I TRIED TO FOCUS ON my journal, instead of watching Maia. I flipped to a clean page and started a small sketch—it was scribbly and hesitant—not good at all. That wasn’t the point, though.
I wasn’t being nearly as stealthy about it as I should’ve been; she’d caught me staring at her at least a dozen times over the course of the last thirty minutes. When I looked up at her the next time, she had set her pen down and was leaning back on her hands, looking toward the open door outside. I placed my pen in the page and closed my journal.
When she looked back over at me, I asked her, “What were you drawing?”
“I wasn’t drawing,” she answered.
She studied her sketchbook for a moment, and when she finally turned it around so I could see, I felt my heart in my throat, pulsing. I had seen that quote many times before—it was my mother’s favorite. She even had it on several items in our house: a bookmark she always used, the cover of a day planner she kept at her desk, and in my parents’ bedroom it was printed on one of those wall plaques that you find in home stores, made of reclaimed wood with the words painted on or airbrushed, or something like that.
Maia licked her lips and read the words on the page out loud, her voice smooth and even: “We don’t see things as they are”—she paused, and her eyes met mine for just a moment before she continued—“we see them as we are.”
Then she bit her bottom lip as she waited for my reaction.
“Okay, that’s bizarre,” I finally managed to verbalize.
“Why?” She looked at the page again, then back at me.
“Why did you write that?”
“I just saw it, and it’s been stuck in my head, is all.” She was squinting hard at me, her eyes crinkling at the edges. “What, have you seen this before?” she asked.
I nodded. “It’s my mother’s favorite quote. She has it everywhere.”
Maia leaned forward, inched herself closer to me, like I’d just told her something huge. She was beaming out this incredible smile at me. This was the most excited I’d seen her since we were in the car and she was telling me about her dreams of traveling the world as a photographer.
“What do you think it means?” She was looking so deeply into my eyes, I could barely think straight.
“I—I guess it means . . . ,” I began, only to realize that maybe I didn’t actually know what it meant. “I’m not really sure.”
“Yeah, me neither.” She turned the sketchbook back around so that it was facing her again. “That’s what I’ve been trying to figure out.”
“Have you checked the interwebs?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said, but she was shaking her head. “Hey, maybe you could ask your mom what she thinks?”
I laughed.
“Or not,” she added.
“No, maybe I could,” I said. “After she starts talking to me again.”
“Sorry. I shouldn’t have—”
“No, please. It’s totally fine, really.”
She smiled in this pinched, apologetic way. After waiting a beat, she seemed to have decided to change the subject. “So, what were you writing?” she asked, looking at my journal, which was still sitting closed in my lap.
“Actually, I wasn’t,” I admitted. “I was drawing.”
Her eyes widened, and she sounded surprised when she said, “You draw?”
“No. Not well, anyway!”
She laughed, then inched herself forward just a little more, leaning like she was trying to see over the top of the notebook. Something inside me said I shouldn’t show her. If I didn’t show her, that old logic told me, then I wouldn’t have to feel all the things she made me feel—terrified and hopeful, all at the same time, for wanting something I had been telling myself I couldn’t have.
But another part of me, the newer part that somehow had manifested itself in this middle-of-nowhere town over the past month, that part knew it was too late. In spite of my best efforts, I had fallen for Maia. Hard. It was not just a crush, not a simple chemical reaction my brain was manufacturing. This was the real thing.
“Can I see?” she finally asked.
I opened my journal and removed the pen from the binding. I examined the scribbly drawing for another moment. Before I could change my mind again, I turned it for her to see. She reached out and ran her fingers over the indented hatch marks my pen had made, but the way it sent tingles through me, she may as well have been running her fingers over my skin. I watched her face carefully as she leaned into the space between us.
We were so close, I could hear the breath she took before she asked, “Is that me?”
The picture was of her. But it was of me, too. It was me seeing her. I wasn’t sure how to say that, though, so I just nodded. It was everything. It was too much. I knew what would happen if our eyes met again.
I couldn’t. I was a coward. I had to look away.