“What does Mike say about you leaving?” Rowan asks, and I hold myself tighter against the cold.
“He thinks all this is going to blow over. Like Danica is going to grow a heart overnight or something.”
“I still don’t understand how he could spend so many years with her and still have no idea who she is,” Dee criticizes.
“She was different around him,” Rowan argues.
“He knows,” I say, and silence creeps into the three-way conversation. I sigh before I continue. “I think Danica was different when he fell in love with her”—the word love feels so gross in that sentence, but I press on anyway—“and he’s just been holding out hope these past few weeks that maybe she was still that same person deep down. That maybe she’d come back to life.” I know the feeling, because I’ve felt it myself. But Danica isn’t the little girl who giggled in a chicken coop with me, and she’s not whoever Mike fell in love with either.
“I think you’re right,” Rowan says, and the understanding in her voice makes me wonder if she knows the feeling too . . . if she knows what it’s like to grieve the loss of someone who’s still walking, talking, breathing. “Sometimes it’s hard letting go.”
“But you shouldn’t hold on to a mistake just because you’ve spent a long time making it,” Dee argues, and all three of us agree.
“I’m assuming you told Mike there’s no way Danica is going to change her mind about this?” Rowan asks, and I use a frizzy brown curl to cut off the circulation of my pointer finger.
“Yeah. He offered to let me stay with him to finish the semester, but . . .”
“But what?”
“He doesn’t know that it’s not just the apartment that Danica’s family pays for. He doesn’t know they pay for my tuition, my bills, my groceries—”
“Why don’t you want him to know?” Rowan wonders, and I guess this is the part that I need to say out loud . . .
“Because it’s embarrassing.” Embarrassing. Embarrassing. I know I shouldn’t feel it, but there it is. “I hate that I have to bring coffee from home. I hate that I can never buy clothes with real tags on them. Mike is this freaking rock star, and—”
“Mike doesn’t care about any of that,” Rowan interrupts.
“I know that, but—”
“But nothing. Do you hear me? Mike doesn’t care about that stuff. Mike isn’t a rock star. Mike is just Mike.”
As if on cue, yellow light spills onto the porch when the door creaks open. Mike pokes his head out and sees me with my arms wrapped around myself. “Hey, sorry to interrupt, but . . . it’s cold. Do you want a jacket?” He holds a black canvas jacket out for me, and my heart constricts when I accept it.
“Thanks.”
“I ordered pizza,” Mike says. “They didn’t have banana peppers, but I got you olives.”
My throat is thick when I thank him again, and when he disappears back inside, I squeeze my eyes shut tight against the sting of the air.
“I still say you should screw his brains out tonight,” Dee suddenly suggests, and my nose is stuffy when I laugh. “Look,” she insists, “if you really are leaving soon, I say you should go out with a bang.”
Crickets.
“Get it? Bang?”
“That was so corny,” Rowan scoffs, but none of us can keep from laughing. And that’s why I love them—because even on my worst night, they can make me laugh. It’s why I’m going to miss them, along with Mike and school and the dog shelter and everything else about this town.
Well, almost everything.
I eventually make an excuse to get off the phone, and I promise the girls I won’t leave until we explore every option. I know that Rowan is going to stay up all night researching scholarships and housing solutions for me and that nothing I can possibly say will stop her from doing so. And I know that Dee’s grand plan is probably to physically hold me down until she can brainwash me into marrying Mike and having a dozen of his babies, because she refuses to believe he only likes me as a friend. But I don’t try to change their minds. I just let them care about me. I let them care about me because, when I inevitably have to move back to Indiana, I need to know that this mattered somehow, that all of this wasn’t for nothing.
Inside the house, Mike and I sit side by side on the couch, game controllers in hand, pizza slices on paper plates beside us, beers on the table in front of us. We join a map with Kyle the PussySlayer and bomb the ever-loving hell out of him until I laugh so hard, I forget about real life. I forget about needing to leave. There is nothing but the way Mike laughs with me, the way he turns to me and smiles.
“What?” I ask sometime around 3 a.m., giggling at the expression on his face.
“I think this might just be the best night of my life.”
I snort. “You’ve had too much to drink.”
He shakes his head, that goofy smile still plastered on his face. “No, I’m serious.”
“I think you mean delirious.” When he just keeps grinning at me, a blush spreads across my cheeks. “You need to go to bed.”
“Come with me.”
That blush turns into hot, molten wildfire. “I’m not tired.”
Mike sets his controller on the couch. “Come anyway.”
My nose catches fire. My ears catch fire. My neck catches fire. “Why?”