Page 161

"Cameron Russo." I put both hands over my face. "That is the most devastating gesture anyone has ever made for me, and you didn't even do it for me. You did it alone in your house where I'd never see it."

"That's why I did it," she said quietly. "It was the only part of you I was allowed to keep."

I lowered my hands. I stared at her. I wanted to say a clever line, and there wasn't a clever word left anywhere in my body.

"You look terrible," I finally said, and my voice wobbled all over the place.

Her whole face melted. "You've been crying for an hour."

"I look beautiful when I cry, thank you very much. It's well documented." I let go of her henley and tried to smooth it flat with my palms. I'd wrinkled it beyond saving. "Come in. Please come in."

The banter was thin as paper, and we both knew it. We were just checking that the language between us still worked before we had to use it for the real conversation.

She sat on my couch.

I sat in the armchair across from her, on top of the orange dress, and tucked my feet under me, because if I sat beside her, we wouldn't talk, and I needed to talk first. I knew that about myself the same way I knew my coffee order. I needed the truth spoken out loud before I could do anything else with it. It wasn't always my most convenient quality. Tonight, it mattered more than it ever had.

The string lights kept the room warm. Outside, the city kept running its indifferent nighttime operations, completely unaware of what was happening in this apartment.

Cam looked down at her hands. She does this. She goes quiet before she commits to a direction, running through her options, making sure she knows what she's throwing before she throws it. I'd learned to read it. I'd been learning to read her for weeks without meaning to.

She looked up.

"I want to tell you what the last three weeks actually looked like," she said. "If that's okay."

"Okay."

She told me.

It wasn't the Cam who gave press conferences, or the one who spoke in measured post-game sentences with her face arranged into neutral. It was halting and honest and looped back on itself. It was a woman who had spent her whole life rationing vulnerability, choosing tonight to spend all of it at once.

She told me about the empty house after I walked out. The free throws in the backyard, forty-seven in a row until she stopped being able to feel them, and then the one she threw so hard it sailed over the fence and landed in her neighbor's hedges. She said it was still out there. She said she hadn't been able to make herself go get it.

She told me about the game film playing on her laptop while she felt nothing. Her best basketball of the season, and all of it hollow. She told me about the list she made: two columns, what she was afraid of losing and what she'd already lost. The second list had my name on it. And under my name, one line.

Walking her to the car.

I had to look away for a second when she told me that.

She told me about kneeling on her floor at midnight with the hair tie in her hand and crying so hard her ribs ached. She told me about calling her mother at two in the morning in Providence, and her mother saying she'd waited Cam's whole life to hear her talk about someone like that.

Then she told me about the tunnel.

"After the semifinal," she said. "You were in the corridor with Mia. You stopped and looked back toward the tunnel."

"I remember." My voice barely worked. "I felt like you were there."

"I was there." She looked straight at me. "Twenty feet behind you. There was a camera crew still filming us walking off, and a security guard next to me, and I stepped behind him. I hid behind a man in a yellow jacket so that you wouldn't see me." Her jaw tightened. "Because if you'd seen me, I would have walked to you. And if I'd walked to you, the cameras would have seen."

I pressed my hand flat against my chest, like I could hold my heart in place.

"That was the worst moment of my life," she said. "Worse than Karlie. Worse than you leaving. Because you looked back for me, and I hid from you like you were the danger." Her voice cracked. "That's when I knew I couldn't do it anymore."

She told me about her team in the locker room, already knowing. About Morgan and Alex saying my name like it was obvious which girl Cam Russo was so gay for. About Bianca writing MONDAY and underlining it twice. About the twenty versions of the post, and the one she finally kept.

"I stopped trying to write the perfect version," she said, "and wrote the true one."

"Why tonight?" I asked.