The phone buzzed against the mattress like a startled insect, and I nearly leaped out of my skin. I stared at the screen, certain my eyes were playing tricks on me. Her name. A notification bubble. A reply.
I opened it with a thumb that felt disconnected from my body. One word: "Hi."
Just that. Three letters that punched the air from my lungs. I froze, the phone suspended in my hand, because this was not a scenario my anxious brain had prepared for. In all the catastrophic imagined outcomes—her ignoring me, her blocking me, her replying with a bewildered "who is this?"—I had never once allowed myself to picture this. A simple, open door.
My thumb hovered over the keyboard, then betrayed me again. I sent a like emoji. A thumbs-up. The most cowardly, noncommittal response possible. Perfect. Brilliant. I was already mentally kicking myself, already reaching to toss the phone back onto the bed and bury my face in the pillow, when it buzzed again.
She had written more.
"How have you been? Where are you now?"
The question was so ordinary, so disarmingly normal, that it broke something loose in my chest. She wanted to know. She was asking. I sat up straighter, my back against the headboard, and typed before I could overthink it.
"Still the same as when I was with you." A pause. My fingers moved again, pulled by some current I couldn't name. "And I am still frozen at the moment when you left me. How about you?"
It was too much. It was melodramatic and stupid and I would regret it the second I pressed send. I pressed send anyway.
Her reply came fast. "Stop with that and say where you are. I am with my mother at my old place."
The old place. Our old stomping grounds. The school. The streets. The world I'd just been forcibly removed from. She was there, walking the same hallways we once shared, while I sat here in this box of an unfamiliar room.
"I am saying what it is," I wrote back, emboldened by the impossible fact that she was still talking to me. "I am still fulfilling the curse that you left me with."
A longer pause this time. I watched the three dots appear, vanish, appear again. Then: "What curse?"
I smiled, a real smile, the first in a week.
"Curse to remain single forever and wait for you forever."
The dots danced again. When her message came, it was so perfectly her that I could hear her voice speaking the words aloud.
"I take the curse back. Now live your life."
I didn't hesitate this time. "Now I will wait till I find you again."
And just like that, the dam broke. She replied, and I replied, and the afternoon melted into evening without either of us noticing. We talked about nothing and everything—her mother's new job, my father's transfer, the teachers we'd hated, the cafeteria food we'd loved to complain about. Somewhere along the way, the conversation shifted. A joke here, a playful tease there. A comment from her that made me laugh out loud, alone in my room. A response from me that made her send a string of laughing emojis.
Five days. We talked for five days straight, the summer heat outside my window paling in comparison to the warmth growing in my chest. There was flirting now, light and tentative at first, then bolder, like swimmers testing deeper waters. She sent a picture of her ice cream and I said it looked almost as sweet as her. She called me ridiculous. She sent another picture an hour later anyway.
On the fifth night, as I lay in the dark, phone pressed to my ear because we'd finally graduated from texts to calls, she laughed at something I said, and the sound of it wrapped around me like something I'd been missing my whole life without knowing it.