Hutton’s cheeks flushed and he dropped his eyes to his notebook. “No.”
“Me neither.” I picked up my pencil again and doodled in the margin.
“Have you ever wanted to?”
He went completely still. “Wanted to what?”
“Kiss someone.”
He looked at me. His Adam’s apple bobbed. “Have you?”
“Yes,” I admitted.
Bob. “Me too.”
Suddenly I was aware of how close we were sitting. And how no one else was in the study room with us.
He leaned forward a little. His eyes were on my mouth.
I thought he was going to do it. I was positive he was going to do it. I wanted him to do it. But then I panicked—how did you kiss a boy?
Like, where did your noses go? What did you do with your tongue? Were my glasses going to be in the way? Was my breath okay? How long were you supposed to keep your lips together? Should I move them or keep them still? Dammit, I was chewing gum! Should I swallow it? And what did this mean that I wanted Hutton to kiss me? Was I in love with him? If he kissed me, were we more than friends? What did he really think of me? My heart was pounding and I was sweating profusely and the seconds were ticking by, I could hear them on that old clock on the wall—tick, tick, tick—and he still didn’t make a move, and I couldn’t take it anymore, so I shot words into the silence like bullets.
“My mother didn’t want me.”
Hutton sat back and blinked. “Huh?”
“My mother didn’t want me. My real mom.”
“The one that left?”
I nodded, my heart still pumping with fear.
“How do you know?”
“I heard her say it one night when I was about six.”
He looked uncomfortable, then rubbed the back of his neck. “Fuck.”
“She left about three weeks later. And she never came back.” So it must have been true, I left unspoken.
Hutton didn’t say anything. His eyes dropped to his lap.
“God, what am I doing?” I put my pencil down and covered my face with my hands. “I’m sorry. Forget what I said. I’m sorry.” My entire body burned with embarrassment. “I have no idea why I just dumped that on you.”
“It’s okay.”
Picking up my pencil again, I stared at my page of problems and pretended the numbers weren’t blurry.
After a moment, Hutton went back to his calc problems too—or at least I thought he did. But about five minutes later, he ripped a page out of his notebook, folded it in half, and slid it toward me.
I glanced at him. “What’s this?”
“Open it.”
I unfolded the page and laughed when I saw a message written out in pigpen cipher text. “You wrote me a note I have to decode?”
“You remember how?”
“I think so.” It took me a minute to recall the grid symbolizing the pigpen’s geometric substitution of the alphabet. But a few minutes later, I had it.
“I have been and always shall be your friend,” I read out loud, my throat constricting as I reached the last word.
“It’s from Star Trek.”
“I know,” I said, slightly insulted. But I was really touched. “Thank you. That means a lot.” I blinked away tears once more.
“You okay?”
“Yeah. I think—I think graduation is messing with me. And maybe the fact that we’re going separate ways in the fall. You’ve sort of been the best friend I’ve ever had.” I gave him a tentative smile. “What am I going to do without you?”
“No matter where I am, I’ll always be there when you need me.”
“I’ll use the code like a bat signal,” I said. “Then you’ll know it’s really me.”
He laughed. “I’ll do the same.”
“And let’s make a deal—we can’t ignore the code, okay? If one of us uses it to reach out, we drop everything and come to the rescue.”
“Deal.”
And just like that, my problem was solved.
FOUR
HUTTON
At first, I was totally confused.
The text from Felicity came in just as I was grabbing a beer from my parents’ fridge. But what she’d sent was a photo of something—a sheet of white paper with a bunch of nonsense symbols on it. I was about to text her back and ask if she’d lost her mind when it hit me.
It wasn’t nonsense. It was code—the pigpen cipher.
I smiled—I couldn’t believe it had taken me more than five seconds to recognize it. “Hey Dad,” I called. “Are we starting right this second?”