Jonas peeked around the end of the cereal aisle. The girl with the messy bobbed haircut and big glasses was still there. No doubt about it; it was Brennan. Finally, after all this time. It felt kind of full circle, considering their history with this very grocery store.
He watched her for a short time, kind of amazed that he was really looking at her. The blurry picture in his head righted itself; the details he hadn’t quite remembered correctly, like the shape of her nose or where exactly her hair came to now, correcting as he looked at her.
She was standing in front of the dairy section, scanning the selection of cheeses. He recalled their cheese conversation of the past summer. It felt like yesterday and last year all at once.
Jonas swallowed. Should he say hello? Say anything at all? Walk up next to her? Or simply wait until she had moved on and he could pick up the shredded cheddar that his mom had asked him to get (the shredded cheddar Brennan was currently holding in one hand while she used the other to do something with her phone). He considered just letting her be, continuing the slow buildup of texting that was killing him a little but letting Brennan, he guessed, feel more in control. Besides, texting was safe. Texting, he could easily dodge anything leg related. He ducked back around the aisle. She was wearing some of those mittens where the top part folds back to let you maneuver your fingers. Jonas had always thought those looked a little like little-kid mittens, but on Brennan they were cute.
Suddenly, his phone buzzed in his hand, a text covering the top of the note he’d written the grocery list in. He tapped the notification and was greeted with a picture of himself at the end of the grocery aisle. His face flamed. Stalker, the picture was captioned.
Jonas stepped sheepishly out of the aisle, the plastic shopping basket in his left hand clacking against his left crutch. Brennan was gripping the handle of her cart tightly in one hand and her phone in the other. Her eyes were wide behind her glasses, but she was smiling.
“Hey. Hi,” Jonas fumbled, his pulse picking up to something that was pushing the upper limits of the average 60–100 beats per minute of the human heart. He could feel the blood in his residual left leg throbbing right along with it, and he shifted his weight off it a bit.
“Hi,” she said softly.
“Hi,” he said again, stupidly.
She didn’t seem to catch his blunder. Maybe she was a little distracted. He tried to convince himself that he was only imagining that she looked a little trapped. She had moved on from gripping the cart handle to buttoning and unbuttoning the button on her left mitten. Jonas looked at the mittens now that he was closer. They had black and white panda bear faces and red cuffs.
“How has your break been?” she asked.
He thought about the surgery he was probably going to have to get and the worsening pain in his leg. “Okay,” he said.
The list grew:
1. Fine.
2. Just.
3. Nothing.
4. Okay.
“Do you want to get coffee?” he blurted. “I’ll pay.”
Brennan stared at him for a moment. He noticed the T-shirt peeking out from under her half-zipped sweatshirt. Jenny’s Diner. “Sure,” she said. “Okay, I guess.”
She followed Jonas to a Starbucks that had opened in the Kroger while they’d been away at school. “This wasn’t here,” Brennan said, looking around a little blankly.
“No, I guess not,” Jonas remarked.
Brennan ordered a hot peppermint tea. “Decaf. Caffeine and I—we don’t really agree,” she muttered. “It just kind of makes me more anxious.”
Jonas nodded before ordering another peppermint tea. He’d already had about half a pot of coffee that morning, at home. The last thing he needed now was more caffeine to push him over the edge from nervous to jittery in front of Brennan. If it wasn’t for needing an excuse to see Brennan, he would have skipped the Starbucks—he hoped his ride, Rhys, didn’t finish up at the pharmacy next door (where Madison was working for the holiday) for a while.
“Tell me something about you,” he blurted. “A Bren fun fact. It was your turn, remember? I told you I wanted to be a doctor and you never told me your next fun fact.”
She laughed then, attempting to cover an involuntary snort with a hand over her mouth.
“What?” he questioned her.
“I can’t believe you’ve kept score like that.” And there were her brown eyes, shining.
“I’m a meticulous keeper of scores,” he said solemnly.
“Okay.” She sucked in a breath. “I used to be on my school’s swim team.”
“Really? What was that like?”
“Awful. I loved swimming for fun, so I somehow thought I would like swim team. I was the slowest person on my team, and I—” She looked away, her face falling a little. “I had my first anxiety attack in the locker room during practice. Locked in a bathroom stall, hiding from everyone.” She straightened, her shoulders lifting. “Anyway, it’s clear, in retrospect, that I probably should have stuck with something like book club or writing club. You know, the things someone might actually expect someone like me to do.”
Jonas offered her a small smile, unsure of what exactly to say.
Brennan broke the silence. “So now it’s your turn.”
It was Jonas’s turn to suck in a breath and try to fortify himself for what came next. “I’m having surgery the first day of spring break.”
Brennan kept her head downturned but lifted her eyes a bit so that they just met his. “What for?” she asked.
“My leg,” he said. “I have a neuroma. It’s been making it kind of painful to walk. Even with the crutches.”
Her eyes looked worried. “Neuroma,” she said, like she was testing out the word. “What’s that?”
“Just a tangle of nerves. Hard to explain. It just makes it hurt pretty bad to put pressure on it walking.”
She let out a breath. “Thank God,” she said. “I heard neuroma and the first thing I thought was some kind of cancer.”
“Aww,” he said. “You were worried about me? How sweet.” He immediately regretted it when her face turned bright red and she avoided looking at him again. She took the lid off her tea and blew on it a bit to cool it; the mint scent wafted across the table.
“I’m just glad,” she said, “that it isn’t anything harmful in the long run. It will be fine after the surgery, right?”
“They hope.” Jonas shrugged. “But they’ve told me that these things can reoccur. They technically didn’t tell me I had to have surgery, I just—” Jonas sighed in frustration, his fingers absentmindedly tapping the table’s edge until he noticed and clenched his fists in his lap. “They gave me some things to try. I’ve already been doing the massage and the percussion—the finger tapping thing I do sometimes on my leg? I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but anyway, I’ve tried, and it didn’t help. Maybe the surgery works. Maybe it doesn’t. But if it does, I’ll be able to walk without pain again—maybe. Even if the neuroma re-forms, that’s still time pain free.”
“Oh,” she said. “I get it now. Why you won’t walk without the crutches. It must hurt pretty bad.”
Jonas swallowed, not wanting to correct her. He ended up just nodding.
They were both silent for a little while, Jonas unsure how to continue the conversation, and unsure whether Brennan even wanted to. Her hands worried the hem of her sweater, and she wouldn’t look at him.
“Well,” Jonas finally said. “I suppose I’d better be getting on to the checkout. I have to get these things home to my mom.” He hoped he hadn’t kept Rhys waiting. He hoped his mom wouldn’t be upset that they were a little later getting home than they’d said they’d be.
Brennan didn’t say anything for a moment, so he turned to go. “Okay,” he heard her say quietly, quickly, as though she’d had to gather up her courage to say it. “See you later?”
See you later. Not “Text you later,” or “Talk to you later,” but “See you later.” Jonas’s heart was beating faster again as he waved and started to crutch away (silly shopping basket clacking away at the side of the crutch).
“See you later,” he said.
See you later, and she’d suggested it.