Prologue
Jefferson High, Indianapolis; May 2009
The note had taken Marcus Hale eleven attempts.
He knew because he’d counted. The first ten were folded into increasingly small squares at the bottom of his backpack, each one a slightly different version of the same sentence rearranged until it stopped sounding like begging.
This one, number eleven, was the best he could do.
I think you’re the most interesting person in this room. I think you’ve known I think that for a while. I just wanted to say it out loud. Even if it’s just on paper. ~ M
AP English, third period. Twenty-two minutes left. Nadia Clarke sat one row over and two seats ahead, which meant he had spent the better part of junior year memorising the back of her head and pretending to take notes. She had a way of underlining things in her books like she was arguing with the author. She laughed at things a half-second after everyone else, like she was fact-checking the joke first.
He folded the note once. Cleanly.
Mr Devlin was still talking about Their Eyes Were Watching God. Nadia was underlining something. Marcus held the note at the edge of his desk and thought about the seven steps between them, which was also the distance between saying it and swallowing it for the rest of the year.
He thought about graduation in three weeks.
He put the note in his pocket.
She turned around right then, not for him, just to check the clock, and caught him looking. She held his gaze for one beat too long, the way she sometimes did, like she was trying to read something he hadn’t quite written yet.
Then she turned back to her book.
Marcus pressed his pen to his notebook and wrote nothing for the rest of the period.
