28. Mina
There’s an irrelevant half day of school the day of senior prom. The people who do show up wear face masks and pj’s and stuff. I go, to maintain my attendance, and then no one even takes attendance, so I leave after first period.
When I get home, my mom is on the couch.
“Big plans tonight?”
“Nope,” I say, flopping next to her. “What are we watching?”
“Let’s watch all the movies we can think of with proms in them.”
“Are you joking?”
“I can be?”
It’s not like I won’t be thinking about it, anyway, so I say yes.
By 8:00 p.m., I’m in boxers and a T-shirt I got in elementary school for winning the spelling bee. I get into bed and do my best to feel tired and not pathetic. It doesn’t work. My room feels stuffy, so I open the window, and then I end up just sitting and looking out of it. This starts to feel really gratuitous, and so I climb out onto the roof. I’ve never been out here without Caplan, even though it’s my roof and my window, and the thought irritates me so much I forget to feel sad. Suddenly, I am furious with myself, and my life, and every choice I’ve made to land myself here.
Because if I were a different kind of person, it wouldn’t have mattered that I have no date and no friends. I’d throw on some quirky surprising dress and march into the fugly glittery room with my head held high and everyone would be impressed with my pluck. Or if my best friend—let’s be honest, my only friend—hadn’t been a boy I was always a little in love with, if my tiny narrow life could actually for god’s sake at least not be an argument for good old-fashioned sexism, or if I were a normal person with girlfriends, or even one girl best friend, I’d be able to walk in arm in arm with her and overrule the whole ridiculous patriarchal heteronormative notion of a romantic happy ending at eighteen years old. I think about Caplan asking me why I have to analyze everything to pieces, and I actually yell out in frustration. But the street is deserted, and anyone who I wouldn’t want to hear me is at prom, being normal.
Then a beam comes sweeping around the corner, lighting up the world. I stay still on my roof in the dark, but when the car pulls into my driveway, I am not all that surprised. It’s a cul-de-sac, after all.
He slams the door and comes over to the jungle gym to climb up, and then he sees me.
“Oh,” he says, “hi.”
I don’t say anything, because I’m worried if I do, I’ll cry. His crown’s slipped off to one side, sitting tilted. He looks better than any boy in any movie.
“Okay,” he says. He puts his hands into his pockets and then takes them back out again. “All right. So I came here because I have some stuff I want to say.”
I manage to nod.
“So. What I have to say—and you’re better at arguing than I am, so I need you to wait till I’m totally finished before you respond, okay—what I have to say is that you said, the other day in your room, that you’re alive because of me and that’s too much pressure or power or whatever it was, but I am who I am because of you. Which I’d argue is just as big a deal. Every decent thing about me is from knowing you. I’ve wanted to be just like you, to deserve to be around you, since I was eight. And I don’t want to meet whoever I’d be today if that hadn’t happened. I don’t know myself without you, I don’t want to, and I’ve looked up to you my whole life. And if that means we aren’t equals, then fine.”
He pauses and takes a deep breath. When I still don’t say anything, he plows on.
“The best parts of myself, I got from you, okay? And that, that has to count. For some kind of love.”
“Of course it counts—”
“AND—I’m not done—AND I know it’s hard to believe because of how shitty I’ve been and how selfish I’ve acted and I don’t really have a good excuse. The best one I can come up with is that after, you know, caring about you—I mean, loving you—in such an easy way it was basically like… like breathing, for so long, well, then falling in love with you just, like, knocked the wind out of me. It was such a different feeling. It’s like—like having to learn to breathe again or something, and I got confused because—because I don’t know why. Because I was scared. Because I didn’t know how you felt.”
“Caplan—”
“BUT I’ve realized—sorry, I’m almost done—I’ve realized it made me a bad friend. And obviously I don’t know jack about love, but I’m pretty sure it’s not supposed to do that, so I think I was loving wrong. Probably, because I was doing it without you, and as we already know, I’m no good without you. So. No matter how you feel about me, even if you love me as a friend, or, you know—either way, I’m not gonna let you down ever again. If you, ah, if you decide to let me be your friend. Again.” He looks up at me, his chest rising and falling like he’s climbing a mountain. “Do you think we could. Be friends again?”
“I don’t know how we can.”
“I’ll do whatever it takes,” he says.
“No, it’s not you, it’s me.” I take a deep breath and shove the words out. “I don’t see you as just a friend. I don’t know that I ever did. Maybe that’s why I didn’t feel equal, growing up. All the other stuff—”
“But—but, Mina!”
“Stop. Stop smiling like that. It’s not a good thing.”
“Okay, sorry.” He’s still smiling so big, his face looks like it’s about to split open and set the night ablaze.
“I tried for years. I tried really hard to make it go away,” I say.
“I think—I think it’s a miracle, if you feel how I feel.”
Something bursts open, unfolding in my chest, stretching and spreading and filling me up. I feel it everywhere. I feel it in my littlest finger.
“Everything would change. And we have no idea how.”
“Mina, you said it yourself, you told me weeks ago, the day I got into college and I asked you to promise me nothing would change. Do you remember what you said?”
“All I can remember about that day is that you got in.”
“You promised me, something like, if things have to change, and they do, because they always will, it’ll be for something better.”
His joy is contagious. It is too much. “Did you get smarter than I am?”
“No, no, I’ve been thinking this through for days. Just trying to keep up with your brain.” He beams up at me, for all the world like we’re just hanging out.
“I’m just—I’m overwhelmed. By it,” I say finally.
“By what?”
“By who you are. And how I feel.”
“Okay. Well, it doesn’t have to be this huge thing. We’ll take it a step at a time. If you still need space, I’ll give you some. If you want to go to prom as friends, we’ll go. If you want me to wait here while you think, then I will. We’ve got all night.”
He sits down in the grass. I know right then that even if I went inside and shut the window and went to bed, he’d still be there when I woke up.
A car horn blares.
“Okay, maybe we don’t have all night,” he says.
I stare at the car, the windshield impossible to see through in the glare of the headlights. Something slides into place. Caplan got out of the wrong side.
“Who drove you here?”
“We couldn’t do prom without you.”
“We?” And finally, I cry.
“No matter what you feel about me,” he says, “I think you should come with us. Or she’ll never forgive me.” Then he puts his hand into his jacket pocket and pulls out a very familiar corsage. “Plus, Quinn’s a sucker for a happy ending.”
He reaches up and ties the ribbon around my ankle carefully. Then he just holds my ankle, hanging on, in no rush. I realize I’m smiling now, too. I can’t stop.
“So what’s next, Mina?”
I wiggle my toes.
“Your call. No wrong answers. Gut instinct.”
“I’ll come,” I say. “I’ll come to prom, and we’ll take it from there. Now let go.”
“Why?”
“So I can go inside and come down.”
“But I don’t want to let go.”
“I’ll be quick. I’m just going to use the stairs. I can’t climb down out here like you.”
“Okay,” he says. “Be fast.” He stays holding my ankle for another moment, looking at me, all lit up, and then, just as he loosens his grip, I jump. His arm is still raised high, ready to catch me.