“Well.” Owen takes his time pouring himself a drink. “Jacob loved you for years, and you were totally oblivious. And now you have all these feelings for him…” He shakes his head slowly. “And Jacob finally met someone else.”
My stomach lurches. Paige.
“How was I supposed to know he felt that way? He never did anything to make me think…”
“Are you kidding? How is it possible you never noticed him constantly hanging around you?”
“He was constantly hanging around you. You’re his best friend.”
“Wrong. I never hung out at that bakery where you worked in high school.”
What? I mean, sure, Jacob used to sit in the back of the café where I worked. But lots of kids hung out there. And Jacob always had his head bent over a textbook and barely looked up when I brought him his order. “He wasn’t there for me. That bakery was a good place to study. Or maybe he just really liked my muffins.”
Owen snorts. “Oh, he liked your muffins all right.”
If we were sitting closer, I’d smack him again. “You are a gross person.”
My brother smiles like he’s proud of it. “How many times was he there at the end of the night to drive you home?”
I bite my lip, trying to remember. If Jacob was studying at the café at closing time, he’d offer me a ride. But half the time, he was coming to our house anyway. And those rides were so painfully silent. I couldn’t wait for Jacob to pull the car in our driveway so I could jump out and run into the house. “I thought it was because otherwise, you would have had to come and get me. Remember, you were the only one who got a car in high school so you could drive to Trenton for those weird Mathletes events?”
“Fine,” Owen concedes, tapping his fingers on his whiskey glass. “But our junior year of high school, Jacob wrote an entire album of songs for you. He burned them to a CD, and I swear it took him a whole month to work up the nerve to give it to you.”
“He never gave—” But a half-formed memory settles over me. A skinny, flannel-wearing Jacob hovering in my doorway with a CD in his hand. When he gave it to me, I assumed he was Owen’s musician friend who liked making mixtapes. I didn’t know he wrote the songs for me. But maybe I wasn’t paying attention. My cheeks burn. I think I thanked him and then put the CD on my shelf.
“You never even listened to that CD, did you?”
I shake my head slowly.
Owen looks at me with his eyebrows arched, like I’m the dumbest person on the planet. Which, maybe I am. Because when I think back on this second chance year, the one constant, the one person I could count on was Jacob. When I needed him, Jacob was there, over and over. And if I really think about it, I see that in his friendship with Owen, too. The way they’re like brothers, the way they’ll do anything for each other.
That’s how Jacob shows he cares. He doesn’t make wild declarations. He shows up.
I take a sip of whiskey, for courage. “So, what do I do now?”
“Nothing. Unfortunately, I think you do nothing.”
“Wait. What? This is the part of the evening where we craft a plan to remind Jacob he still loves me. What am I supposed to do with nothing?”
“Listen, Sadie.” Owen stands up now, and paces across the room. “Jacob is the best guy I know. And while this may feel like a big revelation to you, he’s spent a lot of time wrestling with feelings that you didn’t reciprocate. And now, he’s finally met someone else. Paige is smart, and fun, and she draws him out of his shell.” He stops in front of me. “You know I love you. But…” He cringes, pulling off his hat and running a hand through his hair. “That’s why I need to tell you that I think Jacob is finally moving on. And I just don’t want him to get hurt again.”
I can see Owen is really serious. All traces of his laughing fit from earlier are gone, and it’s clear this really matters to him. And—I look down at my hands—I’m a mess. I’ve screwed up every single thing I’ve touched this year, and I’d probably screw this up with Jacob, too. And he deserves better.
“Okay,” I whisper. “I totally understand.” I get up from the couch, but my legs are wobbly. Now that my feelings for Jacob are so glaringly obvious, my heart is lurching for the door. It’s straining to go and find him and tell him how I feel. To beg him to love me back.
But I can’t. If he’s happy with Paige, I have no right to interfere.
“I think I’m going to bed.” I force a smile. “Good night, Owen.”
“Wait.” He grabs my arm as I walk past. “Are you okay?”
“Yep. Super.”
“You’re upset.” Owen looks me over, and luckily, my face was already puffy, and my eyes were already red, so it’s not like he’ll be able to tell the difference. “We can talk about this more. I don’t want you to get hurt either.”
“No… no. It’s all been kind of a shock. But I really am fine.” I tug my arm away from him. All I want is to go upstairs so I can stop smiling this stupid fake smile.
He hesitates, and then finally says, “Okay, if you’re sure.”
I head upstairs to my childhood bedroom, closing the door as quietly as possible so I don’t wake up my parents. A couple of years after I moved to New York, my mom packed up my books, movie posters, and other remnants of high school into boxes in the closet and turned it into a guest room. I sit on the bed, staring at the wall that’s now painted neutral gray instead of the pale pink of my childhood. The queen replaced my old twin-sized canopy bed, but the matching white dresser and bookcase are the same. My gaze locks on that bookcase, on the shelf that used to hold my rows of CDs.
I jump up off the bed and fling open the closet door. In the back corner, behind the camping gear my parents haven’t used in twenty years, sits a pile of cardboard boxes labeled with my name. I haul them out into the room, one by one, and slice open the packing tape. There’s really no rhyme or reason or much organization. My mom wouldn’t have considered my keepsakes from high school to be very important.
In the first box, I find a stack of old yearbooks, a jewelry box of mostly tarnished silver necklaces given to me by old high school boyfriends, and a folder of recipes I’d cut out of magazines. Another box holds the young adult novels I used to love and that my parents never considered to be quality literature. I’m surprised my mother didn’t burn these in the backyard firepit. Another box holds more stuff: framed photos and old journals and sparkly pens. I open the final box to reveal a haphazard pile of old CDs. I dig through them until my hand closes over the one I’m looking for.
When I read the words carefully written on the cover in black Sharpie, my eyes burn. Songs for Sadie by Jacob Gray.
How was I so thoughtless? So stupid?
I run my hand over Jacob’s neat script. I remember those ds and bs from when I lived in his apartment during my Very Bad Year, when he’d scrawl his grocery list on a notepad on the fridge. Small round circles with long tails, sort of like backward-and forward-facing half notes.
I turn back to the box of keepsakes. Now that I’ve found the CD, how am I going to listen to it? It’s not like I keep a CD player lying around. I wouldn’t even know where to buy a CD player, at least not in person, and definitely not in New Brunswick on Christmas. I bet Owen would have some ideas—maybe he left an old CD-ROM drive in the basement that he could hook up to a laptop—but then I’d have to tell him why I need it. Defeated, I’m about to stuff the CD in my suitcase to figure out when I get home in a couple of days, when inspiration strikes.