Frankly in Love (Frankly in Love, #1)(48)

But it’s too late. Because there she is.

“Where were you guys?” says Brit.

“Uh,” I say.

“I think I should pee,” says Q, and vanishes like the world’s clumsiest ninja.

“You look like you barely slept,” says Brit, scanning my face. “Did you fix a car or something? Is that grease?”

I thought I’d washed all the writing off, but I guess a few stray marks remain around the edges. There’s no good way to explain my face. It’s all a you-had-to-be-there joke. So I just find myself laughing.

“It’s signatures.”

“Signatures,” says Brit. “On your face.”

“I had the craziest night. Let’s go to the greenhouse.”

“Okay,” says Brit, confused. “I guess we’ll just go to the greenhouse.”

As we walk, I squeeze her close so I can feel her hips move with mine with each stride. I smile. I yawn, then yawn again, then remember that yawning is something I do when I’m nervous. I can feel Brit’s eyes watching me.

“What happened?” she whispers.

“I’ll tell you in a sec.”

We turn a corner into a deserted hallway, head outside, and duck behind the greenhouse like usual. Brit slides a hand under my shirt and kisses me.

“Your breath smells terrible,” she says.

“I ate a bunch of chips,” I say. “Sorry.”

“No, I don’t care.” She kisses me again.

“Hi,” I say.

“Tell me what happened last night before I start to worry,” she says.

I wind up with a deep breath. “Okay. So. Dad got shot—no no no, listen, he’s okay. I spent all night at the hospital.”

Brit backs up an inch and simply looks at me with incredulity.

I plow ahead. “The staff were so great. They all signed my face while I was sleeping.” I leave out that the signatures were Joy’s idea. I leave out Q. I feel sick doing this.

Brit sits silently, letting this information trickle through her mind.

I swallow spit gone all sour. “I’m so, so sorry I didn’t call you. It was just such a crazy night. It was late. I was freaking out.”

She rotates one degree away from me on the rickety bench. My ears begin to throb. She doesn’t have to say anything. I can see it in her eyes, which become flat with a growing melancholy. You didn’t call me.

“I love you,” she says to the tiny flowers before her. “Do you love me?”

I jump at this. “Of course I do.”

“Could you please say it, maybe?”

“I love you, Brit Means.”

As soon as the words leave my lips, she clutches my arm. “Help me understand. Me, I share everything with my parents. They share everything with me. My dad will text me during class about a new sandwich he’s discovered.”

She laughs at the memory.

“Maybe it’s just different with your family,” she says.

You’re goddamn right it’s different, I want to say. We barely speak the same language. Literally. You have any idea at all how lucky you are your whole family is fluent in the same freaking language?

Instead, I say: “I’m sorry. I should’ve called you.”

Brit doesn’t seem to hear me. “When you love someone, you want to share everything with them.”

Brit is fluent in the language of Openness, and I realize now that I am not.

I should explain this to her, but it’s all so tiresome and complicated, and my brain feels staticky with fatigue. So I say “I love you” again and again as a kind of stopgap, because it’s so much simpler just to be in love with Brit behind the greenhouse where no one in the world can see us.





chapter 18


black black sheep




“If you bake cookies in either square, triangle, or circle shapes, and have six different colors of icing, how many different combinations of shape and—”

“Eighteen,” says Q.

“Jesus, at least let me finish the question.”

It’s after school. We’re in his room.

Q yawns. “I think we’re fine for tomorrow.” He means our second official try at the SAT. There is no school the rest of the day. So we’ll either celebrate, or hide in our beds dreading the two weeks it takes to receive our scores.

“Hey, Internet, dim the lights,” says Q to the room.

“Dimming the lights,” says Q’s smart speaker. The ceiling lights soften.

Q picks up a game controller. He yawns again and again.

“I can’t even muster the energy to play anything,” he moans, and drops the controller to lie back with an arm over his eyes.

“Life is pain,” I say.

He ignores my ribbing. “So how did your talk with Brit go?”

“Good,” I say.

“But.”

“There is no but.”

“There’s always a big but.”

I sigh—that’s a timeworn joke of ours—and lie back with an arm over my eyes, too. There we lie, both with our arms over our eyes. “She was definitely hurt, and I definitely apologized and promised her I would be more open with things.”