Page 29 of Most Likely to Match (The Matchbooks #2)

DEAN

T he shift is subtle. Measured best by the lack of space between us when we walk down the street, the casual way she drops my name when she talks to her dad on the phone.

It’s there the first time she invites me over to her apartment to sleep over and we’re too tired for anything but sleep, but I still wake up with her hand on my stomach.

It’s subtle, until it isn’t. The morning we’re supposed to speak to Lauren’s class as alumni of Don Head, Chloe sends a series of messages about her ETA to pick me up, asking whether I want coffee, a breakfast sandwich, what I’m wearing— not in the fun way but in the what should I wear?

way. They aren’t much different from what her usual morning texts are like, except the tone and pace of them are frantic.

As we walk into the school, going through the front doors near the main office rather than the doors by the student lot, on the other side of the school, Chloe no longer brushes her hips and hands against mine.

She’s silent. Not like she has nothing to say, but like she simply cannot say them.

Normally I’d be equipped to deal with this. I’d stop her from picking at her nails, ask if we could watch the lava lamp app together— something she was embarrassed to use in front of me the first time— but I don’t have it in me this time.

There’s a shift in me, too. Because she reaches for me as we wait in the office, but I don’t reach back.

It’s different here, during the day instead of at a night market, in the building instead of out on the field, knowing we’ll see Lauren, talk to her, and that I will have to pretend everything is fine.

That’s the thing. It could be fine, I just can’t process it right now.

My body doesn’t know the difference between time and space; that primordial part of my brain is screaming again, trying to protect me like it always has.

So when Lauren comes to collect us, hugging Chloe like they’re old friends, I read into it. When she smiles coyly over her shoulder at me, my skin crawls. Lauren talks to us knowingly about pregnancy, though she hasn’t asked if either of us are parents, so I’m unsure what she thinks we’d know.

For her faults, Lauren seems like a good teacher. Engaged and excited, though her energy seems wasted on the lethargy and ennui of teenagers. She’s better suited to an elementary or even primary classroom.

As always, Chloe somehow pulls it together and puts on a clutch performance in front of a bunch of seemingly uninterested sixteen-year-olds.

By the time she’s finished, explaining how she got into coding (it was fun) and started a business (it kind of happened by accident), at least half the class has leaned forward in their seats, and three students ask questions.

But when it’s my turn, I know I get the words out. Distantly, I can hear myself, but there’s one too many similarities for the panic in my body and brain to handle. It’s not any one thing. I’ve stood in front of a classroom of students before; in front of Chloe; I’ve been under pressure.

It’s the combination of this place and these women and the riot in my heart when I look at her, of feelings I thought I had under control.

It’s wondering what she and Lauren are whispering about while at the same time knowing how upset she’d be if she knew that still, after everything, this sliver of distrust sits between us, a nuisance rather than a pain, but present, nonetheless.

Chloe frowns at me when I’m finished. “Are you okay?” she asks. I’m worried I’m sweating through my shirt. “Why don’t you walk around a bit?” She rests her hand on my forearm, and I try not to snatch it away. “I’ll meet you down in the foyer in five minutes.”

I take the stairs at the end of the hall down to the first floor of the school, from the English department to science.

A few classrooms are in use, students packing up bags and teachers calling out instructions in tones that demonstrate they know no one is listening.

It’s almost comforting to see how many things have stayed the same.

Summer school sucks, no matter what generation you’re from.

I trail my fingers along empty lockers as I take the main hallway slowly toward the foyer.

Students begin to pour out of classrooms, though not at the same volume or intensity as I’d expect during the regular school year.

When I was a student, especially an underclassman, we all seemed so adult .

A twelfth grader seemed like a man . Now I’m not sure I can tell the difference between a freshman and a senior.

“Dean? Dean Westlake, is that you?” Standing at the end of the hallway, a tall white woman with white hair peers at me through thick red-framed glasses.

“Mrs. Rivkin?”

My high school art and photography teacher somehow looks fifteen years older while also not having changed a bit. She wears familiar faded Converse sneakers and paint-stained jeans and a Doors t-shirt. She smiles big. “It’s so good to see you.”

“Am I allowed to hug you?” I ask.

She opens her arms. I spent so much time in her art room, in the darkroom.

It was the place I could go to escape, to be quiet, to think— usually about Chloe.

My formative…if not years, then time, was spent in her classroom.

So even though we’ve never hugged before, it feels like we’ve always been huggers.

“I’m surprised I haven’t seen any of your photographs in National Geographic yet,” she teases.

Once upon a time, I wanted to be a wildlife photographer. Until I realized that would mean spending a shit ton of time out in the bush. “I’m a therapist now. But I dabble in headshot photography once in a while.”

She tsks. “Headshots? You’ve got more than that in you.”

My cheeks heat, and hopefully all she reads into it is modesty, and not the memory of the photos on my camera from my most recent morning with Chlo.

“Dean’s photography is beautiful,” Chloe says, popping up beside me like a hot whack-a-mole.

Mrs. Rivkin eyes Chloe with the full use of her glasses.

“You probably don’t remember me,” Chloe says, her hand bumping mine as she shifts closer.

“I had grade nine art with you, but I’m not what you’d call artistically talented. ”

“Oh, I remember you.” Mrs. Rivkin reached out to my family that summer after it all happened. She asked if I would help her take down her class for the year. I spent most of that time talking rather than helping, but I think that was the point. So yeah, Mrs. Rivkin remembers Chloe.

Her gaze lands on Chloe’s hand, her arm resting comfortably along mine.

Her eyebrow slowly arches. I take a step away, the cool air between us made cooler by Mrs. Rivkin’s cold stare.

I’m embarrassed, despite my age and full acceptance of my choices, at being caught in this casual touch with my former secret friends with benefits who fed me to the high school equivalent of rabid wolves.

The embarrassment is compounded only by the shame that follows when Chloe turns to me, her concern and confusion about my sudden distance a heavy weight against the side of my face.

“I guess the darkroom isn’t around anymore,” I say, attempting a joke to break the weird tension that has settled over all of us.

Mrs. Rivkin’s eyes soften as she shakes her head.

“It’s still here. I don’t teach film anymore, but we use it for photography club.

” She points down one of the halls we affectionately dubbed the “tradies department” as students, where shop class and the now defunct home ec and— oddly— the photography class were.

“Go check it out. I have to run to a staff meeting but…” She opens her arms again, and I hug her with just as much gratitude as last time; the only way I ca n really express my gratitude for her.

“It was good to see you, Dean.” For Chloe, she barely manages to show her teeth in a smile.

We walk in silence to my old class. I never noticed it when I was a student, but the whole building smells like perfume and body spray.

It’s better than BO, but it’s especially strong down this hall, as if we’re passing through a recently sprayed cloud of it.

The photography classroom is a clear-aired reprieve.

Instead of desks, the class is set up with workstations covered in sleeping laptops and computer monitors.

Print trimmers line one wall, high-end laser printers another.

The room is haloed by shelves of cameras, lenses, tripods, soft boxes, and umbrellas.

Some in locked glass cupboards, others piled indelicately into bins.

“Can you show me the darkroom?” Chloe asks. “I’ve never been in one.”

The darkroom door is an unlabeled gray door that could pass for a supply closet if it wasn’t for the bare bulb red light installed at eye-level next to it that lights up when the room is in use.

As the light is out now, I open the door.

Automatically, I reach for the safelight switch.

It’s still in the same place it always was, bathing the room in an eerie red glow.

Chloe wanders around the room, her arms tucked over her chest like she’s afraid to touch anything.

“Nothing’s being processed right now,” I say, giving her permission.

“Show me how it works?”

I mimic all the important steps. How we have to check for the developer, stop, and fix chemicals; use the enlarger to choose the negative we want to print; the importance of a test strip; the benefits of different exposure times.

I haven’t had the opportunity to use a darkroom much since I graduated from high school, but it’s like riding a bike, or a skateboard, as it were.

“My favorite part was the drying,” I say, tapping at the mesh screens. “It was cool to watch the image appear as it was washed, but I always found something new in it once it was dry. Like watching it grow up. ”