I needed to tell two other people about my plan.
Nareem was first. I found him after lunch, walking to Social Studies alone. I slid up alongside him.
“Can I talk to you for a second?”
He didn’t look up. “Yes.”
“I wanted you to know something. I am giving up texting. I am giving up all that stuff. It’s horrible. It’s scary. People write things they don’t mean and would never say. I need to change—it took hurting you like this to realize that. I wanted to tell you face-to-face.”
Nareem nodded. “Good for you. You are following Jane’s advice. Connect.” Then he started walking a little faster, just to get away from me, I think. “I hope you will connect very well with your next boyfriend.”
I hurried to catch up to him. “Nareem, stop.”
He stopped.
“The last thing I would ever want to do was to make you unhappy,” I told him. “You’re seriously the best person I know.”
“It is not necessarily always a good thing, being such a good person,” Nareem said. “People don’t necessarily want good people as their boyfriends. Perhaps I should try to be a bit less good.”
“No!”
He finally looked at me. I suddenly felt embarrassed, and had to turn away.
“So, is this real?” he asked me. “You are giving up texting?”
“And everything else,” I said. “I’m giving up my whole phone for a week.”
“Well, I will be curious to see how it works out,” Nareem said. “There are many times during the day we need our phones for important things, like getting in touch with our parents.”
I’d already thought of that, before deciding not to think about that. “I’ll figure out another way,” I said.
“Well, good luck.”
We arrived at his classroom. “Oh, one other thing,” Nareem said. “I think it’s best if we don’t talk to each other for a while.”
That felt like a punch to the stomach. A punch that I deserved. “Okay,” I said.
He gave me a sad smile and walked into the room. I started to reach into my backpack to see if anyone had texted me, stopped myself, and went to class.