Page 71 of Rules for Rule Breaking
He ran a hand through his hair. He was regretting saying anything, but his mouth was already open, so he had to say something before she thought he’d lost his mind.
“When we first met... I... uh.” He cleared his throat. “Well, what I’m trying to say is that I didn’t only want to be your friend.I mean, I was, like, seven, so it wasn’t all that deep, but I... I don’t know. I told my mom I liked you, and she told me you were only mean to me because you liked me too. So do you know what I did?”
“Cried?” she asked with a nervous laugh.
“Well, yes,” Bobby said with an eye roll. He swallowed the lump in his throat. “But after the tears dried, I decided to wait you out until the teasing stopped. At some point, I think I forgot to keep waiting, but now I’m thinking maybe I shouldn’t have.”
Winter tugged on her loosening braid. “I don’t know what to say.”
“I’m completely misreading this situation, aren’t I?” he asked, and took a step back. “Yes, I am. And... I’m sorry for making this super weird.” Bobby looked around. “Hey, did you know there were other people here?” he said with a nervous laugh.
Winter buried her face in her hands. “I’m sorry I don’t know how to act. No one has ever told me they liked me before.”
“You don’t have to act different. You’re perfect as you are.”
“I am, aren’t I?” she said, and took a gulp of her bubble tea with a satisfiedahhh. Her cheeks puffed out as she chewed on the grass jelly. Bobby was deeply charmed and overwhelmed with the sheer cuteness. He didn’t know what was wrong with him. It was like a dam had broken inside of his own body, and all the discipline he’d been restraining himself with for years wasn’t enough to stop him from grinning like a fool.
They walked through the MIT campus, and he didn’t look at anything except for Winter. Her hair had a wave in it from the braid, and it appeared even wilder than usual. Her cheeks were flushed, and her neck and chest were red and splotchy with Asian glow. She kept glancing at him and saying, “What?” and giggling.
Winter massaged her cheeks. They ached from smiling so much. Bobby wanted to keep her smiling, so he ran to a food truck nearby and bought her a shawarma with extra tahini sauce. When he presented her with it, her face lit up like he’d given her a bouquet of roses.
They ate and walked around the rest of the campus, exploring every single nook and cranny they could get into. When it got too dark, they bought gelato and waited for the stars to come out.
Winter Park
33. WE WILL NOT HAVE PHOTO EVIDENCE OF OUR RULE BREAKING
A space nerd and a future tech wunderkind walked into a party. Winter had heard that joke before, but looking at a flushed-face Bobby pretending he wasn’t completely out of his element, it was more likely being written before her eyes.
MIT students worked so hard that when they partied, they partied like it was the end-times. Their generation had seen the end-times many times before, so they’d adjusted their partying accordingly. Bigger was not better; quirkier was. There was a homemade Slip ’N Slide running the entire length of the backyard, and some of the brightest students in the world were sliding down it, unable to hide their childlike joy. There were Christmas lights hung around the living room, because why not? And people Winter had never seen before, but who somehow felt familiar, were sitting on mismatched couches with red cups in their hands and delighted laughs in their lungs. She couldn’t help but feel that this city—with these people, some of whom looked just like her—was where she was meant to be. She felt up, higher than the clouds, higher than the universe, like she was looking down on herself, wondering what the hell she was doing. At a college party. With Bobby Bae. But at that moment, she didn’t care. Bobby was there to hold her hand through it.
Bobby spotted Kai’s cousin Omari through the crowd. He hadKai’s same low-key energy with a certain dapperness to him. He had on all black with a pair of browline glasses perched on his nose.
Bobby and Winter weaved through the slippery bodies covered in soap and sweat to get to him.
“Bae! You made it!” Omari said, locking him in one of those handshake-hug combinations that men seem to have perfected over generations of bro-dom.
Everything fuzzed out as Bobby and Omari engaged in the obligatory small talk. Winter’s body swayed to the beat of the music without her even telling it to do it. She hiccupped and giggled and then found herself posing for a selfie. Omari draped his arm over her, but that didn’t stop Bobby from squeezing in between them and putting his hands on her waist as they said cheese. She could feel his chest against her back and his hand pushing her shirt up ever so slightly. Would these pictures be online for everyone back home to see? Would people care she was with the very person she’d always been so careful not to be seen with? And would they notice her leaning farther into his arms? Android users probably wouldn’t see it, and it didn’t matter anyway. She was happy.
Bobby followed Omari to the card table bar, and Winter was pulled into a conversation with the people on one of the mismatched couches. Everyone there was so intelligent and so drunk. A series of information dumps was only broken up by cheering and hollering every time a soapy body flew across the backyard.
Alissa was a marketing major at BU and an Instagram influencer for a startup company that sold T-shirts with empowering phrases on them. Seth had moved from Egypt to attend MIT so he could major in biology and eventually work in forensics. Last there was Blaise, who Winter couldn’t quite figure out because he’d self-medicated into an unintelligible slur. She was charmed by them all. Rarely didshe feel she made sense within the context of a group.
The entire time she was talking, she couldn’t stop finding Bobby’s eyes with her own. He was making a mess of mixing drinks while he struggled through small talk with Omari. He kept looking over at her and smiling, pleading with his eyes for her to rescue him, but she liked to see him squirm.
Bobby eventually broke free and found his way back to her. He sat down next to her on the couch and handed her a drink.
“Jjan,” he said, and they crashed their cups together before taking timid sips of what tasted like gasoline mixed with red Gatorade.
“Immediately no,” Winter said, handing it back.
“Can’t say we didn’t try,” Bobby replied, placing the cups on a side table.
“You both look dry,” Alissa said. “You haven’t tried the slide.”
Winter poked Bobby in the ribs. “I dare you.”
She saw something in his eyes change, a flicker of emotion, an acknowledgment of her challenge and a promise to accept it. “Let’s do it.”
