandparents never would have approved of him, but we sat next to each other in homeroom all four years. Rosso, Roth.” Roth: my mom’s maiden name, which she kept as a middle name when she got married.

I wipe my face with the back of my hand. “Was he cute?”

“The cutest. We talked every day, but we were in different circles. I was in the young business leaders group, and Model UN, and art club, and he played basketball and sang in choir. Our friend groups didn’t overlap. But I thought about him constantly. I finally worked up the nerve to ask him to homecoming senior year, and I’ll never forget what he said. ‘As friends? Because I was sort of hoping to go with someone as a date.’ As though it was so very clear I wasn’t even in the datable category.”

“Mom. Steve Rosso is an ass.”

She cracks a smile. “That’s very obvious now, but does that stop me from looking him up on Facebook every so often?”

“What’s he doing?”

“Seems to be happily married. Three kids. Works in tech.” She shrugs.

Bonding with my mom like this—I’m surprised to find I like it.

“I don’t know who I am without Peter,” I say. “Probably because I’ve never been without Peter.”

“Do you think it’s time to try? I’m not saying you’re done being friends or that you can’t go back to him. Just that independence isn’t a bad thing.”

“You mean ‘loneliness.’?”