Chapter Four: Day Seven
Felix kissed her first, or maybe she kissed him first, neither of them would ever agree on the order of it afterward, but by the time the vending machine hummed back to life behind them and neither one pulled away, it had stopped mattering who started it at all.
"This is a terrible idea," Harper murmured against his mouth, not moving.
"Historically, yes." Felix's hand found her jaw again, careful the way it always was, like he was still half convinced she might change her mind if he moved too fast. "Ask me if I care."
That was fifth period, by the vending machines nobody used because the good ones were on the other side of the building. First, there was the hallway, and the thirty seconds she'd given herself to figure out what to say.
She hadn't figured it out. Felix had reached her before her brain produced anything usable, his smile faltering the second he read her face, and the first thing he'd said was not hello.
"You look like someone just told you something," he said. "What did Jess say to you."
He already knows, Harper thought, feeling something in her chest go tight and strange. He knows exactly what she'd say if she ever decided to say it.
"Is it true," Harper said instead of answering. "February. Before April. Did you tell her you already knew who you wanted, and that it terrified you."
Felix went very still, the particular stillness of someone watching a door he'd kept locked for a long time swing open without his permission.
"Not here," he said, low, and steered her by the elbow into the alcove by the vending machines, the one hallway pocket in the whole school reliably empty during fifth period because the machines had been broken since September and nobody had bothered to fix them.
"Yeah," he admitted, once they were alone, and the word came out rougher than she'd ever heard it from him. "It's true. I told her in February because I needed to say it out loud to someone, and she was safe, because I never once thought there was a chance you'd actually want the same thing back. And then April happened anyway, somehow, and I spent eleven days convinced I was about to find out I wasn't enough for you the way I've always assumed I wasn't enough for anyone I actually wanted. So I ended it first. Before you could."
Eleven days, Harper thought, the number landing different now than it ever had before, no longer just a fact about the past but a wound she was seeing properly for the first time. I thought you got bored. I spent five months thinking you just got bored of me, and the whole time it was this.
"You never said any of that," she said aloud, and heard her own voice shake. "You just shrugged and said we were better as friends and I believed you, because that's what you do, you make everything sound easy so nobody asks the actual question underneath it."
"I know." Felix looked, for once, entirely without armor, no joke reaching for the surface at all. "I've had a lot of time to know that about myself. Doesn't mean I've figured out how to stop doing it."
"What did Jess actually get out of telling me this," Harper asked, before she could stop herself. "She could've just let me keep thinking it was nothing."
"I don't know. Guilt, maybe, about the coffee shop thing." Felix rubbed the back of his neck, a gesture she recognized from every uncomfortable conversation they'd had since they were twelve. "I talked to her yesterday, actually. Told her the crush thing was ancient history on her end and I hoped we could still be normal about it. She said she was working on it. Guess working on it looked like handing you the truth so you'd stop wasting time on whatever careful nothing we'd both been doing."
She did you a favor, Harper thought, filing away, for later, an apology she was going to owe Jessica Nandan whether either of them wanted to admit it or not. And you're standing here looking at me like you're bracing for me to leave anyway.
"Then stop right now." Harper's own hands were shaking, and she made herself hold his gaze anyway, refusing the old instinct to look away and let the moment pass uncommented on the way she always had before. "Tell me the actual thing. Not the joke version. Not the five-months-later version. The real one."
Felix exhaled, long and unsteady, like he was setting something down he'd been carrying a long time.
"I've wanted this since February," he said. "Not the assignment. Not the fake version Okafor's making us do. You. I wanted this before any of it was required, and I was too scared of exactly this, of it going wrong and taking the friendship down with it, to ever say so. And then the ledger, sorry, the packet, whatever, handed it to us anyway, and I have spent two weeks pretending the only reason I keep finding excuses to hold your hand is a grade."
Say it back, some steadier part of her urged, the part that had spent all of last period rehearsing honesty and failing to produce any. He just handed you the real thing. Don't hand him a joke in return.
"I'm scared too," Harper said instead, quieter, but it was true, and it came out anyway. "Not of you being bored. Of the exact opposite. Of this being real and then ending anyway, because that's what happens to things I let myself actually want. My parents wanted each other for nineteen years and then they didn't, and I've spent every year since telling myself the safest thing is to never need anything that badly."
"I'm not your parents' marriage, Harper."
"I know that. My brain doesn't always agree." She managed something close to a laugh, small and unsteady. "Working on it. Slowly."
"For the record," Felix said, "I've watched you be the person everyone else leans on for ten years straight. The one who remembers everyone's birthday and covers someone else's shift at the pharmacy without being asked and never once asks anyone to do the same for her. I'm not scared you're going to need too much from me. I'm scared you never will, and I'll spend the whole time not actually knowing if I'm getting through."
That's the thing nobody's ever said to me before, Harper thought, feeling something in her chest crack open in a way that had nothing to do with fear at all. Not "you're too much." The exact opposite of it.
Felix reached for her hand then, properly, no packet requirement behind it at all, and something in the way he laced their fingers together felt entirely different from the careful, documented hand-holding of the cafeteria two weeks earlier.
"For what it's worth," he said, "I'd rather risk the ending than keep doing the version where neither of us says anything real for another five months."
Kiss him, something in her said, plain and simple and entirely unafraid for the first time in longer than she could remember. You have spent five months being careful. Be brave for one second instead.
She kissed him.
It was not careful, not at first, both of them making up for weeks of not saying the true thing with the sudden, urgent honesty of finally saying it a different way, and Felix's hand found her jaw, cradling it, careful even now, even mid-kiss, like some part of him still couldn't quite believe he was allowed to want this out loud. The vending machine behind them buzzed and clicked back to life, its ancient compressor kicking on with a groan loud enough that they both laughed against each other's mouths without fully breaking apart.
"This is a terrible idea," Harper murmured, not moving.
"Historically, yes." His thumb traced the same slow line along her jaw it had at the coffee shop, except there was no packet requirement dictating it now, no rule four to hide behind. "Ask me if I care."
"Do you care."
"Not even a little."
They were still there, foreheads together, when the bell rang for the end of fifth period, loud and ordinary and entirely unconcerned with the fact that something between them had just permanently stopped being simulated.
"We should go," Harper said, not moving.
"Probably," Felix agreed, also not moving.
It was Mr. Okafor's voice, amused and entirely unsurprised, that finally broke them apart. "I do appreciate commitment to the assignment," he said, from the hallway entrance, arms full of the day's handouts, "but I'll need you both in your seats in approximately ninety seconds."
They separated fast, Harper's face burning, Felix's ears doing the same thing hers were, and followed their teacher back toward the classroom with the specific, giddy mortification of two people who had just been caught being exactly as honest as they'd finally decided to be. In the doorway, Harper caught Jessica's eye across the room, and instead of the old, guarded flicker she braced for, Jessica just raised her eyebrows, unimpressed and amused in equal measure, and mouthed one word across the desks. Finally.
Harper felt her own mouth twitch into something that was almost a real smile, aimed back at the one person she'd spent two weeks quietly resenting for no good reason at all, and made a private note to actually thank her properly before the day was over.
Class had barely settled before Mr. Okafor moved to the front of the room, holding up a stack of sealed manila envelopes with a gravity that killed the last of the lingering laughter in the room.
"Day seven," he said. "Halfway. As promised, this is when I distribute the termination scripts."
A ripple moved through the room, half dread, half morbid curiosity, the same reaction Harper remembered from the first day of the unit, except now it landed somewhere entirely different in her chest.
"These stay sealed until day thirteen," Mr. Okafor continued, moving down the rows, setting one envelope on each shared desk with the ceremony of a man who took his own unit far more seriously than any of them expected. "One week from today. You will not open it early. You will not improvise the language when the day comes. The script has been carefully written to produce a controlled, measurable emotional response, and improvising it defeats the purpose of the unit entirely."
Somewhere near the back, a boy Harper didn't know well asked whether anyone had ever actually broken the seal early, and Mr. Okafor said, without missing a beat, that the one student who had tried, four years ago, had ended up writing a six-page reflection on academic integrity instead of a two-paragraph journal entry, which seemed to settle the matter for most of the room, if not entirely for Harper's own racing thoughts.
He set the envelope down on the desk between Harper and Felix, and Harper stared at it, at her own name and Felix's printed neatly on the front beside the words FINAL ASSIGNMENT: SIMULATED TERMINATION, and felt the whole warm, reckless honesty of the last ten minutes go suddenly, coldly still.
One week, she thought, watching Felix's hand come to rest, without seeming to think about it, over the envelope, as if he could keep whatever was sealed inside it from being real just by touching the outside of it first. One week from right now, we have to stand up in front of this entire class and read out loud whatever is written in there, and pretend it's the end of something that only just, finally, actually started.
Felix must have felt her go still beside him, because he glanced over, and whatever he saw on her face made the last of his own easy composure slip for just a second, just long enough for her to see that he'd arrived at the exact same thought a half-beat before she had.
"We have a week," he said quietly, more to himself than to her, like he was testing whether saying it out loud made it more bearable or less. "We'll figure out what to do with it."
Harper looked down at the sealed envelope sitting between them, their two names printed in the same neat font Mr. Okafor used for every worksheet he'd ever handed out, ordinary and bureaucratic and somehow, impossibly, the most frightening piece of paper she had ever seen.