Page 29 of Fade into You

“Don’t be sorry, Bird. You know I’m not mad at you, right?”

I close my eyes and exhale. I’m back in Silas’s dorm room, a fan blowing over us in the dark. I roll over and press my face into his pillow to hide the fact that I’m crying. Kat’s voice in my head, echoing from that afternoon when I told her I just wanted to be friends,Can’t you just admit you have feelings for me, too?But my sniffles give me away and Silas keeps asking me what’s wrong until I tell him.

“I kissed Kat—or she—she kissed me. We—we kissed.”

He does a pretty good job of hiding how much it hurts him, especially since it’s been starting to feel like we’re headingtoward being something more official than the friends-with-benefits designation we’d loosely agreed upon. He sits up and puts on his glasses and just says, “When?”

“Few nights ago,” I mutter, even though a few nights ago was only thelasttime we kissed, not the first.

“Okay. Well, I mean, how do you feel about that? Is that… Is that what you want?”

“No,” I answer immediately, but quickly add, “I mean, m-maybe? I don’t know.”

He waits a beat before saying, “It’s okay. If you don’t feel the same way I—”

“I do have feelings for you, though, Silas. I really do—I’m just confused because I think I have feelings for Kat, too, and I don’t want to hurt either of you….”

I cried harder that night than I’ve cried about anything in my life. He held me and kept saying it was okay, until I blurted out that we should end it—whatever it was we were doing.

Someone was bound to get hurt, I knew that much. But looking back, I wonder if I was mostly trying to make sure it wouldn’t be me.

“Bird?” he says now. “You know I’m not mad,” he repeats, “right?”

“You mean that, really?”

“Really.”

“Thank you,” I tell him, and I mean it too. I can feel this wellspring of tears flooding to my eyes, but I refuse to let myself cry on the phone to him. “Silas, I should go.”

“Oh. Um, okay.” I can hear the deflation in his voice. “Wait, Bird—”

“I’m still here.”

“What did you read?”

“Huh?”

“For the open mic. What poem did you read?”

“It’s a new one.”

“Can I read it sometime?”

“Maybe. I mean, I think so. Yeah, you can.”

“Send it to me? It doesn’t have to be a letter. You could email it.”

“Okay, I will. Bye, Silas.”

“Bye, Bird.”

JESSA

I’ve scrounged every loose magazineI can find around the house, and the mix of brightWiredcovers with their techy glow, vomitous pastels ofGood Housekeeping, and the occasional chunkyReader’s Digestform a discordant palette for the zine I’m supposed to be working on for journalism. On Friday, Bird was all business in journalism. It seemed like something was bothering her. I wondered if it was me, if I did something. So when she told me I had to brainstorm concepts, and that we’d both bring samples of ideas to our next class on Monday—far too organized for my usual last-minute approach to projects—I agreed. I could tell she wasn’t in the mood for our usual banter I’m finding I like, so I just decided to do what she said. And to my surprise, now I’m actually doing it.

There’s cooler pictures in my own mags, but I refuse to sacrifice my well-worn collection ofRolling Stones. There are some fold-out ads I pull that don’t have articles on them, and I see at least a few decent images there. I guess I can go to the library and make copies of some of my fave covers… but the fifteen centsa page seems a bit steep when I’ve been spending most of my allowance on going out with Dade, Kayla, and Bird in order to perform interference with the gnarly couple. So far, our presence hasn’t put a damper on their libido, so I’m hoping Bird has some magic tricks for me.

When I went to ask Dad for his old copies ofWired, he was deep in some computer’s programming, the blocky white font spelling out jumbled commands in digital language against the black screen. I’d rather learn Greek, which Dad has suggested to me before, but it’s a Papadopoulos tradition to remain clueless about our heritage—one I plan to follow.