I reached out, so eager to finally touch her hair, but before I got there she pulled back. Quickly. And just like that, my panic was back in full force. Wind whipped against my ears, so cold it hurt.
“I’m sorry,” I said reflexively. She looked down at her lap instead of at me. “Did you not…” I trailed off. The polite thing to do, I knew, was to give her plausible deniability. But I’d felt what I felt. She’d wanted to kiss me, too.
She did, right?
“No, I did,” said Ruby. “I just…it’s just…I’m not sure.”
My living-room floor. Jamie refusing to look at me. Jamie getting up to leave. Months of silence and confusion. I felt it all again, now twice as strong. I thought I might cry, so I leaned back, making a pillow of my flannel shirt, as if all I really cared about was working on my tan.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said.
“You don’t want to talk about it?” My eyes were closed and I couldn’t tell from Ruby’s voice whether she was disappointed or relieved. But I knew which was more likely.
“It’s okay, really,” I said. I opened an eye to squint at her. “Let’s just pretend it didn’t happen.” She was watching me, so I attempted a smile. “Seriously.”
She smiled back, and it broke my heart.
Ruby lay next to me, not too close, not too far away. We were quiet for what felt like hours, and maybe it was. I had wanted to ask her about the band, and the benefit concert, and—I almost laughed out loud—homecoming, but there was no way I could do that now. I couldn’t believe I’d let myself count on the best possible version of events. I kept opening my mouth to say something, but then—what? I couldn’t come up with a single thing. Eventually the sun started to fall, and the wind picked up, and I could hear the naked people packing up their chairs and umbrellas.
“Are you cold? I’m kind of cold,” she said.
“Freezing,” I said. “We can go.”
My meticulous picnic was still mostly intact, and I knew I’d be sadly chipping away at it in packed lunches all week. The trail I’d appreciated on the way down was torturous in reverse. The worst part was that our backs were turned to the changing sky. The sun set when we weren’t looking. The darkness I dropped Ruby off in didn’t feel romantic, or exciting, like the good kind of trouble. It felt ominous and cold.
“Thanks,” she said in her driveway.
“Sure,” I said, wondering what for. I was pretty sure she’d just been on the worst non-date of her life. She slung her bag over her shoulder and jumped out of the truck. Go, I pleaded in my head. Please just go. But she hesitated.
“See you tomorrow?”
Did I have a choice?
“See you tomorrow,” I said. And then she left, and it was over. Once I turned off her street I put on Céline Dion, and I let myself do the crying I’d been holding in for hours.
So, fuck homecoming, if you asked me. Frankly, it was an imposter of a dance—a big bureaucratic hoax. Every year, the student government led a spirit week leading up to the Friday pep rally, where we engaged in the collective delusion that this year, our football team might be good enough to finish the season in triumph. That this year, they’d draw crowds far beyond the players’ girlfriends and the handful of students who picked the bleachers as a place to be drunk or stoned on Friday nights. In fact, those kids would stop drinking and smoking altogether. The unlikely scrappiness of our newly beloved Mustangs would turn us all into starry-eyed, well-behaved superfans who got into all the right colleges.
As usual, Monday was Pajama Day. But I did not wear pajamas.
Tuesday was Dress Like the Nineties Day. Any resemblance between my outfit and those worn in the 1990s was entirely coincidental. In Civil Liberties, Jamie and I presented our debate to our very bored classmates, most of whom wore some combination of baggy jeans and