Like this past Saturday night. A night when I’m having a particularly bad time and he’s cool about it. Yeah, he asks questions, but he doesn’t judge me or run away. He sits with me and doesn’t make me talk and I’m so grateful that I almost feel better. And then I do feel better, the cloud lifts just a tad, and we have a Moment and he gets all weird and leaves.

I want to chalk it up to gay panic. That Caleb could see my feelings written all over my face and had a hetero-freakout. It’s Occam’s razor: the simplest solution is usually the correct one. Caleb now fully knows that I have a crush, and was trying to be sympathetic to my feelings by excusing himself (un)gracefully.

But something in my hind brain is sending up the alarm at that straightforward (pun not intended) solution. I wasn’t lying when I said there was something strange about Caleb. Something … queer. And not in the current version of the word (though I’m still holding out hope on that front too)—in the “odd or unusually different” way. If I had spidey sense, it would be tingling all the time around Caleb.

He’s holding the thumb drive I just handed him like it’s something precious and unfolding the piece of loose-leaf paper I’d pulled from my notebook in first period and hastily scrawled all over. I should explain more—tell him he doesn’t have to read my reasoning for why I picked these songs (please don’t read this in front of me)—but my brain is stuck on Caleb and tingling so I don’t hear what he’s saying until he’s halfway through his sentence.

“—cool. Thanks.” He looks sideways at me as he pulls a textbook from his open locker. His cheeks are getting redder and redder and my stomach clenches in fear. Have I embarrassed him? This was meant to be an olive branch—a way of saying, “Don’t worry about Saturday, I promise I’m not like that all the time and I won’t try to kiss you ever, let’s just be friends”—but what if he thinks playlist-making is some sort of overture? That I’m hitting on him with music?

Oh god, that’s exactly what I’m doing.

“Hey, listen.” Caleb closes his locker and turns to me, face serious. Here we go. Caleb was trying to let me down easy and now comes the flat-out rejection. I should have seen this coming when Caitlin told me about the dance—if he doesn’t want her, he’s definitely not going to want me. I’m just relieved that this is happening between classes, that soon the bell will ring and this won’t be a drawn-out process.