Page 19 of What You Wish For

What can I say? It was a low point.

A very low point.

And, actually, it became a turning point.

Before that moment back then, I’d been infatuated with Duncan Carpenter for two solid years. Big-time infatuated. Hard-core infatuated. Infatuated the way teenage girls get infatuated with pop stars. If he’d had song lyrics, I’d have memorized them; if he’d had merch, I’d have bought it; and if he’d had a fan club, I’d have been the president.

Of course, he wasn’t a pop star.

But he was, you know… a celebrity of sorts. In the world of private, secondary-school education. In our tiny little sliver of humanity, he was a big deal. He was the pop icon of our teaching colleagues, for sure.

And for good reason.

He had a big, friendly smile filled with big, friendly teeth. He was handsome without trying. He had a magnetic quality that was almost physical. If he was in a room with other humans in it for any amount of time, there’d be a group of them gathered around him by the end. He emitted some kind of sunshine that we all wanted to soak up.

Me included.

Me especially.

But I was terrible around him. I was the worst possible version of myself. All the longing and desire and electricity and joy I felt whenever he was anywhere near me seemed to scramble my system. I’d freeze, and get quiet and still and self-conscious, and stare at him, unblinking, like a weirdo.

It was uncomfortable, to say the least.

When I’d first met him, he was single—and he stayed that way for one long, beautiful, possibility-infused year as I tried to work up the nerve to sit at his table at lunch. A year that slipped by fast, and then suddenly, before I’d made any progress—boom!—a perky new girl from the admissions office just brazenly asked him out.

Their assigned parking spots were next to each other, apparently.

It was front-page teacher news, and the grade-school faculty were by and large offended. Wasn’t it a littleuppityto just swoop in and start dating whoever she wanted?

Apparently not.

Soon, they were exclusive, and then they were serious, and then, barely a year to the day after she’d first asked him out, they were moving in together. Rumor had it she’d been the one to ask him. A move I would’ve admired for feminist reasons if it had been any other couple at all.

The consensus among the female teachers was that she was too conventional, too small-minded, and too ordinary to be a good match for him—mostly because he was the opposite of all those things.

Frankly, I agreed—but I also knew my opinion was based largely on one short interaction, when, awkwardly trying to make chitchat at a school function, I’d said to her, “Admissions! That must be tough! How do you make all those agonizing decisions?”

And she just blinked at me and said, “It’s just whoever has the most money.”

Then, reading my shocked expression, she shifted to a laugh and said, “I’m kidding.”

But was she, though?

Nobody was sure she deserved him.

Of course… it didn’t follow that Idid.

I couldn’t even say hi to him in the elevator.

Anyway, it was not five minutes after I’d heard the moving-in-together news—from a librarian who’d heard it from a math teacher who’d heard it from the school nurse—that, as I was making my way outside to gulp some fresh air… he asked me to cat-sit.

I’d just rounded the corner of the hallway, and there he was. Wearing a tie with dachshunds all over it.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey,” I said, panicking at the way he’d… just materialized.

Then, of all things, he said, “I’ve heard you’re a cat person.”

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