got in my head, it tended to throw off my game. And if I wanted to play for UNC (and I had to play for UNC), I pretty much had to have a flawless season. I hadn’t heard from their recruiter since last year, and I was starting to get nervous about what that meant. This time last year, I’d been so confident it would come easily, like it always had. For my whole life I’d been great at this one thing, and my biggest fear was that, one day, I’d only be good. And then what?
On Saturday I woke up gasping, my upper body damp with sweat. I flung my comforter to the foot of the bed and pulled up my ratty practice T-shirt to wipe my chest and neck. Like so many nights over the past two months, I’d dreamed about Jamie. We were at some outdoor party, or some unspecified holiday barbecue, and she was wearing a light blue dress. I kept trying to talk to her, but every time I got near her, she’d disappear. Then I’d look around, and she’d be standing twenty feet away, talking to some other girl instead of me. Finally I shouted her name, and everyone turned to look at me but Jamie.
Not very subtle, brain, I thought.
I looked at the clock on my nightstand; it was only 7:46. That meant I had seven hours and fourteen minutes to kill until I could pick up Ruby. I wondered at what time I could reasonably text her for her address without seeming like she was the first thing I’d thought of when I woke up. Noon?
There was a crazy part of me that wanted to text Jamie right now, to describe to her my dream. I wanted her to tell me she’d never ignore me like that. I wanted her to tell me she dreamed about me sometimes too. But Jamie wasn’t the type to make bold, impossible promises, and she definitely wasn’t the type to admit to having feelings. It had taken her months to admit that she liked me as more than a friend.
Things between us changed in the spring of our sophomore year. She was sleeping over at my house, like she did almost every Saturday that year, the way we told ourselves all best friends did. We were watching a movie in the usual position: her lying on the floor beneath me lying on the couch. It hadn’t always been that way. The first few times she came over, she sat on the couch with me, like a normal person, but at some point she started insisting she liked the floor better. That way we could both stretch out. I didn’t protest because I liked taking up the whole couch, but also because I liked the way my elevated position let me look at her without her knowing. At the time, the slight tilting of her head, her hand reaching for the bowl of popcorn, her feet rubbing against each other, one sliding over the other until her socks slipped off—it was enough to keep me occupied during the boring parts of whatever movie she’d picked out for us.
I don’t know what it was about that warm, late-May night that made me do it. I still don’t know what made me so brave. We were watching our favorite Lord of the Rings movie, The Return of the King, for the fifth or maybe the twentieth time. Gandalf had placed the crown on Aragorn’s head, and tears were streaming down my face. And then, before I could think about what it would change between us, I reached down and took Jamie’s hand in mine.
We stayed that way for the rest of the movie, and when it was done, she rolled onto her back to look at me. I could barely make out her face in the dark, but it felt like I could feel her heartbeat in my chest too. I slipped off the couch and onto the floor next to her, and then I kissed her.
She kissed me back for what felt like hours but was probably only thirty seconds before pulling away. She said it was too weird.
I could feel the crush of it even now, reliving it. Kissing Jamie had not