I swallow again. “Thanks, man.”
“I’ll tell you about everything when I can,” he says. “I promise. I want to. But talking about it, even with you, would change it and I can’t risk that yet.”
“Okay.”
“And if you don’t kiss Henna on the lips tonight for real, I’ll make sure you have black eyes all the way through graduation.”
He grins, and though I’m still worried about him – I wouldn’t be me if I wasn’t – the happiness I feel at what he said is just like he really did punch me in the chest.
“Would it be okay if I kissed you?” Henna asks, before we’re even half a mile from her house.
I stop right there in the middle of the road.
“What?” is pretty much all I can come up with.
“It’s kind of in the spirit of exploration,” she says. “We’ve both always wondered, haven’t we?”
“We have? You have?”
“You’re a cute boy I’ve known for a hundred years. Of course I’ve thought about it.”
A car pulls up behind us in the wooded dark, its headlights shining on the backs of our heads. After a second, it honks. Without taking my eyes off Henna, I hit the hazard lights. The car honks again, then pulls around us.
“Don’t you feel like the world’s shaken loose?” Henna says.
“Yes,” I say, because it has. “You think I’m cute?”
“Here’s this future we’re looking at. And it’s not far away like the future normally is. It’s here, now.
Like any second.” She rubs her shoulder. “I got vaccinated for the Africa trip today. We’re still going.
Even when I’ve just had surgery on my arm. My dad says he’s a doctor and can look after me and God will watch over us as we do His will and so nothing’s changed. We’re going and it’s real.”
“You could stay with us,” I say and then I think, no, she probably couldn’t. She knows it, too, from the look she gives me. “Or Jared. For the summer at least–”
“No,” she says, shaking her head. “It’s happening. There’s nothing I can do about it. There’s nothing I can do about graduating. Nothing I can do about going to a different college than all of my friends. Nothing I can do about these feelings for Nathan that surprise me as much as anybody. Sorry, but what’s the point of lying about it? What’s the point of lying about anything? We could keep being too afraid to say we don’t know stuff and then the future will come and eat us anyway and we’ll regret not doing all that stuff we wished we did. You know?”
“Not really.”
She smiles. “There’s the truth, see? Isn’t it great?”
Another car passes us going the other way. It goes pretty slowly, though, and we wait for it to pass, as if it could somehow overhear our conversation.
“Why do you want to kiss me?” I ask.
“Because I don’t know if I should. I don’t know what it’ll feel like.” She shrugs. “I used to like you that way. Way back when Mel started school again. I could see how much you cared for her, Mike.
How much you looked after her.” Her eyes have gone a little wet. “I don’t know if Teemu would have looked after me like that in the same situation.” She swallows away the tears. “I’d like to think so but I’m never going to find out. And I don’t like that I’m not.”