He bites his lip as he leans in. “You think I’m great, huh?”
“I think you’re a pain in the ass.”
“Nah, you like me.”
“Never! And stop flirting.”
Laugh lines deepen around his eyes. “It’s okay, Walters. I like you, too.”
“Hello?” I say drily. “More flirting.” I wiggle his phone, my cheeks hot, my mouth hurting from trying not to grin like a complete fool. “Now how do I open this?”
He laughs again and gestures to his phone. I hand it over and watch as he messes with it a second. When he hands it back, it’s open to his contacts page. “Give me your phone number. I’ll text you the address for tomorrow.”
I tense, my fingers hovering over the screen.
My number in Garrett’s phone? Am I really doing this?
I have forty-two contacts in my phone. With a quick swipe of my thumb, I scroll through a list of names. It looks like he has forty-two just between A and B. And most of them are girls. I’m adding my name to a list of names.
I don’t want to be on Garrett’s list. I don’t want to know he can call me.
I don’t want a day to come when I want him to call me.
But I add my contact info and hand the phone back, shaking my head at myself. “I doubt I can go.”
“For the contest, Walters. That’s all.” We both stand. “And if you can make it, you should bring Mai. Anthony will be there.”
I gasp. “That’s bribery.”
His grin agrees with me 100 percent. “See you tomorrow.”
Chapter Fifteen
“I’m having an existential crisis.”
I drop my purse on the carpet of Mai’s bedroom and sit on her unmade bed. “I’m not sure what that is,” I say.
“I’m not sure, either. I just heard it on a TED Talk.” Sure enough, there’s a man frozen on her computer screen, the TED background behind him.
“Well, can your crisis wait?” I ask. “I have something important to talk about.” I’ve just come from the café and I’m still scrambled from the meeting with Garrett.
She spins in her desk chair. “An existential crisis is extremely important.”
“Fine. Your crisis first.” I lie back, loving the softness of her bamboo sheets.
“I’m working on my valedictorian speech. Would you say you’re the author of your own ambition?”
I lift my head so I can see if she’s serious. She is. “What?”
“This man thinks we’re little better than robots, going through life doing what other people think we should do.”
“Why are you watching that?”
“I started out watching graduation speeches and ended up with this.” She leaves her chair and climbs up beside me, pulling the pillow under her head. “I always thought I had things figured out.”
“Because you do.”
“I know where I’m going and what I’m doing, but how do I know it’s what I want? I’m seventeen. My mother still packs my lunch.”
“I’ve known you for four years. You’ve always wanted to be a microbiologist.”
“Because it’s what my parents do.”
“Calling bullshit,” I say. Above me is a dark smoke stain from a science experiment Mai conducted when she was thirteen. “If you weren’t into science, you wouldn’t have signed up for all those extra camps and winter intensives. You wouldn’t have picked one of the top universities in the country.”
She sighs, and I know she’s thinking back to what she doesn’t actually remember. An orphanage in a small country in South America. A little girl with glossy dark hair and brown skin. A mix of features from everywhere and ties to no one anywhere. “They picked me out of all those babies. They brought me here and gave me every opportunity. How could I not push myself?”
I tilt my head to look at her. “You seriously want to do something else?”
“Honestly? I never thought about it until I was asked to give the valedictorian speech.”
“Is that what’s going on? Or does this have something to do with Anthony?”
“No. Well, yes. Maybe.”
“I think that covers all possible answers.”
“He’s a part of it,” she admits. “He’s part of what I’m not choosing.”
I shift to face her, and she curls on her side so our knees are touching. Moving around as much as I did, it was never easy to make friends. I usually didn’t bother trying, but with Mai I didn’t have to. We just fit from the first day we met at the school library. I’m not sure when we had our first heart-to-heart, but I know we’ll never grow too far apart to have our last.
“When you choose one thing, it means you don’t choose another,” she says.
“I guess. But that’s how it is with everything, right?”
“I just hadn’t thought about it that way.” Her brow wrinkles the way it does when she’s working through a math problem. “When you think about it like that, it’s scary. Or maybe it’s sad. Knowing there are things you can’t have.”
I hate to see her second-guessing herself. “I wish they’d never asked you to give this speech.”
“I know. I’m making too much out of it when no one’s going to listen anyway.”
“I’m going to listen.”
She folds her hands under her cheek. “And what would you like to hear?”
I pretend to think. “Maybe something Yoda would say. Yoda is very inspiring.” I deepen my voice. “The force will guide you. If not, a general business degree good will be.”
“That’s a terrible impression.” She rolls to her back again, and I do the same. I smile at the stain on the ceiling. It’s a sad smile, though, because I’m going to miss Mai so much. I’m going to miss staring at that blot on the ceiling with the only friend who feels like family.
But I’m in denial about her leaving, so instead I say, a little too loudly, “Now! Can we move on to a different existential crisis?”
“Absolutely.”
I tell her about my meeting with Garrett. Except for the tickling, I-like-you part. “He wants me to go to this thing tomorrow night,” I finish. “To talk to this guy, Scottie.”
“Why can’t
