Love from a to Z

don’t go out with dudes alone. Bam, done with.” I groaned again. “Kavi,
help me.”
“I don’t get it. What about you and Yasin? When you guys were talking
to each other?”
“That was nothing. And his parents knew my parents, so it would have
been legit, if things had developed.”
“Make it legit, then. If he likes you as much as you like him.” Kavi
shrugged. “There’s always a solution, remember?”
I pulled myself up to lean on the headboard and put my glasses back on.
Is that even possible?
It’s weird.
But could it be possible?
“Kavi, I’m scared about how much I crave him.” I blinked at her sadly.
“Like, it’s intense.”
“Tell me why, then. Other than the physical reasons, because, yeah, I see
that.” She tilted her head, her face serious now. “But don’t tell me that’s the
only reason?”
“No, no way. Like, yeah, there’s this part of me that’s excited about him
liking me back. Excited that, hey, this guy I thought was cute on first sight
likes me, too! That’s there, yeah, and that’s purely physical,” I admitted.
“But then . . . if I’d been around him and he had turned out to be a
douchebag, even with those looks, I would have slammed the door shut
super fast.”
“So you like him because he’s cute, likes you back, and is not a
douchebag? Zay, not good enough reasons to twist yourself like this.”
I didn’t tell her that I wanted to be there for him. That he had something
going on that was huge and that I didn’t want him to go through it by
himself, or, I mean, with the DIS crew, who didn’t know about it—except
for Connor.

---

But MS was his truth to tell.
I lay down again. “I like him because he’s gentle and kind and
considerate and has this sense of confidence without being in your face
about it, and he’s super thoughtful; his little sister adores him; so do his
friends at the international school he went to. But then he’s kind of alone. I
can see that. It oozes out of him.” I sat up, something dawning on me.
“Like, when we were talking about Hogwarts houses the first day I hung
out with his friends, all of them said he was in a house by himself, because
he didn’t even fit in half houses, or quarter houses. Like how I’m part
Gryffindor and part Slytherin, and you’re three-quarters Ravenclaw and
one-quarter Hufflepuff? He’s houseless.”
Kavi frowned. “You like him because you feel sorry for him? Sorry, I
don’t want to dump on you, but I’m not feeling this. Falling for someone is
not a social justice cause.”
She didn’t get it. And I couldn’t explain it over FaceTime. I crossed my
legs and pulled my hair back into a bun, securing it with a scrunchie, ready
to switch topics, ready to shut down my Adam-ache. “Okay, listen, Kavi—
let’s change subjects. Give me a bulletin.”
She relaxed her frown. “You wouldn’t believe what Noemi did. She
volunteered to present her analysis to the class. Remember, the one about
the Turkish girl buried alive?”
“Yeah?”
“She did an analysis comparing the incident to Austrian culture—
Christian, European culture—linking it to the girl kept in a dungeon by her
father for decades.” Kavi smiled huge. “Fencer lost it.”
“PLEASE TELL ME MORE,” I begged, conjuring an image of Fencer
with his own racist methods thrown in his face like a fluffy creamy pie.
“Basically, he gave a BS rant about how that was an isolated case and she
was generalizing about a sensational news story and how that was shoddy
analysis, not senior-year-level work at all, blah blah blah. He was saying all
this shit calmly, but his face was on fire. So Noemi just did this thing where
she kept smiling while he kept getting redder and redder, and then, right
before she went and sat down, after he’d done his whole you’re-a-bad-
student spiel, she said to the class, ‘And, to sum up my presentation, that,
boys and girls, is why you don’t generalize.’ Mic drop.”