Page 2 of Going the Distance
“Eh. Not much different from when I called you last night. I had class this morning. Math. It was pretty interesting. Second-order differentials.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, and I don’t think I want to know.”
Noah laughed, a soft breathy sort of chuckle that made my heart melt. Almost everything about him made my heart melt or my knees go weak or my stomach fill with butterflies. I was a goofball, a cliché straight out of a movie. And it felt great.
I missed that laugh as much as I missed feeling his arms wrapped around me or his lips on mine. We spoke all the time—video chat, Snapchat, messages, good old-fashioned phone calls…but it wasn’t the same. And I was a little cautious about letting on just how badly I missed him, in case it made me sound too clingy. I still wasn’t really sure how to go about all this relationship stuff.
“You’resucha nerd,” I told him.
I’d never thought of Noah as a nerd. I mean, he’s smart. He’d had a 4.7 GPA (his mom had told me that recently—I’d known he was smart but hadn’t realized how smart before now). He’d narrowly missed out on being top of his class, yet he had a reputation all through high school as the resident bad boy. Up until we got together, I’d never really thought that underneath his image, he might actuallylikelearning stuff like second-order differentials. Whatever they were.
“Shh, someone might hear you.” I could hear the smirk in his voice. “Anyway, enough about me. I talked to you for, like, an hour straight last night about college. I just wanted to wish you luck for your first day of senior year.”
I smiled, even though he couldn’t see. “Well, thanks. I appreciate it.”
“So, what’s it feel like? Being the big kids in school?”
“Kind of scary, kind of nauseating, and a lot exciting. I’m trying not to get too stressed out about college and stuff.”
“Scary, right?”
“Thinking about college makes me feel grown up when I feel anything but a grown-up. I mean, my kid brother had to come kill a spider in my room last night.”
“Tell me about it. I had to ask someone how to use the dryer in the laundry rooms the other day. I felt so stupid.”
“You’ve never done laundry?”
“My mom isveryparticular about how the laundry should be done, Shelly; you know that.” I did—she’d asked Lee to spread sheets to dry once, when she went out, only to redo them as soon as she got back. She didn’t ask him to do them again. “Besides, those four teddy bears on your bed probably don’t help with the not-feeling-like-an-adult.”
“I bet there are a bunch of girls at college—some guys, too, probably—who have a teddy bear or two on their beds.”
“But not four.”
“Hey, now, don’t you say a word against Mr.Wiggles.” I couldn’t help but let a pout slip onto my face. “Anyway, you’re the one with Superman boxer shorts.”
Before Noah got a chance to defend himself, there was the sound of someone pounding on a door in the background on his end of the line. He sighed. “Looks like I’ve got to go. Steve was in the bedroom, so I went to the bathroom to talk to you, for some privacy—”
“Flynn, come on, man, I need to take a piss!” his roommate, Steve, yelled. His voice was muffled, probably by their bathroom door.
“I should go, too. The guys will be here by now, and we’re supposed to meet Cam’s neighbor and help him feel welcome.”
“Is that the guy from Detroit? Seven For All Mankind?”
“Levi.”
“That’s what I said. Well, good luck with that. And, hey, tell Lee good luck at tryouts for me. I texted him, but he never replied.”
A rattling noise sounded at his end and more knocking. “Flynn!C’mon!”
“Have a good last first day of school,” Noah said.
“Thanks. I love you.”
I heard the smile in his voice and could practically see the dimple in his cheek that accompanied that smile when he said, “I love you, too.”
We both lingered on the line a moment longer, neither of us saying anything, just listening to the sound of each other’s breathing. Then I took the cell phone away from my ear and hung up, making sure the ringer was off before shoving it into my satchel, where it promptly buried itself among my brand-new notebooks and other first-day necessities (namely a hairbrush, a candy bar, a tampon, and a pair of very tangled earphones).
“Elle! Hey! Over here!”
