needed enough energy to swim back to shore. “You’re not allowed to be like this!” I exclaimed.
“Like what?”
“Mean because I like someone else.”
Jamie stopped floating then. She let her feet sink and looked at the water for what felt like a full minute before speaking, and it still wasn’t enough time to prepare me for what she said.
“You’re right.”
Wait. “What?”
“I’m being weird,” she said. “I’m sorry.” She smiled sheepishly.
“You’re freaking me out right now.”
She rolled her eyes, and that, at least, was familiar.
“I apologized. Accept it. I won’t do it again.”
“Okay,” I said. “I accept.”
But my brain was running in overdrive in a thousand different directions. Was she admitting that my being into Ruby bothered her? Had she already known I liked Ruby before I said it? I wasn’t completely sure I’d realized it before I said it, so how could she? And if it did bother her, what did that mean? Could she really be over me if she still got jealous? Did I want her to be jealous, and if I did—let’s be clear: I definitely did—did that mean I still wanted to be with her?
Stop, I thought. Just stop. I dipped underwater, hoping all these unwelcome and unproductive thoughts would somehow slip out of my ears and nose and mouth and into the ocean and stay there.
I knew what I had to do to move on. To chin up. To get my head back on, like Robyn sang in one of my favorite songs from the Moving On—I Mean It This Time playlist I’d made recently.
I had to go home and have a good final cry. Yes, I’d had other “final” cries. But those other times didn’t count. This time was different. I was reborn in the ocean that day, baptized, not heartbroken but a heartbreaker. I wasn’t going to spend my senior year moping over Jamie. I was going to spend it winning over Ruby.
Which was why the second thing I had to do when I got home was text her.
In retrospect, what are you up to wasn’t the ingeniously, slyly seductive message I thought it was when I sent it at 10:48. On a Sunday night. Probably the answer was sleeping, or going to bed soon, or something similarly unlikely to lead to a flirtatious back-and-forth. But we had to start our text rapport somewhere, and everything else I’d thought of was even stupider. For longer than I’d like to admit, I’d entertained the idea of texting her my favorite picture of Ashlyn Harris, in which she’s sitting with her teammate and partner Ali Krieger on the pitch, her hand on Ali’s shoulder—I guess as a way to be, like, See anything here that interests you?
Ordinarily I’d have been devastated that Ruby didn’t text me back within two and then five and then ten hours, but luckily I’d become a very laid-back person over the weekend. And then, presumably as an award for my unprecedented chillness, my phone buzzed on the table at lunchtime the next day. Just thirteen hours later. I felt all eight of our eyes on my phone until I picked it up.
“Who’s texting you? We’re your only friends,” said Ronni.
I was too excited to come up with a retort. Ruby was texting me. That was who.
Sensing potential gossip, Alexis perked up. “Wait, who is it?”
I ignored her and reread Ruby’s message, again and again: hey, sorry, just saw this.
It wasn’t Shakespeare, but it was a response. It was an acknowledgment that I’d texted her, that texting her was an okay thing for me to do. As I watched the screen, the typing bubble appeared, and I gasped.
“Wait. Really, though,” said Alexis. “Like—”
“It’s Ruby,” said Jamie.
That snapped me out of it. I locked eyes with Jamie, and hers narrowed, daring me to deny it. So I decided to put Alexis out of her misery, and I nodded.
“Omigod,” she said, not altogether surprised by my confirmation. Interesting, I thought. I hadn’t talked to