Chapter 16
Blue
I can’t sleep.
I’ve been in my bed for an hour and twenty minutes, and I have not closed my eyes for more than two minutes before my brain pulls them back open and goes back to the kitchen.
Fuck it.
I pick up my phone. The screen is too bright, so I squint and drop the brightness with my thumb. The thread at the top is hers.
I sent her two messages from the kitchen.
Me: Same number?
Melly: Yes.
Me: Cool.
What am I? Ten-years-old? The best I gave her was cool? This is what happens to me around her. I lose words in the presence of Melly Sorcha. I wonder if she’s staring at our small exchange wondering what’s wrong with me. Hell, I’m wondering what’s wrong with me.
I sit up and turn on the small lamp on the nightstand. I look at my knuckles. The third one is going to give me real trouble tomorrow. I can already feel it stiffening in the joint, the slow purple climb of a bruise that is going to take a full week to come down.
I type.
Me: Can’t sleep.
I stare at the message after I send it. Then I type the second one before I can talk myself out of it.
Me: You up?
I stare at the small Delivered under the message and my stomach does the slow heavy turn it has been doing all night, and I almost take it back.
I almost actually pick up the phone and unsend the message and put it under my pillow and call this whole thing off.
I have not sent a girl a you up text in my entire life.
I have received them. I have never sent one.
The not-sending of them was one of the small private things I was quietly proud of about myself.
Then dots appear, and my stomach sinks. She’s up.
Melly: Yeah.
Melly: I can’t sleep either.
I grin because I’m not the only one awake. The knowledge does something to the inside of my chest. It’s the second time tonight she has done something to the inside of my chest, and the night’s not over.
I stare at the screen.
I cannot take too long to write back because if I take too long, she is going to know I am churning.
And I am churning, and the time is going to give me away.
I start to type. I erase. I start to type.
I erase. Another minute passes and the Delivered under her message is staring at me like a coach with his arms folded waiting for me to make a decision, and I think — fuck it, fuck it, what is the worst thing she can say, the worst thing she can say is no, I have said no to her a hundred times and she survived it, I will survive it, I think, no, I probably won’t, but fuck it.
Me: Can I come over?
I send it before I can think about it.
I want to punch myself.
I drop the phone on my chest and look at the ceiling and I think — Blue, you fucking idiot, you absolute fucking idiot.
It’s past midnight. She has a roommate. She has a whole life she has built here, and the life does not include me showing up near midnight at her apartment door because I cannot sleep.
The life has very specifically not included that.
The life has been a careful well-constructed thing made of distance, and I just took a sledgehammer to it because I want to talk to her again.
I squeeze my eyes shut.
I have never asked a girl to hang out before, and this is agony. This is genuine bodily agony. This is worse than my chin throbbing. No wonder I have spent my entire life avoiding it.
I pick the phone back up.
She has answered.
Melly: Yeah.
I fucking panic.
Blue: Now?
The dots come back instantly.
Melly: I thought that’s what you meant.
I am out of bed before I finish reading the sentence.
Me: Address?
She sends it. I throw on the only hoodie I own, and a pair of sweats.
I look around my room like a man who has misplaced his entire life, and then I remember — mouthwash.
Mouthwash, Golding. Genius. I make it to the bathroom in three long strides.
I rinse, I spit, and I look at my own face in the mirror for one full second, hat backward, bruise rising on the underside of the jaw.
This is the face she is going to open the door to, and then I think, she has already seen worse, get in the car, Goldie, get in the goddamn car and go, do not change your mind — and I am down the stairs.
I walk down the stairs to an empty house. It’s fucking sad in here without the livelihood of the Hawthorne House boys. When I reach the front door, I hesitate for a second. Is this the dumbest thing I’ve ever done?
Probably.
I pull out my phone and text her.
Me: Heading over now.
Linden Street is six blocks from Hawthorne.
I’ve never been here before. I park in front of her building and look up. I get out and walk to the front door, where she’s already waiting for me.
“Hey,” she says, opening the door for me. “It’s cold.”
“Yeah,” I say, stepping in.
She rushes to the elevator, shivering.
I pull off my hoodie and shove it over her head right when the elevator doors open.
She looks up at me with soft blue eyes. “Thanks.”
I adjust my shirt and look at my hoodie, swallowing her whole.
We step inside the elevator, and I’m nervous as hell for the thirty-second ride. When she opens her apartment door, I walk in and can’t believe what the place looks like.
“Wow,” I say. “This is nice.” I look around. “Really nice.”
“This way,” she says, grabbing a container on the counter. We walk to her bedroom. She closes the door quietly behind me.
“Penelope’s asleep, so we have to be quiet.” She points at the wall, gesturing that it’s her bedroom in the room over.
I nod, looking around at her room. “Okay.”
She goes to her bed and pats the space next to her. She lifts up the container and says, “I baked cookies if you want.”
I walk over and sit next to her. The mattress dips. My knee is six inches from her knee. I can feel the heat of her through the air.
“Cookies?”
She pulls one out and takes a bite. “They are so good.”
I reach for one and take a bite. “Yeah.” I nod. “Thank you.”
I shove the rest of it in my mouth and lie back on her bed because if I keep sitting up, I am going to have to look at her face from six inches away, and I am not equipped for that yet.
The bed is made on this side. The sheets are warm.
The sheets smell like her, the bed smells like her, the whole room smells like her, and I love it.
I close my eyes for half a second. I want to wrap myself in this blanket. I want to take this bed home with me.
We eat our cookies in silence, and I look at the ceiling.
“Are you okay?” she asks, closing the container.
I look up at her. “Yeah.”
“Why can’t you sleep?”
I shrug. “I haven’t been sleeping that much lately.”
She lies on her stomach next to me. “Is that normal?” she asks, pulling her hair behind her shoulders.
“No.”
She lets that sit. She looks down at the bedspread and picks at a thread with one fingernail, and I notice that her hands are doing a small, nervous thing.
She isn’t as composed as she pretends to be.
Her chest is moving a little fast under the hoodie.
Her fingers will not stop moving on the thread.
I look at her face. “The guys said you dropped off my hoodie and shirt the day after Halloween.”
“Yeah,” she whispers. “I didn’t know if it was your only hoodie.”
I look at her. “It is.”
She smiles. “I was right?”
“How did you know?”
She shakes her head, embarrassed. “It’s nothing.”
“What?”
“You said something in high school. Like, why have two if you only need one. I didn’t know if I was right. I just had a feeling.”
I lean up on my elbow and look at her. I let that sink in, and then I whisper softly, “You really remember everything about me?”
I give her the moment. I want to tell her — I remember everything about you too, I remember every time you wore blue, every time Mila didn’t come to school so she hung out with other friends, what her handwriting looks like, how she wears her hair, the smell of her shampoo — but I don’t mention it. I let her have the moment.
She says quietly, “I’ve been wanting to apologize for how I was in high school.”
I laugh. “You?”
She nods. “It’s so embarrassing, Blue. I knew I freaked you out, and you don’t need to apologize. You were just reacting to how I was acting.”
I shake my head. “No, Melly.” I sit up a little. “I owe you an apology. A big one.”
Her eyes stay on mine, and I cannot, for one full second, breathe. There is something in her face — a small careful waiting — that’s making my chest do the thing again. She’s bracing for it. The bracing is a painful thing to witness because I am the boy who hurt her.
“I’m sorry for how I treated you back then.”
She blinks, giving me a small smile. “And I’m sorry too.”
I nod once.
She smiles openly. “That feels good to get out of the way.”
“Yeah,” I say, following her lead. The room falls quiet. I can hear the building. The radiator clicking somewhere down the hall. A car going by on Linden Street outside. The soft far-away hum of the refrigerator from the kitchen.
I look at her.
“What else do you want to get out of the way?”
She takes a moment to think. “I did not tell Chris that we hooked up. I didn’t tell anyone.”
I blow out a long breath. “That wasn’t your fault.” I look up at the ceiling and smile a little. “You were worried about that?”
“I was worried about a lot of things.”
I look back at her. Her finger is back on the thread.
“I thought,” she says, “for a very long time that I was actually crazy.”
I don’t move.
She thought she was crazy. And I’m the reason she thought she was crazy.
I know it before she has even finished the sentence.
I know it in my whole body. I spent years telling a girl with my eyes that I loved her and then telling her with the rest of me that I didn’t want anything to do with her, and I made her think she made it up.
I made her think she invented us, that she was the crazy one. I want another fist to my face.
I keep my voice low. “Why?”