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“Yes,” she said. “Okay.” She was starting to feel not so upset now. Not so terrified. This was a pretty reasonable solution. This could cover a lot of her problems. But when she imagined going out with Gideon, she imagined dancing with him, maybe. Having his hands on her. She coughed. “You don’t happen to know anything about rope climbing, do you?”

“What?”

“Never mind. That’s silly.”

“I do...”

“I don’t want to climb a rope. But it is something else that I quit. Something else I didn’t finish.”

“Well, it’s stupid to expect a bunch of students with no physical training to just go climb a rope. There, you have my two cents on that.”

“Thank you,” she said. “It is stupid. I was never going to be good at that.”

“You’ve gotta stop thinking that way. It’s not about good at it or bad at it. Did you get what you wanted out of it?”

“What?”

“In the real world, there are no points for a good attitude. It didn’t matter if I did some grim march out in the desert with a smile on my face, Rory. But I got out of it what I needed. Who gives a shit if you like climbing the rope? Who cares if you did it? Didyouwant to?”

“No. But we weresupposedto.”

“Sure. But what was the consequence for not doing it?”

“I failed PE.”

“And does that have a direct impact on where you are now?” he asked.

She thought about it. She could see where he was going with this. A bad PE grade had nothing to do with where she could or couldn’t get in her life.

But that wasn’t the point.

“It does. Because what I learned was that if it was too hard I didn’t have to try. I could quit. And unfortunately, that was a lesson I internalized. It was bad. On a lot of levels. I became a quitter. And that’s the problem. I let all of that stuff make me a quitter. You’re right. It’s about learning to be about that end goal.”

“Just, trust me on this, Rory, you don’t want it to be a parade. I feel like what you’re headed for is not the destination you want to be at.”

“That’s easy for you to say. People were voluntarily throwing you parades for your entire life.” She closed her eyes. “I’m sorry. It isn’t fair of me to say that anything is easy for you.”

“No. You’re right. For a very long time, I had it easy. I was a golden boy. I was everything that everyone could have asked me to be. And I loved it. I got whatever I wanted as a result of it. You are right about that.”

“Maybe I have to have the parade part before I can have the other parts. Before I can have the lesson. I don’t know. Maybe I need this.”

He sighed. “Okay. Rory, I’ll help you. But I’m... I’m going to need your help, too.”

The words, so stark and so very unexpected, made her breath freeze in her lungs. She wanted to help him. She wanted it more than she wanted anything on that list right now and that wasn’t supposed to be how it worked.

“Tomorrow night,” he said.

“Tomorrow?” Her heart jumped. She didn’t know what she’d been expecting, or why she’d thought it might not be so soon. She was leaving, after all. She needed to get this show on the road.

It was just she was better at planning, at dreaming, than actually doing.

“Yeah, we’ll go to Smokey’s. You can help me figure out how to be...charming.”

“Maybe you missed part of what my issue is. But some of what’s happening here is that I don’t know how to be charming.”

“You recognize when I’mnotbeing charming.”

“That is true. So what do I do, likeevaluateyou when you talk to women?”