It could’ve been two or twenty minutes later—time ceased to function in a linear fashion when I was engrossed in discovering how Curtis’s mouth moved against mine and how his skin felt beneath my hands—but when I heard someone whisper-shout “Oh—Oh!” I reluctantly disengaged my lips from his neck.
“Uh. Hey, Merri.” Curtis’s voice was deep and startled but not embarrassed.
It’s possible I nipped his neck—accidentally—before whirling to see my best friend taking backward steps with her hands over her eyes. “Um, don’t mind me. Carry on. But heads-up, the van leaves in ten minutes.” She bumped into a chair, then almost sprawled over a table.
“Merri, uncover your eyes before you end up in the ER,” I said.
“Is it, um, safe?” she asked. “Are all hands where I can see them?”
I tugged mine out from under his shirt. I’m not sure when they’d gotten there, but I was going to go ahead and blame that on needing his body heat to warm up my fingers. Curtis untangled his from my hair and folded them in his lap.
“All clear,” he said.
Merri lowered her hands. Her eyes were enormous, her smile bigger. “I didn’t mean to interrupt. We can talk later. Like, I’ll give you five more minutes to . . . whatever, then I’ll still have five minutes to interrogate Eliza before the van!”
Curtis looked between my beet-red face and Merri’s happy dance. He grinned. “We can ‘whatever’ another time—why don’t you take the whole ten minutes.” He squeezed my hand. “That okay?”
I nodded and sat up, straightening my skirt so I could return his coat without flashing my torn tights.
He stood. “I guess I’ll go find my family so Win can mock me about his school beating mine.” He looked at me. Looked at Merri. He patted her shoulder, then squeezed mine. “Uh, good luck?”
“Goodbye, Curtis.” Merri’s wave looked more like a shooing motion as she plopped onto his chair.
When he and I had been knee-to-knee it had been comforting and sweet—but Merri in that same spot made me claustrophobic. The strategic move would be to go on the offensive—take control of the conversation before she could—but my mind was a whirl of panic.
Merri crossed her arms and tried to look stern. “Just so you know, I’m reserving the right to be angry at some future date—but we only have ten minutes! So let’s skip the part where I yell at you for lying to me and get to the part where you tell me all the heart-squish swoony details.”
I laughed. If there was a better person on this planet than Merrilee Rose Campbell, I’d never met them and had no interest in doing so. No one could ever replace my best friend.
“Wait!” She held up a hand. “But maybe first just explain why you didn’t tell me?”
My laughter choked to a halt and I studied my hands. “You know how you always say we have friendship ESP?”
She stuck out her tongue. “And you always tell me it’s not a real thing.”
“I know—but I’ve been wishing it was. Hoping-slash-dreading you’d guess what was going on with Curtis. Almost resenting that you didn’t, because I couldn’t figure out how to tell you. I know it’s not fair.”
My words and emotions were so contradictory, but Merri didn’t seem fazed. She nodded thoughtfully. “I have five magic—yes, magic—words for next time.” She smirked, I chuckled.
“Go ahead.”
“Merri, I need to talk.” She shrugged. “I’m sorry I didn’t guess—but I would’ve listened.”
My eyes filled again. “I know.”
She handed me a tissue printed with bulldogs from a pocket pack and waited for me to wipe my eyes. “Okay, there’s only six minutes left. Start with the good stuff.”
“I guess it’s maybe, slightly possible I rushed to judgment when it comes to Curtis and what you just saw.” I was mumbling, and I hated mumblers. “Or something like that.”
“I believe that’s what we call”—Merri did an offbeat drumroll on her lap—“being chicken-lickin’ wrong.”
“No. We absolutely don’t call it that.” I scrunched up my nose. “Don’t use the phrase ‘chicken-lickin’’ ever again. It sounds like a revolting way to catch salmonella.”
“Fine, but how long have you two been secretly dating? That’s so romantic! I wish Fielding and I had secretly dated before telling everyone. Does it make things extra steamy?”
She was starry-eyed and clasping her hands beneath her chin. I was shaking my head and pressing back against my chair. “We’re not dating. And you can’t tell anyone.”
Merri dropped her hands. “Of course I won’t if you don’t want me to—but why not? And what are you doing?”
“We’re . . .” I shrugged, because the whole “not-dating” thing was going to get lost in translation. “I don’t know what I want. I’m still figuring that out.”
“You need to trust your instincts.”
I stared at the dregs melting off of Merri’s shoes, puddling on the floor. Curtis and I were like those snowflakes—we’d hold together only under perfect conditions. Alter the temperature even one or two degrees and we’d phase-change—go from solid to liquid, from not-dating to not-anything. I wasn’t allowed to date, and secrets could stay secret for only so long. Like ice crystals when they reached zero degrees Celsius, we were doomed. I looked away. “I trust science.”
“But you are more than science.”
I stood, melted snow dripping off my coat as if to prove my point. “I am precisely science. Everything I am from the sub-cellular level is science. I know what you’re saying, but there’s science to emotion, and it often contaminates rational thought.”
“You don’t always have to be rational.” Merri stood too. “What you were doing in here wasn’t rational—and that’s okay. You can be angry and disappointed and frustrated and happy and silly and besotted—you don’t have to analyze the facts behind your feelings and decide if you’re permitted to feel them.”
“Maybe you don’t.” But the last time I’d dared to raise my voice at my parents was in the airport leaving Brazil, and it turned out to be the last trip they’d taken me on. And when I’d used the word “feel” on the phone ten days ago, they’d shot me down.
“Eliza—” The timer on Merri’s phone went off, and she grimaced as she mashed the button. “We need to get to the van, but seriously—there’s so much you’re going to miss if you don’t let yourself take risks. If you don’t let yourself feel.”
But risks meant risking failure. Today, I’d failed . . . and while I didn’t yet know the fallout with my parents, failure had brought me here, to the building I was exiting where I’d had the most captivating who-knows-how-many minutes of my life. It had brought me to honesty with Merri about my something with Curtis and her impossible and wise advice. It was even a failure on a math test—fine, technically a B plus—that had brought me to the quiz bowl team and thus to Curtis and cupcakes and half-marathons and not-dating.
Merri linked her mittened hand through my arm while Ms. Gregoire’s words from a week and a half ago replayed in my head: Sometimes we don’t ask for what we want because we’re scared of being told yes.
I think Anne Shirley would agree with my conclusion: Some risks were worth it.