Page 118 of 16 Forever

But last week, I got curious. Like, what has she been up to? How is she?

So I looked.

Since April, she’s posted exactly one thing:

A short video from an Angry Baby concert. It went onto the grid on July 19, just a few days before I checked. It looked like they were in Shana’s backyard, playing a song I didn’t recognize.

“They don’t hide,” Maggie sang, her voice like an arrow to the torso. “They don’t hide from each other.”

After the first time I watched, I had to put down my phone and catch my breath.

Was she sending me some kind of message?

I’ve seen it a few times (or twelve) since then, and I watch again now.

I love the way her eyebrow rises when she sings.

I keep thinking she’ll post something else, a story at least, but she hasn’t.

I scroll down to January, linger on a selfie Maggie took with Shana and Ember during a rehearsal.

I hop out of bed and slide open my closet door.

I grab my camera from the shelf beneath my hanging clothes where I stashed it the night I got home from the wedding. Haven’t really been in the picture-taking mood.

But I want to see Maggie.

I sit on the edge of my bed, staring at the small screen as I scroll through.

The first shots I see are from the wedding, minutes before I snuck up on Maggie and tapped her on the back. When I first peeked into the backyard, I saw her standing with Shana and Ember, passing around a glass and laughing, lit up with joy.

She looks so beautiful. It makes my stomach hurt.

I keep scrolling through, and I find the shots I took in my bedroom earlier that week: first the selfies of the two of us, then the shots of Maggie lying on the bed, staring right at me.

She looks simultaneously goofy and ethereal and breathtaking.

And suddenly I realize I’m not angry at her anymore.

I know she cares about me. It’s so obvious in the photos.

She wasn’t trying to mess with me. She was in an impossible situation, and she fucked up.

I fuck up all the time.

I put down my camera and pick up my phone.

Hey,I type.I really miss you.

I’m about to send it when it occurs to me:

I can’t do this to Maggie again.

She’s about to leave in a few weeks for her first year at Delaware, and I’m going to try to start things up again? Why? So we canhave a really painful goodbye, followed by a few tortured months of a long-distance relationship, followed by an even more painful goodbye after which I straight up forget her?Again?

That’s insane.

I gasp as the phone starts vibrating in my hand and, for a moment, I think it’s Maggie. Like we mind-melded or something.