sure? That’s, like, probably more than a hundred bucks,” I said.
“I don’t need it,” said Ruby. “Honestly. They’ve been really cool to us, and I want them to have it.”
Suddenly I was so sad I almost couldn’t speak. I tried to thank her, but it came out like a whisper. Ruby reached across the sticky table and brushed away a tear I didn’t feel until it was gone.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know why I’m so emotional.”
“It’s Christmas, it’s senior year, you aren’t going to school where you thought, you’re trying to help some friends in trouble?” Ruby guessed. “PMS, maybe?”
I laughed. “All of the above, yeah.”
“We synched up,” said Ruby, looking so fond of me I had to look away.
“Jamie told me that’s a myth,” I said. “But I don’t believe her.”
“I like that you want to believe in things,” said Ruby. “It’s a really good way to be.”
My vision clouded with tears again, because I could feel it: we were breaking up. Only I couldn’t call it that, because we hadn’t been girlfriends in the first place. A year or two from now, when I wanted to describe to someone what Ruby Ocampo had meant to me, what would I call her? Not a friend. Not an ex-girlfriend. My former lover, I thought, and snorted involuntarily. Nothing fit. Nothing would do our brief, informal, up-and-down, exciting, stressful, thrilling time together justice. It would be too much and too weird to tell anyone I didn’t know very well that she was the person who’d made me believe in love again, but she had.
“Why are you crying?” Ruby asked gently.
“Because you’re not in love with me,” I said. I laughed, embarrassed and astonished by what I was willing to say out loud.
For a moment Ruby looked like she might cry too. “I mean, are you in love with me?”
I had wondered, but as soon as she asked, I knew. “No,” I admitted. “But I think I could have been, eventually.”
Ruby smiled. She pulled at her rubbery mint-green phone case, suddenly shy. “I don’t think I’ve ever felt that way about anyone.”
Even though I was the one being dumped (or whatever), I felt sorry for Ruby then. Before her, I thought that quote about it being “better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all” was bullshit. The losing hurt too much. I would have given anything not to feel it.
Ruby was watching me now, I realized. “You have,” she said.
It was a question, but it wasn’t.
“Yeah,” I said. “Just the once.”
It was impossible to explain, and somehow, simultaneously, it was as simple as everyone said: when you were in love, you knew. What surprised me most was the way the feeling morphed and faded and brightened again, reliable only in its unreliability. When I told Jamie I loved her for the first time, it meant something different from the last time I told her I loved her. But both times, and every time in between, it was true. I felt it in my bones. Sometimes I felt that love still knocking around my body. It was like a fish, once granted an entire ocean to swim in, now restricted to a tiny bowl. Still, it moved within me.
“Are you a Cancer?” Ruby asked suddenly, her eyes narrowing suspiciously.
“Aquarius.”
“That’s why.”
“Why what?”
“Your feelings are so…big,” she said.
I laughed. “Would you have said that explained it no matter what I said?”
“Maybe,” Ruby admitted. “Unless you said Capricorn, and then no.”
Unsure what else to do, I reached for my cocoa and took a sip. I grimaced—too cold—and was once again mystified by my inability to catch hot chocolate at the correct temperature.
“What do we do now?” said Ruby.
“Can we be friends?”
“Of course.”
“Can I still come to your show?”
Ruby threw her head back. “Ha! No, Quinn. You’re banned from your own event