Page 107 of Under His Jersey

He takes another bite and smiles at me.

Scrabble becomes a war. Sam is the kind of person who knows two-letter words nobody’s ever heard of and refuses to explain them. Brandon plays entirely for aesthetics and puts down OBOE for eleven points when he could have had thirty. Kenzie keeps her tiles pressed to her chest. Theo tries to play QUIZZING with one Z and a blank and argues for four minutes that the blank “can be whatever we want it to be.”

“It can be whatever you want it to be, legally,” Sam says. “It cannot be a second Z when there’s only one Z in the entire bag.”

“How do you know there’s one Z?”

“Because it’s on the box, Theo.”

I win, and by a lot, because I put QUIET across a triple with the Q on a double letter. Theo makes a noise like I’ve struck him, Sam says, “Respect,” and I’m unreasonably proud of myself.

Somebody puts music on low. Bianca and Kenzie get into The Bachelor. Brandon tells a fifteen-minute story about his cousin’s wedding. Nobody’s drinking, nobody’s loud, and Theo’s morning plans have come up twice as a kind of curfew everybody has accepted. Somewhere around nine, I end up on the orange couch next to Theo, who’s been working himself up to something all night.

“Can I ask you something? You’re a girl.”

“This is how I was born, yes.”

“There’s this girl,” he says.

He tells me that her name is Justine. They have a lab together and she’s in his study group. She laughs at his jokes, which he has analyzed extensively. She once brought him a coffee, which he has analyzed more extensively.

“Okay, so the coffee,” he says. “Is that—”

“Have you asked her out?” I ask.

He looks shocked. “What?”

“Have you asked her out?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know if she likes me. You have to know first. You get, like, signals, and then you—”

“Theo.” I put my cup down. “How long have you been trying to figure out if she likes you?”

“Since September.”