She starts clearing away the fries and shakes, mostly to avoid looking at me. “He was so sad after he was suspended. He called me all the time. At first, I held out—how could I answer him? But when I was in nursing school, he wrote me all these letters. He begged me to forgive him, said God was making him a better person. The Bible says we have to forgive, and I was trying to live my faith. I prayed about it a lot. In the end, I told him I believed him but that I had moved on past high school, and I thought he should do the same.

“I didn’t see him again until he came to an alumni reunion seventeen or eighteen years in, and, you know, he seemed to be all the things I liked best with none of the anger. I thought about how I changed, and decided to give him a chance, too. For a while, I thought he had.” Her voice gets soft. “But some people never become the best version of themselves.”

I go to Mom and draw her close. “He never deserved you, in any timeline.” I say what I now know to be true, “I’m glad to be yours, even so.”

Cheng comes over, and we sit on the flat rooftop of my apartment complex. We’re not supposed to be up here, and it’s probably dangerous, with all the hot air vents and a generator and, you know, a forty-foot drop to the lawn. But it’s not the Ledges and, this week, I’ve broken more than a few rules—mostly involving quantum physics.

Imagine telling your boyfriend—hours after he has taken you to the school nurse with a head injury—about your time-traveling adventure. I mean, it’s a hard sell. Chill as ever, he just nods a lot, quietly stroking my back. Even when I talk about kissing Chaz, which I downplay hard, he just listens without comment. When I am all done, he offers up only one conspicuously noncommittal response: “Okay.”

“ ‘Okay, I believe you’ or ‘Okay, drama queen, I’ll humor you, but I really think it’s a concussion talking’?”

He grins, leaning over to kiss me instead of expanding on his answer. “Okay, as in okay.”

There will be plenty of time to decide how much I want to convince him, or whether I even should. For now, we are quiet. No talk of the past or of prom. No revisiting our argument. Just boyfriends enjoying a silence, trusting each other enough to not fill the air with chatter. We are lying on our backs, looking at the heavens. I don’t know what he sees, but my eyes are on the Big Dipper.

His head rests on my shoulder, and we’re breathing, soft and slow, as one.

The night, the sky, the universe—it’s all ours.

Prom

Prom