30. Feelings. Yeah No.
FEELINGS. YEAH NO.
BEFORE
Sophomore year starts perfectly.
My roommate takes a semester off because of a can’t-be-missed internship opportunity, meaning I start off by myself in what should have been a double.
Thanks to the summer of coursework credits I’d transferred and petitioning to get out of a lower-level algorithms class I could likely help teach, I’m finally out of remedial hell.
Patel helps me draft our first paper, and my father’s so pleased by the preprint he increases our monthly allowance.
Though Arjun and Xinzhe recruit a first-year PhD student from Russia, they’re no match against the synergy Brody, Lucas, and I have built after a summer of practice.
Arjun still complains, but even Professor Miller seems to have stopped listening.
We finish the regional problem set with an hour to spare.
The next-best team struggles to solve ten of the twelve problems.
At nationals, which even Professor Miller deigns to attend, we’re allocated three hotel rooms: the coach, the boys, and the girl.
Brody smirks, because he knows his upgraded suite (parents and hotel points) will be a single because Lucas will opt to join me.
After months of practically living in my dorm room, Lucas and I are used to each other’s rhythms. He knows I won’t kiss him unless he’s brushed his teeth (because early-morning kisses pre-toothpaste are a disgusting, romance-book-only fiction), and I know he sometimes hiccups so violently (somehow during his REM cycle) that he wakes up, startled and disoriented, unless I catch it all early enough, by rubbing him up and down his spine.
Perhaps more importantly, when I have a cluster headache or when he’s feeling particularly overwhelmed, we’ve learned to default to sex.
Orgasms, nature’s cure for anxiety.
Even though there are only seven appropriately aged girls in the entirety of the nationals competition, Brody, with his magical-bro-dude energy, manages to get himself entangled in a situationship.
The end result is that all three of us enter the competition on postorgasmic highs, full bars of sleep, and at the top of our game.
It’s nationals, but it’s not even close.
Not. Even. Close.
Harvard Hermès, who’s in his last year of competitive eligibility, comes over to do the obligatory congratulations, but he can’t quite force the appropriate words out.
“Well,” he starts, before clamping his mouth shut, his thin lips puckered as if he’s sucked on a basket of lemons.
It’s a new scarf this year, but he hasn’t otherwise changed or aged as far as I can tell.
They came in fourth this year—good enough to attend worlds but little else.
On their way over, I heard him berating one of his teammates for misnaming a variable, as if that was the detail that made the difference.
“It did go well, didn’t it?” Brody slings his arm over my shoulder, his big goofy grin daring Harvard to say something.
I can’t help but grin up at Brody, his effervescence contagious in this particular moment.
Lucas was, of course, the powerhouse. I worked through the ones in my wheelhouse, catching everyone else’s bugs, and though Brody solved the fewest problems, he intuited one of the tricks of the hardest and caught a fencepost error in something Lucas had been trying to speedrun.
Harvard Hermès swallows, looking constipated, clearly wanting to end on some higher note given the number of people taking photos. “Your solve for Problem G was . . . elegant.”
“All Lorelai,” Lucas brags.
“And did you see how quickly my boy Lucas solved B?”
Harvard swallows, his skin looking almost mottled in his rage. “Very quickly.” He nods again, because there’s an audience and he’s got to extricate himself somehow. “Well,” he repeats, before giving up and shaking his head.
“That right there, payback that’s been a fucking year in the making? That might be my favorite part of nationals,” Brody announces, loudly enough for several people, Harvard included, to hear.
“You’re my favorite part of nationals,” Lucas tells me, his voice low, leaning close. “You were brilliant. And I can’t tell you how much I love you—”
I pull away a moment before our lips would have made contact, cognizant that even though the photos will mostly be distributed in local papers and college newsletters, there’s also a student from Georgia Tech’s School of Literature, Media, and Communication interviewing people for his YouTube channel.
Who knows which photograph or sound clip makes it back to my father.
I look down and away. “You’re not allowed to say that here.”
Brody sticks his head uncomfortably close to us. “What are we not allowed to say? I missed it.”
Lucas lowers his voice so only Brody hears. “Lorelai’s got a hang-up about me saying I love you.”
“Ah,” Brody says, leaning back. “Feelings. Yeah no. I’m going to leave you guys to that.”
He walks away, finding another team to chat with as Lucas looks down at me with eyes almost shimmering with happiness. “Does your dad know I’m more than your teammate?”
I shake my head, not wanting to lie. My father’s sending money regularly, but like a gas, our monetary needs expand ceaselessly.
Aurora needed braces. My mother had problems with her gallbladder, a surgery that wasn’t completely covered by insurance (meaning paying out of pocket while petitioning).
The rent increased by the state cap maximum.
“He doesn’t approve of the idea of me dating.”
“And we care about his opinions.”
I bite the inside of my cheek because Lucas has been tossing around the we more frequently these days, impatient at the things we’re not ready for which he knows are really all . . . my hang-ups.
“Sooner or later, we have to tell him.”
“Later,” I plead, hoping Lucas will stay patient with me just a little while longer. “I don’t mean to—” I bite the inside of my cheek even harder, at a loss for words, wanting to just hang on to the joy of nationals a little longer, to not deal with feelings and talks at this particular moment.
Lucas grabs my hand and gives it a squeeze. “I know. I’m sorry.”
He smiles at me, and I think, for a moment, that it will be okay.