Then we wait. In one corner of the room is a boy holding a red wad of tissues to his hand, the girl next to him clutching a plastic bag with what I’m half certain is a chunk of his finger in a sea of melting ice cubes. Since I’d rather not sit next to the guy who may or may not have hacked off his finger, I pick a pair of empty seats next to the vending machine.
“You really don’t have to stay,” I tell Tarek. “They’ll give me some antihistamines and tell me not to eat any more mango masquerading as cheddar, and I’ll be fine.”
“I’m not going to make you Uber home alone.”
“Are you sure your parents are okay with it?” Or maybe it’s that I wish my parents had been less insistent about holding on to Asher.
“They’ve got plenty of help.” Then he holds up a hand, a patch of rough red skin disappearing into his sleeve. “It’s usually me with the rash,” he jokes, sounding not at all self-conscious.
I give him a noncommittal grunt in return, and then we both go quiet. I cross and uncross my legs so many times it must look like I’m doing Pilates at best and a seductive chair dance at worst.
“So… you’re back,” I say, desperate to fill the silence.
He stares down at his plain black shoes with clunky comfort soles, idly scratches at that dry skin on his wrist. I wonder if he hates his eczema as much as he used to. The joke he made would indicate otherwise. “Yep.”
“For the whole summer?”
“The whole summer.”
Lovely.
“Was college…?” I trail off, unsure where I want to go with the question. “Everything you hoped it would be?”
He makes an odd face at this, one I can’t quite interpret, and then he runs a hand through the hair I used to dream about touching in that exact way. If I’m light-headed, I blame the mango. “Even better.”
“I’m glad.” It kills me to say it. Picturing him at UC Davis, taking classes in their renowned food science program, so completely sure of this thing he wants to spend his life doing—it stretches that jealous ache in my chest.
“And senior year? You had a good one?”
“Definitely.”
“Great.”
I’m not used to this stilted conversation, this way of talking without saying anything at all. We’ve always bickered, and I’m stunned to realize I miss that rhythm.
Because here is Tarek’s fatal flaw, the thing he has tried over and over to convince me is a feature and not a bug: he is, at his core, a hopeless romantic. And not the kind of sends-a-dozen-roses-just-because romantic or hides-a-note-in-your-jacket-pocket romantic. He’s much, much worse.
To date, Tarek has been in four relationships, all of them documented in excruciating detail on Instagram.
There was Safiya, who he wooed by filling her car with balloons.
Chloe, who he rented an inflatable bounce castle for on her sixteenth birthday because she told him she’d always wanted to play in one as a kid.
Paige, who he asked to junior prom with a flash mob involving his school’s dance team and an old One Direction song.
And Alejandra, who he charmed by having Mansour’s deliver a different homemade snack to each of her classes. After last period, she smashed a cupcake into his face and then pulled him in for a kiss.
He believed epic, sweeping gestures were the epitome of romance. If he wasn’t babbling to me about his latest flashy display, he was posting about it, interspersed with couple photos that were so clearly staged but inspired comments like wow otp and omg you two are the CUTEST. Meanwhile, I did… things I definitely wasn’t posting about on Instagram.
This was what we bickered about: romantic gestures, the very thing keeping our parents in business. Everything Tarek did felt fake, performative, bordering on intrusive. He’d insist he only planned a gesture when he was already in a relationship or when he was certain the other person would be open to it, but I couldn’t imagine the pressure of being on the receiving end of something like that. It wasn’t jealousy. I swear.
He and Alejandra broke up right after graduation, which meant that last summer, he was single for the first time in ages. My feelings for him whirlpooled out of control, turning me into someone who obsessed more than usual and dreamed up scenarios that could never happen. I didn’t like that person. I tried every antidote, the way I’d done for the past few years—I kissed other boys, went a full week without speaking to him, made a list of everything I didn’t like about him. Nothing worked. The more excuses I made to see him at weddings last summer, the more I could ignore the mental alarms telling me we weren’t right for each other.
I shouldn’t have ignored them. Because after our biggest fight, a fight that didn’t feel at all like bickering, I had an idea. It was obvious, really: I’d smooth things between us and let him know how I felt all at once.
So I charged forward with a grand gesture of my own. In retrospect, it wasn’t that grand, but it was about as brave as I could be.
I didn’t expect some poetic declaration of love when I sent that email the night before he left for school, even if I secretly hoped for one. I’d gone out of my comfort zone, broken all my rules, assigned words to the swirly sickness in my chest. If he rejected me, I reasoned, he’d be more than seven hundred miles away. That had to be the best way to speed up a heartbreak. At the very least, I thought I was worth a response.
Instead, after three weeks of unbearable silence, I sent him a text. Hey, did you get my email?
He replied
