Chapter 1 #7
He frowns faintly. “Because of me?”
“Because of me,” I clarify. “I just—I tend to make things awkward.” Because even though he didn’t know who I was, I told myself I was fine with that.
I could admire him from a distance like he was a character in a movie.
The connection felt pure. More beautiful, less real.
I didn’t have to worry about ruining things by saying something stupid.
“That’s not true.”
I roll my eyes, but I’m smiling. “You’re being nice again.”
“Is that your favorite conspiracy theory? That I go around being nice to people for no reason?”
“Basically, yeah.”
“Well,” he says after a pause, “I kind of wish you had. Come up to me, I mean. And I’m not just being nice when I say that.”
I breathe out. “I wish I had too. I wish I hadn’t wasted so much time.”
Before I died, I had been stuck waiting.
From the moment I woke up, I was waiting anxiously for the first meeting of the day, and then at the office I was waiting for the lunch break, and then at lunch I was waiting to get back home, to eat and shower and crawl back under the covers.
But when the time finally came, nothing happened, and so the waiting felt meaningless.
I didn’t have anything worthwhile to wait for, maybe that was the problem.
Time just dragged on.
“Well, there’s always now,” I say softly. “Isn’t there?”
“Yeah,” he says, then hesitates. “There’s something I should probably tell you, though . . .”
He looks so serious, almost guilty, that I feel my stomach contract as if bracing for a blow. Is he about to reject me? Tell me that he already likes someone else? That he isn’t looking to start anything?
“I lost my last race,” he says, his voice quiet, like he’s confessing a grave sin.
I stare at the screen, confused. “What?”
“My last race,” he says. “I . . . I came in fourth. Didn’t even place.
I don’t know if it was the pressure or I was too tired that day or what—I lost my footing and I fell.
So my friends, what they were saying earlier, that stupid chant: Luke Blythe always wins.
It just—I wish it was, but it isn’t true. ”
“Oh my god. Luke—are you okay?”
“Well, my next race is on Saturday, so it’s soon, but if I train hard, I should be fine for that—”
“No. I don’t mean your—your track record. I mean you. Are you hurt? I feel like you should rest.”
He frowns, as if the idea has never even occurred to him. “You care about that?”
“What do you mean?”
“I didn’t want to—you know, ruin your impression of me,” he says. “When you were telling me about your crush earlier . . .”
I feel a deep, wrenching sensation inside my chest, because it’s so familiar. It’s exactly how I used to think, about school instead of sports. That if I didn’t perform well, nobody would want me. If I wasn’t successful, nobody would care.
Luke Blythe and I—we aren’t as different as I believed.
“Luke, I don’t like you because you’re perfect,” I tell him.
“Whether you win or lose, whether you come in first place or last—that doesn’t matter to me.
And if running makes you happy, then yeah, I think you should keep doing it, even if you lost every race.
But if running only makes you stressed out and miserable, and you’re only doing it because other people expect it of you, then you should be able to stop, even if you win all your races. ”
He stares at me without speaking for a long, long time. “How do you make it sound so simple?”
“Maybe it can be that simple. I used to think that succeeding was the only thing that mattered in life until . . . until I had this near-death experience,” I confess, which is as close to the truth as I can get.
“And it’s like everything just became so much clearer.
What was worthwhile, what wasn’t. I’m not sure how my life will go from here or what my future will look like, but I want to live .
. . honestly. I want to be honest with myself.
And with you too . . .” I pause when I realize I’ve been rambling.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to give a whole inspirational speech—”
“No, god, don’t be,” he says, and then he releases a soft sound between his teeth like a suppressed laugh, though I can’t tell if he’s laughing at himself or at me.
He really is beautiful. His dimples, his dark, rumpled hair.
Even in the low resolution of the phone’s camera, the night light casting a silvery glow around him.
He looks so beautiful that I feel an overwhelming compulsion to tell him, not to flirt or win some kind of reaction, but because it is simply, remarkably true.
You just want to point it out, like a full moon or a butterfly with astonishing streaks of color in its wings.
And then I think, Why not? Why not tell him?
But before I can, he says, “You’re really beautiful. Since we’re talking about being honest . . . I’ve been thinking that to myself the whole night, and I wanted to let you know.”
I grin. “Funny. I was just thinking that about you.”