Free Platonic by Kate Paddington Page B

allowed inside and told to help himself.
    He walked up the stairs as slowly and quietly as he dared, able to smell Daniel’s mom, Molly, a hint of her perfume and something cooking in the kitchen; and if he really concentrated, he thought perhaps he could still smell Daniel. In his room, the bed was stripped of its sheets and many of the shelves were bare.
    He found the books he’d lent Daniel over the summer, pushed them into his bag and stood there for just a moment’s reprieve.
    “He misses you, you know?”
    Mark jumped to hear Molly just behind him. She was leaning on the door, her arms crossed and her face grim. “He doesn’t know why you stopped talking to him.”
    “Mrs O’Shea,’ Mark stuttered. “I’m really sorry, but—”
    “Are you okay, Mark?” she asked. He could tell she meant it as more than a footnote to her son’s well-being. “You look tired.”
    As he exhaled, Mark felt everything inside him threaten to break. So he collected his thoughts, hugged his backpack tighter in his hands and mustered a smile. “It’s been a hard year, so far.”
    She nodded as though she understood.
    “I have to go,” he said.
    She moved out of his way, out of Daniel’s room and watched him brush past her and start down the stairs. “He’d be happy to see you over Christmas,” she called after him. “And you’re welcome here any time.”
    Mark didn’t look back, just raced out the door and into his car and drove straight home.
    They didn’t see each other once over Christmas even though Daniel sent him a handful of messages before he went home to New York.
    Somehow Rita forgave Mark, hugged him the week after New Year’s and seemed to understand the things Mark still did not. He wouldn’t talk about it though, just offered her a weak smile and a tight hug back.
    ***
    “What the fuck?” Patrick interrupts the story.
    “Yeah,” Mark concedes.
    “You just stopped talking to him?”
    “I was really confused.”
    Patrick sighs heavily, levels a hard stare at Mark and says: “My ass is really numb.”
    They find their pants and move to sit side by side on Patrick’s bed.
    “So was that it?” Patrick asks. “You just never spoke to him again? Because if that’s what happened, that would be really—”
    “No. I saw him again.” This last bit, Mark knows, is the bit he deserves to be judged for: the hope he let himself feel when he hadn’t been able to recognize how much was already lost. But for once it doesn’t ache the way it used to; it just feels like some silly teenaged star-crossed fuckup. He has a career ahead of him that he is actually excited about and he’s surrounded by friends he cares for, that he knows care for him. He has managed to escape from the shadow of his father and get past so many of the issues he considered unsolvable when he was a teenager. So, he figures, telling Patrick about the last moments of the demise of his high school romance won’t hurt the way it had back then, not the way it still might if he didn’t have so much good in his life now.
    ***
    By the end of February, Mark had offers from a half-dozen colleges and admissions deadlines loomed. The first letter had sparked something in his heart. It had taken him days to recognize the feeling was hope. All the offers were for good colleges, all of them with undergraduate majors tailored to feed into the very best law schools the country had to offer. His father, he thought, was almost proud of the lack of rejection letters, even if he remarked that standards were obviously slipping.
    His father, of course, was livid when Mark chose Columbia and began the paperwork before the letters for Stanford and Yale had even come.
    Hope blossomed; and suddenly New York was real, it was there, and in a couple of short months all the waiting would be over and his life would really start. High school and his year of hopeless pining would be but a blip in a lifetime of happiness.
    Daniel, he knew from Facebook, was coming