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Seriously, it felt like the air had been punched out of me. I was on the verge of suffocating.(Again with the dramatics.)
I forced a breath into my lungs and huffed it back out, plopping down backward into the desk in front of him. His lips tilted slightly—an almost smirk, or smile, I didn’t know. Whatever.
“I made a bet with Sydney; you know Sydney, right?” I came right on out with it like I said I would. It was now or never, because secrets only came around to bite you in the ass in the end, and I didn’t need anything else working against me. You know, on top of the list of a thousand other reasons for why Neil and I were a stupid idea.
He nodded in response, his features shifting from amused to curious, and it was weird how time slowed down just enough for me to watch it happen.
“So, anyway,” I continued with a sigh. “I made a bet with her on the first day of school that I could get you to kiss me—stupid, right? But I felt like I should tell you that and clear the air. My air, anyway.”
A smile. That was definitely a smile on his lips now. It reached his eyes. “Good to know,” he said, and that was it.
Good to know.Good to know.“Good to know?” I repeated for the third time, only this time out loud. This secret had been plaguing me like the goddamn… well, plague, and all he had to say wasgood to know?
And that smile?
Clearly, Ididn’tknow Neil anymore. Not at all.
A-N-D?Sydney spelled out in American Sign Language. We’d only gotten through the alphabet andHello, my name is…in our first period ASL class, but once we knew more, we planned on carrying on secret conversations wherever we went. You know, add another layer to our unbreakably awesome friendship.
G-O-O-D-T-O-K-N-O-W,I signed back at the pace of a sloth, and she broke out in laughter. Her head tilted back with a loud cackle. Our group of friends looked over at us, but I just rolled my eyes, and they shrugged and went about their business.
“Oh my god,” she said as she caught her breath. “Fucking priceless. I like him.”
I gave her a piercing stare.
“For you, psycho,” she added. “I like him for you.” And I shook off my proprietary feelings. “So, now what?” she asked.
“I have no clue,” I answered.
She smirked. “We’ll think of something.”
I walked into fourth period, ignoring the sear of Neil’s eyes cauterizing into my skin as I sat down.
I’d divulged my secret to him just one short period ago—in his class, not mine. And not one we shared, by the way. How I knew where his first, second, and third periods were was no one’s business but mine. It just made the apparent need to get it off my chest as soon as possible that much more annoying. But whatever; now he knew.
Sure, I’d thrown the ball in his court, but at some point, I was going to steal it back. Just as soon as I could figure out how.
Our teacher started rambling on about something, but my mind wandered its way back to lunch. To Sydney and me, spelling out every curse word we could think of in sign language. By the end of lunch, we’d been getting pretty damn creative, finding at least one inspired word for every letter of the alphabet.
I snorted—out loud, in class—and our teacher paused to give me a pointed look before continuing on with his lesson. Something about the limit of function y, but I wasn’t listening. I was still biting back my smile, smothering the urge to keep laughing.Freaking Sydney.
The rest of the day dragged on. Neil’s eyes trailed me the entire way through, but I made it a point to ignore them. I was stealing my power back one way or another, figured I’d start there.
But now, sitting in my car in the mostly empty high school parking lot, I was in the middle of a self-imposed conundrum. Weighing my options on my metaphorical balancing scale: To go home, or not to go home. To do my homework at Inkcafé—like I almost always did—or to not do my homework at Inkcafé.
My mother was out of town again for work. “Work.”And going back to an empty house just didn’t feel like the kind of thing I was in the mood for today. But Neil would probably be at Inkcafé—also working.
Butalso, I wasn’t going to let him, and this bizarre attraction and his confusing allure and his excitingly contradictory behavior, bulldoze me out of my favorite place.
Nope. No way. Screw that notion right up it’s pretty little—you know what, never mind.
I tossed my backpack onto the chair next to me and pulled my things out of it one by one: notebook, math book, pencil, calculator. Hot Cheetos. And got to work.
No Neil. Not yet, anyway.
Good.
I took a long and full breath. I refused to acknowledge that it was the first I’d taken all day, free and unshackled by the weight of Neil’s awareness.