A strange sense of déjà vu hits me the second the words leave my lips, and my mind skips back years into the past, to when we’d play hide-and-seek around campus. No matter how well I hid—curling up in the suffocating space of the art supply closet, silently inhaling the sharp smell of acrylic; ducking behind the rosebush in the gardens; plastering myself to the wall behind the auditorium curtains—he had always been the first to find me. It reached the point where I accused him of cheating. There’s no way you didn’t open your eyes early, I would protest when he opened the door, brushed aside the thorns, pushed away the curtains. How did you find me that quickly?

“I almost walked right past this area, but then I saw the rock that looks like a sloth,” Cyrus says, lowering the flashlight. “I admittedly had my doubts, but the resemblance is uncanny.”

“Right?”

“I mean, let’s not give your rock descriptions too much credit,” he says. “You were also shedding glitter. It was like tracking down a fairy.”

I frown at him. “Shedding glitter?”

“Your top,” he explains, then shines the light on his own shirt. With great mortification, I notice the glitter shimmering over the fabric from where my body was pressed to his moments ago. “Who would’ve thought that your impractical fashion choices would save you from an eternity of wandering through the trees?”

I wince. “I’ll dust that off for you—”

“No need.” His features are serious, but his eyes gleam with private amusement. “I’ll just tell people that I ran into a fairy. Come on,” he adds, before I can say anything else. “We should really go back before Wang Laoshi combusts from stress. He’s probably getting ready to call the police—or hand in his resignation letter.”

He turns around in the direction he came from, the flashlight throwing the patch of trees up ahead of us into clarity, and for a brief second, he stretches his hand out, his fingers flexing. I stare, unable to tell if he means for me to take it. If this were anyone else, it would be obvious to me. I’ve never had trouble reading signals before; I would know in an instant, just from how a boy looked at me, how his gaze flitted to my lips, how he walked next to me, exactly what he was thinking. But with Cyrus, everything seems to be written in Morse code. I’m still trying to decipher his body language when he slides his hand back into his pocket, the gesture quick, casual, as if nothing had happened. Maybe nothing had, and I’m just imagining things now, the way I’d imagined footsteps. Out of desperation. Out of fierce, foolish hope.

* * *