Chapter Three: The Counselor's Office
"You could have told me you were scared of this turning real," Felix said, low, careful, like each word cost him something to hand over. "Instead of just deciding, alone, that it couldn't."
Harper stared at him across the small round table in the counselor's office, her heart going too fast for a conversation that was supposedly about scheduling conflicts. "That's not fair."
"No," he agreed. "It's just true."
That was fourth period, Monday. First, there was the forty-three replies, and then the four hundred more that came after them over the weekend.
Harper had turned her phone face down on her nightstand Friday night and not looked at it again until Sunday morning, which had felt, at the time, like self-control, and felt, in retrospect, like hiding. By the time she worked up the nerve to actually open the junior class story, the photo of Felix's hand against her jaw under the bookstore awning had been screenshotted, reposted, and captioned by at least six separate accounts, most of them with some variation of the same joke: guess the psych project got real, huh.
It's fine, she told herself, scrolling with the specific dread of someone picking at a wound to see how deep it went. People forget things by Monday. Something else will happen. Someone will get suspended for something dumber and everyone will move on.
Nobody moved on. If anything, the story followed her into the building Monday morning with a kind of momentum she hadn't accounted for, half the underclassmen giving her the sideways, delighted look reserved for people who had accidentally become the most interesting thing happening at school that week.
Maren, the girl who'd sent the original photo, caught her at her locker with the guilty, over-apologetic energy of someone who had clearly spent the whole weekend feeling bad about it without actually deleting the post.
"I didn't think it would blow up like that," Maren said, wincing. "I just thought it was cute. I'm really sorry."
"It's fine," Harper said, which was becoming, she noticed, the thing she said most often when it was the least true.
She found Felix by his own locker two hallways over, and the look on his face told her he'd had a version of the same weekend she had, minus the part where he actually seemed to be handling it.
"Hey, at least we're getting an A in relational investment," he said, attempting the joke, and it landed flat between them in a way his jokes rarely did.
"Felix."
"I know." He closed his locker, quieter now, the performance dropping away by degrees the longer he looked at her. "I know it's not actually funny. I'm working on it."
Mr. Okafor, it turned out, had also seen the photo, because Mr. Okafor had a seventeen-year-old daughter and therefore access to every piece of gossip currently circulating within a five-mile radius of the school, and he pulled Harper and Felix aside before class with an expression that suggested he found the whole thing simultaneously inappropriate and academically fascinating.
"I want to be clear that I did not authorize photography as part of this assignment," he said, in the tone of a man choosing his words for a potential parent phone call. "I also want to be clear that the physiological response the two of you are apparently generating, whatever its cause, is exactly the kind of data this unit is meant to observe. I'm not thrilled about the audience. I am somewhat thrilled about the results."
"That's deeply unhelpful, sir," Felix said, and Okafor, to his credit, looked genuinely apologetic about that.
The counselor's office appointment, when it came at fourth period, had nothing to do with the photo directly and everything to do with it indirectly. Ms. Reyes ran scheduling conflicts for next year's electives, and Harper and Felix happened to share a ten-minute slot, a coincidence that felt, by that point in the day, like the universe actively conspiring against her ability to avoid a real conversation.
They sat across the small round table from each other while Ms. Reyes stepped out to pull a file, and the silence that followed had none of the easy, old-friend quality of the coffee shop two days earlier.
"Can I say something," Felix said, once the door clicked shut.
"You're going to whether I say yes or not."
"Fair." He didn't smile at that, which was somehow more unsettling than if he had. "The photo happening the way it did, that wasn't the plan. But you pulling away from me at school today like I'm contagious, that's not really about the photo either, is it."
Don't, Harper thought, feeling the familiar, well-worn instinct to deflect rise up in her chest, the one that had gotten her through the last five months without ever once having this exact conversation. Don't let him see the actual answer.
"I'm not pulling away," she said. "I'm being normal. There's a difference."
"You could have told me you were scared of this turning real," Felix said, low, careful, like each word cost him something to hand over, "instead of just deciding, alone, that it couldn't."
"That's not fair."
"No," he agreed. "It's just true." He leaned forward, elbows on the table, and for once there was nothing easy or joking in his face at all, just something tired and honest that she'd only seen flashes of before, always gone as fast as it arrived. "You know why I make everything a joke, right? Actual question."
"Because you're annoying," Harper said, but it came out softer than she meant it to.
"Because my brother is twenty-two and got a full ride to Northwestern and dated the same girl for four years and never once, in his entire life, seemed scared of anything mattering too much." Felix said it fast, flat, like ripping off a bandage before he could think better of it. "And I have spent my whole life being the funny one instead, because it's a lot easier to be liked for not caring than it is to actually want something and risk finding out I'm not enough to keep it. That's why I joke. Congratulations, you've unlocked the whole tragic backstory in one conversation."
"Your parents actually say that? That you're not enough?"
"Never once." He shook his head, something almost rueful in it. "That's the annoying part. Nobody's ever said it out loud. I just watched my brother make being loved look effortless for eighteen years and figured there wasn't room in one family for two people who got to have that be easy." He shrugged, like the admission weighed less than it obviously did. "Therapist would probably have a field day. I haven't told her that part yet either, for the record. You're getting the exclusive."
Harper sat with that for a moment, feeling something shift and resettle in her chest, the specific vertigo of watching someone she'd known for ten years hand her a piece of himself he clearly didn't hand out often.
"That's not tragic," she said finally. "That's just honest. I don't think I've heard you be honest like that before."
"Yeah, well." Felix looked down at the table, some of the old, easy grin trying to reassemble itself over his face and not quite managing it. "Don't get used to it. It's very draining."
He just told you something true and you barely said anything back, Harper thought, watching him retreat, feeling the familiar door in her chest stay stubbornly shut even now. Ten years of friendship and you still can't do the one thing he just did for you.
She opened her mouth to try anyway, to say something closer to the truth than sometimes had been, and the door swung open before she could, Ms. Reyes returning with a folder in one hand and an expression that suggested the conversation she was about to have was going to be considerably less interesting than the one she'd interrupted.
"Sorry about that," Ms. Reyes said, sitting. "Now, I understand there's been a bit of a scheduling situation. Harper, it looks like your AP Lit section overlaps with the new elective you both requested. Felix, yours doesn't overlap with anything at all, which is unusual, unless."
She paused, glancing between them with the mild, professional curiosity of an adult who had clearly also seen the photo over the weekend.
"Unless you two would prefer to keep sharing a schedule," she finished, "given the assignment."
Harper felt her face go warm in a way that had nothing to do with the overhead lighting, and beside her, Felix, for the first time all day, looked almost as unsettled as she felt.
Neither of them answered fast enough, and Ms. Reyes's eyebrows rose a fraction, filing that particular silence away with the same interest Mr. Okafor had shown twenty minutes earlier.
"We can figure it out later," Harper said finally, too quickly, and Ms. Reyes, with the practiced grace of someone who had navigated far more awkward silences than this one, simply nodded and slid the paperwork across the table.
The rest of fourth period passed in a blur of elective codes and signature lines, and Harper walked out ten minutes later without a clear answer to the actual question underneath the scheduling one, only to find Jessica waiting by the water fountain outside, arms crossed, expression unreadable in a way that made Harper's stomach drop before a single word was said.
"Got a second," Jessica said. It wasn't really a question. "There's something about April you should probably hear from me instead of finding out some other way."
She's about to tell me something Felix didn't, Harper thought, feeling the floor tilt slightly under a conversation she had not braced herself for. And judging by her face, I'm not going to like it.
"I'm kind of due back in class," Harper said, which was true, and also the first excuse her brain had managed to produce.
"This'll take two minutes." Jessica fell into step beside her anyway, matching her pace down the emptying hallway, her voice dropped low enough that it felt less like gossip and more like something she'd been carrying around, unsure where to set it down. "You know Felix and I used to be close. Before you two got weird about each other last spring."
"I know you're friends."
"We were more than that, for about a month, right before he and you happened." Jessica said it plainly, without the sharp edge she'd used in the coffee shop, which somehow made it land harder. "I'm not telling you this to be cruel, for what it's worth. I've had a long weekend to decide that, so believe it or don't." "It ended because he told me, and I'm quoting him almost exactly here, that he couldn't do it because he already knew who he actually wanted, and it terrified him too much to try."
Harper stopped walking.
"He was talking about you," Jessica said, watching her with an expression that had finally, entirely, stopped being about jealousy and started looking like something closer to pity. "Back in February. Two months before you two actually happened. And then April happened, and it fell apart in eleven days, and he never told you any of that, did he."
The hallway noise seemed to recede to almost nothing, the bell for fifth period ringing somewhere very far away, and Harper stood there with a piece of information she had not asked for and could not now put down, understanding, with a slow, sinking certainty, that the boy currently walking toward her from the other end of the hall, waving, easy smile already back in place, had been afraid of exactly this for far longer than either of them had ever said out loud.
Say something, she told herself, watching him close the distance between them, watching the smile start to falter as it registered, whatever was on her own face right then, clearly wasn't the reaction he'd been expecting. You have thirty seconds before he reaches you and asks what's wrong, and you still don't know what you're going to say.