This is probably a terrible idea, but if it’ll take his mind off the Red Hall, it’s worth it. Maybe. I charge forward before I can reconsider. “Before the essay contest winners were announced and you revealed your true self, I… had a crush on you.”
Nope, that was definitely a terrible idea. Regret fills me almost instantly, and I squeeze my eyes shut, waiting for the laughter. When it doesn’t come, I tentatively open one eye.
Neil meets my gaze, no longer nauseous-looking. Now there’s amusement on his face: a deeper curve to his mouth, like he’s trapping a laugh in his throat.
“You had a crush on me.” He turns it into a declarative sentence. He’s not asking for clarification; he’s stating a fact.
“For twelve days!” I rush to add. “Four years ago. I was basically a child.”
He doesn’t need to know what, exactly, I found so appealing about him back then. At first I was mesmerized by the sheer number of freckles he had, thought they were beautiful, really. I nodded along with the insights he shared in class, offering my own and feeling a spark of pride when he agreed with me.
He doesn’t need to know that every so often over the course of that year, I found myself wishing he hadn’t turned out to be the worst kind of lit snob so I could resume my English-class daydreams, the ones where we lounged beneath an oak tree and read sonnets aloud to each other. I was so disappointed he wasn’t the guy I’d dreamed up. He doesn’t need to know that a couple times, when our shoulders brushed in the hall, I felt this flip in my belly because I was fourteen and boys were a mysterious new species. Touching one, even by accident, was like passing your hand through a flame. I wasn’t proud of it, but my body hadn’t quite caught up with my brain. And my brain had decided twelve days into freshman year that Neil McNair was to be despised, his destruction earning slot number ten on my success guide. By sophomore year, all those belly-flips were gone, and I could barely remember having a crush on him at all.
He also doesn’t need to know about the dream I had a few months ago. It wasn’t my fault—we’d been texting before bed, and it had screwed with my subconscious. For all I know, his subconscious gave him wacky dreams too. We were at a fancy restaurant eating math tests and lab reports when he took my face in his hands and kissed me. He tasted like printer ink. My logical side intervened and woke me up, but I couldn’t look him in the eye for an entire week after that. I’d dream-cheated on Spencer with Neil McNair. It was horrifying.
Neil’s full-on grinning now. “But I was like… the dorkiest fourteen-year-old.”
“And I was so cool?”
“You were,” he insists. “Aside from your inability to acknowledge The Great Gatsby as the quintessential American novel.”
“Ah, yes, The Great Gatsby. A feminist text,” I say, though my mind stumbles over his profession of my coolness. “Nick is a piece of white bread. Daisy deserved better than that ending.”
He snorts at this. But I can’t deny he seems to be feeling much better. His complexion has gone from ashen back to his regular shade of pale. Debating books in a library—this is our natural state, perhaps.
“So like. This crush,” he continues. “Did you write poems about me? Did you doodle my name in your notebook with a heart on the i? Or—oh! Did you imagine me as the hero of a romance novel? Please say yes. Please say I was a cowboy.”
“It sounds like you’re feeling a lot better.” I stretch out my legs, eager to get moving again.
He glances down at his arms. “I didn’t even realize—am I exposing too much skin? I don’t want to be parading myself in front of you, taunting you with what you can’t have. I have a hoodie in my backpack. I can put it on if you’re—”
“You’re definitely better. We’re leaving.”
* * *
My mom calls when we get to the main floor of the library.
“We made it!” she announces. Her phone’s on speaker, and my dad is cheering in the background. “The book is done!”
“Congratulations!” I motion for Neil to follow me around the corner so we won’t disturb anyone. “Is it going to come out the same time as the next Excavated book?”