Which felt like its own kind of answer.
So I broke up with him, though even using the word “breakup” felt ridiculous. Can you even call it a breakup if it wasn’t really a relationship to begin with? Even though Mikey was perfectly stoic when I told him, I cried the whole night. I felt like a monster.
But then again, waking up alone in my bed the next morning felt kind of . . . right. And the next day felt even more right. I walked around campus that whole week feeling like I’d just stepped off a too-fast treadmill. Discombobulated and dizzy, but also kind of blissfully untethered.
And then it was winter break.
At first, it was my parents who made it weird, Mom especially. She was so full of Gentle Concern it was almost aggressive. Basically, neither of them let me out of their sight for a week. We did the menorah lighting at Avalon and the Fantasy in Lights at Callaway Gardens, and they both spent the whole time watching me warily, like at any moment I might remember to collapse into a big messy gloom-spiral meltdown.
But this wasn’t anything like my breakup with Ben. I was a year and a half older and wiser, for one thing. “Plus,” I reminded Mom as she pulled into the parking deck at North Point Mall, “I wasn’t the one who got dumped this time.”
Mom put the car in park and turned to look at me strangely. “You weren’t dumped last time either.”
She was right, of course. My breakup with Ben was completely mutual. Technically, verbally, on paper, and any way you looked at it.
I don’t know why it always felt like Ben dumped me.
The point is, Mikey was different. I felt fine, for the most part. Maybe my heart did a little jolt every time I scrolled past his name in my texts, but it’s not like I was moping or pining. Sometimes I’d even go hours without thinking about him.
Until Christmas Eve.
I swear, it hit me out of nowhere. My parents were watching Home Alone for the twenty billionth time while I swiped through TikTok and texted memes back and forth with Ethan. But then Macaulay Culkin walked into a church.
I think I stopped breathing for a second. It was like a cartoon anvil crashing down.
The choir was singing “O Holy Night.”
And suddenly, all I could think about was that night in October, when my friend Musa roped a bunch of us into waking up before dawn to watch some meteor shower. Not going to lie—at first, I was really grouchy about it. I was only half-awake, it was fucking freezing, and I didn’t really get the point of meteors to begin with.
But then we got to Foss Hill, and something shifted in my head. Lots of people were out there lying on blankets with extra blankets on top, like the world’s biggest sleepover. And it was really nice tucking in right beside Mikey, gazing at the sky and holding hands under the covers. He told me about his niece, and what it was like to have much older siblings, and how lonely he was when they all left for college. In the month or so that I’d known him, I’d never heard him speak this much at once. It was the first time I’d noticed his very faint accent, the lilt in his voice on the short o sound. It made me want to kiss him every time he said Boston.
He talked about Christmas and how much he loved it, and how he used to sing with his church choir. He hated when they did “Joy to the World” because it was too melodically simple, but “O Holy Night” was his favorite. So I told him how we used to sing that song in school chorus, and I loved when the notes got really high at the end, but I’d always have to mouth the word “Christ” instead of singing it, because I didn’t want God to think I was a bad Jew.
Mikey turned to face me when I said that. “A bad Jew?”
“For cheating on him with Jesus.”
I was hoping to make Mikey laugh, but he didn’t. He just gazed at me, half smiling, like he was starting to realize my brain was just one big surprise egg full of mystery weirdness, and maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing at all.
I tried to memorize the lines of his face in the starlight. We’d kissed a few times before at that point, but something about that moment seemed to cut deeper than kissing.
So there I was two months later, on the couch between my parents, thinking, O holy fuck.
I missed him.
Which is how I ended up in Boston a week later, begging Mikey for a do-over. To let me get it right this time. To be actual, official boyfriends.
Mikey McCowan, my actual, official boyfriend.
Therefore, Ben Alejo is welcome to mail his eyes and freckles and his fucking cute bright blue pants straight back to the universe. Return to sender.
“And the weirdest thing,” Ben says, “is that I didn’t even know you were going to be here until literally that day. I don’t know how I missed that.”