My eyes drifted to the wall above Amelia’s bed, where a painting of a distorted fish hung. I had always liked the painting: it reminded me of how it felt sometimes being under the water—a separate body experience. Amelia said her brother’s girlfriend, Abby, had painted it. Her brother was a few years older than her. Sometimes when I saw them together I tried to picture if my brother and I would’ve had a similar relationship—both loving and annoying at the same time. The way my parents described him, it seemed like we would’ve been close.
A knock sounded on the door, then Cooper poked his head in. “Amelia, Mom wants to know if you want lunch.” Cooper’s eyes lit up when he saw me. “Oh, hey, Hadley. I didn’t know you were here.”
“Yes, hi.” I blushed a little. Cooper was cute, and for some reason, I felt like the fact that I had just been thinking about him was written all over my face.
“Tell Mom we’ll be there in a minute,” Amelia said.
“Will do.” He shut the door.
Amelia’s attention was back on me. “So? What do you think?”
“I wasn’t thinking about anything.”
She furrowed her brow. “Gross, I don’t want to know. I was referring to Robert. Will you talk to him?”
“Oh. Yes. I will,” I said, glad for the chance to move past my embarrassing thought process.
“I’ll go with you,” she said, maybe realizing it would be hard for me.
“Okay.” I took the notebook from her and scanned the list. “Seventy-two,” I said. “We’ll talk to Robert first, but if he doesn’t know anything, we need to work our way down this list. Someone has to know something. Right?”
“Agreed,” she said with a nod.
My stomach twisted in a knot. I had to talk to Robert. The guy I’d been avoiding for the last month. This would not be fun.
Six
My heart fluttered at the sight of Robert. So I had been right to avoid him for the last month, but it obviously wasn’t long enough—there were still feelings lingering under the surface that I needed to stomp out for good. His blond hair seemed longer than I remembered, and his shoulders broader. His skin glowed with a tan from all his time running or at the beach. He liked the beach. I had successfully not thought about that and many other things about him and here we were heading straight for his car in the parking lot. I wanted to turn around and leave, but right as I stopped to do so, he looked up and met my eyes. If I left now, he’d know he still had an effect on me. He would not have an effect on me.
Amelia gave an excited bounce next to me. I self-consciously smoothed back my hair. Why had we decided to find him right after swim practice? He had track after school, so I figured there would be less people around, but I hadn’t thought about how I’d look. A piece of wet hair stuck to my temple. I tucked it behind my ear, feeling heat creep up my cheeks. It wasn’t like Robert hadn’t seen me like this before. But still, here he was after a month, looking amazing. I wanted to look amazing too. Or at least a couple steps up from awful.
“Hey, Robert,” Amelia said.
He gave my body a quick look up and down, as if checking to see if he had made the right decision. He must’ve decided he had because he didn’t even smile. “Hi, Amelia. Hadley.”
“So we were online the other day and noticed you follow Heath Hall,” Amelia spit out.
Wow. No buildup at all. Just straight to the topic. I widened my eyes at her. She just smiled. She totally got away with stuff like that because she was so cute, even with her wet hair and swim sweats.
Robert laughed. “He’s not the real one.”
I furrowed my brow. “There is no real one. He’s a movie character.”
Amelia elbowed me. “We were just wondering if you knew who he really was,” she said.
Robert met my eyes then and held my stare for a three count, my cheeks completing their transformation to red, before Amelia interrupted by asking again, “So? Do you know him?”
“Yes . . . sort of. He goes here.”
“That’s what we’d heard.”
“Who is he?” I asked.
“I can’t tell you. You have to figure that out on your own.”
“Figure it out?” I asked.
“Yes.” But that’s all he said.
I wondered if he would’ve told Amelia had she asked the question, if he was holding back the info because it was me who wanted to know. It wasn’t the best breakup. Even though he was the breaker-upper, it had been obvious that night that he thought I’d tell him that he was more important than swimming. That I’d beg him not to go, promise not to practice as much or that I’d spend more time with him or something. But I hadn’t. Because it wasn’t true. “Why is his identity some secret?”
A loud voice called from across the parking lot, “Robert!”
He whirled toward the sound, then let out a yodel. And without even a backward glance at us to say goodbye, he bounded over to his friend and they bumped chests.
I took in a deep breath and willed my body to return to its normal state.
Amelia ran the toe of her shoe along a crack in the asphalt and then, as if it was the one withholding information from us, looked up with a scowl. “That was useless. He only told us information we already knew.” She studied my face. “Your cheeks are red.”
I tugged at the neck of my hoodie. “I’m hot.”
She squinted her eyes and focused on something over my shoulder, probably Robert. Then her eyes lit up. “Do you still like Robert? Is that why you’re so flustered?”
“Can we walk away from his car before he comes back?”
“Of course.” We headed for her car, the only one left in the back row of the parking lot. “So tell me, what’s going on? If you still like him, I can come up with another good excuse to talk to him. Should I ask if he wants to go get hot wings with us?”
“Hot wings?”
“I’m hungry. Can we go get something to eat? I’ll ask him if he wants to eat with us.”
I grabbed her arm before she could go through with this plan. “He broke up with me. It wasn’t mutual. He said I had a one-track mind.”
“What? Hadley! Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Shh.” I could hear Robert’s voice behind us still. I was sure he could hear us.
Amelia lowered her voice. “Sorry. But you should’ve told me. We could’ve bad-mouthed him together all these weeks.”
“I just wanted to forget about it. I felt stupid. I had liked him.” I obviously still did. But nothing had changed. If he didn’t like what was important to me, or at least understand why it was important, there was no chance for us.
“He should feel stupid. You’re amazing. Don’t let his blindness make you feel bad about yourself. You have a passion and you work hard at it.” She made a weird noise in the back of her throat that I recognized immediately as a noise Robert made. “So annoying.”
I laughed.
“Of course you’re too focused for him because he is a lazy pig.”
I smiled. “He’s not lazy. He’s on the track team.”
“Shhhh,” she said. “We’re venting.”