Chapter Thirteen
If our dorm room looked like a cage match between green cartoon characters when Christina left the night of the Alphabet Party, it looks like a full dismemberment of them now. Which is truly saying something, because it’s been a full week and not one shade of the green carnage has faded from her sheets, her side of the wall, or poor Bluebeary, who was unwittingly caught in the green cross fire and may now need a legal name change for it.
The worst part is, Christina is still in a funk about what happened—her cross-country pregame went disastrously wrong. Well, by any college kid’s standard, at least. Apparently she and her teammates were so exhausted that after consuming their bagels and popping on a quick episode of Parks and Recreation before they left, they all just fully conked out. Christina didn’t wake up until sometime around three in the morning, which was when I subsequently was woken to a sobbing, sexily clad Shrek who spent the better part of the next hour crying snot and green slime into my shoulder.
“Are you sure you don’t want to come home with us this weekend?” I ask, hoisting the plastic bag of our green-stained clothes into my backpack. Neither of us wanted to inflict the slime on our hallmates by attempting to put them through the laundry here. “There’s gonna be Funfetti cake.”
Christina shakes her head forlornly, watching me from her perch under a mountain of textbooks on her bed. “It’s our only weekend without a race and I’m so behind. If I get within a fifty-foot radius of either of my parents they’ll be able to smell the overdue assignments on me.”
“You sure?” I ask. “We can have a little study session before the party if you’re worried. I think you could use a weekend at home to regroup.”
I can’t be entirely sure of what was said the night of the Shrekoning, because it was hard to discern much of anything through the fully clothed shower we had to get her into around four in the morning to scrub the swamp paint off her. But I think the gist of it was “this isn’t what I thought it was going to be like” and “I’m so fucking tired” and “this is the least Shrexy I’ve ever been.”
I tried to bring it up with her a few times this week, but she’s been adamant that she “got it out of her system” and is fine now. Which, judging from the bags under her eyes and the fact that the wall by her bed is still so green that you could project a weather forecast on it, I don’t remotely believe to be true.
“I’m sure.” She kicks her foot out in my direction, nearly toppling the precarious homework pile. “Also since when are you and Seb taking weekend getaways together?”
I turn my face so it’s angled away from hers, worried that my cheeks might flush. That is apparently an ongoing symptom of this whole “I have designs on kissing Seb” situation. So far, nothing seems to be able to mitigate it. Every time I’ve walked past Seb on campus or seen him in the dining hall this week—boom. Cheeks.
And then, unfortunately, boom, brain. Which has been spending some deeply unproductive spells imagining kissing Seb, and then imagining a whole lot else. For someone who has zero experience in that realm, it turns out I can get real creative real fast.
All this to say, I’m going to have to start investing in a personal fan and quite possibly a calendar so I can pencil in “STOP THINKING ABOUT SEB’S HAND ON YOUR WAIST” for every hour until the Newsbag competition is through.
“Seb has a car, is all,” I tell Christina. “Enduring his company is a small price to pay to get out of taking the bus.”
Christina nods like she doesn’t believe me, either. “I’m just concerned now that you’ve both turned in your second pieces. For him, to be clear. A road trip gone wrong is a perfect way to disappear a whole boy.”
My brow furrows. “Maybe we need to hit pause on your HBO subscription.”
Christina waves a lazy hand. “Nah, that’s coming from my own vengeful brain. I haven’t been able to watch a single onscreen murder or psychologically unhinged power struggle between two Strong Female Characters in weeks.” She sighs. “Bring me back some cake?”
I finish zipping up my backpack and sling it over my shoulder, doing a last scan of the room to make sure I’m not leaving anything vital behind. “Can do.”
“Oh! And tell me how it goes, telling your parents about Newsbag. ”
I pause with my hand on the doorknob. “Right. Can also do.”
The Sunday after the Alphabet Party, I ended up taking Christina to Pancake It or Leave It with Seb, who candidly informed her that I would be telling my parents about it this week. I chugged a good third of his coffee in retaliation (in my defense, after the night we’d had, I certainly needed it more) but didn’t correct him. The two of them assumed I would talk to my family about it this weekend.
But the piece was due Friday. I didn’t want to tell them about it while Seb and I were under identical roofs, waiting for the same email that would decide our fates. That, and—Seb’s words about my piece stuck. I realized what was missing from the draft: my own feelings about being away from my family for the first time. I’d stepped out of the narrative like an anthropologist, like it had no relation to me, but it does.
And I didn’t even understand how much until I was FaceTiming my parents and told them about Newsbag. There was no surprise. There weren’t even any questions. My dad said, “Well, good for you, getting involved on campus!” and my mom said, “Oh, that sounds fun,” and then they were interrupted by Marley yelling that Meowtwo had knocked a LaCroix onto her laptop keyboard.
I’ve been feeling off-kilter about it all week. All this time bracing for a big reaction, only to get… almost the opposite of one. From two people who have never done one subtle thing in their lives, no less. I can’t tell if it’s because they don’t understand it’s important to me, or if they just were too distracted to take notice altogether.
It strangely did help with the piece, my unease with the whole situation. Not to tell my own story, but to infuse that same off-kilter feeling we all have when telling other people’s stories. I felt more connected to the piece by the time I turned it in, the way Seb always does with his. Less like I was trying to tell a story and more like I was letting the story tell itself.
But I was embarrassed enough by making such a big deal out of what was essentially a non-deal in the end that even though I sent the draft of the story to Seb before our deadline, I never mentioned telling my parents about Newsbag to Seb or Christina. I’m not even planning to mention it when I get home. Everything will just be business as usual. Nothing to worry about.
Except cheeks. Because Seb pulls up to the dorms in his dad’s old pickup truck, and there they go again, heating up like they’re trying to light an emergency flare.
He lowers his sunglasses to look at me, and dear god. Between the tousled hair and the white shirt and the lazy way he’s got one hand wrapped around the bottom of the steering wheel, he looks like something out of a country-music video.
Then he makes it even worse, and smiles.
“Your Uber has arrived,” he says.
I open the door to his car, proud of my last functional neuron for managing to do it without tripping. This has been an especially confusing week for just about every organ in my body, because the thing is—nothing about Seb has changed. Those are the precise same tanned forearms lightly flexing under the wheel; that’s the precise same curl of his hair over his ear when he’s overdue for a cut; that’s the precise same smile I’ve seen aimed at more people than I can count.
But it’s like almost kissing Seb broke some dimension in my brain, and now I’m noticing all of him in angles I’ve never let myself consider before. Angles that my imagination is now treating like a jungle gym, bouncing from thought to thought. What it would be like to hold that hand he’s flexing or run my hand through that overgrown curl or press my lips into that smile.
“So I have an idea,” says Seb.
I blink. We’ve fully left campus. Great—I’ll go ahead and add “complete dissociation” to my new list of Seb-related symptoms.
“Why do I have a feeling it has to do with the Wicked soundtrack cued up on your phone?” I ask.
“That’s not an idea, that’s a lifestyle. No, I meant—I have an idea for a follow-up for Jock for a Day.”
I’ve been so distracted with the finishing touches on my piece that I haven’t had much time to worry about the aftermath of our stunt, but we’re having another Newsbag meeting about it soon. Apparently the administration is still giving the student orgs the runaround because they need time to “look at the existing structures” and “hear back from athletic suppliers” and “insert uncreative excuse here.”
It’s clear that they think we pulled all the stops out already and don’t have any other leverage. And maybe that’s true. But Amara and Rowan want to keep the momentum up and find some leverage, fast, while everyone is still stirred up from our jock antics.
“If you wanted to be pelted by more random objects so badly, I’m insulted you didn’t just ask,” I tell Seb.
He turns on the car and taps his phone, flooding the car with the sound of jubilant Ozians celebrating Elphaba’s demise. It’s just not a good week for the green people in my life, I suppose.
“Nah,” says Seb. “I have another idea to really put the heat on them.”
A few more bars of upbeat, vaguely threatening singing pass.
“Are you going to share with the class, or…?”
Seb shakes his head, looking both pleased with himself and apologetic. “I want to make sure I can pull it off first. It’s a little—borderline.”
“Like illegal?”
“It’s not… not.”
I narrow my eyes at him. “You don’t trust me.”
It’s a joke, but it also isn’t. He sent me back a Well fuck! text in response to the draft of my piece—high praise that made me feel confident enough to hit Send on the final version—but this time he didn’t send his piece back. We were pretty close to the wire on the deadline, but still. It seemed a little strange.
But Seb takes one of his hands off the steering wheel to bat me lightly on the shoulder. “More like I don’t want to implicate you.”
I scowl. “So you’re just going to get implicated without me?”
Seb laughs. “It might not even be a thing. We’ll see.”
I settle back into my seat. “Well, good. You’ll need something to distract you from the embarrassment of losing to me a second time.”
“Ah. But will either of us even be able to feel an emotion as human as embarrassment when we’re both leaving this mortal plane?”
Seb is referring to Marley’s birthday party, which has two themes. The first is “Resurrection Mystery Party,” which is, by her definition, “the opposite of a Murder Mystery Party.” We all get assigned characters who are actually ghosts, and we have until the end of the night to figure which one of us secretly came back to life and was just pretending to be a ghost the whole time. I’m not sure what the motivation is to solve this particular mystery if there’s no technical crime involved, but I’m less concerned with that than I am with the second theme of her party, which is “If Anyone Plays Taylor Swift’s ‘22’ At This Party, I Will End Them On Sight.”
Safe to say that Seb and I are planning to rig the playlist to blast it at random no less than sixteen times, so we might actually be ghosts by the end of the night.
“I’m still unclear if we’re making our own backstories or if we’re getting assigned them,” I say.
“I think assigned,” says Seb. “But we should have back -backstories, too.”
I pinch my chin with my fingers as if in thought. “Oh, I know. Maybe our characters are in a not-so-secret rivalry that escalates to the point of absurdity over the course of a decade, all leading up to a climactic competition that will determine their entire futures.”
“Huh,” says Seb, nodding in consideration. “A little out of left field, but I dig it. What happens to them next?”
I smirk, leaning farther into my seat and pressing my knees against the dashboard. “What, you’re going to make me write the whole story on my own?”
“Nah,” says Seb. “I’ve got a few endings in mind.”
“Happy ones?” I ask wryly.
Seb smiles, his eyes still on the road but the intent of them clearly somewhere else.
“I’ll have to run it past my editor. She’s a real hard-ass. But yeah—if I have my way.”
That flutter under my ribs kicks up again, a warmth spreading in my chest that lingers the whole rest of the ride home. At least until we round the corner to our neighborhood, and I’m sitting up at attention, strangely anxious to get there faster and anxious to get there at all. Like I’m desperate for the touchstone of home and irrationally scared it won’t feel like one anymore.
But then we pull into Seb’s driveway to find all four of our parents sitting on my porch with lemonades, waving and cheering as dweebily as possible, and the knot in my chest loosens. I scramble out of the car and am scooped up into a hug by both my parents before I even make it off the lawn.
“It looks even cuter in person!” my mom exclaims, grabbing the ends of my hair.
My dad pulls my backpack off my back and does the same bit he always does, pretending it’s too heavy to carry. “Did you adopt a bunch of pet rocks?”
Seb is similarly greeted by his own parents—his mom grabs his hair, too, and right on cue says, “Well, look at our little hippie!” the same way she always does when it grows out. His dad pats him on the back and starts giving a status report on the various large plants in the house, all of which Seb named at some point.
“Please, everyone come inside,” says my mom, motioning to the front door. “We’ve prepared a charcuterie board for the arrival of our esteemed guests.”
Marley slinks out then in her combat boots and a minidress, high-fiving both me and Seb in turn before turning back to her phone.
“Charcuterie” could mean any number of things in my house, so I don’t have any expectations when I walk in. Even if I did, nothing could prepare me for what we find on the kitchen table—a truly unholy collection of snacks, all of which Seb and I immediately recognize. Potato chip s’mores. Mini cheeseburger pizza. Cheesy mug pancakes. Even the cursed jelly bean pudding.
I wheel around in surprise. My parents look positively gleeful, holding a fresh copy of last week’s Newsbag between them.
“We took your quiz,” says my mom. “We were laughing too hard to score ourselves properly, so we just made all the snacks.”
“You took my quiz,” I bleat out. It’s all I can manage, because I feel like I’m in one of those very bizarre dreams you have when you’re not fully asleep or awake. And in this particular dream, my parents are positively beaming, my dad turning through the pages of the zine to open it to my quiz.
“Did you manage to get any extra copies?” my dad asks. “We could only get four sent to us. One of them is on the fridge, but I thought it’d be nice to have one for every member of the family.”
“Oh.” I look at the fridge and sure enough, there it is again: my byline. In my house. On my fridge. Where everyone can see it. “I, uh—yeah. Yeah, I have more copies.”
I’m smiling so hard that my face is aching and my eyes are threatening to fill up. I’m so overwhelmed I don’t know what to say or where to look.
“Bring them next time. I want to give some to our D&D friends. This is gold,” says my mom.
My dad reaches out and jostles me on the shoulder. “Who knew you had it in you? The quiet ones are always the funniest of the bunch, huh,” he says.
I laugh outright, too relieved to even think about explaining myself. “Thanks,” I say. “I can’t believe you guys did all this.”
“It’s not every day your kid gets their name in print,” says my dad.
I feel a familiar pinch of guilt then that I know is only going to get more pronounced later—that I made all these assumptions about them, not just before I told them but after, and they’re this supportive. I turn to Seb, whose face is set exactly how I knew it would be: a little bit smug and undeniably proud. I take an unconscious step closer to him, but Seb’s mom beats me to him, holding a copy of the zine.
“I didn’t see anything of yours in here,” she says, concerned. “Aren’t you both competing for the spot?”
Seb nods, the smile going static on his face for a moment.
“Well, that’s how the competition works. Sadie’s piece beat mine, so it got published.”
Seb’s dad pores through the copy of Newsbag my parents left on the table. “I thought you were more interested in serious writing anyway,” he says, frowning at the contents—Colby’s “Please I Am Begging You, Do Not Bring Back Headbands, Some of Us Have Flat, Flat Heads,” and Amara’s latest “Maple Mishaps” column where Sweetie tries to get brunch with her pals and accidentally discovers the football coaches frying up the donor checks meant to go to student-run organizations and eating them for breakfast.
“I am,” says Seb. “I have a piece that’s—I mean, I have some drafts, if you want to read them.”
His dad nods, still scrutinizing the zine, but doesn’t actually say anything. Seb shifts uneasily. I open my mouth to vouch for him, but Seb shakes his head just once next to me and I close it.
“You hear from Blue Ridge in a few weeks, right?” his dad asks.
Hadley busts into the kitchen then, and immediately beelines for Seb, throwing her arms around him hard enough to visibly knock the air out of his lungs. “I got the part!” she crows.
“Oh, hell yes,” says Seb. “You did that monologue we practiced? With the big scream at the end and everything?”
“She sure did,” says Marley wryly, hiking herself up to sit on the edge of the kitchen counter with a mini cheeseburger pizza. “I have two broken eardrums from all the practicing she did to prove it.”
Hadley pulls away from Seb to level Marley with a scowl. “Says the loudest woman in the state.”
“It’s my birthday month. I’m allowed to be any volume I want.”
I extend my arms out to Hadley. “Hello, hi. It’s just me, the actual sister you haven’t seen in weeks.”
“Hi,” says Hadley, leaning in to hug me next. It’s not the same wild welcome Seb got, but she squeezes tight and doesn’t let go for a few long seconds. I realize that her head is higher up on my shoulder and genuinely get a little emotional when I exclaim, “Did you get taller ?”
“Turns out the pipsqueak wasn’t done growing,” says Marley.
Hadley beams. “If it keeps up I might end up taller than both of you.”
“Only physically,” says Marley. “Emotionally? Never.”
“Congrats on landing the part,” I say into Hadley’s hair. “Can’t wait to see you onstage.”
She dashes off then, not before shoving Seb out of the kitchen to show him the cast list and ask which kids he knows. The adults already wandered off to the living room because Meowtwo had something in his mouth, so it’s just me and Marley left behind.
“You seem… different,” says Marley. “Not just the haircut. Did you get taller, too?”
She searches my face in a way I’m not used to her doing. I love Marley, but we’ve never exactly been close. She was a wild child from the start, and a busy one, at that. Sometimes growing up with Marley was more like having a chaotic roommate who occasionally dispensed questionable advice than an older sister.
Marley slides off the counter and steps over to me, putting a hand on her hip. “You’re dating Seb, aren’t you?”
Luckily I already finished off my most recent bite of cheesy mug pancake or I’d have choked on it. “Excuse me?”
She just nods smugly to herself, as if either it’s true or she has willed it into being by deciding it is. “Huh. So are you gonna tell Mom and Dad or what?”
“We’re not dating,” I blurt. And then, because I can’t help myself, “Why would you think we’re dating?”
“Because I’ve seen the way Seb looks at you for years. And for the first time you’re looking at him the same way.”
The heat rises up in my cheeks faster and wider than it ever has before.
Marley nods to herself, taking another bite of pizza. “Yeah. That face,” she says. “The parents are all going to be thrilled. You know they low-key always wondered if you two hated each other?”
Apparently we’re just dropping truth bombs left and right. “Oh,” I say in a choked voice. “Well. We don’t. And we’re not. Dating, I mean.”
Marley gets right up in my face then, lips twisting like a detective’s. “Yet,” she decides. “Don’t wait too long. Life is short. And also—it’s Seb. Someone’s gonna try and snap him up if you don’t.”
I laugh nervously. Not because I’m actually worried about that. Yes, Seb could walk out on the front porch and be dating a stranger in the next five minutes, but I know better than to think he wants to. I know better about a lot of things regarding Seb now.
But Marley does have a point. Life is short. Too short for me to be hiding who I am from my parents all these years, and too short for me to waste more time denying my feelings for Seb. I decide right then that I’m going to tell him this weekend—here on our home turf, the place where we grew up beside each other and then grew apart. We’ll bring it all full circle, then, and go back to school not as the new version of ourselves but the same ones with a new start.
I wait for the thought of telling him to scare me, but it doesn’t. The thought that comes after does. Maybe we aren’t wasting time. But with Newsbag ’s and Blue Ridge’s decisions on the horizon, we sure may be borrowing it.