Felix Ever After(66)

No answer when I buzz his apartment door.

He doesn’t even bother showing up to class on Monday.

The realization hits me, over and over again. Ezra is in love with me. He has been for a while now. Declan was right.

God, I’ve been so effing oblivious.

The memories spin in my head on rerun. The way I told Ezra I didn’t want to hear how he feels about me—the way I told him not to love me. It was pretty shitty of me, but I was freaking the fuck out. That’s what I text Ez, what I tell him in a voice mail: I’m sorry. I was freaking the fuck out.

I regret it now. I should’ve spoken to him about it more calmly, figured out where things are between us. Are we still friends? Does he hate me now? Does he never want to see my face again? I was afraid we’d fuck up our relationship, but I still somehow managed to do that anyway.

It doesn’t help that I kind of feel like I cheated on Declan.

“What are we?” I ask him. I’m on the phone, locked away in my bedroom. I have the lights off tonight, so my dad won’t judge me for still being awake at two in the morning.

“What do you mean?” Declan asks.

I tell him, “I kissed someone.”

He’s silent on the other end for a few seconds too long. My nerves start to spike.

“Well,” he says, “it’s not like we’re going out or anything, or like we decided to only date each other. You can kiss whoever you want.”

“You’re not upset?”

“I am a little,” he admits. “But mainly because I don’t understand why you won’t let me have a chance to . . .”

“To kiss me?”

“I was going to say to meet you, but yeah—I’d like a chance at that, too. If that’s something you want, anyway.”

“You don’t even know what I look like.”

“I’m not sure I need to know.”

I open my mouth, almost tell him that he doesn’t know if I’m a guy or a girl or both or don’t have a gender at all, like Bex—but I hesitate. Even I don’t know my own gender identity.

“What if you’re not interested in me . . . physically?” I ask him.

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

“You can’t be attracted to everyone in the entire world.”

“No, maybe not.”

Captain is asleep beside me. When I touch her ear, it twitches back and forth. “What would you say if I told you I’m questioning my identity?”

“I would say okay.”

“Okay?”

“Are you questioning your identity?”

I scratch Captain’s ear, and she opens one eye lazily. “It’s weird,” I tell him, “because I thought I’d already had it all figured out, you know?”

“But that’s normal, right?” he says. “When I started questioning whether I was into guys or not, I drove myself crazy for a while, going back and forth and trying to figure out if I’m into guys or girls or both or neither, and it felt like the answer kept changing every week. I was going insane.”

“Did you?” I say. “Figure it out, I mean?”

“Not really. But I looked at a bunch of stuff online. Read posts with other people’s questions. Realized a lot of us have the same questions, wonder the same things, and I guess that just took the pressure off to figure it all out, you know?”

There’re so many things I wish I didn’t feel the pressure to figure out. Now that Ezra has told me he’s in love with me, I feel like I have no choice but to ask myself how I feel about him. I love him—of course I love Ezra. But do I love him the same way I would love a boyfriend? The question is so big, so huge, that I’m trying to avoid it. Every time it appears in my mind, I push it aside. I ignore the real reason I don’t want to think about it: I’m too afraid of what my answer would be.

“Is there anything that you feel pressure to figure out?” I ask Declan.

“Yeah, all the time. I guess the main thing is my future. If I get into college, how will I pay for tuition? Sometimes I wonder if it’s even worth it. Why be in debt for the rest of my life?”

“I know what you mean,” I tell him. “I’ve been so focused on this one goal of getting into college, because—I don’t know, I felt like I had something to prove . . . but I don’t really think I’m going to get in, and I don’t know if there’s any point in trying.”

“Something to prove?”

The irony of the conversation hits me. This is Brown that I’m talking about—the school that both of us have wanted to get into, the school that we’ve fought over. “Yeah. I don’t think a whole lot of people would think I deserve to get in. I guess I want to prove them wrong.”

I can practically hear him shrug over the phone. “Maybe there isn’t any point,” he says, “but I don’t think it’s a bad thing to show others that you can get in, just for the sake of proving that you can. There isn’t anything wrong with that, is there?”

After we’ve said good night—it’s only three in the morning this time, as opposed to five when we usually hang up—I pull out my laptop. I haven’t been sleeping much anyway, not since everything that happened with Ezra. I bring up Google and type in I don’t know if I want to go to college. What should I do instead?