My stomach immediately clenches with guilt. “Yeah, I know,” I say, “and I’m really—”
“No,” she says, slicing her hand through the air. It’s another of her mom’s gestures, one that means you’d better shut up before you get yourself in even worse trouble than you already are. “Don’t apologize. I’ve had enough.”
“What do you—”
“I’ve had enough of you sitting there and feeling bad because all your friends love you,” she snaps. “Just now, when you were cheering for Roya? It was the only time this whole week I’ve seen you look something other than guilty for your friendships.”
“But—”
“No!” She slices her hand through the air again, and I feel like I’ve been caught sneaking in past curfew with a hickey on my neck and a bottle in my pocket. “We all love you, okay? Your friends all love you, and it doesn’t matter if you think you deserve it or not because we love you anyway. You think it isn’t fair to let us love you and help you? I’ll tell you right now: the way you’ve been mooning around feeling bad about our friendship isn’t fair. It puts the onus on all of us to make you feel okay about the fact that we’re helping you and it isn’t fair. And it would be incredibly stupid and insensitive of you to turn yourself in. Doing that? After everything those girls have sacrificed to keep you safe? Just because you don’t think you deserve their friendship?” She shakes her head at me. “Honestly.”
She huffs out a short, sharp breath. A couple of people near us have turned to stare. She got pretty loud by the end there. My eyes burn and my vision blurs and I feel my chin buckle in that little-kid way I hate. Maryam is still glaring at me. She’s quiet for long enough that I think I’m allowed to talk. “I’m really—”
“And another thing,” she interrupts. “It’s really messed up that we all have to go around pretending that we don’t know you’re in love with Roya, and it’s really extra messed up that you don’t think you can tell me about it!”
With that, she shoves her sunglasses back on, crosses her arms, and turns back to the meet. Tears spill down my cheeks, but they’re nowhere near as hot as the shame that roils in my gut. I look over at Maryam, then down at Roya, standing by the pool with a towel draped over her shoulders. “Did Paulie tell you?” I whisper.
“What?” Maryam snaps.
“Paulie—did she tell you about how I’m … how I … Roya.” I can’t look at Maryam, so I keep watching the way Roya’s long wet braid is dripping over her collarbone.
“No. You talked to her about it, but you wouldn’t talk to me about it? Who else? Gina Tarlucci?” She sounds like a pot of water that’s on the edge of boiling over.
“No—never Gina, I don’t—no. But Paulie talked to me about it,” I mutter. “The same way you did, pretty much. Although she was a little less mad at me.”
Maryam sighs, a big exhausted kind of sigh. She takes her sunglasses off again, tucking them into her pocket this time. “Look,” she says, then goes quiet for a while. She seems so tired. Two whistles blow before she continues her sentence, but I don’t dare interrupt. “It’s just that there’s only a few weeks until the end of school, and then summer is going to go by really, really fast, and then we’re all moving in together at school, right?”
“If you still want to.” I hate how petty and insecure I sound.
“So, are you really going to bring all of this with us? The pining and the meaningful glances and the frankly unbearable chemistry between you two? Because I don’t want to have to clean up after the elephant.”
“The what?”
“The elephant that’s in the room any time you two sit next to each other,” she snaps. I laugh before I can stop myself. She tries to look stern, but she laughs too, then wraps an arm around me and squeezes my shoulders. “You gotta do something about it,” she says. “You can’t keep torturing all of us like this.”
“I will,” I say, leaning into her. “I’ll do something about it. I promise.”
Maryam spots Iris and we cheer for her in the 200-meter freestyle. She and one other swimmer finish at what looks to me like the exact same time, and there’s some seriously poor sportsmanship on display from the other team as the coaches argue. Iris pinches the bridge of her nose to wait it out. In the end, they call it a tie. Maryam and I both boo, earning another dirty look from swim-dad.
I stifle a giggle, then nudge Maryam with my elbow. “So. Do you really think we have chemistry?”
Maryam rolls her eyes. “Are you seriously asking me that?”
“Yeah.” I bite my lip, then stop before Maryam can catch me at it. “She’s been kind of distant lately.”
“Like, since prom?” She’s tapping her fingernails, idly changing them from green to pink to blue.
“Yeah.”
Maryam raises her eyebrows. Her mouth drops open into an O. She turns to me and lowers her voice to a barely audible whisper. “I wonder if … Do you think that could have anything to do with you trying to sleep with a boy you don’t even like and then her having to lie to her chief of police mom about the fact that she knows exactly what happened to him? While also losing pieces of herself for reasons she doesn’t understand and can’t predict?” She manages to maintain a straight face for long enough that I’m not sure she’s making fun of me until she starts chewing on her bottom lip and says, “I don’t know, maybe you’re right and she’s acting strange because she hates you.”
“Okay, I get it.”
