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“I don’t want to give it up,” I said. “I don’t want to give her up.

But I’m scared. I see what’s waiting for me down the line and I’m having a hard time imagining that being a future that works for me.

” I tossed my words around in my head for a second, thinking it over.

“I’m scared I’m going to go through all of this just to get bored.

Or that it’ll end up being more stress than it’s worth.

I can think of, like, one thousand reasons why I shouldn’t do it. ”

“What about the reasons you should do it?” “What do you mean?”

“Like how you feel when you’re with her?

How you feel heard and understood and supported?

How she’s the only other person you can spend all of that time with consecutively besides me?

” Iris asked. She sat down on the chair next to the couch and turned her body to look at me.

“At least come to the game. Don’t completely disappear out of her life like this with no explanation. ”

“I don’t know if I can handle looking at her.”

“I feel like that should tell you something,” she said.

“Most people would kill for that exact feeling of having feelings so intense they make your head spin. The magnetic pull between you guys has always been obvious. I think you’re going to spend the entire rest of your life chasing this exact feeling if you give it up now. ”

“What if the head spinning part feels like a bad thing instead of a good thing? Like it’s horrific, vomit-inducing, hangover-esque head spinning?”

“I think it’s supposed to feel kind of good and bad all at the same time. And then once you’ve found the right person and let yourself go, it starts to feel only good.”

I curled up on the couch, bringing my knees to my chin. “Can I have a little more time? ”

“I don’t know much more time you’ll have,” she said. She was quiet for a beat and then stood up. “I can wait for you if you want to come. Just say the word. I’ll even risk missing tip off for you.”

I thought about it— really thought about it.

I could just run right back into Theo’s arms, tell her I was sorry for the way I was distancing myself, make everything feel good again.

But no one ever showed what came after the big movie moment.

The fights and disappointment and annoyances that added up.

The boredom of doing the same things with the same person over and over again.

I enjoyed it with Theo but we’d only been in our routine for a few months.

After a year, and then a few years, I was sure I’d feel suffocated by it.

I knew myself. And I knew the woman who raised me.

“I can’t,” I said, practically whispering.

The air between us was heavy. Iris was too quiet, to the point that I knew I was at least a little bit in trouble even without her saying it again. “Okay,” she said. She got up and grabbed her purse. “I’ll see you after the game.”

“Okay,” I responded, matching her slightly passive tone. It was no use pestering her about it—I knew why she was upset and I wasn’t going to be able to give her the answer she wanted.

She left a minute after that, shutting the front door behind her. The apartment was silent from when I’d muted the TV and felt almost suffocatingly still. It was so quiet it was overwhelming.

I turned the TV sound back on it but that didn’t fix it. Everything still felt sideways, my body knowing that something was wrong but my brain refusing to admit the truth.

I switched the channel over to Theo’s game. The pre-game chatter was already going, switching between the panelists and clips from various Lakeside Green and Point Brook games.

“I think we’ll be seeing a lot of scoring from both teams tonight,” one of the panelists said.

The screen showed four women sitting together, none of whom I recognized but I had a feeling they were probably a pretty significant deal to women’s basketball fans.

“Both teams are heavy on shooting—it’ll come down to whose defense will come out on top. ”

“I think Lakeside Green might surprise us. Nia Adams is quick on her feet and Gemma Doherty has a lot of energy out there. She’s able to match Theo McCall’s aggressive style of playing, which is exactly what the team needs.”

“And don’t forget GJ Mitchell,” the panelist next to her said. “We all saw the way she kept Ivy Hill College in line in Michigan.”

A third panelist shook her head. “I don’t know.

I think part of the Point Brook legacy is that the players can do anything.

They have defense, shooting—as much as I want to root for an underdog, I don’t know if Lakeside Green can pull something like this off.

Theo might not be enough, especially up against someone who has demonstrated to match her skill level. ”

The women went back and forth from there on stats, discussing games, and specific plays that I didn’t understand. It seemed like the same kind of conversation I’d always heard in relation to sports—people trying to convince everyone else of who’s the greatest of all time.

A clip of Theo from a few games ago popped up and my body couldn’t tell the difference between looking at her and someone squeezing my heart in their fist. I wondered if she was nervous, if she was thinking about me.

If she’d been tempted to text me before the game or if she was starting to accept that I was successfully pushing her away.

I muted the TV again and pulled out my phone, hoping my mom might still be awake.

If there was anyone who was going to understand me and ground me, it was her.

She might’ve not done a great job of talking me out of seeing Theo initially, but I was sure she could remind me of the eight million reasons why her preference was to be single.

I needed to hear that right now before I did something stupid.

“What are you doing, calling me late on a Thursday night? You should be getting ready to go out to the bar,” Mom said. I could hear the bustling of people around her.

“Are you at the store? Sorry, I can call you later.”

“It’s okay, I’m just at Fetterman’s,” she said.

Fetterman’s was the local organic market around the corner from her house.

I’d never liked it there—a container of strawberries cost three times as much there compared to anywhere else—but Mom loved it.

She became a loyal shopper once I moved out and she was only feeding herself.

It was part of the long list of things she couldn’t wait to do once she was an empty-nester, a list that usually felt more like a I can’t wait for my daughter to move out already list.

“Oh,” I said.

“Do you need something, baby? I have you in my headphones, I can still shop.”

“Oh, I just…” I suddenly felt ridiculous for calling her, like I always did. But I knew that I needed to do this. If there was anyone who could make me feel less alone in this moment, it was her. “Do you remember that crush I was telling you about?”

“Of course. What happened?”

“Things are getting…complicated, I guess. With graduation coming up. And a lot of other things. And it sucks really bad.”

“Okay,” Mom said, as if she was waiting for more.

“How do I get over it? How can I just, like, cut and run like you do?” I asked. Tears welled in my eyes and I took a deep breath to calm myself down. I didn’t need her to know I was crying. “It just sucks so bad.”

“What part of it sucks?”

“All of it. I have to end it but I don’t know how. I don’t want to have this… feeling anymore.”

Mom was quiet for a moment. “Honey, you know that I don’t just cut and run, right?”

I stopped, sitting up straighter on the couch. “What do you mean?”

“The break-ups, the boyfriends…it’s not that I’m just leaving them and feeling nothing. Maybe sometimes, when I really don’t like them and I’m over it. But relationships aren’t usually that simple, even for me.”

The world suddenly tilted on its axis. Years of watching my mom navigate the dating world and singlehood flashed before me through a different lens.

I realized that I’d been watching her but I’d never really talked to her about it.

I’d been a child for so much of it; I didn’t know any better, didn’t know the actual truth behind what I was seeing.

All I knew was the show my mom was putting on for me.

But maybe, all this time, she’d just been a convincing actress.

“But the boyfriends,” I said, as if that was some kind of point. “You always left so easily. They’d just disappear from your life basically overnight. You would be back to normal the next day, like nothing happened. You were always so detached.”

Mom was quiet for so long that I wondered if I’d lost her.

The only reason I knew she was still on the other end was because I could still hear the soft sound of other people’s voices and music playing over the grocery store radio.

“Is that really what it seemed like?” she asked, her voice the softest I’d ever heard it.

My stomach knotted with guilt. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have brought this up while you were at the grocery store.”

“No, no, it’s okay.” She went quiet again. “I was trying my best to protect you. That was all.”

“What do you mean?”

“I tried to make everything feel as normal as possible for you. I carried a lot of guilt around getting impregnated by a man who didn’t want children.

And there were so many men who promised to be there for you but it was obvious they didn’t really want to be fathers.

And I didn’t want a man around who treated you like a burden,” she said.

“You were right that I’d cut and run, but it wasn’t because I was emotionally detached and could move onto the next thing no problem. I was just the first one to leave.”

“Oh, Mom,” I said, bringing my fingertips to my lips.

For the first time in all of my years of being alive, I understood what it meant to see my mom as a person.

She’d lived a whole life before me, did things without me.

She had thoughts and feelings, crushes and heartbreak.

It felt like the most basic and selfish—and obvious—revelation a person could have, but it was suddenly smacking me across the face.

It was also the closest I’d ever had to my mom telling me that I wasn’t a burden to her like I’d always imagined.

She wasn’t a perfect mom and her actions had always communicated to me that I wasn’t the biggest priority in her life most of the time.

But it wasn’t absurd to think that maybe she was just human and I needed to give her the benefit of the doubt, at least try a little bit to explain to her how her actions made me feel.

“I don’t think you want to follow in my footsteps. And I definitely don’t think you want me, of all people, talking you into anything,” she said. “Or I guess, talking you out of anything. Especially when it sounds like things are going well.”

“But what if they don’t go well in the future?

” I asked, my voice small. But the more I was saying it out loud and the more I was thinking about it, the dumber I felt.

I was so caught up in what was going to happen, all of the factors I couldn’t control.

There wasn’t a single thing in life that I was going to be able to predict.

And I could definitely be wrong, as demonstrated by how I’d completely misunderstood my mom’s entire dating history—and frankly, her as a person.

As much as I was convinced I knew everything and could see how things with Theo would turn out, there was always a chance I didn’t know nearly as much as I thought.

“I think you already know what you want to do,” she said. “You wouldn’t have to be talked out of something if you didn’t want to do it, at least a little bit.” I could almost hear her smile through the phone. “I haven’t forgotten our initial conversation about her.”

I thought back to practically pleading with my mom to help me get over the small crush I had on Theo. It’d bloomed into something so much bigger than that and something so much more overwhelming.

But also something really beautiful.

Mom was right that I’d already known how I felt.

It was exactly what Iris was trying to tell me—and Theo, too, in her way.

I wouldn’t be agonizing over it like this if the decision was the easy one, the unscary one.

But I wanted Theo and I wanted to make it work.

And I needed to start being okay with not being able to predict the future if that was going to be the case.

“Oh god,” I said. “I think I know what I have to do.”

“Go make things right,” Mom said .

I smiled a little bit. For the first time since I was a kid, I felt the urge to hug her. “Thanks, Mom.”

“I love you, sweetie.”

I took a deep breath. "I love you, too. I’ll see you at graduation?” I asked.

“Of course,” she said, her voice warm.

When we hung up, I looked up at the TV screen. There were only a few more minutes until tip-off. I definitely wasn’t going to make it in time for the start of the game—but I could at least try to make it before halftime.

I bit my lip, wondering if it was really worth it to do this. Maybe trying for some kind of big movie moment was a huge mistake and maybe I’d regret it and maybe I’d be mortified for the next few months for even trying.

Or maybe it would be the best thing that had ever happened to me.