interesting, and beautiful. I put “beautiful” last because for some reason, I have a feeling you’d roll your eyes if I wrote it first. But you are. You’re beautiful and adorable and so fucking charming. And you have this energy that radiates off you, a shimmering optimism I wish I could borrow for myself sometimes.
You’re looking at me like you can’t believe I’m not done yet, so let me wrap this up before I turn it into a five-paragraph essay. But if it were an essay, here’s the thesis statement:
I am in love with you, Rowan Roth.
Please don’t make too much fun of me at graduation?
Yours,
Neil P. McNair
12:43 a.m.
AT FIRST THE words don’t sink in. It doesn’t make sense. This has to be some elaborate joke, one final, twisted way for Neil to win by making a fool of me. So I read it again, lingering on the fourth paragraph, and the sixth paragraph, and the way my nickname looks in his handwriting. And then the seventh paragraph, the single-sentence confession:
I am in love with you, Rowan Roth.
There is too much care and sincerity in those words for it to be a joke. My pulse is roaring in my ears, my heart a wild animal.
Neil McNair is in love with me. Neil McNair. Is in love. With me.
I’m not sure how many times I read it. Each time, different words jump out at me, “crush” and “beautiful” and “in love,” “in love,” “in love.”
Something catches in my throat—a laugh? A sob? Valedictorian Neil McNair wrote “fuck” in my yearbook. I read it again. I can’t stop. “Shimmering optimism”—not head-in-the-clouds-ism. He likes that about me, enough to tell me when I’m so extreme about it that I’m standing in my own way.
Except. It would have been a mistake, he said when I asked about what happened on the bench.
He was bluffing. He had to be. This note is so heartfelt, he couldn’t have switched off those feelings in a matter of hours. I may not know much about love that I haven’t read in a book, but I’m sure it lingers longer than that. A simmer, not a spark.
This message, it’s sweeter than any romance novel.
It’s real.
Neil loves me.
Earlier today, I couldn’t picture him kissing anyone. Is it because I can only picture this happening with me, that Rowan plus Neil is this inevitability everyone has known except us? Kirby and Mara, Chantal Okafor in student council, Logan Perez who let us into the safe zone, my parents…
Do I love Neil McNair?
Even if I’m not entirely certain, the reality is that I really think I could.
I have to get off this fucking Ferris wheel.
Life is funny, though: the most romantic moment of my life, and I’m at the top of a Ferris wheel with a yearbook instead of the boy who wrote in it that he’s in love with me.
* * *
The Museum of the Mysteries, located in a downtown Seattle basement, is Seattle’s only museum dedicated to the paranormal. I’m not sure why they need to explain it or why the city would ever need more than one museum dedicated to the paranormal, but there it is on the sign in front.
Can we talk? I texted Neil once the Ferris wheel touched down. I feel really awful about what happened. And I think I figured out the last clue. No one’s won Howl yet, or we’d have received a message blast. I’m determined to make things up to him.
He replied ok without any punctuation, very un-Neil-like. He was clearly upset if he wouldn’t spell out the word, but maybe it’s proof he still feels the way he did when he wrote in my yearbook that he agreed to meet back up. Or he wants to win this game and be done with tonight.
He’s waiting on a bricked street with a rickety staircase that leads to the museum. His hair is mussed, his posture slightly hunched. Why did I ever tease him about those freckles? I love them. I love every single one of them. I love his freckles and his red hair and the too-short legs of his suit pants and the too-long sleeves, the way he laughs, the way he pushes up his glasses to rub his eyes.
I am in love with you, Rowan Roth.
He lifts one hand in a wave, and I melt.
I am in so much trouble.
“Hi,” I say in a small voice.
“Hey.”
“Eerie that it’s—” I say, at the same time he says, “Should we—”
“What was that?”