Page 36 of 16 Forever

OHMIGOD HE SAID IT BACK TO ME.

I’d been waiting weeks for Carter to say those words. For all the clichéd reasons people want to hear them, yes, but also for another one:

I thought Carter might have just unstuck himself.

And I was so relieved and overjoyed that I lost myself a bit.

“This is amazing,” I said, my eyes still glassy, my hand on the back of his neck.

“Is it?” Carter turned us onto his block. “I probably won’t even know who you are tomorrow.”

“You might, though. I think you really might.”

“I love the optimism, Mags, but there’s no reason to think this time I will—”

“You saidI love you, Carter! And you meant it.” The words spilled out of my mouth like loose change off a dresser.

“Wait,” he said, pulling the car over to the curb in front of his house. “So what? What does that have to do with me making it to seventeen tomorrow?”

My mind couldn’t scramble fast enough to come up with a legitimate-sounding excuse. “Well,” I said, “I have this theory. But it’s not—”

“You have atheory?” Carter seemed very annoyed. “You mean about how to fix me? And you didn’t think I might want to know?”

“No, I couldn’t tell you because... Because then maybe it wouldn’t work right. Like, you saying those words would have tohappen on its own! Not because I told you about it. You know?”

“Not really!” Carter ran his hands through his hair. “What in the actual fuck, Maggie? You think if I saidI love youit would break the spell or something? Like my life is a Disney movie? Why would you even think that?”

I couldn’t tell him why I thought that. Or I could, but I didn’t want to. “It’s... I don’t know. I learned some stuff from Lincoln.”

“You were talking toLincolnabout this?”

“Only a little!”

“Jesus, Maggie.”

“The night before you first looped, you dumped some girl, okay? Apparently she said ‘I love you’ and you—you didn’t say it back. Your response was, ‘Oh wow. That’s really awkward because I actually want to break up.’”

Carter pressed his index fingers against his closed eyelids and groaned. “And you think that caused all this?”

“I don’t know,” I said, suddenly questioning everything. “Maybe that’s insane.”

“So you’ve just been waiting for me to... Did you even mean those words when you said them? Or was this just all part of the plan?”

“Of course I did!” I shouted. He needed to know how much I cared. “I love you, Carter. I really love you. I just felt scared to say it. And I didn’t want...”

“Me to say it just because you did? ’Cause then the magical spell wouldn’t break?”

I grimaced and shrugged.

“Who was I dating?” Carter asked.

“What?”

“Who was the girl I broke up with?”

I was prepared for this question, on the off chance I messed up—LIKE I JUST DID—and it needed to be answered. “Layla Banerjee.”

“Layla Banerjee?I’ve known her since kindergarten. We were dating?”