didn’t want to sound like I was whining. Besides, Henry was a lot more like my sister and my parents, when it came to goals. He probably agreed with them.
I’d always wondered if there was something wrong with me because I hadn’t figured out what I wanted to do yet. What if I was someone who just didn’t have passions? What if I was just terminally boring and lame, skating by on looks and athletic talent that wasn’t even enough to take me anywhere professionally?
I didn’t want to be someone who peaked in college, but sometimes I wondered whether I even had a choice.
I pulled my phone out, itching to message Frosty again, before I remembered that Henry was sitting right next to me. So I opened my camera instead.
“Here, look like you’re laughing at me while I cry about my ankle,” I told Henry, turning the camera around so that it was facing us.
“What?” He looked confused.
“I need to post about my mortal injury on Instagram,” I explained. “I’ll get more sympathy points if I can say that my friend is making fun of me and doesn’t care about my pain.”
Henry frowned. “Actually, there’s something I’ve been meaning to—”
“Oh my God, not that shit about us not being friends again. Dude, it’s just an expression.”
“That wasn’t what I—” he broke off, his cheeks flushing. “Maybe I just don’t want all your followers to think I’m a heartless bastard, ever think about that?”
I laughed. “Fine, then look like you’ve just found out your best friend only has three months left to live and you can’t handle the tragedy. Think you can manage that?”
“You’re talking to a theater major, aren’t you?” Henry said archly.
“Touché.”
I hooked my ankle up onto my knee and put on the saddest face I could, while Henry mugged in the background, looking like he was about to cry.
“Put your hand on my shoulder,” I said. “Get in close, like you’re inspecting my terrible wound.”
I told myself it was just because I wanted to make sure Henry was fully in the picture. But feeling him close to me was a nice side benefit. He put one hand on my shoulder, the other on my knee, and looked absolutely anguished.
I took a few pictures, then shivered when he took his hands away. I could feel the warm spots where they’d been on my body, like an afterimage from staring at the sun.
“Just have to think of a caption now,” I said, hoping Henry hadn’t noticed the way he’d affected me.
“Call it La Pietà,” he said with a laugh.
“What’s that? Something Spanish?”
My dad’s parents spoke Spanish to each other sometimes, but I’d taken French in high school, and only understood a few words here and there.
“Italian.” Henry shook his head. “Don’t actually call it that. It’s a joke, but it’s not that funny.”
“What, you don’t think my followers are high-brow enough for your theater jokes?”
“That’s not what I said,” he responded primly. “And anyway, it’s not a theater joke. La Pietà is a sculpture.”
I gave him a wry look. “Don’t get defensive. It’s probably true.”
Since I couldn’t think of anything wittier, I just captioned it ‘Hiking owie’ with a crying emoji.
“Want me to tag you?” I asked, saving the draft and swiping over to the search function. “What’s your name on here?”
“Actually, that’s what I wanted to…” Henry trailed off as I looked up at him. “I kinda liked one of your pictures the other day. By accident. So you can just…look it up there. If you haven’t seen it yet.”
“Wait, really?” I blinked. Henry followed me? That seemed highly unlikely, but it made me feel almost as warm as his hands had. “No way.”
I clicked over to my likes. I got so many that I didn’t usually look at them too closely, but sure enough, halfway down my screen, an account named HenryTheEighthWonderOfTheWorld—it took me a second to make sense of that—had liked my picture from Hamburguesas El Gordo.
“I didn’t know you followed me,” I said. I clicked on his profile, then saw it was set to private.
“I don’t,” he said quickly. “I just—honestly, it wasn’t even—it was just, after you called, last week, and left the message to call you back. I was worried you were stuck somewhere or something. So I just went on to check and I—it doesn’t matter.”
Oh. I tried not to feel disappointed. It was a little weird, maybe, that he’d checked there. But it made more sense than him looking at my profile