Georgie, All Along (7)

“Oh. My. God,” Bel says, interrupting my thoughts. I look up to find her wide-eyed, a notebook open in her lap. “Oh my Godddddddd,” she repeats, and I lean forward to peek.

“What’s—”

But as soon as I get close enough, the question trails off, because I know what this is. I haven’t thought about it in years, but somehow, I’d know it anywhere.

Bel shrieks in excitement. “Our friend fic!”

“Oh my God,” I echo quietly, taking it from Bel’s lap without even thinking. I hold it with a strange sort of reverence, memories flooding me. I’d spent more time on this notebook at the age of thirteen than probably I did on any of the schoolwork I was assigned for the next five years. I loved this notebook. I loved writing this fic.

“Look at your handwriting!” Bel says, and my eyes scan over the loopy script that I packed to the very edges of each page, pink and purple ink my medium of choice. When I skip a few pages ahead, I find an entry of Bel’s, shorter and tidier and in a standard Bic blue, the same kind of pen she used for homework. It is possible that Bel thinks my handwriting has changed in some way, but honestly it still pretty much looks like this.

“I can’t believe you still have it,” I say, turning pages, barely registering what’s written there. But even still, my head is full of the stories inside it, the scenarios Bel and I wrote with almost frantic excitement. We’d started it halfway through eighth grade, our minds constantly preoccupied with what awaited us in high school. Story after story of what we’d do once we got there, this new threshold of being grown up. Real teenagers.

“I didn’t know I did,” she says, scooting awkwardly forward. I set the notebook sideways atop the mess of stuff left in the bin so we can both look.

“Look at this,” I say, pointing to one of her entries. “This is a whole story about you getting a powder-blue convertible when you turned sixteen.”

Bel snorts. “Extremely fiction,” she says. “My old Corolla must’ve had real impostor syndrome.”

She flips ahead a page and my face immediately heats, seeing the huge hearts that decorate the margins. Prom with Evan Fanning, it reads across the top, and also I’ve made the a in his name a heart.

“Georgieeeeeeeeeee,” Bel squeals teasingly. Maybe this is payback for me being delighted over her secret storage shame room. “You had such a crush on Evan Fanning!”

I groan in embarrassment. I did have a crush on him, and it lasted way longer than it should have, since he barely knew I existed. Evan Fanning was a year older than Bel and me, a golden boy from Iverley whose family owned and operated the local waterfront inn there. I’d met him once the summer before Bel and I had started this fic, tagging along with my dad to a job he’d had at the inn. Over the course of an introduction that probably lasted less than two full minutes (“This here’s my girl Georgie, short for Georgie,” my dad had joked goofily), I’d pretty much latched on to Evan’s boyishly handsome face and good manners as evidence that he would be the perfect high school boyfriend. This fic is positively littered with his name.

“I wonder what happened to him,” I say, but as I flip through the pages, really I don’t. Instead, I sort of wonder what happened to me, because I can hardly believe what I’m seeing. It’s the opposite of blankness, my newly teenaged brain fairly bursting with ideas about my future. Sure, it’s a small-scale one, full of adolescent imaginings of local traditions and film-and TV-INSPIRED teenage activity—The Day We Jump Off Buzzard’s Neck Dock, Sott’s Mill Shopping, Hard Cider and Horror Movies—but the point is, it’s a future.

A future I wrote for myself.

My palms are sweaty, my face hot. I can’t bear to look at Bel, because I know I’m having a way-too-serious reaction to what is meant to be a fun box of silly nostalgia. I am strangely desperate to be alone with this discovery.

From downstairs, I hear a door open and close, and like I’ve got thirteen-year-old muscle memory, I slam the notebook shut.

“Bel?” Harry’s deep voice calls, and she excitedly calls back, “Up here!”

I transfer the notebook to my lap and quickly dive back into the bin, messily shoving things out of the way. There it is, I think, pulling out the folded-down paper crown. “Here,” I say, shaping it back the best I can and handing it over to Bel. “Put this on, too.”

She laughs and obliges, the faded-pink circlet crooked on her head. She stands and turns to the door right as Harry finds us, his face brightening into a smile as soon as he sees her.

“Well, look at you,” he says, his eyes running over her, as though his wife in a too-small sweatshirt and glittered homecoming sash is the best thing he’s ever seen. Henry Yoon is a prince among men, the best person I could have ever imagined for my best friend to be married to, and I love him like a brother.

“Hiya, Harry,” I say from my spot on the floor, and his smile transforms for me, familiar and friendly. He makes his way over, bending to accept my outstretched arms. He smells like fancy cologne, except not too much of it, and also whatever hair product he uses to tame his thick black hair back from his forehead. Except not too much of that, either. Harry always seems like he went to some kind of fancy school to learn how to be a very sophisticated man. He went to Stanford, but I’m pretty sure they don’t teach you how to make cufflinks look totally normal there.