The Rival

Chapter Eight

My history with theater is brutal but abrupt. It was fourth grade. I was asked to play a tree in the school-wide production of The Wizard of Oz. Well, “asked” is a generous word. I was told, and when I nearly cried because I didn’t want to be onstage at all, let alone photosynthesizing on one, I was commanded. Apparently there is no free will in the public school system when it comes to impressing parents with how very cute their kids are in an effort to get as much donation money as possible. (Do I even need to mention that Seb was playing Toto the dog? That alone probably funded half the school’s new gym equipment.)

But I was good Sadie, quiet Sadie, so I did what I was told. My job as a dancing tree was basically to swing left and swing right and then spin in a circle, and then do that three more times. So that was what I did. Until the third and final night, when I tripped, fell into the backstage curtain, and the student teacher playing stage manager startled and fell back into a lever that brought down the curtain not only on the tiny trees but on the head of the girl playing Dorothy, whose wig was subsequently flung into the audience directly onto one of the school’s most prolific donors.

The whole incident would have been more life-scarring if it hadn’t come with the perk of never ever being forcibly cast in a school production again.

It turns out my luck could only last so long, though. Because not ten minutes into the interactive show, a beautiful wood nymph stops serenading us to pull a name out of a bucket, smile winningly, and say, “We’d love to welcome our first lover to the stage… the incomparable Sadie Brighton.”

It’s okay, because this is a nightmare. I’m going to wake up any second. That’s what Seb must be doing now, nudging me in the arm, rousing me from this very vivid hallucination.

“That’s you,” he says gleefully.

I shake my head. “No. I legally changed my name to ‘No.’”

“Go go go,” he chants, way too loudly.

I lean in and grab him by his shirtsleeve. “If you say one more word, Seb, I swear on all that is holy, I will bury you. I will pretend to look for you. I’ll shed pretty tears at your funeral and die in bed eighty years from now peacefully and without regret.”

“Sadie Brighton?” calls the nymph, who looks worried enough to break character.

Little do they know I have a whole lifetime of experience keeping my trap shut. The only thing that’s getting me out of this chair is someone yelling “Fire!” And even then, I might just stay an extra minute for good measure.

Once it’s evident that no Sadie is willing to step forward, a water nymph clears his throat and steps in. “Maybe our mysterious Sadie will join us onstage once our second lover of the afternoon inspires some bravery,” he says, pulling another name. “The unparalleled… Sebastian Adams.”

Oh, all right. At least that clears it up. I’m not just unlucky; I am a cosmic joke.

Seb’s on his feet in an instant, and the audience cheers with clear relief. Then Seb turns to me and offers his hand, a winning smile on his face. To anyone watching, it would look like a gallant, romantic gesture. Which it could very well be if Seb didn’t say, “Come on, you coward.”

My mouth drops open. Apparently nobody respects a decent murder threat these days.

“Do it, Sadie!” yells someone—nay, my newest enemy—from the audience. “He’s so cute!”

“Can I pretend I’m Sadie? Damn,” says public enemy number two.

Seb’s cheeks go pink, but he doesn’t look away from me. Good. That way I can look him square in the eye with every inch of my potential wrath when I say, “Absolutely not.”

Seb leans in and makes a show of tucking a strand of hair behind my ear. “Eh, you’re right,” he says, his voice so low that only I can hear. “I’d probably kick your ass at it anyway.”

That’s it. I’m up on my feet so fast that if it were anyone else, I’d have accidentally decked them. Seb, on the other hand, dodges me like it was a choreographed routine, then wraps a firm hand around mine and starts pulling me toward the stage. To my absolute mortification, the mildly tipsy post-brunch matinee audience is cheering like it’s the halftime show at the Super Bowl. Which especially does not bode well for me, because if this show is as interactive as it promises, they’re the ones about to be in charge of my fate.

What happens over the course of the next hour is anybody’s guess, because the plot immediately goes off the rails. The nymphs carry out a scene around us that seems to imply that we are on the run in their woods because of our “forbidden love,” at which point the audience gets to decide why our love is forbidden. It’s clear the performers are expecting a reasonable answer like “their families are in an ancient feud!” or “they work for competing taverns!” Instead they decide it’s forbidden because Seb is an alien, and his poisonous spores might kill me if we make contact for too long.

The sky nymph blinks out at the insistent audience and then says, “Yeah, okay. Let’s roll with it.” Then comically snaps back into character to step away from Seb dramatically and yell, “His spores! Oh, god! They burn!”

National treasures indeed.

Whatever they’re putting in the coffee and mimosas at the restaurants on Main Street, I’m a fan, because the audience only gets more lawless from there. When the audience is asked where we’re lodging for the night after a storm rolls in, they decide it’s a White Lotus –themed hotel, prompting the nymphs to pretend to plot to kill us in exceedingly ridiculous, ineffectual ways. When they’re asked what our secret skills are for vanquishing our enemies, they decide mine is telekinesis, and Seb’s, for some reason beyond me, is to morph into a porcupine, which he manages to do with zero dignity but surprising flair.

I am so terrible and Seb is so committed to every bit that every now and then the nymphs have to shout over the raucous laughter from the crowd. Eventually the hijinks get so anarchic that I forget we’re even onstage in the first place—that is, until we’re nearing the end of our adventure through the woods, when the resounding opinion of our audience is that Seb should “kiss her already!”

This sentiment is contagious, apparently, because before the embarrassment of the request can settle in, it becomes a full-on audience chant. “Kiss her, kiss her, kiss her.”

Seb raises an eyebrow at me. I raise one back. The water nymph breaks character to say, “Only if you want to. I mean, you guys are dating, right?”

And then I see what the rest of the audience must have been seeing, which is two deeply in sync humans wearing matching T-shirts on Sunday afternoon, and Seb every so often grabbing my hand to nudge me to different corners of the stage when I floundered. They thought we were dating the entire time. The thought makes me suddenly more self-conscious than I’ve been all day.

But Seb, who only recently was unporcupined, says reassuringly, “I’m not gonna kiss you.”

I should be relieved, but if I am it’s not half as loud as the surprising bite of my irritation. “Right.”

Seb lets out a breathy laugh, searching my face. “I mean, you don’t want me to kiss you.”

“Of course not,” I say, and then because apparently all we do is steal lines from each other, onstage and off, I add, “I’d probably kick your ass at it anyway.”

Seb rolls his eyes in such affectionate exasperation that I’m in no way prepared for what happens next. For the sudden heat behind his momentum when he pulls me in by the elbow, cups my jaw between his hands, stares me directly in the eye. For the sudden oh my god, this is it. It’s happening. My first kiss, with my—what even is Seb to me?

Hell, what isn’t Seb to me? Lifelong enemy. Childhood friend. Unparalleled rival. And now—

Now settling his thumbs firmly against my lips and pressing his lips to the tops of his own fingers, pulling our faces away so it looks like a genuine kiss.

He holds me there for a beat as it sinks in—the swell of anticipation and the crush of confusion. The rush of a runaway car and the slam of an emergency brake. The happy roar from the audience and the dead silence between my ears as Seb pulls away, looking just as breathless and thrown as I do, even though he was the one who initiated the whole thing.

My brain is a vacuum after that save for one indignant, ridiculous thought: He didn’t want to kiss me. He didn’t want to kiss me. I try to disrupt the loop. It’s not like I wanted to kiss him either. But then my brain disrupts the loop with an even less helpful one: Christina a few weeks ago, pestering me about my “chemistry” with Seb, like the kissing was just inevitable. Don’t tell me you haven’t thought about it.

Maybe it’s self-important of me to be so stunned. The thing is, I never let myself think about kissing Seb in any intentional way, but if I did I would never have imagined him rejecting me. Or rather, I never imagined it would matter so much to me if he rejected me.

And it doesn’t. I’ve collected myself by the time we take our bows, buried the surprise and the weird sting of hurt. There’s no room for it anyway. It’s probably just another distraction tactic, is all. Seb finding some creative new way to get in my head.

Only Seb is beaming at me so genuinely when we hop off the stage that I know it isn’t—especially when his expression dims a bit as he registers mine. We’re both swallowed up by the audience then, who rib us and take pictures and tell us all the plotlines they had ideas for if we had more time. I don’t bother correcting them when they say what a cute couple we make, and neither does Seb. I know I’m doing it out of embarrassment; I wonder what he’s doing it for.

But not enough to stick around. The first moment I get to myself, I use to head for the exit. Seb is so close on my heel that there’s no way he didn’t have one eye on me the entire time.

“All right, have at it,” he says, once we’ve walked out of earshot.

I pull my hair up to put it in a ponytail, an old tic when I’m flustered, only there isn’t enough hair to do that anymore. “Excuse me?”

“You’re pissed. But we had fun!” he says. “A good story for your future memoir. You know, the ‘What It’s Like to Be Seb Adams’s Friend’ one.”

“We’ll workshop that last word in the title,” I say.

“Fair,” says Seb. “It has a sneaky way of changing on us over the years, huh?”

It does, and now more than ever. It feels like it’s been in flux ever since we got here. I don’t know if I like it—Seb has always been a thorn in my side, but an easy and predictable one. This I’m not sure what to do with.

“Where did you learn that thumb thing?” I blurt.

Seb’s brow furrows. “Oh, you mean stage kissing? Mrs. Carl had us do all our kisses like that for high school productions. Oldest trick in the book.”

I forget sometimes that Seb’s tiny Toto was just the beginning of his thespian career. He never took it all that seriously, but theater was his elective all through high school. We each had a little thing that was safe from the other—Seb with theater, and me with the book clubs the librarians kicked off every year.

“Oh. A trick, then.”

Seb lets out a reflexive laugh. “Are you—upset I didn’t kiss you?”

“No,” I snap.

Seb is quiet for a moment, then lets out one of those irritatingly knowing “hmmmm”s of his. Then he glances over at a bench, pulls his backpack off, and sits.

I stand there. He pats a hand on the bench for me to join him. I scowl. He tilts his head up at me and says quietly, all traces of teasing gone, “Sadie. I wasn’t going to let your first kiss be some gag onstage.”

It feels like ice water rushing through my veins. “Who says that would have been my first kiss?”

Seb just watches me patiently, not even bothering to humor my half lie. I’m not sure why I bothered, either.

“It’s not like I’m—it’s not a big deal,” I insist, my cheeks burning and spreading the heat fast. “I just was busy in high school, is all.”

By “busy” I actually mean “cursed.” The few times I did get close to kissing someone, it was nothing short of a shit show. It started in ninth grade, when a boy in our book club leaned in to kiss me between the stacks in the library. I immediately tripped on his foot and knocked him into a shelf, causing a small avalanche of books and nearly concussing him with Jane Austen’s collected works. Then came the summer before eleventh grade, when Christina’s cousin tried to kiss me when we were kayaking, and in my eagerness I somehow managed to flip us both over into a lake. By the time twelfth grade rolled around and I set my lab partner’s coat sleeve on fire during yet another doomed first-kiss attempt, I figured it was time to pull myself out of the game before I accidentally benched a whole damn team.

Seb is just watching me, so I add, “I’m not like—scared of it, or a prude, or something.”

Dear god. That came out so magnificently awkward that maybe it’s for the best if AI really does hijack our brains.

But Seb is unfazed, lifting his hands up. “I don’t think that. And to be clear, it wouldn’t be a problem if you were. Everybody does stuff like that in their own time.”

He pauses then, and I realize he’s waiting for me to sit down. I relent, and he waits until I’m settled to add carefully, “But it’s allowed to be a big deal, you know. It doesn’t have to be, but sometimes it is, and that’s fine.”

Some defensive coil in my chest wants to snap that I don’t need Seb’s little after-school special to tell me that, but my curiosity beats out my pride.

“Was it a big deal for you?”

The instant I ask it I worry it might be too personal of a question. Until the Joey situation neither of us ever talked about dating beyond the surface level of him being like, “This is my boyfriend, Roger” at family hangouts, and me adding Roger to the list of humans to try not to resent for their mere association with my mortal enemy.

Now I’m wondering if some quiet part of me wasn’t just insecure about Seb opening up a whole new part of his life that I hadn’t even opened the door to myself.

But Seb nods, happy to have been asked. “It felt like one. And I was lucky, because it was a good kiss. The right person at the right time.” He waits until I meet his eyes, which I didn’t realize I was avoiding. “So, yeah, I didn’t want to kiss you like that. You never know who it’s a big deal for or not. At least, not unless you talk about it.”

The crush of relief at hearing him say that comes with its own embarrassment, but at least it feels better than the rejection did. I cast my gaze back at my shoes.

“Well—no need for us to talk about that,” I say.

Seb goes very still at those words, processing like they have more weight than I meant to put behind them. I clear my throat.

“I mean, odds are I’ll never be dodging your poisonous spores onstage again.”

“I don’t know. Life is long,” says Seb. He leans back against the bench. “It’s funny. This actually ties into what I’ve been writing about for our second piece.”

“Sexually inexperienced communications majors making fools of themselves in front of a hundred strangers?” I ask, leaning into the whole “humor as a defense mechanism” bit like it’s my job.

He nudges his shoulder into mine, a quiet stop that. “Nah. More like how unprepared a lot of us are for this kind of stuff in college, or just at our age in general. Like obviously the public school education system dropped the ball, that’s nothing new. But I’m not even talking in terms of sexuality—just, like, the basics of how to be emotionally healthy about getting into all this stuff. Especially now. All of a sudden you have all this independence and all these options and like—no road map for what to expect or how to cope with any of it.”

Seb is equal parts methodical and passionate in the way he speaks, the way he always gets when his whole heart is in a piece that he’s writing. These were among the few times in high school we weren’t at each other’s throats, when he was pitching a piece like this to me for the school paper. Truth is, he probably never needed to pitch in the first place. He has impeccable instincts for choosing his topics and an innate sensitivity in his writing about them, and this is no exception.

But even at the heights of our irritation with each other, what I liked most about these pitches was watching Seb get in the zone. I still do. The way his hands move in this tight, precise way to punctuate his points, the way his eyes brighten like there’s something burning behind them. The way Seb is a person who never does anything halfway.

“Yeah,” I agree, mulling over his words. “I didn’t really think of it that way. More like—some people were just naturally more confident about that kind of thing, and I kept missing the boat, you know?”

Seb nods effusively. “I think that’s just it. The boat never came. We were all just kind of—swimming.”

I slouch deeper into the bench. “Well, in that case, I’m barely treading water. But at least I know how to wrap a banana in a condom in ten seconds or less.”

“Vigilantly keeping bananas safe from the perils of the open air since freshman year.” Seb knocks his shoulder into me again, gentle and reassuring. This time after it lands against mine, he doesn’t move it away. “And you’re a plenty good swimmer. I think it’s just a matter of deciding when you want to get farther from the shore.”

Despite the solidness of the bench under me and Seb’s warm shoulder next to mine, I feel wobbly for a moment. Like I didn’t know how badly I needed to hear those words until someone said them to me. After a lifetime of trying to be a certain way, I know how rare it is to feel thoroughly seen by someone; it’s something else entirely to be seen by someone before you see it in yourself.

“You’ve thought about this a lot, huh?” I ask.

Seb’s nod is slower this time as he considers. “Well—part of it is I just sort of had to? Like, good luck being queer and having questions in sex ed about anything other than how to not get someone pregnant.” He angles more of his body toward me. “But I’m lucky. I mean, you know my parents. They were always supportive and like, super blunt about everything, whether it was over a silly crush or full-on sex. The instant I came out they did all this research, so by the time I had questions, they were ready to fill in the gaps we never learned in school the best they could.”

I think of all those rainbow plates stacked diligently in Seb’s basement and smile to myself. “Yeah, they’re pretty cool.”

“These days a lot of parents are. But I think even the most well-intentioned parents are kind of reluctant to talk about stuff like this with their kids.”

I ruefully recall the copy of The Period Book under my bed, and a few stilted, awkward conversations I had with my mom about sex that I attempted to ask Marley about later. Somewhere between my mom’s mechanical description and Marley’s rambling one (it came with a whole lot more commentary about her exes than actual information), I pieced together some idea of what to expect when it comes to dating.

Not that it mattered much in the end. Even with the few crushes I had, I was more focused on crushing as a verb—namely, of one Seb Adams, in every academic capacity possible.

“Or at least, that’s the impression I’ve gotten talking to other students. Particularly in the Rainbow Maple Ride Alliance,” says Seb. “So I think that’s what I’m going to focus on for the relationships angle. The way we’re all coming at them from different lenses depending on how we were raised, and what we were taught or not taught. And how you can still have a personal timeline with it that has everything or nothing to do with any of that.” He smiles, scratching the back of his neck self-consciously. “It sounds pretty broad right now, but I’ll find some way to narrow it after I’ve talked to enough people, I think.”

He’s very still for a moment, his eyes on me with a strange kind of apprehension. It’s not just that it matters to him what I think—I’ve always known it has. We’re each other’s best and most honest critics. But it’s clear that this is the first time an article hasn’t just mattered because it’s important; this time it’s personal.

There’s a warmth in my chest so soft that I can’t help the way I look at him then, with a tenderness and a strange, misplaced pride. Seb watches the smile that curls on my face like he’s hooked to the edges of it, and I don’t mind. I want him to know. I can tell that he does.

Which is why I have no problem following up the profundity of the moment by blowing out a breath and saying, “Well, shit.”

“What?” Seb asks, already amused.

I knock the heel of my shoe into the cement. “This is going to be a really fucking good piece, huh?”

Seb laughs out loud. “That’s the idea. Better bring your A game.”

For once I don’t even have the remotest urge to rib him back. “I mean it,” I say sincerely. “I think it’ll be helpful for people to know they’re not alone. If you don’t win this round, I hope people still get to read it.”

Seb blinks into his lap like the praise was every bit as unexpected as it was appreciated. When he looks up, though, his eyes are gleaming the way they do before he’s about to gloat. I hold in a sigh and decide to let him. He did suffer the humiliation not just of losing to me but of becoming a spore-infected alien/porcupine, after all.

Only Seb doesn’t gloat. Or at least, not in any way I’m expecting him to. Instead he leans in and says unabashedly, “Just so you know—if it ever seemed like I was the right person at the right time—it would be an honor to be your first kiss.”

For a moment I’m too stunned to react. I cycle through my familiar options: Counter him with a sarcastic remark. Don’t say anything at all, so he doesn’t have the satisfaction of thinking his words meant anything. And then a third unfamiliar option: Kiss him.

It’s an option I don’t just feel in my head, but all over my body. Maybe not an option at all, but a demand. Ghosting on my lips, tingling in my arms, fluttering in my chest.

“Duck!”

We’re too busy staring at each other to register the word, and both end up getting chucked in the head by balled-up pieces of paper.

“What the—”

“Have a day!” someone clad in an entirely silver outfit calls from behind a tree, before making a break for it so fast that we might have imagined them.

Seb looks as bewildered as I do. Even more so when we look down to see the papers balled at our feet are both tied together with silver ribbon.

“Every time I think this day can’t get weirder,” I say, reaching for the one in my lap.

Seb unties his, too, uncrumpling them to find that they’re both in the shapes of an “S.” Written in squished handwriting around the curves of the letter are the words, You and a guest are chaotically invited to this year’s Alphabet Party. If you are not dressed as something that starts with the letter “S,” you will be swiftly stopped, speedily sequestered, surely sorry. Just under it is an address and a day and time next week.

“Dare I even ask what this is?” Seb asks.

“My ticket to being the best fucking roommate on the planet, is what it is,” I say gleefully.

Christina mostly put the Alphabet Party on the Bitch List as a pipe dream. Nobody knows how to get invited because there’s no rhyme or reason to it. The Random Acts of Chaos club commits to the bit.

But I can cross this off the list for her, and maybe it’ll help make up for all the ones she’s had to put off. I’m so pleased with myself and full of the strange adrenaline of the day that this time I’m the one who leans in and grabs Seb’s face, pressing my thumbs to his lips and loudly smacking my fingers. It’s a quick, cheesy version of what he did earlier, but as I pivot and start making a break for the dorms, I swear the tips of his ears are pinker than I’ve ever seen them.

“So I’ll see you then?” Seb calls after me.

“Surely, stupendously, and sincerely!” I call back.

If I’m still thinking of those pink ears of his on the way home, that’s nobody’s business but my own.