In the morning, there’s an email from Stanford admissions.
I’m still bleary-eyed from lack of sleep—we stayed up talking until nearly four—and I squint at my phone, letting my thumb hover over the message. But I don’t click on it. Instead I roll out of bed and stumble out into the hallway, but it’s not until I’m standing outside Leo’s room that I realize this might not be the best idea.
If it’s good news, it might just make him feel worse about everything. Though if it’s bad news, we’ll both have an excuse to lie on the couch all day and eat ice cream in our pajamas.
Last night, after we’d come inside and made popcorn, which Teddy burned, then made a second batch, which Leo knocked over, then finally a third, which we managed to carry into the living room without incident, Leo broke the news.
“It’s over,” he said, but I’d known it even before then, since the moment he’d emerged from the darkness like some sort of melancholy ghost. Now, though, it was suddenly a fact, and the way he said it—the words set down like they were something heavy, like a suitcase he’d been carrying for far too long—broke my heart.
Teddy, who had clearly been too distracted to guess at this, immediately froze, his hand still shoved into the metal bowl of popcorn. Slowly, carefully, he extracted it, then shifted to face Leo.
“You and Max?” he asked in astonishment.
Leo nodded.
“But…why?”
“I don’t…,” he began, then paused, his eyes swimming. “I don’t think I want to talk about it right now.”
Teddy and I exchanged a look.
“That’s fine,” I said quickly. “Maybe tomorrow.”
And so we let it go. For the next few hours, we watched movies and ate popcorn and made Teddy tell us all about his big television debut and the hundreds of messages he’d gotten since it aired, including three marriage proposals. “I only considered one of them,” he joked, ducking as I threw a pillow at him. I told him about how Uncle Jake and I had started the boat, and he swore we’d finish it together now that he was back, and Leo promised to buy us floaties in case things went terribly wrong.
We didn’t talk about Max. Or Teddy’s dad. Or even Sawyer.
For a few hours we just ignored all the rest of it.
But now it’s morning; now it’s tomorrow. Teddy is probably still asleep downstairs, and Leo is just a knock away, and what was so easy to avoid last night no longer seems to make sense in the light of day.
I glance down at the phone in my hand once more, then I knock. On the other side of the door, there’s a grunt. “Leo?”
“Go away.”
I pretend not to hear him. “Can I come in?”
“No.”
“Great,” I say as I fling open the door. The first thing I see is his green duffel bag, which is lying in the middle of the messy floor, and I feel a pang of sadness when I remember watching him carefully pack it only a few days ago.
“What?” he asks, poking his head out from under the covers, and it’s hard not to laugh at his rumpled hair and grumpy expression. I sit down on the edge of the bed.
“I wanted to see if you were up.”
“Clearly I’m not,” he says, throwing the quilt back over his head.
“Well, now you are, so let’s talk.”
He groans and rolls over onto his back, reaching for his new glasses on the bedside table. “I don’t know if I can talk about it yet.”
“You said tomorrow.”
“You said tomorrow.”
“What happened?” I ask, unable to help myself. “What did he do?”
Leo props his pillow against the wall behind him and sits up, a look of annoyance flashing across his face. “Why do you assume it was him?”
“Because you’re you,” I say, expecting to draw a smile out of him, but instead his expression darkens.
“Yeah, well, I’m not sure Max would agree anymore.”
I’m afraid to hear whatever’s coming next, but I ask anyway. “Why not?”
“Because,” Leo says in a small voice, “I’m the one who broke up with him.”
“Oh,” I say softly, the word landing heavily between us.
“It was inevitable,” he says with a shrug, almost eerily calm now, as if he’s talking about someone else entirely. “All we’ve been doing is fighting about next year. Then I go up there, and I see him with his new friends and his new band and his new life, and I realized we’ve been holding each other back.”
“But you love him.”
“I want to go to art school,” he continues, as if he hasn’t heard me. “I just do.”
“Okay,” I say. “So go to art school.”
“Whenever I thought about Michigan, I started to feel claustrophobic, like I was being pushed into it. And that’s because I sort of was. And I just didn’t want to go.”
“So you told Max that?”
He lowers his eyes. “No, I told him about how I never applied.”
“What?” I stare at him. “But I thought—”
“No,” he says flatly. “I couldn’t do it.”
“Leo…”
“I know,” he says in a tight voice. He speaks slowly, as if trying to keep the words from spilling out at once. “I filled out the application. I just never sent it. It was like, as soon as I decided not to, this huge weight came off me. But I didn’t want to lose him—”
“Because you love him.”
He ignores this. “So I was gonna wait to tell him. I wanted to have one more week together without having to think about all this, but then I got up there, and he was so excited to show me around campus, and after a while, I just couldn’t keep lying to him.”
“Because you love him.”
“And then we got into a huge fight about all of it, and I realized that everything had been building up, and it just felt like too much.” He looks down at his hands, blinking a few times. “So I ended it.”
“But you still love him.”
“It’s not that easy.” He shakes his head. “I messed everything up.”
“Yeah, but you—”
“Yes,” Leo snaps, and something seems to crack in him, his eyes filling with tears. “I love him, okay?”
“That’s not nothing,” I say softly, unable to keep from thinking of Teddy. “To love someone and have them love you back.”
“I don’t think it’s enough.” He takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes with the heel of his hand, and it strikes me how sad it is, the way a relationship can be so unexpectedly fragile. If two people who love each other as much as Leo and Max can fall apart so easily, what hope is there for anyone else?
“I was reading about the curse of the lottery on the bus ride home,” Leo says, slipping his glasses back on. “Do you think it extends to friends and family too?”
“Like a phone plan?” I joke, but when he doesn’t smile I shake my head. “I don’t think so. I don’t believe in curses.”
He gives me a funny look, and I know what he’s thinking: that with a past like mine, choosing not to believe in curses is a pretty impressive piece of magical thinking.
But it’s not that.
Bad luck exists; I’d be crazy to think otherwise. But what I believe in—what I have to believe in—is randomness. Because to imagine that my parents died as a result of curses or fate or the larger workings of the universe, to imagine it was somehow meant to happen that way—even I don’t think the world is that cruel.
“There are so many articles,” Leo continues, “about winners whose lives got completely ruined by it. Suicides, overdoses, family rifts. And a lot of them went broke too. It didn’t matter how much they won. Somehow it all ended in disaster.”
“Those are just stories,” I say, but I’m thinking about Teddy and everything that’s already happened, how I’m the one who put it all in motion, for better or worse.
Leo leans back against his pillows with a sigh. “I think I need some ice cream.”
“Are you sure you don’t want to—”
“Ice cream,” he says firmly, and I nod.
As he hops out of bed, he catches me glancing at my phone and raises his eyebrows. I give him a sheepish look. “I got an email from Stanford.”
“The email?”
“I haven’t opened it yet,” I tell him. “I couldn’t do it alone. But I wasn’t sure if you’d be in the mood.”
“Just because I broke up with my boyfriend, who hates me, and only applied to one college, which I probably won’t get into, and will most likely still be living in this room for the next four years, stuck letting Teddy pay every time we go out, and—”
“Stop,” I say, holding up a hand. “You’re going to be fine. You are.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Yes, I do. You’re an amazing person. And you have the biggest heart of anyone I know. Whatever happens next, you’ll be fine.”
“When did you get to be such an optimist?”
“I think it’s your fault.”
“I think it’s Teddy’s.”
I laugh. “It’s usually one or the other.”
“So,” he says, eyeing my phone, and I pass it to him. He glances at my inbox, then lifts his eyes to check with me once more, and when I nod he taps at the screen. For a few long seconds, his face is impossible to read, but then a smile moves from his eyes down to his mouth, and I breathe out.
“Really?”
His grin broadens. “Really.”
“Wow,” I say, feeling almost weak with relief. I blink fast as I think of my mom. I know she’d be so proud of me. I know they both would. But this is one of those times when I really, really wish they were here to tell me that themselves.
“So, California, then,” Leo says, handing back my phone.
“I guess so,” I say, and we both stand there for a moment, imagining what it will be like to be so far away from each other, half a country apart, just like it used to be, like all these years in Chicago never even happened.
“Maybe we should go downstairs and tell the others,” he says, and I have a feeling he’s not just talking about Stanford; he’s talking about his own news too.
“Can I ask you something?” I say, and he nods. “Were you ever really going to apply to Michigan?”
He hesitates, looking uncertain. “Yes,” he says, then changes his mind. “No. I don’t know. Maybe.”
I nod at this; I’d expected as much. “It’s not a crime, you know.”
“What?”
“That your head and your heart are in two different places. I mean, you were trying to psych yourself up to spend the next four years in the most un-Leo-like place in the world just so you could be with Max. That’s a lot of love.”
“You’re making me sound way more selfless than I am,” he says, pointing at the back of the door, which is covered in printouts of his digital animations. “My heart is in this stuff too. That’s the problem. That’s probably why it feels so broken.”
“It’ll get fixed again,” I say. “Eventually.”
“Is yours?” he asks, and I don’t know if he’s talking about Teddy or if he means what happened with my parents. But either way, the answer is the same.
“Not yet,” I tell him.