Tenth grade – present day

Jude crossed the room and slapped the journal out of Connor's hands. It went flying, landing on the floor with a thud, but Jude didn't move to retrieve it. He only said again, his voice rising—

"What are you doing?"

Connor didn't reply.

"How much of it did you read?" Jude demanded.

Jude's voice was loud, thick with anger. His hands had curled reflexively into fists. Even though Connor was taller than him by several inches, with an athlete's build, he found himself shrinking away. Jude looked like he was going to take a swing at him.

"How much?" Jude yelled.

The sound of his own voice seemed to bring Jude back to himself. He took a step back. He flexed his hands and turned away from Connor.

From downstairs, there came a call. Stef's voice, muffled by distance: "Jude, honey, is everything all right?"

"Yeah, Mom, I'm fine," Jude called back. "Connor's just leaving."

"I'm not leaving," Connor said to Jude.

"…You wanna stay? You wanna rifle through my closet? Go through my internet files? What the hell else do you want?"

Jude had got enough of a grip on himself that he was no longer yelling, but anger still burned bright in his eyes. It made Connor balk.

"I want you to tell me…" Connor began and then trailed off.

Jude's voice was caustic. "What?"

Connor took a deep breath and tried again.

"I wanna know why I'm on every single page of your journal. I wanna know why you write about me like—like—"

He couldn't bring himself to say what he was thinking. Like I'm the love of your life.

"It's not you!" Jude exploded.

Connor looked at him uncomprehendingly. Jude was silent for a long moment. When he began to speak, Connor could hear the strain in his voice as he worked to control his anger.

"I don't even know who you are anymore, Connor. I don't know if I ever did. You're just some popular guy with a tin heart. I don't care about you and you don't care about me. We just make out sometimes, because you're bored of your life and you know I can't say no to you."

As Jude spoke, he sounded calm – frighteningly calm. He wasn't trying to hurt Connor. He was just telling the truth.

Connor found that his own voice was very small-sounding when he replied.

"Then why did you write all those things—?"

"What's in that notebook, it's like… the version of you I have in my head," said Jude. "The person I thought you could be. The perfect Connor who I've loved since I was twelve fucking years old. You're the fairy story I tell myself. The Connor on those pages"—Jude looked at him scathingly—"it's not you."

"Connor…" Stef said as Connor brushed past her on his way out of the house, but he didn't stop.

He felt like he couldn't stop, like his whole body was movement and if he was still, he might die.

He stumbled back into his car and accelerated haphazardly out of park. Full of crazed, kinetic energy, he hit the gas and drove. He turned on the car stereo, loud enough to try and drown out his thoughts. His hands bounced agitatedly against the steering wheel every time he hit a stop light. And every time the light turned green, he drove.

He drove and drove and drove. He drove aimlessly, without destination; out of the city and then back again. He drove to feel better and, when that didn't work, he just kept driving anyway.

Slowly, as minutes turned to hours, he felt the energy ebb out of him. That was worse. Amped up was better than hollowed out.

Finally, as the sun was setting, he found himself at the beach. He parked up, a few blocks from the school, and walked to the shoreline. Water lapped at his feet, but he scarcely noticed. The sun was sinking, the sky darkening, and the water creeping inland.

He sat down and buried his fingers in the cold, gritty texture of wet sand. As he watched the dark waves lick at his feet, he wondered how long it would take for the water to rise and cover his whole body.

Nothing changed.

Everything stayed exactly the same.

Two weeks passed, during which time Connor went to baseball practice. He sat with Bryce at lunch and ate the mystery meat. He endured his dad's lectures and his mom's silences. He looked at Jude across crowded corridors and Jude didn't meet his eye. Two weeks passed and everything stayed the same.

The realization that everything could be exactly as it had always been made Connor feel lightheaded. He sleepwalked through the days and even that didn't seem to make much difference. He wondered for how long he'd been sleepwalking through life.

The hours after school that he'd once spent with Jude, he now spent writing.

In slow, laborious cursive, only vaguely remembered from grade school, he filled page after page with neat, tortured writing. An emotional clamor on silent pages.

He typed most of his school assignments on his laptop, but for this, it felt right to write with a pen. His hand ached from the effort and he had to stop often to think. Most days, he did more thinking than writing. But he kept on writing. Page after page.

Nothing changed unless you changed it, Connor thought and kept writing.

"What's up with this meat?" Connor asked conversationally. "Is it supposed to be beef?"

He sat down across from Jude at his lunch table. It was the start of Sophomore lunch period and the school lawn was crowded and noisy, the outdoor tables around them filled with talking, laughing students. Connor lifted a forkful of mystery meat and continued speaking to Jude:

"Maybe it's from, like, a pig with rabies. Or a really messed-up chicken."

Jude said nothing.

"What do you think?" Connor prompted.

Jude picked up his lunch tray and stood up.

"If you move, I'll just follow you," said Connor. "I think we should eat lunch together."

Jude made a face, but he set his tray down.

"Why? When have you wanted to eat lunch with me, ever, in the last three years?"

Connor considered this for a moment.

"Every day," he said calmly. "Every day since you started here, I wanted to eat lunch with you."

Connor's simple declaration seemed to set Jude off balance.

"Well, I don't want to eat lunch with you," Jude said, frowning.

Jude picked up his tray again. He turned his body, sliding out of the trappings of the plastic picnic table. Seeing that he really was leaving, Connor began to panic. Was he actually going to chase Jude across the lunch room? Did he really think this could be as easy as sitting down at a different lunch table?

"Jude, I'm sorry—" he began.

"Too late," Jude said. "Apology not accepted."

"Jude, you have to give me five minutes—"

"I don't have to give you anything," Jude said, his voice low and angry.

"Jude, I wrote three letters and one of them's for you."

The words came out in a rush and Jude looked at him uncomprehendingly. But now that he'd started, Connor didn't feel like he could stop. It felt like a dam had broken and he could only keep talking, each word coming out a fraction too fast.

"I quit the baseball team this morning. I told my best friend to fuck off. I told him he's not my best friend, because—because you're my best friend. And I think I love you. Or something like love. Like a spindle and the feelings wrap around it. And I don't know if I'm gay. I don't know anything. I just know that I don't want to be who I've always been. I want to be the person I'm supposed to be. That person you write about in your journal. I want to be that person.

"So I wrote three letters. Saying those things. Saying all of that. Everything I never said, I finally put it down on paper. I mailed one of the letters to my dad this morning. He'll probably be really angry. Or he won't believe it. That's worse, maybe. He has this set idea of who I am and it's not even close to being true. I left one for my mom, too. She won't read more than a couple sentences of it. She avoids anything that she thinks will upset her. But I guess I had to write it for her anyway. Just in case she ever wants to get to know the real me."

Connor looked up at Jude, who was still standing, tray in hand. Jude's expression was glazed with shock. Connor reached into his backpack and pulled out a sheaf of pages, covered in laborious handwriting. This was the longest letter he'd written, filling six or seven pages.

Connor said, "I tried to write to you as well, but…"

He sent the pages skittering across the surface of the table, where they were lifted by the breeze.

"…I realized something…" Connor murmured as he watched the pages twist in the air and lift away from him.

Jude looked at Connor and then at the pages, some of which were on the ground, some of which had been blown further away. Connor watched impassively – strangely past caring – as a passing student stepped on one of the pages, and as another became lodged in the green tangle of the hedge. Jude put down his tray and made a jerky grab for some of the pages that remained on the table.

However, Connor reached out a hand to stop him.

"I realized something," Connor said clearly. "They're just words."

Connor stood up and moved so that he was standing in front of Jude. A group of their classmates jostled past them. The air was still thick with chatter; a blanket of muffled talk and laughter. Lunchtime at Anchor Beach was a fish tank and everyone could see them.

Connor leaned forward and pressed a light kiss to Jude's lips.

Drawing away, he looked at Jude intently and whispered, "I'm sorry. I'm really, really sorry. You have to forgive me. I need to earn your trust. I get that. But you have to forgive me. You can't just shut down when I screw up. You have to forgive me. You have to forgive—"

Jude cut him off with a kiss. It was open-mouthed, instinctive. A momentary spark that lit up the air.

"Okay," Jude said in a small voice, when their lips parted. "I can try."

Most of Connor's words got trodden underfoot or tangled in the foliage. Some even got blown out to sea. But Connor didn't care. It wasn't the words that mattered. It was the act of writing them, of tearing those parts of himself free.

Jude did rescue one sheet of his letter, though. When he read it, he laughed.

"What's funny?" Connor asked, frowning.

"You've written, I want to eat popsicles with you forever."

"So?" Connor said, shrugging. "I do. Don't you remember that day? It was a really hot day. July or August. Your moms said we'd been playing video games too long. They forced us to go outside. So we had a water fight and ate popsicles. Don't you remember?"

Jude shook his head. "I don't know," he said, smiling shyly. "Maybe. It was a long time ago."

Weeks later, when Connor was over at Jude's house – dinner with the moms; Jude and Connor holding hands under the kitchen table – Connor saw a new painting of Jude's. It was abstract, in sunset shades of yellow and red and orange. And, pasted at its center, Jude had cut out a single sentence from Connor's letter.

I want to eat popsicles with you forever.

The end.