Page 71 of The Summer List

That’s not what made me turn to my mom on the car ride back here tonight and blurt the age-old words: so, there’s this girl…

I’ve started falling for her in the moments like this, when her silence gets so much louder than her sound, when the truth of her bubbles up to break her swirling surface and whisper in my ear to tell me somehow, somehow, there is a part of me and this girl that are the same.

I pull the door open and step out onto the deck.

“Hey.”

She turns her head, and even though I should be used to it by now, the glimpse of her stunning profile makes my breath catch.

“Oh, hey. You’re back.”

She slides her guitar away and shifts over a couple inches. I sit down beside her, close enough that the couple centimeters between her arm and mine feel like they’re buzzing with an electric current.

The whole house has felt like it’s lined with live wires ever since the night of our date. We’ve kissed at least once every day since then. We’ve cuddled and watched Jennifer’s Body. We’ve played around in the pool together and stood side by side in the kitchen while making dinner and taking turns picking songs to listen to while we cook.

There’s a small, scared voice inside me that whispers I must be reading things wrong, that those moments can’t possibly have meant as much to her as they have to me, but that’s all the voice is: a whisper.

I’m done letting it shout. I’m done letting it scream the words, ‘What if?’

I’m choosing to listen to Andrea instead when she tells me I’m amazing and special and one of the best people she’s ever met. For once, I’m choosing to see what it feels like to tell myself the same thing.

“Ouch.” I slap my arm as a mosquito pricks my skin. “Aren’t you getting attacked out here?”

Andrea swats at her legs as more bugs descend on us. “Yeah, they’re getting bad. I just…didn’t want to be inside.”

She shudders, and I inch a little closer to her.

“I get that. It’s kind of creepy to be in a house that big all by yourself. That’s how I felt the few days I was alone here before you showed up.”

She grins and leans over to bump her shoulder against mine. “I definitely prefer the house with you in it.”

We stay pressed together as she goes back to staring across the yard. I glance at her and see the grin has slipped off her face.

“You okay?” I ask.

She blinks and shakes her head like I startled her. “Oh. Yeah. Just, um, thinking about how early it gets dark now. August always goes by so fast, doesn’t it?”

I nod, my chest tightening. She’s right. There are still a few weeks of summer left, but the slow, sticky pace of July has morphed into August’s sprint towards September.

September.

When both our lives change. When she goes back to Toronto. When our summer fling ends.

Unless it doesn’t.

“Yeah,” I say, as my thoughts drift back to the talk I had with my mom in the car tonight, “it does go fast.”

I told my mom something I haven’t even told Priya yet, something I wasn’t totally sure of until it slipped out and I heard my own voice say it: I don’t want the end of summer to mean the end of me and Andrea.

I don’t want to tear up everything between us when we tear off the next page of the calendar. I know we never planned on more than a chapter, but I don’t want to write ‘the end’ on this story yet.

“Andrea…”

The rest of my sentence gets lodged in my throat when she turns to look at me, her brown eyes almost black in the growing dark. The ‘what if’ questions get louder, crashing against everything I want to say until the words are a jumbled mess in my head.

What if she doesn’t want that?

What if I got it wrong?

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