“I, um… I like you too,” I say, stepping a tiny bit closer to him.

He lets out a breath that he might have been holding all night. “Well, that’s a relief.”

I smile dumbly. He smells like some combination of deodorant and shampoo that I’ve never smelled before. It’s exciting, the prospect of learning his smells. He leans toward me. Every star is behind him. I know it, even though I can’t see it.

“Can I kiss you?” I ask, finally looking up into his eyes. They’re so many shades of brown. I’m self-conscious, petrified.

“I suppose so,” he jokes, then leans against his car and pulls me toward him.

At the last second, I pause. Our faces are so close together that there are just a few atoms between us and how we are now and what we could be. I giggle in my head because my heart is racing and he can probably hear it and my breathing seems loud too. I stop thinking about it, just close my eyes and go in the direction of him. Immediately our teeth clank together. Both of us jerk back.

“Ow!”

“Sorry.” I giggle, relieved that it’s dark in this parking lot. We try again, and this time our noses kinda hit each other in a weird way.

“Third time’s a charm,” he says, and it is. We get it. The softest parts of our faces connect, creating this slow, deep, twisting kiss that really shouldn’t be called a kiss, since it feels like so much more than that. He runs his hands through my hair, drawing me closer. I put my arms around his neck as I fall for him. It has to do with gravity. Our gravities.

“I meant to tell you,” he says, abruptly pulling away and smiling at me shyly.

I quickly adjust my X-tits as he opens his car door and then hands me a folder. One hand is still touching mine while the other holds out a manila envelope. “I put together some of the stuff we talked about.”

“What do you mean?” I ask, taking the envelope from him.

“Pieces of your essay.”

He lets go and I undo the tab, then peek inside. “I don’t understand.”

“I mean, I sent Evelyn all the stuff you said that day in your room. It wasn’t a coherent essay or anything, just a lot of notes, but I wanted Evelyn to know that you worked really hard on it.”

“Wow,” I say. I consider taking the pages out, but then I reclose the envelope. I haven’t had anything to add to the box under my bed in a while. Now I do. And someday I have a feeling this will be worth remembering.

“This is really nice, Brendan.” I hold the envelope to my chest and look up at his face. His eyes are sweet and familiar behind his dark lashes. “Thank you.”

He takes my hand and gives it a gentle squeeze. “Just in case you ever want to write a college essay sometime, you’ll have some notes to work from.”