Wait. What had just happened?
Will jumped out of bed and reached for his cargo shorts. He stopped before he put on his T-shirt, and stared at the full-length mirror. He’d lost some of the weight, right? Was he so hideous that she couldn’t stand to touch him? She had flown out of there as fast as if she had been a cartoon roadrunner.
He threw the T-shirt on and fumbled into his sneakers. He ran down the stairs and out the front door.
Luella was standing on the street, staring at her phone.
“Luella!” he shouted. She looked up at him sharply. A dog barked down the street. “Lu. Sorry. Lu.”
“What are you doing, Will?”
“I just wanted to . . . Hey, can we talk about this? What just happened?”
Lu looked suspicious.
“Okay. I guess.”
“Look, Lu,” he said, his voice serious. “I was thinking—”
“Stop,” she said, “just stop.” Lu was smiling a weird tight-lipped smile. Will stared at her in surprise. It didn’t look like her at all. Something had changed really quickly, and Will had no idea when or how or why. He just knew that it was his fault. He had done something to make her run away. Maybe it was something he didn’t even realize. Maybe it was just . . . how he was. Maybe she was running away from him. “We all know what’s going to happen when we start school. You have a whole new life ahead of you. You’re going to be on the soccer team and leave all your mathlete friends behind, and you’re never going to want to be seen with a theater girl like me. And I’m going to try out for every play and hang out with super unbearably artsy kids and go to indie concerts and probably start smoking cloves.”
“Cloves?”
“Yeah. Cloves. And my friends will judge guys like you, and your friends will probably talk shit about me and my friends. So why don’t we just cut our losses and quit while we’re ahead? You go your way, I’ll go mine. No hard feelings—it’ll save you the trouble of doing it later. Okay?”
“What?” Will’s face crumpled. She was lying. He knew her lying face so well.
“Really,” Lu said. “No hard feelings. It was a great summer. But it’s over now.”
Will clenched his jaw.
“That’s what you were going to say, right?”
It didn’t matter now, what he was going to say. She had said enough for the both of them. And then his face hardened into something tighter, colder. Everything was so messed up, and it had happened so quickly. Everything that had made this summer the best summer of his life was slipping through his fingers. All he had wanted was to impress her. He was changing himself for her. The whole reason he had wanted to join the soccer team was for her.
And she was throwing it all back in his face. How could she do that to him? What kind of person was she?
Lu could never love him the way he loved her. She was cold. She was heartless. Where her heart was, there was nothing but a gaping black hole. She felt nothing.
Will could be that way too. He could show her. Suddenly he didn’t want to be himself anymore. He wanted to be someone different. Someone who didn’t care about anyone.
“Sure,” he replied. “If you say so.”
Something had changed inside him. It only took a moment.
Lu pursed her lips. “All right then.”
Will looked at her. There was more he wanted to say, but he didn’t. “Enjoy high school.” Then he turned and jogged up the steps of the stoop, past the red tin mailbox, and through the black lacquered door of the brownstone that stood between two potted cone-shaped shrubs.
The next day was the first day of the rest of everything. Will would make sure of that.