You Have a Match by Emma Lord

Author:Emma Lord
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

eighteen

It’s unusually chilly the next morning, when I’m lining up by the shore in my swimsuit with the two dozen other campers who were harebrained enough to sign up for the camp’s weekly Polar Bear Swim. My teeth are chattering, but maybe it’s not the cold—maybe it’s just the expected brand of mortal terror that comes with deciding today is the day you’re going to tell your best friend you have feelings for him, and alter the flow of the resulting space-time-friendship continuum for the rest of your lives.

I cut a glance at Leo, his eyes bright even with his hair still rumpled from sleep, and feel a cinch in my heart—something gleeful and terrifying, something that chased my dreams all night and woke me with a jolt this morning.

It’s going to be today. It has to be. I just don’t know when.

Before I can think about it too much, the whistle goes off, and I take off like a rocket with the first wave.

The cold is a heart-stopping zap. My legs pump under the frigid water and my arms flap like they’ve forgotten how to be arms, but for a freeing, very long second, it’s like it is happening to someone else. I breathe in and there’s fog in my lungs and ice in my blood, and it pushes out everything in its path—every embarrassment, every confusion, every doubt—frozen and sloughed right off.

I start running back out of the water before I’m even fully immersed, and straight up to where Leo is prepping the hot chocolate. He stops in the middle of whatever he’s saying to Mickey, his eyes wide with alarm.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” I pant. “Um—I just wanted—can I talk to you?”

“Uh, yeah, of course,” says Leo, scanning me up and down like he’s not quite sure I’m intact. We take a few steps away from Mickey, and he lowers his voice. “Actually, I had something I wanted to talk to you about, too. What’s up?”

“I…” For once it’s not that I’ve lost my nerve, but my teeth are chattering like one of those wind-up skull toys on Halloween. I need a beat. “You go first.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, yeah,” I say, hopping between my feet and shivering with violence.

Leo glances around us, and something flips in my rib cage. A stupid little hiccup of hope that maybe, just maybe, we are about to tell each other the same thing.

“The thing is, Abby … last week I got off the waitlist at another culinary school.”

The words are so unexpected that there’s no room for the disappointment that follows. I blink dumbly at him. “I thought you’d only applied to the one.”

“Just the one in Seattle,” says Leo quietly. “This one’s in New York. And yesterday, I … I sent the deposit. I leave in September.”

The ground feels uneven under my feet, like someone suddenly tilted it.

“Oh.” I try to smile, but it’s wobbly and wrong. “Congratulations, Leo, I … wow.”

He leans in, talking in the too-fast way he does during his legendary information dumps, except now he’s wringing his hands and saying it like an apology.

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