“Meg,” he says from behind me, and I turn, look back down to where he still sits, his body curved forward. His face is turned up to me, his eyes serious but dancing with the fluttering shadows from the canopy of trees overhead.

“Yeah?”

“Your friend . . . I don’t believe she doesn’t want to be your friend anymore. I think she must—” He breaks off, lifts a hand and runs it through his hair, something I’ve never seen him do. “She must have something going on, with herself. I’m sure she’ll come around.”

Oh, no. It’s a big pendulum swing back. We’re probably in one-second-from-crying territory now. Reid’s quiet vote of confidence on this—even in spite of the fact that he’s never met Sibby, that he’s giving me all the benefit of the doubt, that he’s admitted, not ten minutes ago, that he doesn’t have all that much experience with friendship himself—it gives me so much comfort. I don’t even know if I believe it, really, but—God. God, it helps to hear it.

“I hope so.”

He stands then, and the movement puts us close to each other, unexpectedly so. Both of us seem to take the same quick inhale, and his hands rise to cup my elbows, as though to steady me, and I guess it’s a good thing, because whoa. Both of my elbows at the same time. I feel that touch like starbursts beneath my skin, between my legs.

My eyes rise to his. His head is tipped down, the hair he smoothed back curling over his brow again. When he breathes out, I feel the fine strands of hair around my face quiver.

I feel so many things, so much more than I did this morning.

“What I mean to say is . . .” He pauses, those blue eyes searching mine. “What I mean to say is, I think anyone would want to be your friend.”

Friend.

The way Reid says this word—I want to draw and redraw it, capturing how it sounds from his lips. I want to ask him to say it again, so I can watch. So I can know if I’m seeing too much in those letters when he says them.

I must be, right?

Friend is not starbursts in your elbows. Friend is not face-pressing. Friend is not thinking about how a so-often-stern, sometimes-laughing set of lips would taste.

Something in my body must’ve changed, straightened, because Reid drops his hands from me, though I still feel those starbursts. Do it again, I want to say, but instead I take a half step back and fix him with what I hope is a normal, unaffected smile.