“Do you want me to run back with you?” he asks, then kisses the back of my neck, which now holds all the nerves of my body.

“You don’t have to,” I say. But like, yeah, I do.

“It’s okay,” he says, and gives me one more kiss. He smells peppery, like he does when he’s starting to sweat. “I want to.”

Once he’s put on the eight layers required to go running in Massachusetts in the butt of winter, we hold hands and walk outside. He talks about how excited he is to start training right after Senior Volunteer Trip because preseason starts in the middle of June. I don’t say anything. I don’t really know where we comes into all of this.

“Race you to the corner?” I ask suddenly, then take off, feet hitting the pavement, body revving up. I pump my arms and legs faster, breathing more quickly to create a rhythm. I hear him behind me, sneakers slapping the sidewalk, so I cut across a lawn and then the road to beat him. Some lungs crave oxygen. Mine crave the lack of it, and the strain for more.

I force everything in my body to work harder as I approach the red octagon, my orange sneakers blurring with the dark pavement, and the curb of the sidewalk shaking back and forth. Just as I’m starting to taste iron in my mouth, I reach it. With a grunt and a jump, I slap the top of the stop sign and run a bit past it as my legs slow down.

“You win,” Gene pants, slapping the stop sign too. He jogs over and pretends to bump into me. “Excuse me, excuse me,” he says.

“You let me win,” I gasp, and push him toward the road. A car goes by and catches us in its headlights, kissing. The kissing makes it kind of hard to breathe, but breathing easy is boring anyway.

“Come on,” I groan, grabbing his cold spandexed butt and taking off.

For a few seconds I’m ahead of him, charging toward the traffic light, but then he catches up with me, a few strides here, and then he’s ahead of me.

“Wait!” I call as the light turns green and the stopped car drives off and the pom-pom on Gene’s hat bobs away. “Wait,” I call again, but I can’t catch up, so I just keep running as fast as I can after him.

3

Days ’til prom: 100

ON THE MORNINGS WHEN MY HAIR IS OBEDIENT, I HAVE EXTRA time before school to tend to the thing under my bed. Don’t worry; it’s not a monster. Maybe I am too romantic, but since that day with Gene in gym, I’ve been keeping a cardboard box there for all the sweet debris of senior year: movie stubs, the moldy daffodil Gene got me for my birthday in November, Polaroid pictures Abigail took of us, the fangs Gene and I wore trick-or-treating even though some old man said we were too old to be trick-or-treating, a Milk Dud, some sample perfume, and an unopened condom with red flames on it that says In case things get hot. It’s not that I’m a pack rat or a scrapbooker or a hoarder. It’s that right now we kind of have a kingdom here in the universe of rare and regular high school experiences. Maybe I’m too sentimental, or maybe one day when I’m old and life is bankrupt of adventures and my memory is even worse than a goldfish’s with Alzheimer’s, I will take this box out and remember. I’ll touch the black Ticonderoga and know what it was like to be bored out of my freaking mind in Calc until Gene walks by and throws his pencil at me and suddenly every bacteria in my gut is alive. I’ll remember how it felt to make videos with Abigail and laugh until we wet her bed. Maybe the deep purple paint on the box will be chipped and the glow-in-the-dark stars will be peeling off, but I’ll look inside and know that every single moment of senior year mattered.