And then I got in the car.
I sat down in the booth and instead of sitting across from me, he sat next to me, his hip against mine. “I talked to your mom a few times,” he said. “I think she’s coming around to me.”
Who cares if he wants his bacteria in my mouth? Kissing is nice. Kissing feels good. I want to kiss him. But you don’t want to get campylobacter. I won’t. You’ll be sick for weeks. Might have to take antibiotics. Stop. Then you’ll get C. diff. Or you’ll get Epstein-Barr from the campylobacter. Stop. That could paralyze you, all because you kissed him when you didn’t even actually want to because it’s fucking gross, inserting your tongue into someone else’s mouth. “Are you there?” he asked.
“What, yeah,” I said.
“I asked how you’re feeling.”
“Good,” I said. “Honestly not good right now, but good in general.”
“Why not good right now?”
“Can you sit across from me?”
“Um, yeah, of course.” He got up and moved around to the opposite bench, which made me feel better. For a moment, anyway.
“I can’t do this,” I said.
“Can’t do what?”
“This,” I said. “I can’t, Davis. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to. Like, I know you’re waiting for me to get better, and I really appreciate all your texts and everything. It’s . . . it’s incredibly sweet, but, like, this is probably what better looks like for me.”
“I like this you.”
“No, you don’t. You want to make out and sit on the same side of the table and do other normal couple things. Because of course you do.”
He didn’t say anything for a minute. “Maybe you just don’t find me attractive?”
“It’s not that,” I said.
“But maybe it is.”
“It’s not. It’s not that I don’t want to kiss you or that I don’t like kissing or whatever. I . . . my brain says that kissing is one of a bunch of things that will, like, kill me. Like, actually kill me. But it’s not even about dying, really—like, if I knew I was dying, and I kissed you good-bye, literally my last thought wouldn’t be about the fact that I was dying; it would be about the eighty million microbes that we’d just exchanged. I know that when you just touched me, it didn’t give me a disease, or it probably didn’t. God, I can’t even say that it definitely didn’t because I’m so fucking scared of it. I can’t even call it anything but it, you know? I just can’t.”
I could tell I was hurting him. I could see it in the way he kept blinking. I could see that he didn’t understand it, that he couldn’t. I didn’t blame him. It made no sense. I was a story riddled with plot holes.
“That sounds really scary,” he said. I just nodded. “Do you feel like you’re getting better?” Everyone wanted me to feed them that story—darkness to light, weakness to strength, broken to whole. I wanted it, too.
“Maybe,” I said. “Honestly, I feel really fragile. I feel like I’ve been taped back together.”
“I know that feeling.”
“How are you?” I asked.
He shrugged.
“How’s Noah?” I asked.
“Not good.”
“Um, unpack that for me,” I said.
“He just misses Dad. It’s like Noah’s two people, almost: There’s the miniature dudebro who drinks bad vodka and is the king of his little gang of eighth-grade pseudo-badasses. And then the kid who crawls into bed with me some nights and cries. It’s almost like Noah thinks if he screws up enough, Dad will be forced to come out of hiding.”
“He’s heartbroken,” I said.
“Yeah, well. Aren’t we all. It’s . . . I don’t really want to talk about my life, if that’s okay.” It occurred to me that Davis probably liked what infuriated Daisy—that I didn’t ask too many questions. Everyone else was so relentlessly curious about the life of the billionaire boy, but I’d always been too stuck inside myself to interrogate him.
Slowly, the conversation sputtered. We started talking to each other like people who used to be close—catching each other up on our lives rather than living them together. By the time he paid the bill, I knew that whatever we’d been, we weren’t anymore.
Still, once I was home and under the covers, I texted him. You around?
You can’t do it the other way, he replied. And I can’t do it this way.
Me: Why?
Him: It makes me feel like you only like me at a distance. I need to be liked close up.
I kept typing and deleting, typing and deleting. I never ended up replying.
—
The next day at school, I was walking across the cafeteria to our lunch table when I was intercepted by Daisy. “Holmesy, we have to talk privately.” She sat me down at a mostly empty lunch table, a few seats away from some freshmen.
“Did you break up with Mychal again?”
“No, of course not. The magic of being Just Friends is that you can’t break up. I feel like I’ve unlocked the secret of the universe with this Just Friends thing. But no, we’re going on an adventure.”
“We are?”
“Do you feel like you’ve recovered your wits enough that you could, for instance, sneak underneath the city of Indianapolis to attend a guerrilla art show?”
“A what?”
“Okay, so remember how I had that idea for Mychal to make those photographic montages of exonerated prisoners?”
“Well, it was mostly his i—”
“Let’s not get lost in the details, Holmesy. The point is he made it and submitted it to this supercool arts collective Known City, and they are putting it in this one-night-only gallery show they’re doing Friday night called Underground Art, where they turn part of the Pogue’s Run tunnel into an art gallery.” Pogue’s Run was the tunnel that emptied into the White River that Pickett’s company had been hired to expand, the work they’d never finished. Seemed an odd place for an art show.
“I don’t really want to spend Friday night at an illegal art gallery.”
“It’s not illegal. They have permission. It’s just super underground. Like, literally underground.” I scrunched up my face. “It’s like the coolest thing ever to happen in Indianapolis, and my Just Friend has art in the show. Obviously don’t feel obligated to be there, but . . . do be there.”
“I don’t want to be a third wheel.”
“I am going to be nervous and surrounded by people cooler than me and I’d really like my best friend to be there.”
I opened the Ziploc bag containing my peanut butter and honey sandwich and took a bite.
“You’re thinking about it,” she said, excitement in her voice.
“I’m thinking about it,” I allowed.
And then, after I swallowed, I said, “All right, let’s do it.”
“Yes! Yes! We will pick you up at six fifteen on Friday; it’s going to be amazing.”
The way she smiled at me made it impossible not to smile back. In a quiet voice, not even sure she could hear me, I said, “I love you, Daisy. I know you say that to me all the time and I never say it, but I do. I love you.”
“Ahh, fuck. Don’t go all soft on me, Holmesy.”
—
Mychal and Daisy showed up at my doorstep at six fifteen sharp. She was wearing a dress-and-tights combo dwarfed by her huge puffer coat, and Mychal was wearing a silver-gray suit that was slightly too big for him. I had on a long-sleeve T-shirt, jeans, and a coat. “I didn’t know I was supposed to dress up for the sewer,” I said sheepishly.
“The art sewer.” Daisy smiled. I wondered whether maybe I should change, but she just grabbed me and said, “Holmesy, you look radiant. You look like . . . like yourself.”