Tell Me Three Things(76)
I laugh, because what I’m feeling is something so much bigger than relief.
“What? You didn’t expect to almost get into a fistfight?”
“No, no, I did not.”
“I can’t believe it’s you,” I say, letting out the breath I didn’t even realize I was holding. My phone beeps.
SN: are you disappointed?
Me: NO!!!
SN: can I come sit next to you?
Me: YES!!!
Ethan switches sides of the booth, and now his thigh is up against mine. I can smell his Ethan smell. I bet he tastes like coffee.
“Hello,” he says, and reaches up and tucks my hair behind my ears.
“Hello,” I say.
—
After we’ve talked for a while, it’s like all those other times I’ve hung out with Ethan but also totally different, because we’re not working on a project, we’re just together because we want to be, and I now know him, like really know him, because we’ve spent the last two months talking with our fingertips.
“Why?” I ask. He closes the gap, puts his hand in mine. We are holding hands. Ethan and I are holding hands. I am not sure I ever want to give his back.
“Why what?”
“Why did you email me that first day?”
“Since my brother…I feel like I’ve forgotten how to, like, how to talk to people. My dad made me go to this therapist, and she said that it might help to start writing instead. And when I saw you on the first day of school, there was just something about you that made me really want to meet you. You seemed lost in a way that I totally get. I decided to email. It felt safer to be undercover.” He shakes his head, as if to say Yes, I’m strange.
“Have you written to anyone else?” I ask.
“I mean, a few times here and there. I like to watch people. I’ve told some kids stuff in the nicest way possible. I told Ken Abernathy that Gem was cheating off him in calculus. With you, it was different. Ours was a two-month-long conversation.”
“So what you’re saying is you’re kind of like Wood Valley’s Batman.”
He grins. Looks down.
“Not really. This is my brother’s shirt. It’s silly, but whatever.”
“I like being able to ask you questions and you answering them.”
“I like you asking me questions.”
“Tell me three things,” I say, because I love our three things. I don’t want them to stop even though we can now say them out loud.
“One: contrary to popular belief, I do not do drugs. Terrified of them. Won’t even take Tylenol. Two: I memorized the first part of ‘The Waste Land’ just to impress you. Normally, I play Xbox in the middle of the night or read when I can’t sleep, but I thought it would make me seem, I don’t know, cooler or something.”
“It worked. It was totally dreamy.” My voice is smiling. I didn’t even know it could do that.
“Three: my mom’s in rehab as of yesterday. I am not naive enough to be optimistic—we’ve been to this rodeo a few times—but at least it’s something.”
“I—I don’t know what to say. If we were writing, I’d probably emoticon you.” I squeeze his hand, another way to talk. No wonder Ethan can’t sleep; his family life is even more screwed up than mine.
“Your turn. Three things…”
“Okay. One: I was really hoping it was you. I was sure it was, and then I was sure it wasn’t, and for that second, I thought you were Liam and I wanted to cry.”
“Liam’s not so bad. I need to be nicer to him. Especially now. Oh man, he’s going to break my legs.” Ethan smiles. He’s not scared of Liam at all.
“No he won’t. He’ll go back to Gem, and they can be prom king and queen or whatever, assuming you even do that here, and it will be fine. It’s too bad, though, because I so want to set him up with Dri.”
“By the way, how right was I that you and Dri would be friends?”
“You were right. You were right about a lot of things.”
“Two…”
“Two…” I stall. What do I want to say? That for the first time in as long as I can remember, I feel like I’m exactly where I want to be. That I’m happy to sit still. Right here. With him.
“Two, thank you for being my first friend here at a time when I had no one. It really…made a difference.”
Now it’s his turn to squeeze my hand, and it feels so good, I almost close my eyes.
“Three? I don’t have a three. My head is still spinning.”
“I have one.”
“Go for it.”
“Three: I want to kiss you, like, very much, please.”
“You do?” I ask.
“I do,” he says, and so I turn toward him, and he turns toward me, and even though we are in this random IHOP and our table is full of the bizarre array of uneaten foods Ethan has ordered to allow us to keep our table for the past three hours—pancakes, of course, but also pickles and apple pie—everything falls away.
It is just him and me, Ethan is Ethan is Ethan and Jessie is Jessie is Jessie, and his lips touch mine.
But sometimes a kiss is not a kiss is not a kiss. Sometimes it’s poetry.