Friday and Everything After
He picked me up at exactly seven.
Not seven-ish. Not a text saying on my way at six fifty-eight. Seven o'clock, standing outside my door in a dark jacket, hair slightly damp like he'd rushed the shower but not the getting-there part.
"You're on time," I said.
"I told you seven."
"People say seven. They don't usually mean seven."
"I meant seven." He held out his hand. "Ready?"
The diner was exactly forty minutes drive, exactly as advertised, tucked between a laundromat and a bookshop on a street that looked like it had been asleep since 1987 and hadn't seen a reason to wake up.
Inside it was warm and slightly loud, red vinyl booths and a counter with spinning stools and a chalkboard menu that hadn't been updated in what looked like a decade.
"This is your life-changing pancake establishment,"
"Don't judge it yet."
"I'm not judging. I'm observing."
"Same thing with your face."
We slid into a booth by the window. The menus were laminated and slightly sticky and I loved it immediately, which I wasn't going to tell him.
"Blueberry or chocolate chip?" he asked, already knowing I'd get one of those two.
"Blueberry. Obviously."
"Obviously," he agreed, and ordered for both of us with the ease of someone who'd been here enough times to know what was worth getting and what wasn't.
The pancakes arrived in a stack that was borderline unreasonable. I cut into mine, took one bite, and sat with it for a second.
"Well?" he asked, watching me with entirely too much satisfaction already loaded into his expression.
"They're good," I said.
"Life-changing good?"
"I'm not giving you that."
"You're thinking it."
"I'm thinking they're good pancakes, Daniel."
He leaned back, arms crossed, grinning. "You're thinking they're life-changing."
They were life-changing. I was never going to say it.
We stayed in that booth for two hours.
Not because we ran out of things to say, the opposite. The conversation kept finding new rooms to wander into.
He told me about a photography elective he'd almost taken freshman year before basketball swallowed his schedule whole.
I told him about the short story I'd been trying to finish since before the semester started, the one that kept changing shape every time I thought I knew what it was about.
"What's it about now?" he asked.
"A girl who keeps rewriting the ending," I said. "Because she can't decide if the ending she wants is the one she's supposed to want."
He looked at me for a second. "That's not really about a story."
"It's about a story."
"Nuella."
"It's about a story, Daniel."
He smiled, and let me have it.
On the drive back, the city lights blurred past the windows and he played music low enough that we could still talk over it, his hand finding mine on the center console somewhere around the twenty minute mark and staying there the rest of the way.
When he pulled up outside my building, neither of us moved immediately.
"The pancakes," he said.
"Were good," I said firmly.
"Life-changing."
"Goodnight, Daniel."
He laughed, leaned over, and kissed me once, warm and unhurried, tasting faintly of maple syrup. "Goodnight, Nuella."
I got out before I could stay longer than I meant to, and stood at my door listening to his car until it turned the corner.
Life-changing, I thought, in the privacy of my own head where he couldn't hear it.
The weeks after that were the best kind of ordinary.
The rooftop became a regular thing, Tuesday afternoons when the weather held, sometimes just sitting, sometimes talking until the light went.
He took me to the boathouse one Wednesday, which was quiet and slightly overgrown and perfect in exactly the way he'd promised.
The diner became a Friday ritual, our booth by the window becoming something I looked forward to in a way I'd stopped pretending I didn't.
Saraph noticed, the way Saraph always noticed.
"You're different," she said one afternoon over lunch.
"Different how?"
"Lighter." She pointed her fork at me. "You've got the face."
"I don't have a face."
"The Daniel face. You've had it since the rooftop thing." She paused.
Saraph set down her fork. "Wait, the rooftop. You told me about that last week."
"I know."
"Nuella." She pointed at me. "You were glowing when you told me about it. Like actually glowing.
You used the word 'unexpected' four times in the same sentence."
"I did not."
"You did. I counted." She leaned forward. "And now you're sitting here with that face again.
The same one you had when you were telling me about it."
"What face?"
"The one where you're trying very hard to look like you're not feeling everything all at once." She smiled. "It's a good face, for the record. It means something actually got through."
I sat with that information quietly, turning it over, feeling it settle somewhere warm.
It was so gradual at first that I almost missed it.
A call that went to voicemail on a Thursday evening. Not unusual, he had practice Thursdays, the signal in the gym was unreliable. I didn't think anything of it.
Then a text that took three hours to come back.
Sorry. Busy day.
Short. Fine. Everyone had busy days.
Then the Friday diner visit got pushed, can we do Saturday instead? and Saturday became actually this weekend isn't great, next week?
Next week came and went without being rescheduled.
I told myself I was noticing nothing. I told myself I was pattern-matching onto old anxiety, reading distance into things that were just life being life.
He was busy. Senior year was busy. Basketball training was picking back up. These were all real, reasonable things.
But then came the call where I heard it.
"Hey," I said. "You okay?"
"Yeah." A pause that lasted a beat too long. "Just tired."
Just tired.
I stayed on the line a moment, waiting for more. More didn't come.
"Okay," I said carefully. "Get some rest."
"Yeah. I'll call you tomorrow."
He didn't call tomorrow.
I sat in my room that night, phone face up on my desk, and let myself think the thing I'd been trying not to think.
Tired. Just tired.
I said it quietly to myself, just to hear how it sounded out loud.
First it was family. Then it was busy. Now it's tired.
I pressed my lips together.
Same song. Different verse.
The rooftop, the diner, the hand on the center console, the kiss that tasted like maple syrup, all of it still real, all of it still warm in my memory. I wasn't imagining those things. I wasn't imagining us.
But I also wasn't imagining this.
I picked up my pen and opened the short story I'd been rewriting for months, the one about the girl who couldn't decide what ending she wanted.
I stared at the blank page for a long time.
Then I wrote, in the margin, small enough that it looked like nothing:
What if the ending keeps changing because the story isn't over yet?
I closed the notebook.
And waited to see what tomorrow would bring.