Chapter 11 Bird #3
He laughs. And I can picture him looking down, pushing his glasses up, the way he always would when he laughed.
“So,” I begin. “How are you?”
“I’m all right. It’s been weird trying to adjust to being back home. Being back in school. Everything feels different after this summer, you know?”
I’m nodding because I do know. He’s right, everything does feel different.
“Bird?”
“Oh, sorry, I’m nodding but obviously you can’t see me.”
“I wish I could,” he says. And now I start to think maybe this was a mistake. But he changes course, just in time, as usual. “So, how are you doing?”
“How am I doing?” I repeat. “Ugh, I don’t know. Okay, I guess. I mean, school definitely feels weird. Like, I’m just already ready to be done—now that I sort of know what college life is like, having all that freedom and having…” you, I don’t say, and Kat. “It’s just hard to go backward.”
“Exactly.”
“I, um, I did the open mic night.”
“Nice,” he says. “How was it?”
“Kind of terrible,” I admit.
“No, I’m sure it wasn’t.”
“It really was! This awful girl was laughing at me while I was up there. It was humiliating. Truly mortifying. I don’t know how I’ll ever do that again.”
“Come on. Don’t let one idiot ruin it for you.”
I’m surprised by how I bristle at him calling Jessa an idiot… even if she was being an idiot, laughing at me with Dade. It was probably Dade’s fault anyway. I’m sure he started it. Or maybe she just thought my poem was stupid.
“Thing is, she’s actually not an idiot, so maybe she was right to laugh, I don’t know.”
“Hey. If she was laughing at you, she’s an idiot. You’re amazing.”
“Why do you still say stuff like that, Silas?”
“Because it’s true.”
I don’t know how to respond to that.
“Hey, what time is it there?” he asks after my silence becomes uncomfortable.
I glance over at the stove. “Like ten thirty.”
“Kinda late for you.” He pauses. “Everything okay?”
“Yeah,” I lie. “Mostly. I was waiting to hear from Charlie about our dad.”
“Did he find anything? Does he know where he is, or…?”
“I don’t know, we keep missing each other.”
“Hmm,” I hear him mutter.
“But anyway… did you submit your story to that magazine, like you said you would?”
“Yep. I mailed it in the day we got back. Haven’t heard anything yet, though.”
“I’m sure they’ll love it.”
“I’m not!” he says, laughing again. He really does have the best laugh, all big and loud and shameless, not a mean note to it.
“If they don’t, then they’re idiots too.”
“Thanks.”
There’s a pause, and it’s out of my mouth before I can censor myself. “Hey, have you heard from Kat at all?” And then the quiet just stretches out even further, making me wish I could rewind and think first and tell myself not to mention her.
“We’ve emailed a little, yeah. Talked to her a couple times on the phone. Funny, she asked the same about you.”
“Sorry, I don’t know why I—I shouldn’t have brought her up. Sorry,” I say again.
“Don’t be sorry, Bird. You know I’m not mad at you, right?”
I close my eyes and exhale. I’m back in Silas’s dorm room, a fan blowing over us in the dark.
I roll over and press my face into his pillow to hide the fact that I’m crying.
Kat’s voice in my head, echoing from that afternoon when I told her I just wanted to be friends, Can’t you just admit you have feelings for me, too?
But my sniffles give me away and Silas keeps asking me what’s wrong until I tell him.
“I kissed Kat—or she—she kissed me. We—we kissed.”
He does a pretty good job of hiding how much it hurts him, especially since it’s been starting to feel like we’re heading toward being something more official than the friends-with-benefits designation we’d loosely agreed upon. He sits up and puts on his glasses and just says, “When?”
“Few nights ago,” I mutter, even though a few nights ago was only the last time we kissed, not the first.
“Okay. Well, I mean, how do you feel about that? Is that… Is that what you want?”
“No,” I answer immediately, but quickly add, “I mean, m-maybe? I don’t know.”
He waits a beat before saying, “It’s okay. If you don’t feel the same way I—”
“I do have feelings for you, though, Silas. I really do—I’m just confused because I think I have feelings for Kat, too, and I don’t want to hurt either of you….”
I cried harder that night than I’ve cried about anything in my life. He held me and kept saying it was okay, until I blurted out that we should end it—whatever it was we were doing.
Someone was bound to get hurt, I knew that much. But looking back, I wonder if I was mostly trying to make sure it wouldn’t be me.
“Bird?” he says now. “You know I’m not mad,” he repeats, “right?”
“You mean that, really?”
“Really.”
“Thank you,” I tell him, and I mean it too. I can feel this wellspring of tears flooding to my eyes, but I refuse to let myself cry on the phone to him. “Silas, I should go.”
“Oh. Um, okay.” I can hear the deflation in his voice. “Wait, Bird—”
“I’m still here.”
“What did you read?”
“Huh?”
“For the open mic. What poem did you read?”
“It’s a new one.”
“Can I read it sometime?”
“Maybe. I mean, I think so. Yeah, you can.”
“Send it to me? It doesn’t have to be a letter. You could email it.”
“Okay, I will. Bye, Silas.”
“Bye, Bird.”