an actual letter is nice.”
“Okay, okay,” I conceded. “So what do we say?”
“I’ll write down some themes,” Jamie said excitedly. She slid off the couch to be closer to the poster board and uncapped a bright red marker. Then she turned to me expectantly.
“Gay rights!” I yelled.
Jamie laughed and wrote it down. She looked at me again.
“Ummmm.”
“Small business owners?” Jamie offered.
“Ooh yeah,” I said. “That’s great.”
We went on from there, Jamie suggesting things and me agreeing with them. My mom came downstairs after a while to get a second or seventh can of Diet Coke, and we told her about our plan. Like I had, she reminded Jamie that she was a crime reporter, and the Union-Tribune a small paper. But she agreed to send our letter when we’d written it. By then it was a quarter past ten, and I was starting to fade, and Jamie’s weekday curfew, the last I’d heard, was ten-thirty.
“Aren’t you going to be late?” I asked. The poster board was full, with various themes and bullet points surrounding Linda Weller’s name in red and orange and green. In the end, the board was rainbow-colored anyway. The Sweets plan, which Jamie kept calling plan B, remained isolated and undeveloped off to the side. I’d wanted us to take it seriously, but Jamie was so excited about her idea, and I couldn’t quite bring myself to ask what we’d do if it didn’t work. It was strange: we’d worked on a project together just weeks earlier, but it felt like much longer ago. Something felt different now, and it wasn’t just that this was a project we really cared about and the other one was homework. Something between us had started to mend. If our breakup had burned our relationship to the ground, it felt like we’d just finished work on our new first floor. It was familiar, and still us, but it was smaller, and more thoughtfully built. I felt more aware of what we were and could be to each other, when for so long I’d taken for granted that we’d always be each other’s everything. It wasn’t that I wasn’t sad (and in fact I was pretty sure I’d cry as soon as Jamie left), but I felt lighter, too.
“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” said Jamie. “I should go.”
I helped her clean up and took our glasses into the kitchen. She pulled on her jean jacket, and I carried the poster board out to her mom’s car, which she’d borrowed for the night. I slid it gingerly into the back seat under Jamie’s close observation, then stood with her next to the door.
“Okay,” I said.
“I’ll put together a draft and send it to you tomorrow,” she said.
“Okay.”
Tentatively, she raised her arms, and I did the same. We laughed, and stepped together, her arms around my shoulders and mine around the safe middle of her back. Soon I’d throw my arms around her without worrying where exactly they landed. Soon, but not yet.
* * *
—
It figured I would get the email on a Thursday. Historically, I hated Thursdays.
When I didn’t have a girlfriend (which, so far, was approximately 99.5 percent of the time), there was nothing particularly special about Thursdays. Even their proximity to Fridays, and therefore the weekend, was tempered by the usual need to start and finish the homework and studying I’d meant to start earlier in the week, plus the nerves that settled over me the night before a big game. And lately, every game felt like a big game.
I should have been grateful, I guess, that she emailed me after practice, when the other girls were already getting in their cars and driving out of earshot. I wondered if she knew, and was trying to minimize my humiliation, or if it was just coincidence, and I was the last, least important thing on her checklist that day. An unwanted task between her and freedom.
The email read, in full:
Dear QUINN,
We are writing to let you know that all letters of intent for next season’s women’s