Archive of Our Own

“What does that mean? What are you saying?”

They’re nineteen and twenty when Daya fucks everything up. 

“I’m saying I’m in love with you.”

At fourteen years old, Daya Betty is a sophomore in high school and a proud menace to her fellow student population.

She’s supposed to be fifteen, not fourteen. Most people in her grade are fifteen or about to be, but she won’t be until February. For reasons not fully clear to Daya, her mom felt the need to have her skip a year of school midway through kindergarten– something about how she was already ahead of the other kids, she could already write her name and color inside the lines, blah blah blah. She’s heard the story about a million times at family gatherings. It’s a cop-out fun fact to pull out during icebreakers, and that’s about it. Did you know I technically skipped a grade? Makes her sound smarter, which is nice. 

The real fun part, at least in Daya’s opinion, is that some of the boys in her grade are already sixteen and she’s still a full head taller than them. That’s what she calls fun.

Another decision her mother has made that evades Daya’s understanding, coincidentally, is the same decision that’s brought her here today, to a dinky little classroom in the arts building. After school, when she’s supposed to be at home locked up in her room with her music and her magazine cutouts. 

Daya scuffs the toe of her boot on the ground, reading the sign that’s been pitifully taped on the door: DEBATE TEAM. (It’s been written in permanent marker on lined paper, for crying out loud. What kind of losers can’t even print their signs out on printer paper?)

She’s here because her mom has insisted on it. To “keep her out of trouble,” in her mom’s exact words. Which is ridiculous. Daya doesn’t get into trouble, she just enjoys correcting people when they’re wrong. And pointing out when they’re being stupid. Both of which should honestly be in her rights, as a student in high school where people are constantly either wrong or stupid or frequently both. 

Alas. Daya begrudgingly understands when she can and can’t choose her fate, and this is one of those times where she simply can’t. Apparently there had been some sort of online enrollment for this thing, and they take attendance like the snitches they are, so. Debate team is where she’ll be spending her Monday and Wednesday afternoons for the rest of the semester, or at least until she can get out of this. She’ll get extra-good grades or something, she’ll bribe Crystal with dollar store rhinestones into arguing on her side, she’ll figure it out. 

And speaking of arguing. If she has to be dragged into a lame extracurricular, Daya would rather it be something she knows she can be good at, if she tries. Daya’s been arguing since she learned how to talk. She hates to give her mom credit, but as far as after school activities go, maybe this is one of the better choices for her skillset. 

Inside the classroom isn’t much more impressive than the outside and the Sharpie sign. There’s a teacher sitting behind a table with a computer and a few kids already scattered around the room.

“Hey! Come on in,” the teacher calls. “There’s waivers on the desk right there, go ahead and take one and find a seat.”

Daya takes a waiver. She doesn’t understand what could possibly be waived in terms of rights, since she’s a high schooler and they already basically make sure the students have none of those. 

Taking her seat, she leaves the packet closed and unread and instead chooses to inspect the metal staple in the corner of it. It’s strong-looking and shiny, she notes. Not dull or flimsy. She runs a finger over the staple in mild approval.

“Did you ever get bored and make nose rings out of those things?”

Daya looks up, startled.

Someone’s taken the seat next to hers. They’re leaning on the desk attached to their seat, elbows on the glossy wood finish, and when Daya takes too long to answer they give a flick of one finger to gesture to– oh, yeah, the staple. Of course.

“No,” Daya confesses. “But that’s a really good idea, I can’t believe I’ve never thought of that.”

“I used to do it all the time.” They drum their fingers on their arm, and Daya notes the painted nails. Dark red, like wine. “It looks pretty real, from a distance. I want a real one so bad.”

“Oh– me too!” Daya’s fully turned in her seat now, grinning. “The septum. I want that one. And I want more ear ones, after that.”

“Oh, love.”

There’s a silence that falls, then, and Daya’s inexplicably anxious for it not to stretch out too long, so she goes for what she knows. A compliment is always a safe bet.

“I love your hair, by the way.”

“Thank you.” They’re not too expressive with their face, it seems, but they sound very pleased. One hand comes up to card through their hair, which is long and slightly wavy and colored like the champagne that Daya’s aunt drinks at family reunions. Daya doubts it’s natural, since she can see the slightest hints of duller, darker roots starting to peek through, but it doesn’t take away from the look at all. Daya likes it.

“I’m Daya. What was your name?”

At nineteen years old, Daya’s sitting on her bed in her college apartment, trying to decide what color to paint her nails.

“I think I’m getting homesick.”

She’s talking to her phone. She’s got it propped up on her dresser, since her giant container of nail polish bottles is in her lap and very soon her hands will be occupied.

“I didn’t even think it was possible to get homesick after your first year,” she goes on. “I feel like I didn’t even get homesick last year. I think I was just so happy to get out of there that I wasn’t even thinking about being home. But now I am, for some reason.”

The voice on the other end of the phone call is distorted by technology. Fortunately, Daya would know these intonations and inflections anywhere, any time, with any voice-disguising filter technology could conjure up. 

“Do you actually miss our hometown, or just the people in it?”

Good question. Daya takes a moment to think, but the answer’s a pretty easy one. “Definitely the people,” she admits. “I miss Crystal. And my mom. And my dog, fuck, I miss my dog.”

She receives a sympathetic hum for her troubles. “Yeah, I’m sure. You’ll see them in a month, though.”

Daya pauses for a split second. “Ah. No, I must have forgotten to tell you,” she says. “I’m actually not going home home ‘til, like, August.”

“Oh?” the other voice says. “Why not?”

Daya groans. “Summer school.”

“Oh, someone failed a class?”

“Ha ha. No.” Daya pokes through her nail polish collection, glass bottles clinking together. “I’m trying to see if I can add an education minor, and to do that and still graduate on time they told me I should probably do summer classes. But,” she adds, “I’ve heard the summer session is totally doable if you don’t take a crazy number of units. A lot of kids stay over the summer to work, so it can’t be that bad, right?”

“Whatever you need to tell yourself.”

“Wow, so supportive.” Daya holds up a bottle of neon highlighter-yellow, seriously considers it, then puts it back. “Okay, no, it is gonna be fine. I’m also gonna have a solid, like, two weeks where I’m not doing shit, because classes won’t start until early July.”

“Oh, sick.”

“And you know what that means, right?”

Daya can picture Bosco’s face just by the sound of her voice, the raised eyebrows, the bemused hint of a smirk. “What does that mean, Daya?”

Bosco.

The girl’s name is Bosco. And she is a girl, Daya shortly finds out– “I didn’t wanna assume,” she tells Bosco sheepishly, to which Bosco just waves her off.

“I don’t mind being a little in-between,” she says. “I like to keep people on their toes. Makes me feel powerful.”

And that’s a joke, Daya’s pretty sure that’s okay to laugh at, so she does. Happily.

Daya learns Bosco’s not here because she’s being forced by her parents. She’s here just because she wants to be, which is a revelation so mystifying that it actually stuns Daya into reconsidering this whole debate thing. If someone like Bosco, someone with Bosco’s layers of jewelry and fiery hair and easy, crinkled smile can want to be here– maybe Daya has reason to want to be here too. Maybe. Big maybe, and she certainly won’t be admitting any of this to her mother.

(She will be admitting it to Crystal, though. She can’t be asked to keep anything from her big sister, and she’s already trying to commit Bosco to memory, get down every detail of her so she can relay it all to Crystal on the phone later.)

She’s not sure why she’s already thinking about that, telling her sister about Bosco. Somehow it just makes sense. Bosco is so unlike any other high schooler Daya has ever met– they’re the same grade, so it’s slightly puzzling how Bosco seems to lack that typical teenage awkwardness that Daya had assumed would just cling to everyone and only peel off in slow, gradual layers once they began to enter college and the rest of their adult lives. 

It turns out to be a much less harrowing first meeting than Daya expects. The teacher eventually does stand up and start droning on about the debate team and all its many accolades, all the requirements and commitments, all the supposed benefits (Daya swears if she has to hear about college applications one more time, she might flip her shit). Daya sits there in her chair, swinging one leg, half listening and half letting her eyes wander around the classroom. 

On the occasion that she steals a glance at Bosco, which is admittedly more than one occasion, Bosco seems to be paying attention. One hand will come up to twirl a lock of hair around her finger, or she’ll twist her ring, but her eyes rest passively at the front of the classroom and rarely stray. At least from what Daya observes. So interesting, so extremely peculiar. Strangely mesmerizing.

“Alright, I’ve been talking for a long time,” the teacher announces. Daya can’t remember her name, but she knows they’ve been told to call her by her first name, something weird and modern-sounding. Pretty odd for a teacher, but Daya supposes she does look young. “Get to know each other! Turn to your neighbor, and tell them your name and grade and one thing about yourself.”

There are no other people around, but even if they were, Daya would have no problem at all ignoring them in favor of turning readily to Bosco.

“We did this already,” she giggles. “It’s like we knew we were gonna have to do that.”

“Ahead of the game.”

“Totally. In fact, I bet we could, like, Uno-reverse it.” Daya sits up straighter in her chair. “You’re Bosco,” she says, confident. “You’re a sophomore, and you want a nose piercing. You used to make pretend ones out of staples.”

Bosco grins. “You’re Daya,” she says. “You’re also a sophomore, and you want more ear piercings. And you’re here because your mom is making you do this.”

Daya laughs. Her face feels a little warm, though not in an unpleasant way. “She did, but… I don’t mind, I guess.”

“What does that mean, Daya?”

“You should come here,” Daya says, twisting open the color of nail polish she’s settled on. Black, but she’s gonna put chunky holographic glitter on them afterwards, duh. She’s alt, not boring. “It would be so much fun. You can meet my friends, we can go out because we won’t have to worry about fuckin’ school– ohh, I can take you downtown–!”

“Or,” Bosco drawls, “you could just come to me again.”

She says it like she’s teasing, but Daya knows she’s serious from the way she waits for an answer. Daya thinks that might be a side effect of being someone’s friend for a long time. You start to know what you can get away with, what kind of chances are worth taking with them and what kind aren’t.

She’s determined to stand her ground. “Ha ha, nice try. I’ve been there twice already, you know.”

“Right.” There’s rustling on the other end of the line, then a distorted clack like Bosco’s put the phone down in a new location. “You already know how to get here, don’t you? Haven’t you heard that third time’s the charm?”

Daya feels her lips stretch into a reluctant smile, and she rolls her eyes. “Third time's the charm for what?” she challenges, dipping the little brush into the bottle and dripping off the excess. “Winning the lottery, or something?”

“Dunno,” Bosco says. “You should come here and find out.”

This girl.

Daya applies one more careful swipe of translucent Midnight Onyx (that’s what the shade of black is called, Daya swears) onto the nail of her left pinky, and brings her hand up to her mouth to blow gently on the wet polish. “I could do that,” she says. “Or you could just get your ass down here after your semester ends, and we could go downtown like I’ve been talking about for the past two years. I told you, there’s this one gorgeous street of all these crazy stores selling antiques and jewelry and whatever that I think you’d really like, and there’s a restaurant I want to take you to– I told you this, right?”

More rustling. “I think so,” comes the slightly delayed response. “Was it the Mediterranean place?”

“Yes, yes, yes. Probably that one.” Daya has no idea if that’s the one, actually. That sounds about right, and it doesn’t really matter to her which exact restaurant they end up at. She has a general picture in her mind, of her and Bosco at a table somewhere with warm, effusive lighting, surrounded by the clink of cutlery and ambient conversation, just loud enough to fill the silences. Other details– what kind of food, inside or outside, where in the city– don’t really matter so much.

Her focus will be mainly on Bosco, anyway. So all that other stuff might as well be obsolete.

“So?”

Bosco heaves a sigh that Daya can hear through the crackly noise-cancelling of the phone call just fine. “Can’t believe you’d make me drive,” she mutters, and Daya smiles. Gotcha.

“Hey, I drove for you and I didn’t complain,” she chides playfully. Then, because she can’t help herself: “We could do the weekend of the eighteenth, I think we said, if that still works for you? Or, like, we don’t have to talk about the date right now, we can always nail it down later. I’m free pretty much every weekend in June.”

Bosco’s end of the call is quiet for a second. “I think the eighteenth would work.”

Daya smiles, open-mouthed, and she just happens to inhale as her lips part and that’s what produces the sound that comes out of her. It’s not a gasp, for the record. “Really?”

“Yeah.” Bosco’s speaking offhandedly now, as if preoccupied. “I have to double check, but I’m pretty sure I have to pick up a costume from somewhere around you before July second, so I could just, y’know. Do it then, get it out of the way.”

Now it’s Daya’s turn to go quiet, just for a moment. “Okay,” she says. “Okay, yeah. Perfect.”

“Perfect,” Bosco echoes. “Okay. My shift starts in a minute, I have to go inside now or Kerri’s actually gonna murder me, but I’ll text you after to confirm the dates. We’re looking at eighteenth through the twentieth?”

“Yep. Friday to Sunday.”

There’s a faint jingling, probably Bosco’s keys, and then the muted slam of a door. “Got it,” she says. “I’ll text you. Remind me if I forget, okay?”

“‘Kay.” Daya picks up her phone, gingerly, careful to avoid smudging anything. She holds the phone close to her chest. “I’ll talk to you later, then. Bye, I love you!”

“Love you too.”

The display on her phone goes back to her lockscreen, which is a photo she’d taken herself, about five months ago. It’s a close-up of her final project in her fall semester fashion design class, an intricately studded corset with a hand painted design intended to mimic the lace and iridescence of dragonfly wings. She’d thought it was just about the coolest photo she’d ever taken, at the time, especially because it was of something she’d made herself, which she still stands by. 

(Her previous lockscreen before this one had been another picture she’d taken herself, this one of the sunset outside her family home on the night before she’d moved out for college. And the one before that– an old picture of her high school friend group, arms behind each other’s backs, with her and Bosco at the center.)

Daya sits with the silence, nails half-done, thinking about that. About lockscreens, and how weird it had felt to change to the sunset picture when she’d had the one of her friends since her sophomore year of high school. How disconcerting it was to pick up her phone and not be greeted by the same smiling image of a younger, less recognizable version of her best friend’s face anymore.

She also thinks about how said best friend could still, after all these years, get on the phone with Daya and act like driving down to visit her in her college apartment was no different than picking up a costume, a literal article of clothing. Daya smiles, rueful and coppery, her only witnesses the four walls of her bedroom.

Five hours and twenty three minutes later, Bosco texts her without being reminded. 

Bosco <3: Just got home, June 18-20 works for me

Daya rolls over onto her back, holding her phone above her face. Precarious. The nails on both her hands are done now, she’s added the glitter and it catches the light when she moves her thumbs to text Bosco back, glinting rainbow in the waxy glow of her bedside lamp. 

Daya: Sounds good!!!!

Daya: Can’t wait to see you ahhhh

Bosco <3 reacted ❤️to “Can’t wait to see you ahhhh” 

Bosco <3: Mwah

Daya’s sixteen and on top of the world.

It’s probably a common way to feel, when you’re sixteen. In hindsight, Daya can clearly see it for what it is: not having left the bubble of her hometown, yet to have her shiny iridescent illusion be popped by the harsh edges of the real world. Living a life that was always temporary, yet somehow didn’t feel that way.

But that also probably has something to do with being sixteen, to be fair. Something to do with being sixteen and finally feeling like she’s gotten into the groove of homework and debate meetings and study sessions, feeling like things have started to settle and shift into their correct places. 

School is okay. She’s not failing any classes, that’s for sure. It’s junior year, so the classrooms have started to feel like pressure cookers slowly nudging them along toward either a gleaming future or a violent, explosive end, but… whatever.

Debate. She’s still doing that, and she’s made more friends. There’s Angeria, who sits next to Daya on one bus ride and declares them forever bonded from that day on, and Camden, who Daya’s convinced could win over any comp judge with just that charming accent of hers. Then there’s Jasmine, who’s loud and colorful and chatty and somewhat disorganized, and did Daya mention loud? 

There’s also Bosco. There’s always Bosco, the one constant through all the madness, the dependable variable of Daya’s Mondays and Wednesdays and soon her lunchtimes, too, her weekends and afternoons and late nights. Anywhere and everywhere Bosco can reach, she eventually does. It just makes sense, when everything is so much more fun with Bosco there. 

And she’s really, really good at debate. They’re all pretty good, Daya’s not too shabby herself, but Bosco’s fucking amazing. 

Daya can’t understand it. Bosco starts talking and it’s like she just puts people under some kind of spell, anyone who’s judging the round, anyone who’s in earshot. Even her opponents. Daya’s watched her go up against countless other students who come in confident as anything, and get their asses sorely kicked. It would be absolutely infuriating, if she wasn’t Daya’s best friend and if Daya wasn’t constantly at least slightly in awe of her.

Daya thinks about this, sometimes. Best friends. It feels like such a little kid thing to say, but Daya knows people still have best friends in high school, and she thinks… yeah, Bosco’s definitely hers. She’s the first person Daya looks for in any room, the person Daya will clamber up next to in the car when their friends are carpooling to the mall. She thinks she could spend days with Bosco and never run out of things to talk about.

She wonders if Bosco feels the same way. If she thinks of Daya as her best friend. It’s a passive kind of wonder, more of a curiosity than anything. She’d like to know, but she’s not going to ask. 

Daya’s pretty sure they are something resembling best friends. Everyone else seems to group them together, these days. A package deal, which makes Daya’s heart feel like it’s sprouting little wings and taking flight. 

Bosco has this very specific sense of humor. She calls it bullying, which is an exaggerated version of the truth. She doesn’t bully anyone. She just teases, and she teases all their friends. It just so happens that she’ll tease Daya the most. “Cursed,” she’ll proclaim, after Daya loses her third practice debate in a row, and make a show of hesitating before sitting next to her at lunch the next day. 

“I don’t want to catch the curse,” she says with a sly look on her face. 

Jasmine frowns. “Curse?”

“Yeah.” Bosco lifts one leg over the bench, then the other, sitting down gracefully. Next to Daya, despite what she’s just said. “Didn’t you hear? Daya’s cursed to lose.”

“I’m not cursed,” Daya says around a mouthful of her sandwich. “Cam lost three rounds too.”

“Yeah, but they weren’t consecutive, were they?”

And another day when Bosco’s over at her house, Daya asks what color she should dye her hair. “I was gonna do pink, but I’ve done that already,” she says. “Althought maybe I could do a different shade of pink.”

“Oh, the hot pink from last year?”

“Mhm. That was cute, right? Oh, I could do a darker pink. Closer to purple.” Daya toys with the ends of her hair, which is currently a box-dyed dark brown. “Or something totally in the opposite direction. Turquoise, I’ve always thought turquoise might be fun.”

Bosco hums her approval. “Your Sailor Neptune moment.”

“I don’t know who that is,” Daya says. “I was thinking Hatsune Miku. Is that Sailor-whoever like Hatsune Miku?”

“Right. I forgot you’re uncultured.” Bosco thinks about it, sprawled out on Daya’s bedspread. Her hair hangs off the edge of the mattress, soft and sparking white-gold in the afternoon sun. “You could do green again,” she says. “I liked when you did that and wore the orange sweatshirt for picture day and looked like a carrot.”

Daya’s laugh is a screech like a bird, wide mouthed and outraged. “Shut up! I did not!”

“No, you definitely did.” Bosco rolls onto her stomach just to laugh. “That was really a look. You should go for that again.”

It’s just their thing. It’s familiar, it feels like slipping into a well worn coat that smells like your favorite perfume, and Daya takes it all in stride. She delivers it right back, most of the time. Laughs every time. To be fully honest, she quietly wears it with pride, the fact that Bosco thinks they’ve gotten close enough for her to tease Daya that way. 

And they are… close. Daya’s no expert in having friends, but she has a fairly certain feeling about this one thing. She and Bosco have gotten close, over the last year and a half or so. 

It’s not something that gets handed to Daya, nicely put in her hands or on a silver platter. Bosco won’t say it out loud, Daya realizes over time. So instead, Daya learns to just notice things and keep them to herself. She loses track of the number of times she’ll announce to their friends that she needs some clothing item, some pair of shoes or earrings for an outfit, and Bosco will insist on lending it to her. “Don’t buy it unless you actually want it for yourself,” she says offhandedly. “If you just need it this once, take mine.” 

And Bosco’s always offering to go with her, wherever she needs to go. For the few months after Bosco’s gotten her first car and Daya hasn’t yet, she knows she’ll have a ride to wherever she wants as long as Bosco isn’t doing anything. Trips to the grocery store, to the dry cleaner’s, even a trip within Daya’s house down to the laundry room or to the kitchen for a glass of water. Daya never goes alone. “I’ll go with you,” she gets used to hearing. “I’ll drive you.” “I’ll take you. You’re not walking, Daya, don’t be an idiot.”

There’s other stuff, too. Daya couldn’t list it all if she tried. She’s the only one among their friends who Bosco will share a hotel room with, for all their overnight debate competitions in other cities. Daya likes those competitions. Piling onto a bus outside their school at 6:30 in the morning on a Saturday, that part’s not so great, but the fancy hotels and all the other students from other schools. That’s fun.

And getting to see Bosco first thing in the morning, hair falling around her face, eyes closed and coffee cup permanently fixed to her lips. Or last thing at night, with her hair all clipped up and a face mask on. How Bosco can afford to care about her skin past midnight when they’ve been up and on their feet all day, Daya doesn’t know. Maybe this is some secret competitive strategy Bosco’s developed. Blinding the other debate kids with her dewy cheekbones, so they’ll forget all their tactics and evidence and lose. (Daya wouldn’t put it past her.)

All things Daya notices about Bosco. Things she notices and never says aloud, because when she tries to do that she tends to be met with the same kind of reaction. “Ew” is a favorite of Bosco’s. So is “ugh,” and “gross,” and “stop staring at me like a weirdo.”

It’s okay. Daya has these little bits of information for herself, and sometimes when it’s something worth sharing, she can share it with Crystal.

For her spring break, Crystal comes home from college and Daya goes with her mom to the train station to pick her up, and runs down the platform to hug her like in the movies. Crystal’s ready for her with open arms, and Daya’s taller than her but Crystal’s still stronger. Daya blinks away a few tears in Crystal’s wild curls. She’s still getting used to Crystal being away. It’s only Crystal’s second year in college, and already Daya doesn’t know how she’ll do this all four years. 

They go home, and as soon as Crystal’s settled at the table with her bowl of pretzels and Daya’s flopped onto the couch, Crystal’s ready.

“Okay,” she says. “Catch me up. How are your friends? How’s Bosco?”

Daya smiles. “She’s good.”

She tells Crystal everything. Chemistry homework, math tests, running the mile in PE and trying to outrun all the boys, debate meetings. Bosco’s name comes up a lot, not by any particular effort on Daya’s part. She’s so present in Daya’s life that it would be more of an effort to talk around her, to not to mention her. Daya thinks she’d fail at that immediately, if ever she were to try.

“We’re gonna go shopping for prom dresses in a few weeks.”

“All your friends?” Crystal asks.

“No. Uh, well, maybe.” Daya brushes a hair off her face. “They can come if they want. I was just gonna go with Bosco.”

“Oh, of course.” Crystal bites down on a pretzel with a satisfying crunch. “Are you guys gonna match your dresses? Be all cutesy?”

Daya chuckles. “Maybe. I don’t think she’d go for that, but I can try.”

Crystal points over at Daya, talking with her mouth full. “That’s what you guys should debate next,” she crows, triumphant. “Whether you match for prom or not!”

“Oh my God, totally.” Daya tips her head back to the ceiling. “She’d probably win. We do those practice debates sometimes, during meetings, and I think I’ve lost to Bosco more than I’ve lost to all my other friends combined.”

“Whoa,” Crystal says. “She’s that good?”

“Yeah.” Daya props her feet up on the arm of their couch. “Well. No, I mean, she is good, but she’s just… That’s just how she is. It’s like, even if you’re not debating against her, you can still lose. I feel like sometimes I’m having a conversation with her and I’m losing, somehow, even though it’s not a competition.”

Crystal’s laugh is infectious, echoing down the picture frame-adorned walls of the hallway, making Daya’s chest ache a little. She’s missed hearing that laugh around here. “You hate losing,” Crystal points out, clearly amused.

That’s a good point. 

“Yeah,” Daya agrees. “ I do. Usually I do.”

June seventeenth finds Daya sweating in her apartment, music blasting from a speaker on her kitchen counter, two hours into a deep clean of her entire apartment. She’s been done with final exams for weeks, there’s really no reason to have put off cleaning ‘til now, but– oh well. She’s doing it now. It’s only 5PM, and the sun is still high in the sky and bearing down on her tiny defenseless apartment, slicking Daya’s baby hairs to her forehead with sweat even though she’s got an oscillating fan going. 

She’s got plenty of time. The night is young.

In Bosco’s last text, she’d said she would aim to be at Daya’s place by around 4. Less than twenty four hours, Daya realizes, taking a step back from her now-sparkling-clean stovetop and dragging the back of her wrist over her hairline. God, does she have another fan around here somewhere? She must. 

She isn’t cleaning only because Bosco’s coming. Her apartment had been long overdue for a cleaning day, she’d just been a little too swamped during the tail end of spring semester to get around to it. And yes, Bosco’s arrival does make for quite a convenient catalyst to finally get Daya to just do the damn thing already. Two things can be true, Willow’s always saying that. Willow is one of the wisest people Daya knows. 

Daya looks around, hands on her hips. She has to take the trash out and do her dishes, but besides those two things the kitchen is basically done. That just leaves the area around her bed, and the pile of clothes on the chair by her closet that’s been peacefully collecting dust for the better part of a month. Easy peasy.

Bosco probably wouldn’t think twice about the state of her apartment, to be realistic. They’d seen each other’s houses and rooms in just about every state possible, from freshly cleaned to slightly disorganized to recent hurricane damage site.

Cleaning’s kind of fun, though. Not the cleaning itself, but when it’s all over and everything smells vaguely of pine and lemon and Daya can see her reflection in the kitchen counter. See, why would she keep her apartment clean in small, unsatisfying tidy-ups when she could just do this instead?

Daya flops onto her couch, and starts a mental list. Things she still has to do before Bosco gets here.

Check her pantry and fridge, probably. See what the food situation is, and whether she needs to go grocery shopping tomorrow morning.

Text Bosco, send her the menu from the Chinese place two blocks over and ask her what she wants for dinner tomorrow.

Move her car, so Bosco won’t have to look for street parking.

Daya heaves herself up. There are probably more things she’s not thinking of, but her last entry to the list for now is also one that’s moving to the very top of her priorities, which is to shower. A nice hot shower, because she’s been cleaning and she deserves it. Plus, what can’t be made better by a shower in water about as hot as you can stand before you start screaming in pain?

About an hour later, her hair is hanging down her back in tendrils, the wet strands clinging to one another and dripping beads of water onto Daya’s T-shirt. She’s in bed, because her car’s been moved and her fridge has been deemed satisfactory to last her through to next week. Really killing it, as far as her mental list is concerned. 

She finds the Chinese restaurant’s menu online and texts it to Bosco. Let me know what u want, she says, with a smiley face. 

No response comes back immediately, which is both expected and totally fine. Bosco might be at work, or out with friends. She’ll probably reply tonight, after Daya’s already asleep.

If Daya can even fall asleep, that is.

She’s not nervous. She’s excited, though, and she kind of really sucks at sleeping the night before something she’s excited for. Daya’s been looking forward to this since they’d first arranged it, settled on a date way back in the middle of the semester, and now that it’s the next day it feels basically impossible to think about anything else. It’s the first thing her mind defaults to, whenever she’s not actively thinking about something else, as soon as there’s nothing distracting her– Bosco. She’s seeing Bosco tomorrow, Bosco will be here in her apartment, no longer just a contact on her screen or a photo on her Instagram feed. Real, in the flesh.

Daya’s phone screen goes dim, her finger darts out to tap it automatically, and it refreshes to the same unchanged display. Her message, unanswered. 

That’s fine. Daya can be patient. She’s been patient all these months, she doesn’t mind waiting a few hours more. 

(Daya is patient all the way up until 12:02AM, which is when her phone finally buzzes with Bosco’s reply. Daya’s not sleeping when she gets it after all. She’s wide awake, curled on her side watching shitty TikToks because– shocker– she can’t fall asleep, and when she sees the notification pop up she immediately blooms into a smile.

Today. She’s seeing Bosco today.)

.

.

.

Daya wakes up the next morning with no alarm. She purposefully hadn’t set one, in the hopes of sleeping in later, since the later she woke up the less time she’d have to wait for Bosco to arrive. When she blinks her eyes open, there’s already sunlight streaming into her room and the sky looks to be a lovely shade of cerulean, which is a good sign that her plan had at least somewhat worked. 

It turns out that it’s 10:07. Not too bad, Daya will take it. She heats up some frozen waffles for breakfast and decides to take herself for a little outing, something to pass the time so she doesn’t spend these next few hours pacing in her apartment like a caged animal.

She goes to the craft store. It’s an easy six minute drive from her house, so half the cashiers know her by name now and she has more coupons for yarn and glitter and rickety wooden birdhouses than she even knows what to do with. More importantly, it’s the perfect spot to lose herself wandering up and down aisles, browsing through things she’ll buy and then shove in a closet to forget about for months. Not even thinking about the passage of time. Barely even aware of it.

It proves harder than it seems. Not thinking about the time, that is. Suddenly, remnants of Bosco can be found in everything. That skeleton with the heart sunglasses propped up by the entrance to display the gaudy tie-dye T-shirts, Bosco would think that was funny. The bolt of eyesore fabric covered in obnoxiously glittery Taylor Swift themed silhouettes, she’d wrinkle her nose at. The aisle of jewelry supplies with its beads of every color and shape and size, the ones that resemble delicate gemstones and mesmerizing tiger’s eyes, she could probably spend hours in. Just picking through everything, looking over each string of beads with a carefully critical eye, because naturally she’s extremely picky about her jewelry. Daya’s always slightly shocked (and more than slightly pleased with herself) when she gifts Bosco jewelry and the other girl actually wears it, shows up the next time with it dangling from her neck or wrist or earlobes.

Maybe this is its own form of getting the time to pass, though it doesn’t exactly help Daya to be more patient. If anything, it makes her more antsy, makes her glance at her phone more often and silently plead the digital numbers to change faster. It figures, in a way, that the closer Bosco gets, the more Daya misses her. 

It seems like forever, but eventually the hours do creep by, and it all may as well be the blink of an eye anyway when Daya finally gets that text she’s been waiting for.

Bosco <3: Hey. Picked up the costume just now, I’m getting gas

Bosco <3: ETA around 4 I think?

Bosco <3: If traffic is willing

Daya’s really very lucky that there’s no one else currently in the yarn section where she is, because the way she whips out her phone to check it and then immediately breaks into a huge, maniacal grin would probably have any well-meaning citizen a little worried. Perhaps for her, or generally to be in her vicinity. Oh well. 

Daya: Omg okay!!!!!!! I’ll see you soon

Daya: Did I give you my apt number already I can’t remember

Daya: And parking spot number

Bosco <3: You gave me apartment but not parking spot I think

Daya: My b!! Parking spot is 177 I’m like 89% sure

Bosco <3: One percent short of 90 I see

Bosco <3: If my car gets towed you’re paying

Daya laughs aloud. More reason for these imaginary craft store goers to think she’s losing it, awesome.

Daya: LMAOO no ur not getting towed. Park in 177

Bosco <3 reacted 👍 to “LMAOO no ur not getting towed. Park in 177”

Bosco <3: Whatever you say 89%

4 o’clock cannot come fast enough. 4 o’clock has never arrived slower, in Daya’s lived human experience, especially when 4 o’clock does roll around and there’s still no Bosco on her front doorstep because traffic has pushed her ETA back “another 10-15 minutes.” 

At 4:12PM, Daya’s phone rings, and she lunges for it like it owes her money. Picks up without even looking at the caller ID, because she just has a feeling–

“Hello?”

“Hey,” Bosco’s voice says, unmistakable in its lack of enthusiasm, and Daya’s heart sings. “I think I found the right parking lot. You said 177, right?”

“Yes!” Daya’s already up out of her spot on the couch, scrambling to get her shoes on. “Give me one sec, I’ll come out and get you.”

“Oh, you don’t have to do that,” Bosco says. “I have your apartment number.”

Daya’s successfully gotten one shoe on. She reaches down to tug at the other, hopping on one leg. “I know, but still. I can help you carry stuff!”

“Daya, I’m here one weekend. I have, like, my old duffel from our overnight debate trips, I’m not gonna need–”

“Can’t hear you over the sound of me not listening,” Daya interrupts. She has both shoes on, and she throws open her front door, not bothering to lock it behind her. She might be jogging. “See you soon!”

She hangs up before Bosco has another chance to argue with her, and shoves her phone in her jeans pocket. The afternoon dregs of sunlight are painting the trees a vibrant green, there’s a breeze ruffling through her dyed bangs, and the short walk to the parking lot from her front door feels like putting the very last piece of a jigsaw puzzle into place.

Daya’s parking space is in the far back corner of the parking lot. Her feet know the familiar trek to her car better than she does at this point. She shields her eyes from the sun with her hand as she walks, squinting past the bright reflections glinting off the rows of cars she passes.

Daya squeezes between two parked cars to avoid going around the whole row, and– there she is.

Her best friend. Fiery hair dyed red as ever, in a tank top and light grey jeans, dislodging a singular duffel from the trunk of her car. 

Daya nearly calls out her name, then it occurs to her that she has the element of surprise, which is exceedingly rare when it comes to Bosco.

She creeps up as silently as she can, then runs the last few steps and tackles Bosco in the strongest (but hopefully not painful) hug she possibly can.

“BOO!”

Bosco’s never startled easily. She makes no sound of surprise, not even a little gasp, but she does rock forward with the momentum of Daya’s weight crashing into her and Daya feels, briefly, one of Bosco’s hands come up to hold onto her wrist. Dizzying.

“Hello,” she says without turning her head, clearly unamused. 

Daya beams. 

“Hi,” she chirps. She releases her hold, steps back for all of five seconds to let Bosco put the duffel on the ground and turn around, and then she opens her arms again right away. 

Bosco gives her a look. “You already hugged me,” she says, not moving a muscle, because she is frankly terrible.

“I know,” Daya says, stepping in close again. “You didn’t get to hug me back, silly.”

She closes her arms around Bosco, and Bosco does hug her back. Properly, not just one of her please-get-off-me-now air hugs, which is a nice surprise. Daya breathes in, and Bosco’s perfume goes straight into her brain, filling every last cavity and crevice. Just the way Daya likes it.

“Hi,” Daya murmurs, for the second time, against Bosco’s ear. 

Bosco is the one to let her arms go slack first. “You said that already.”

“I know.” Daya pulls back fully. “I missed you. How long has it been? Since winter break, so that’s, like, six months? Something like that?”

Bosco adjusts the straps of her top. “Yeah, just under six.” She narrows her eyes against the sun, peering down the line of parked cars. “If my math is right. I just drove, like, three straight hours, so I wouldn’t trust my math right now.”

“Right, right.” Daya reaches for the duffel at Bosco’s feet, and promptly gets her hand swatted away. “Ow!”

“Nice try.” Bosco lifts the duffel onto her shoulder and turns back to her trunk, pulling out a dusty looking sweater. Then she reaches up to close her trunk, shutting it with a decisive thunk. “Okay,” she says, and pulls the pair of sunglasses sitting atop her head down onto her face. “Lead the way.”

Daya talks all the way to her door and then some. It’s a talent, truly. “Put your stuff anywhere,” Daya rambles, “there’s actually room to do that now that I cleaned this place up. Or, I hope there is. The bathroom counter was kind of a lost cause, I really need to get some kind of shelf or, like, organizer-thingy, but I promise the counter itself is clean underneath all that clutter.”

“Mine is no better, I’ll tell you that,” Bosco says absentmindedly. 

She’s looking around Daya’s apartment, surveying what she can see from her spot immediately inside the threshold, no doubt catching all the mismatched furniture and chipped paint. 

Daya gives a self-aware laugh. “I know how it looks,” she says. “It came like this, believe it or not.”

“What? No.” Bosco leans down to pull at the laces of her boots. “I like it. It’s very you.”

And Daya’s not sure if most people would take that as a compliment, the comparison of this shitty college apartment to them as a person, but that’s irrelevant. It was said to Daya, coming from Bosco, and she’s beyond touched.

Daya spends the next ten minutes or so giving Bosco the deluxe tour of her one-person living space. It’s not a whole lot to get through, but what it lacks in square footage Daya’s certainly made up for in personality. She shows Bosco the tiny watering can she’d found for her front door tomato plant, the garish rubber duck slippers that were a gag gift from Crystal but that Daya treasures and wears every day, the Pedro Pascal shower curtain that she and Maddy had purchased drunk and then proceeded to die laughing over when it had arrived a week later. “At least he’s only on the outside,” Daya helpfully points out. “So it’s not like he’s watching you shower, or anything.”

“Right,” Bosco agrees dryly. “Because that would make it weird, and this is super not weird.”

“Exactly!”

When the tour is done and Bosco’s seen the lay of the land, she stands in the middle of Daya’s kitchen (between the stove and the fridge) and leans side to side to stretch out her back. “I’ve been sitting down for too long,” she says. “Let’s, like, go for a walk or something.”

Daya gives her a stare of faux concern. “I don’t know who you are or what you’ve done with my best friend,” she starts, “but you are clearly not Bosco. The Bosco I know would not suggest such peasant activities as going for a walk.”

Bosco rolls her eyes. “Oh my God.” She pushes off Daya’s kitchen counter to brush past her. “I’ll go by myself, then, fine.”

“No, I’m kidding.” Daya follows. Of course. She can’t imagine a universe in which she wouldn’t. “That’s perfect, actually, ‘cause we can do pickup instead of delivery for dinner and we can just walk around until the food’s ready. The restaurant’s only two blocks away.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, I thought walking was a peasant activity?”

“Only for someone like you! You literally always talk about how much you hate– okay, you know what, never mind.” Daya reaches out to grab her keys, tucking them away in her pocket. “Come on, I wanna show you this one house that has the cutest cat ever. It’s all black except for the stomach and the feet are white, so it’s got, like, a little tuxedo on– is that why they call them tuxedo cats? I never thought about that before, but now that I’m saying it out loud…”

Daya understands from very early on that winning is kind of fucking everything to Bosco, but it doesn’t get bad until their senior year of high school.

Bosco doesn’t change overnight. It happens in small increments, seemingly-innocuous shifts in the atmosphere. On a normal Thursday, for example, Daya’s walking to sit with their friends for lunch, and Bosco closes her locker and starts to walk the opposite direction.

“Are you not coming to lunch?”

Bosco looks back. “I’m gonna go to the debate room,” she says. “I just want to tweak some things in my defense before Saturday.”

“Oh, okay.” Daya glances at her hands, which are holding only her phone and her water bottle. “Are you, like, gonna eat? Do you want me to get you something?”

“No, no. I’m fine. Thank you.” Bosco’s already walking again. “I’ll see you later.”

When Daya sees her next, after school in the debate classroom, she comes up to sit next to Bosco and bumps their knees together. “How’s the defense looking?”

Bosco runs her pen over her bottom lip. “Better. I think I just wanted to re-structure, make it more cohesive. There was this one part that just had to be totally rewritten, so that’s what I did in bio instead of taking my notes.”

Daya nods. “Model student.”

“You’re one to talk. Your notes are covered in more doodles than actual information,” Bosco says, accurately. “Anyway. I got Willow to read my stuff over before you got here, and she said she couldn’t think of anything she would change, so I’m happy with it.”

“Sick.” Daya follows the line of Bosco’s tattoo with her eyes, the delicate lines inking themselves from her wrist down to her elbow. (She’d gotten it as soon as she could, when she turned eighteen at the beginning of the summer. Daya had gone with her to all her appointments, so she’s very familiar with the tattoo itself, but she still likes to look at it.) 

“I hope you don’t make a habit of abandoning us at lunch,” she says. She means it lightheartedly, and Bosco quirks one corner of her mouth.

“I won’t,” she says dryly. “Clingy. Don’t worry, I’ll be there tomorrow.”

And she keeps her promise, she is there for lunch the next day, but here’s how things progress from this point on. They both go through everyday life as normal, routines and rhythms keeping steady tandem. Bosco comes over to her house at least once a week, and sits on Daya’s bedroom floor talking about team stats for the competitive debate season while Daya sits behind her braiding her hair. 

Daya gets a part-time job with an after school program at the library, helping to herd around groups of tiny kids with sticky fingers and keep them from destroying the books. Bosco asks, over a coffee run, if Daya’s picked her events for regionals yet; Daya steals a bite of her croissant and tells her she hasn’t even begun to think about regionals yet, they’re nearly three months away. 

Bosco gets a new tattoo. Daya doesn’t go with her this time, she has a dentist appointment at the same time, but Bosco shows her the tattoo at school the next day and Daya asks about how long it took, why she picked the design, how much it hurt, whether she’d recommend the tattoo artist. “It’s the same person I’ve been going to for all my tattoos,” Bosco tells her, sounding just the tiniest bit like she’d expect Daya to know that already. 

Daya did know that already. She’d wanted an excuse to keep Bosco talking. She hasn’t had many chances to hear her best friend just talk, lately, about something she cares about. Something that isn’t debate, although if Bosco wants to talk about debate then obviously Daya won’t deny her that. 

When they get busy, as all high school seniors do, Daya tries not to be a baby about it. She’s an adult, or practically an adult (even though she won’t technically be eighteen ‘til next year.) It doesn’t have to be a big deal that Bosco cancels on outings with Daya and the rest of their friends for the third or fourth time in the same month, or that she spends nearly all her lunch periods in the debate room these days. “I do homework there,” she says when asked about it. “My aunt has me teaching the juniors’ class at the dance studio after school, so I have to save time somewhere.”

“You could also save time by not spending so much of it worrying about debate,” Daya can’t help but point out. “I swear that’s, like, all you think about now. You probably have dreams about debate at this point.”

Bosco sniffs. “I don’t have dreams about debate,” she says. “Sue me for wanting to have a strong comp season for our last year here.”

She sounds perfectly calm, but the fact alone that she doesn’t bounce off Daya’s obvious attempt at humor tells Daya maybe this isn’t a good thing to poke fun at, for right now. 

“No, yeah, I get it. I want that too.” Daya softens herself deliberately. “It’s gonna pay off. And… I don’t know where that’s gonna leave the rest of us, ‘cause we all know you’re already really fuckin’ good.”

Bosco smiles, the kind of measured curve of her perfectly lined lips that always makes Daya want to crack dumb jokes and shower compliments until she’s blue in the face. Anything to turn it into a full-fledged smile, the kind that shows Bosco’s gums and makes her cheeks dimple. 

“Thanks,” Bosco says, quiet and honest. “I want to be the best.”

Daya just nods. 

(Daya could tell her she’s already the best. Bosco would probably just argue back with statistics and numbers, though, and that’s not what Daya wants to talk about right now. Bosco means that she wants to be the best in the eyes of some high school debate judges. What Daya’s thinking is that she’s already the best, in a sense that has nothing to do with debate, and no one else has come close for some time and Daya can’t see that ever changing.)

They do see less and less of each other, despite everything, and Daya decides she has to be okay with this. She’s not entitled to Bosco’s time. And they’re still a package deal, close in a way that transcends words and gestures and ends up manifesting in moments like the soft exhale Daya lets out into Bosco’s hair when they hug each other goodbye at Angie’s birthday sleepover. It’s the first time she sees Bosco outside of school in weeks, and everyone else is exchanging casual, fleeting hugs while Daya pulls Bosco into her arms and keeps her there. Bosco lets her, which Daya will appreciate as the blue-moon occurrence it is. She breathes Bosco in as much as she can before she has to let go.

Of course, they’re still in debate together. It effectively becomes the only time Daya gets to spend with Bosco, around Bosco, in her general orbit.

Predictably, it’s not exactly all sunshine and rainbows when they’re in that classroom. Bosco’s always been driven, since the very first time they’d both stepped in here, but now she moves and talks with a nearly robotic efficiency that goes beyond just driven.

She’s not drastically different. Not toward their teammates. Daya might be the only one who can see it, the way she’ll smile without her eyes when someone says something that’s meant to be funny, the pauses during group discussions to write things down in her notes when no one else is writing. Even when they’re supposed to be on break. Always writing, always watching others and holding conversations with a detached kind of charm to everything she says. 

“Bosco’s scaring me,” Daya murmurs under her breath to a few of her friends, when Bosco’s out of earshot. She keeps her tone light, even though she’s not really joking.

“Why?” Camden asks. “She gets like this every year before regionals, you know how she is.”

“It’s not usually this bad. I thought she was gonna make that poor freshie cry, earlier, in that practice round.” Daya picks a piece of lint off her sweater with her fingernails. “I mean, you’d think the fate of regionals rested on that one practice match.”

Willow sighs. “No, yeah,” she says, and Daya feels her shoulders slump slightly in relief. Not only me. “I know what you’re talking about, but I think Cam has a point. We might just have to wait it out.”

Daya presses her lips together, and nods and breathes through her nose. Willow’s right, they’re both probably right. They can wait it out, weather the storm and come out on the other end fine. They always have before. 

Daya’s not sure how on earth she manages it, but after the second to last competition of the year, it turns out she’s actually in the top two most likely to advance at yearly regionals. 

It’s her and Bosco. Based on the numbers and past performances, it’s the two of them who are most strongly predicted to advance, which means states.

Daya thinks it’s some kind of mistake, at first. Bosco, that makes sense. She eats and sleeps and breathes debate. But Daya? Daya, who had just signed up for this stupid after school activity because her mom had made her do it?

After the surprise wears off, she actually feels pretty special about it. Not because she’s suddenly gunning to be the state champion, or anything. More because— well, it’s her and Bosco. Another thing they can share, something they can experience together. Maybe, Daya hopes, in a mindset that truly verges on delusional, it means she and Bosco will spend more time together. Helping each other practice or whatever.

“It’s you and me, did you see?” Daya asks, as soon as Bosco sits down that Monday after school. “After the last comp. We have the highest averages out of all the seniors, can you believe that?”

Bosco’s smile is pleased, a purse of her lips with no teeth. “Yep. I saw yesterday, when I checked scoring sheets online.”

Daya pauses. “Oh,” she says, “yesterday? You should’ve texted, or something!”

“My bad.” Bosco tilts her head to the side, propping her chin on her hand. “This means we’re technically competitors now,” she says, leisurely conspiratorial. “Only the top sixteen from regionals advance, I think. That sixteenth spot could come down to one of us.”

Daya laughs, slightly caught off guard. “I guess, but I feel like the chances of that happening are really low.” 

“True,” Bosco says. “Low, but never zero.”

It’s hard to tell whether she’s being serious. Daya doesn’t think so, but it’s not entirely clear either way, and it gets even more baffling when they get to debate later in the day and she asks Bosco to read over her policy intro, and Bosco hesitates before taking the papers from her.

“You’re okay with me reading it?” Bosco checks, and Daya blinks at her for a solid five seconds.

“Yeah,” she says, slowly. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

Bosco accepts the papers and scans the first one, her voice going absentmindedly light. “I don’t know. Just making sure.”

It takes Daya a few beats longer to finally connect the dots. “What, like… ‘cause of regionals?”

“Well, yeah.” Bosco flips a page. “Again, just making sure.”

Daya knows it matters to Bosco, winning and being the best, but this is just absurd. They’ve been looking over each other’s notes and outlines since the very beginning, since day one, and Bosco believes that could change now just because of the slim possibility that one of them might beat the other out for a spot in states? 

“I’d always show you my stuff,” Daya says. “Would you not show me yours?”

Bosco spares her a glance through dark lashes, just for a second, before going back to reading again. “No, I would.”

They already have so little time together these days, so Daya doesn’t have the time to waste on questioning whether Bosco actually would or not. Daya’s not planning on asking, it’s not like she would ever try to get a leg up competitively through her best friend’s hard work. She doesn’t know how she would even go about doing that. And since she’s not sparing time to question Bosco’s honesty, she’s also not going to spare any on being hurt, even just privately, at Bosco’s insinuation that either of them would do such a thing.

It’s still going to be fine. Daya’s going to make sure of it. Bosco’s always been competitive, and she may be acting differently recently but she’s still Bosco. 

Wait it out. It’s gonna be fine, Daya tells herself over and over.

Except then there’s prom, which kind of throws a wrench in things. Just… minorly.

“Does anyone actually have their prom dress yet?” 

“We do,” Camden says, gesturing between her and Angie. They’re sitting on the same bench eating lunch, like the disgusting lovebirds they are. “We got them last week, they’re really pretty. I’ll send pictures to the group chat later.”

Playfully, Daya groans. “Oh my God, I just realized we’re all totally gonna be third-wheeling you guys.”

From her place behind the bench-turned-loveseat, Jasmine plants her hands on her hips. “Speak for yourself,” she says. “I’m going with this girl from my English class, so I have a date, thank you very much. No third wheeling here.”

“Maddy?” Willow checks, to which Jasmine’s face splits into a stupid smile that makes Daya want to roll her eyes. “Aww. Did you ask her, or did she ask you?”

Jasmine bats her lashes. “I asked her.”

“Good for you.”

Daya turns to Jorgeous, who’s eating her lunch sitting on the grass. The shorter girl isn’t in debate with the rest of them, but she’s Jasmine’s friend from cheer, so she sits with them anyway. “What about you, Jorgie? Are you going with anyone?”

Jorgeous covers her mouth, chewing and swallowing before she speaks. “There’s a guy from the football team,” she says. “He asked me with, like, a poster and shit. It was super cute. He lowkey can’t spell, I couldn’t even understand what the joke on the poster was supposed to be, but–” She holds up both hands, grinning. “I can’t spell either. We’re perfect for each other.”

That gets a good laugh out of everyone. Daya looks around the group, mentally pairing people up in her mind. Cam and Angie will be each other’s dates, obviously, Jasmine and this Maddy girl, Jorgeous and illiterate football guy–

“Willow?”

Willow sighs. “I can’t go. My cousin’s getting married in Colorado, my mom’s making the whole family go even though I told her it’s prom weekend.”

“Oh, oh, yeah. I remember. You told us.” Daya’s gaze drifts around one last time, then settles on Bosco, who hasn’t said anything this entire time. She’s actually eating with them, for the first time in maybe a week. “It’s okay. Bosco and I will be each other’s dates again, then no one has to third wheel anybody.”

Bosco’s picking at her food with a plastic fork. She doesn’t look at Daya, or anybody else when she speaks.

“I’m kind of thinking of not going either.”

It’s like a literal record screech. Daya refuses to even believe what she’s heard, at first, because there’s no way Bosco just said what Daya’s somehow imagined her saying, but when she looks to all their other friends they’re wearing similar expressions of shock and confusion. So, no, Bosco really had said that.

“What?” Daya breaks the stunned silence first. “What do you mean?”

Bosco’s eyes flit up to the sky, as if the answer to Daya’s demand is nestled among the clouds. “It’s not that I don’t want to go,” she says evenly. “I just have, like, a ton going on that weekend. My aunt and uncle are gonna be out of town, so I’ll have to pick up extra classes at the studio, and we’re all really busy the entire week after, too. Plus, those tickets are kinda stupid expensive, and–”

“It's senior prom,” Daya interrupts. “Tickets are always stupid expensive. Are you seriously not gonna go?”

“I said I’m thinking about not going, Daya.” Bosco’s voice is clipped. Daya hates it, she hates this, she hates that Bosco’s even introduced the possibility of her missing prom. As if they haven’t been planning to go together since they were fifteen and sixteen, as if they haven’t been texting each other photos of dresses since September. “Like I said, there’s also the next weekend to think about. I have tests, we’re all gonna have debate. It’s just a lot going on—”

“Oh my God.” Daya doesn’t stand up from her seat, but she’s sorely tempted to. “Oh my God, don’t tell me it’s because regionals are the weekend after. You’re thinking about fucking regionals?”

Bosco doesn’t outright deny it. “Aren’t you?”

“Yeah, but not like this!” Daya’s laughing, just purely bewildered. Incredulous. “I actually can’t believe you. Does it matter to you that much? You’re that worried that, like, I’m gonna qualify for states and you’re not? Something like that?”

Bosco’s not eating anymore. She gets up, throws the rest of her food away. “Now you’re just being immature,” she says, icy cold. “That's not happening and we both know it, but sure, tell yourself that if you want.”

She walks away. None of their other friends say a word, and Daya refuses to look at any of them, her blood still simmering and her heartbeat pounding in her temples. 

Daya gets sick of her friends’ cautious silence, stifling and eggshell-ridden. She spends the rest of lunch in the library. Bosco’s in the fucking debate room, probably, so there’s no chance of running into her there.

After school, they have debate and Bosco doesn’t acknowledge her existence once. When they end up standing across from each other in the lineups for practice events, Bosco taps some junior on the shoulder and murmurs something in their ear, so they switch places. That’s fine. Bosco can pretend she doesn’t exist, Daya doesn’t want to talk to her anyway. She’s being unreasonable. Daya ignores the sting, grits her teeth and gives her all against the junior and loses anyway.

She ends up staying later, after everyone’s already left. She’s packing up her things very slowly, slowly enough that their teacher ends up approaching her.

“Daya, everything okay?”

She zips up her backpack with unnecessary aggression. “Yeah.”

Her teacher perches on a desk nearby. Daya usually finds her presence comforting. Maybe it’s that she’s so much younger than every other teacher, or the fact that Daya’s spent four to six hours in her classroom after school every week for the last almost-three years. 

“You and Bosco are…”

Daya heaves a sigh. She could’ve guessed that someone would catch on, since she and Bosco have never once behaved towards each other like they had today.

“She doesn’t want to go to prom,” Daya says tonelessly. “It’s the Saturday before regionals, and she’s really determined to let debate take over her entire life for some reason. And she wants me to be a seventh wheel to our friends all by myself, I guess.”

“Seventh wheel,” her teacher repeats. “That’s rough.”

“I know.”

“Guess you’re gonna have to get a really good dress, then.” Her teacher folds her hands in her lap. “If it were me, I’d show up in something outrageous. Something with gigantic shoulder pads, or a really long train, or… strobe lights. Or maybe something with a bunch of spiky feathers that make it so no one can stand next to you. Y’know?”

It’s exactly the kind of eccentric solution Daya would expect from her eccentric teacher. Her name’s Aquaria, so that about sums up what her parents must have been about, and she gives advice accordingly.

“I’ll just have to do that,” Daya says, slinging her backpack over her shoulder. She does feel marginally better from Aquaria’s little pep talk, surprisingly. “Thanks. See you on Wednesday.”

It’s only once Daya goes home that she really thinks about Aquaria’s suggestion. It’s not actually a bad idea. Not the feathers and strobe lights, obviously. But the part about getting a really good dress. 

She ends up going with her mom to pick out a dress, rather than with Bosco. That hurts, but Daya’s already made up her mind. She’s going to get exactly the dress she wants, and she’s not going to think about Bosco, and she’s gonna look really fucking hot.

The dress she ends up getting is a rich, earthy green, almost a very dark gold. It has black at the waist and a lace-up back, it has this floral lace trim dotted with tiny rhinestones at the sleeves, and it comes with gloves. Daya’s not gonna say no to gloves, Jesus Christ.

She and Bosco have never been in a fight before, not even once, so the days leading up to prom are very strange. Bosco doesn’t show up at lunch at all, and Daya doesn’t have to wonder where she’s spending all her time. They see each other at debate, but Bosco avoids eye contact like it’s an Olympic sport. She’s so good at ignoring Daya’s presence completely that it’s unnerving. It’s like she truly doesn’t notice Daya’s there at all, which Daya knows can’t be true.

Daya thinks of texting Bosco, more than once. Asking if she’s changed her mind, or talking about something totally unrelated, acting like nothing’s happened. Maybe asking her to hang out, if she can spare a precious few hours from her incredibly busy life that evidently doesn’t have room for Daya or their friends anymore.

She doesn’t do any of that. Bosco has a phone and two working thumbs, she can also send a text if she wants to talk. Bosco’s already far away and getting further, but Daya doesn’t feel like chasing after her right at this moment.

On prom night, Daya gets ready at Jorgeous’ house with the rest of their friends. They take turns fawning over each others’ dresses— especially Daya’s, which admittedly feels like a victory. “It’s gorgeous, Daya, seriously,” Cam tells her in earnest, and Jorgeous nods, chiming in: “You look like a million bucks.” They take pictures in the backyard, group ones and in pairs and threes and whatnot, and Daya watches each couple and date pair take pictures together with not an ounce of jealousy. She can’t be jealous, when her friends all look so happy. 

She thinks about Bosco just a little bit, then, and she decides it’s allowed because it’s only due to Bosco’s absence that Daya is the odd one out with no date. It’s just annoyance.

Prom is enjoyable for what it is, which is a group of rowdy teenagers dancing to bass-boosted Billboard’s Top 40 and trying to hide the fact that they’re buzzed or high. Daya sticks with her friends. She dances, loses her voice screaming over the music, gets lots of blurry selfies with photobombs from a very tipsy Jasmine. 

At some point during the night, Daya stops pretending to not be thinking about Bosco.

At some later point after that, Daya also gives up on pretending she doesn’t miss Bosco with every fiber of her being. She checks the time on her phone, and sees her lockscreen with all her friends and Bosco’s smile and feels like something’s around her heart and squeezing. Gripping, not letting go, turning the colorful chaos of her surroundings nauseating rather than fun. She feels heavy, she feels… She wants to leave, maybe.

She calls an Uber to get home. Her mother is on her as soon as she’s through the front door, worried over why she’s home earlier than she’d said. “I’m fine,” Daya insists. “I’m tired and it was loud in there, that’s all.”

So that’s senior prom.

The next week is regionals. She and Bosco still aren’t talking to each other, so they don’t exchange their scores and results like they usually would. Daya thinks, with bitter humor, that it must be some kind of undoubtedly bad omen that the first competition they don’t spend glued to each other is also the last one of their high school careers.

Daya comes out twenty ninth overall. Not even close to advancing. She hears, later, that Bosco places eighteenth– two spots short. 

There is a very petty part of Daya that she’s not proud of, and this is the part that conjures up the notion of texting Bosco for the first time in weeks, just to be cruel. Was not going to prom worth it? she imagines typing out, in some alternate universe. To get eighteenth? Is this what all that work was for?

It’s nothing she’d ever do, of course. It’s just a passing thought, and it still makes her feel sick. If anything, as pathetic as it is, she’s itching to text and make sure Bosco’s okay. She’s not sure what she could say that wouldn’t just come off as insensitive, or rubbing it in, but— God, she and Bosco aren’t talking and Daya doesn’t know what to do with herself. She’d never expected it to go on this long. She’d assumed one of them would cave and give the other a call after this weekend, or maybe after last. 

But if one of them is going to cave, Daya supposes, it’ll be her. There’s no way it will be Bosco. And Daya doesn’t know what she’d say, or how she’d say it, even if some days it seems like there’s no more room in her brain for any other thoughts with how much she thinks about Bosco. There’s a gaping hole in her universe left by Bosco’s absence, a hole that she now realizes had been steadily forming for weeks, maybe months before their fight. And that day at lunch might have just been the tipping point, the thing that pushed it over the edge. 

She thinks about what the rest of their lives look like, from here on out, if they don’t make up now. School ends, debate ends, they spend the summer without any reason to run into each other. Then they go off to college in the fall.

And that’s it?

That can’t just be it. It makes Daya feel physically sick to think of it. That can’t be it, no, not when Bosco’s still pinned at the top of her contacts list, not when her car is still littered with Bosco’s hair ties and lip gloss and her mom still asks at least twice a week if Bosco’s going to be coming over anytime soon. Not when remnants of Bosco’s presence are still strewn haphazardly around Daya’s entire life like the aftermath of a tornado, and everything she’d never gotten the chance to say out loud to Bosco still weighs heavy on her tongue like solid lead. You have no idea how much you meant to me, do you? Because you’d never let me tell you. Stupid.

Daya gets caught in a cycle, thrown around like driftwood in a current. It’s the same thing every time. She needs to talk to Bosco. She doesn’t know how. She has to somehow get through to her, but there’s just never a good opportunity. 

Then there’s the banquet.

Daya’s nineteen and on top of the world, this time simply because Bosco’s here for the weekend and everything is wonderful.

The walk is nice, and dinner is nice too, eating Chinese takeout on Daya’s sofa while a movie they’re not really watching plays in the background, but the real treat in Daya’s opinion is what comes after.

The takeout containers are pushed to the side, the movie is left on because they’re barely paying it any attention, and what happens next is entirely Daya’s initiative. She’s got a bottle of white wine on top of her fridge that she’s been saving for a special occasion, which– what could be a special occasion, if not this one?

“This is why I really brought you here,” Daya announces, holding the bottle by its neck and gesturing with it. “To get you drunk so we can talk shit about people from high school.”

The corner of Bosco’s mouth quirks upward. “That time of the night, huh?” She reaches out to take the bottle, which Daya hands over while she goes off to find glasses and a corkscrew. “We’ve got nothing better to do than talk about those losers?”

Daya knows her better than that. She may have the reputation for being the petty one, between the two of them, but the delightful truth is that Bosco has a particular penchant for holding grudges, some that run deeper than anything Daya can imagine herself holding onto for so many months and years. All it takes is the right setting to bring it out of her. 

Wine and Daya’s living room, it turns out, can be the perfect setting for such a thing. Daya opens Instagram to pull up profiles of former classmates, and they just go one by one. Pointing out post-grad breakups, expected and unexpected, lamenting the poor souls who’d definitely peaked in high school. Then, after that gets old, it’s digging through their camera rolls from several years back. 

“Here’s Jorgeous when she was drunk and dancing at our grad night,” Daya announces, leaning over with the photo. “Probably high as a kite, too. It’s a miracle she was still on her feet this late in the night.”

Bosco wheezes. “There’s not a thought behind those eyes.”

“Not a single one.”

“Oh, here’s something. I think this is Halloween junior year,” Bosco says. “Remember this? When we went to that party and Cam ran into her nightmare ex?”

“Wait, yeah. And she paid Angie twenty dollars to make out with her on the stairs.” Daya examines the picture, admiring their makeshift low budget costumes. A pair of devil horns and a red minidress could go a long way, when you were fifteen and broke. “And that’s literally how they got together, like, a month later. Crazy.”

“U-Haul lesbians.” 

“Exactly.” Daya picks up her own phone again, scrolling down and watching the neat grid of square memories fly past. “Okay, I went too far back, you’re not even in these anymore. Let’s go to… senior year.”

Bosco makes a pfft sound with her lips. “Boring. All the funny stuff is from when we were younger, we got less interesting as time went on.”

Daya laughs. “There are some hidden gems,” she insists. “If you know where to look.”

As luck would have it, she ends up proving herself right with the very next swipe of her finger. 

“Ohhh my God.”

Bosco doesn’t take her eyes off her own phone. “What?” she asks, low and already disproving, even as her voice still curls at the edges with laughter.

“I just found something. I forgot I still had this, hang on–”

Daya lets the video play, turning up the volume to hear. Fuck, she knows exactly what this is. It’s their senior year banquet for debate, held against the trim white background and neatly sculpted shrubbery of Camden’s backyard. (Rich parents, all that great British stuff.) That’s Willow’s muffled sniffling in the background, the clumsy shifting of the video as she awkwardly tries to get a surreptitious angle, and– that’s Daya’s own tearful voice in the background, she realizes with both fondness and chagrin. “And I just– she means a lot to me,” the younger Daya in the video says, her lip obviously wobbling and sending a tremor through all her words that’s honestly painful to listen to even now. “I don’t really think I can find the words to, like, properly even– describe it–”

Across from her, Bosco’s head shoots up. “Daya.”

“I definitely… don’t think I could have done this without her—”

“Why do you still have that?” Bosco’s out of her seat now. She walks right up to Daya, reaching out as if to grab for her phone, and Daya twists to the side to keep it out of her reach. “You said you got rid of it. I told you to delete— Daya.”

She’s talking over Daya-in-the-video, but that doesn’t really matter. Daya’s not watching this video to listen to herself cry her way through a corny ass speech, even if she meant every word from the bottom of her heart and she’d stand behind every word now. 

Because while present day Bosco is towering over her, glowering down at her (still trying to snatch her phone away), senior year Bosco is doing none of those things. Kind of the opposite. 

Daya’s watched this video more times than she’d like to admit, so she has every last detail memorized, telegraphed forever into her mind’s eye. She could tell you by heart the way the camera wavers here, the way it zooms out shakily before panning, just briefly, across the table to where a younger version of Bosco sits. She doesn’t look too different from today. Her hair’s blonde instead of ginger. She has fewer tattoos, fewer piercings, more color in her clothing.

The main thing to pay attention to is her face, and her body language. 

Her hand, which covers her mouth with those dainty pearl-colored nails and doesn’t move. Her eyes, glassy with tears and red rimmed, and her other hand resting on the tablecloth in a closed fist. Knuckles flat to the table. Her gaze is fixed somewhere off camera– presumably on Daya. Daya chooses to think so.

Daya gets all of two seconds to smile down at this Bosco before the real life version leans her entire body across Daya’s torso in order to finally pry her phone out of her grasp.

On muscle memory alone, Daya manages to click the power button in the nick of time. “Bosco–”

“Nope.” Bosco draws back, and starts to unlock Daya’s phone while standing right there in front of her. Daya knew it was a mistake to tell her the passcode and then never change it. “I can’t believe you’ve had this since high school, oh my God. I would have done this ages ago if I knew–”

“No, Bosco. Please.” Daya’s standing now too, covering the phone screen with both hands. Trying to hide the delete button, mainly. “Please, please, please. I’m not gonna send it to anyone, I promise. I would never.”

Bosco is relentless. She wedges the phone free, turning away and making Daya chase after it. “Yeah, but you still have it.”

“It’s the only video of my speech I have!”

“Liar, you have others.”

Daya laughs incredulously. “I don’t! And I’m not a liar, you know that.”

They’ve reached a standstill, it seems. Bosco has Daya’s phone trapped firmly in her hands, but Daya’s got her hands caged around Bosco’s, preventing her from actually doing anything. It’s almost like they’re holding hands, Daya’s brain supplies, which is a both appropriate and productive thought to be having right now about her best friend of five years.

“I’m not gonna send it to anyone,” Daya says again, a tiny bit breathless, laughing even though she knows she shouldn’t be. “I pinky promise. I’ll, like, sign something in my own blood.”

“You’d rather do that than just delete the video.” Bosco’s stare is unfaltering, cold grey like jagged stone cutting into Daya’s weakest spots. “Which you told me you already deleted.”

Daya shakes her head. “I said Willow deleted it,” she says. She can’t help the way her voice goes gentle and placating, even though she knows Bosco hates that. “She sent it to me first, I– I asked her to.”

Bosco looks at her like she’s just admitted to some heinous crime. “Why?” she asks. Quietly, with the miniscule strain of someone who genuinely doesn’t know the answer. 

Daya opens her mouth, no words coming out as she flounders for the right ones. Because it’s adorable, she wishes she could blurt. Because I can’t remember any other time you cried in front of people and I kind of need proof that it’s even physically possible. And because I’m the one who made you cry, which is not something I thought could ever happen, ever. 

“It’s, like…” Daya struggles for a second, and Bosco lets her, unblinking. “I don’t know, Bosc. It’s such a sweet moment to me. I’m crying way more than you are, in case you didn’t notice. If that makes you feel any better,” Daya says, letting a note of self-deprecating humor into her tone. “I didn’t realize you hated it that much.”

“I don’t–”

It’s incredibly disconcerting, watching Bosco piece her mask back together in real time. The crease between her brows is erased, smoothed over as if it was never there to begin with, the muscles in her jaw going slack. “I don’t hate it,” she says. Okay, who’s a liar now? “I just don’t really know why Willow felt the need to film me, in that moment, when it was literally the middle of your speech, but whatever.”

Daya’s eyes fall to their hands, still joined together between them. She loosens her grip, a peace offering. “I’ll delete it if you really want me to.”

Bosco tugs her hands away entirely, not rough and not tender, something vague and in between. She hands back Daya’s phone unceremoniously. “It’s fine,” she says. Back to offhanded, her default settings. “If I ever catch you sending that to anyone–”

“I won’t,” Daya promises, ardent. She means it. The memory is for her and her alone, no one else. 

They go on like nothing’s happened. As they always do. They’ve never really talked about it, Daya realizes later in the night when she’s lounging on her couch to the comforting soundtrack of Bosco’s electric toothbrush in the other room. The banquet, her speech, the tears she’d shed herself and the ones she’d shockingly, impossibly brought out of Bosco too. All of it.

The closest they had gotten to talking about it was during the moments immediately after, the hug they’d shared when Daya went to sit back down at their shared table. She remembers Bosco standing up, remembers her vision going all blurry as Bosco had leaned toward her and hugged her while not meeting her eyes, and she remembers exactly what Bosco had said to her– “Not cool,” she’d whispered into Daya’s shoulder. The first words she’d spoken directly to Daya in weeks. “You could’ve warned me.”

Daya doesn’t even remember what she’d said back. Probably something about how she didn’t intend to say any of that, how she was only planning to mention Bosco briefly along with the rest of their friends, which all would have been true. All she remembers is sitting back down, wiping mascara from her undereyes, and sniffling all the way through the speech of whatever poor kid had been up next after her. Not because of the speech she was hearing. Because of Bosco, and the realizations that were beginning to settle on Daya retroactively, numbly, one at a time. Bosco didn’t hate her, maybe? Or at the very least, there must have been some part of her that still cared, for her to get all… emotional. 

Daya supposes it’s a good thing, technically, that she was already teary-eyed and there were still sentimental speeches going on at the time. Other factors to pin the blame on for the fresh waves of tears that continued to overtake her, easier things to explain than my best friend just gave me a hug after I stupidly made half my speech into a dedication to her, and I just realized we might still be best friends.

They’ve never acknowledged it beyond that day. Until now, that is. Daya brings a subconscious hand to her pocket, where her phone is nestled, and smiles at the floor.

When Bosco comes out of the bathroom, she’s fresh faced and her hair is up and she has her fucking glasses on. The ones with the wire rims and thick lenses, the ones the outside world has never seen because Bosco refuses to even go outside and get her mail in these glasses. Daya nearly coos aloud at the sight, before her senses return to her and she remembers that Bosco would immediately take them off and never wear them in front of her again. 

“I hate your shower curtain,” Bosco says in greeting.

Daya’s smile gets wider. “What? It’s literally the best thing ever,” she says. “He watches over me all the time, he’s like my guardian angel.”

Bosco shakes her head, coming to sit on the other end of the couch. She’s in a sweatshirt that falls off one shoulder and threadbare pajama bottoms that look like she’s had them for years. Slightly too short, Daya notices, and they rise up to a little above her ankle when she sits down.

“No,” she says. “More like Big Brother. It’s too sinister to be a guardian angel.”

“Sinister? It’s Pedro Pascal!”

Bosco doesn’t even grace that with a response. She just shakes her head again, and starts undoing the bun in her hair, plucking at the hair elastic holding it up. Daya tries not to be too distracted.

“Okay, fine then,” she decides. “Who would you rather have on your shower curtain instead of Pedro?”

Bosco rolls her eyes. “Dude, no one. Why does a shower curtain need to have someone’s face on it?”

“For the sake of whimsy. To add a little spark into your life.” Daya props her elbow on the couch’s armrest, gazing over at Bosco with a contemplative hum. “You could put my face on your shower curtain, how about that?”

Bosco actually laughs. “Oh, yeah, that’s the one.”

“Right? Then you could walk into the bathroom every morning and be greeted by my beautiful face.” Daya puts her chin in her hand, gazing upward at nothing. “Or, instead of one big me, it can be a bunch of tiny little me’s. That’s like that one movie, what’s it called– Despicable Me? The one with all those yellow guys?”

“Minions?”

“Yes! Minions,” Daya agrees. “Except they’d all be me. Me-nions.”

She giggles out loud after saying it, and Bosco sends her a withering look. “What?” Daya says. “That was a good one, admit it.”

“Comedic genius.” Bosco doesn’t take the bait. Her hair is loose around her shoulders, and she runs her fingers through it once before dropping her hands to her lap. “I think this is a sign that it’s getting late,” she remarks, now teasing. “You’re clearly delirious.”

Daya heaves a dramatic sigh. “No fun at all,” she says. “But you’re probably right. What time is it?”

“Almost 1.”

“Oh, that’s not even late. Maybe you’re just getting old.” 

Daya stands from the couch and starts towards her room, but she stops when Bosco makes no move to follow. 

“You coming?”

Bosco looks over, and has the nerve to look confused. “Hmm?”

Daya hooks a thumb in the direction of her bedroom. “I thought you wanted to go to bed.”

“Oh,” Bosco says, after a beat of silence. “I’m totally good here.”

Here, meaning the couch? 

Daya apparently needs to get her hearing checked, or her critical inference skills, because there’s no way she’s understanding this right. “No,” she says, quite plainly. “You’re not sleeping on the couch when I have a perfectly respectable bed. Come on.”

Bosco looks like she wants to argue. “It’s seriously fine,” she starts to say, and Daya doesn’t have the patience. Huffing under her breath, she crosses her tiny living room in a few strides to take hold of both Bosco’s hands and physically pull her off the couch. 

“You’re forgetting our sleepover roots,” she says cheerfully as she leads Bosco to her room. She releases Bosco’s hand to climb across her bed, reaching over to turn on her lamp. “We always shared a bed then. And in hotels, too, for all those competitions. We’re pros at this, I can’t believe you’d forget that.”

“I didn’t forget.” Bosco sits on the edge of the bed, taking her glasses off and setting them on Daya’s bedside drawers. Daya takes that as a win. “It’s your bed, dude. I’m not gonna assume.”

Daya tucks her legs under the covers, scooting all the way to one side. “You should always assume,” she says. “It’s always a yes, if you’re the one who’s asking.”

In response to that, Bosco doesn’t say anything at all. She hides a yawn behind her hand, and Daya barely hides a smile. 

When she finally joins Daya under the covers, Daya reaches out again and pulls the cord to turn her lamp off. Then it’s them and the darkness, Daya and the steady rhythmic thump of her own heart and the warm weight of her favorite person in the world, only inches away. The conditions almost couldn’t be more perfect for sleep to come easily.

Daya curls up on her side and closes her eyes. She keeps waiting for Bosco to shift, to move around and pull the blanket tighter around herself the way she does when she’s on the verge of falling asleep, but it never comes. 

.

.

.

The next morning, Daya blinks the world into bleary consciousness and immediately registers a warm Bosco pressed into her back.

It’s very reminiscent of their high school days of sharing a bed. They both move around in their sleep, Daya more so than Bosco, so it’s not uncommon for them to wake up tangled together. Daya will have an arm thrown across Bosco’s sleeping form, usually, or her head will end up more on Bosco’s pillow than her own. Bosco always complained about it; Daya always let her due to the suspicion that there was no true annoyance behind it. If Bosco didn’t like sharing a bed with her, she simply wouldn’t. Bosco wasn’t one to voluntarily put herself through anything she didn’t enjoy. 

Another thing Daya’s always thought about Bosco is that she looks like an angel in her sleep. With her eyes closed, lashes dark against her skin and her face completely relaxed, she’s so… unimposing. This is a sight Daya could never tire of, it’s the reason she’d “forget” to turn off her alarm on days even when they didn’t have anywhere to be. 

As if on cue, Bosco stirs, mumbling something quiet and unintelligible, and nestles deeper under the blankets. Daya thinks her heart could burst from all the pressure, implode like one of those soda cans taken to the very bottom of the ocean.  

Bosco’s not a morning person, so being around Bosco before she has any caffeine in her is a rare kind of privilege. She finally opens her eyes after a few more minutes of grumbling at nothing, squints at the sunlight coming in through the crack between Daya’s curtains, and closes her eyes again. No good morning. No hello. Daya chuckles, and lays back against the headboard like they have all the time in the world.

They don’t, by the way. Have all the time in the world. Daya knows this, and instead of making her antsy to get them up and out of the house, it’s having the opposite effect on her. She’s determined to savor every moment, let it linger as long as it wants instead of rushing it by and racing onto the next. The next time she sees Bosco after this will probably be when she goes home in August before school starts. 

Daya turns her head to gaze at Bosco. Her cheek is pressed against the pillowcase, lips parted and hair falling across her face. The cover’s fallen down to expose one pale shoulder to the outside world. If Daya were braver, if this were a fictional movie universe where everything went right and nothing bad could touch them, she’d lean over and plant a kiss on that shoulder. Just to see what Bosco would do. 

It’s a dangerous line of thought. Daya banishes it promptly, and forces herself to get out of bed and start the coffee machine. 

. 

. 

.

They leave for downtown around 2 in the afternoon. They take Daya’s car, even though Bosco thinks they should take hers– “You’ll lose your spot,” she points out as they step outside into the summer heat. “Mine’s in your assigned spot, so no one’s gonna park there.”

Daya waves her hand in the air. “It’s whatever. You drove so long yesterday,” she counters. “I can find a spot somewhere, I’m really good at it.”

She adds this second part even though Bosco is already well aware of her passion for finding free street parking anywhere they go. She refuses to pay for a literal rectangle of concrete, especially one that she won’t be using for more than a few hours. That’s stupid. No, she’d rather drive around the same block four times like they are right now, scouring for cars with the brake lights on, groaning loudly when they prove to have indeed just parked rather than being about to leave.

It’s better when Bosco helps. Her presence doesn’t do anything to increase the likelihood of finding a spot, of course, it just means Daya doesn’t get as mad. “Come on,” Bosco says, after the second time a car’s brake lights fake them out. “No, someone’s gotta be leaving. Follow that guy in the orange shirt, see if he’s going to his car.”

Daya does as she’s told. The guy in the orange shirt is leaving, thankfully, and Daya claims his spot with the swiftness of a lion closing in on a wounded gazelle.

There’s no shortage of things to do in the city. Daya’s intended destination for them is a particular street, the one she’s been telling Bosco about. It has antique stores, coffee shops, boutiques, and one store selling obscenely expensive art pieces of woven silk and blown glass that Daya’s mildly afraid to even breathe inside for fear of breaking something. 

“It’s so cool,” Daya says as they stand together at a crosswalk. “You’re gonna love it. I hope you love it.”

“Sounds like I will.” Bosco inspects the stickers on the traffic light pole beside them, leaning in to get a closer look. “Are you shopping for anything specific?”

Daya thinks about it. 

“No. I’m probably not gonna buy much, to be honest. I just love window shopping here.”

And this is the truth, or part of the truth. She does love window shopping here, that’s not a lie. The more complete version of the truth is that she truly could not care less about the details of where they end up, as long as she gets to point out things that she thinks Bosco would like and goad her into buying them (or buy them for her). As long as she can listen to Bosco talk about her part time job teaching at the dance studio back in their hometown, fall into the lull of her voice in between all the overlapping sounds of the city. As long as she can glance over, every so often, and just watch some mundane version of Bosco exist. Bosco looking at pigeons, Bosco examining a pair of thrifted gloves. Bosco in her purest and most unfiltered forms. 

This is what Daya misses most, when they’re apart during the school year. The dolled up, perfect makeup, front cover of a magazine Bosco– Daya can see that any time she likes. All she has to do is open up social media. It’s not the same as in person, but it’s something. This Bosco, Bosco in between all the picturesque moments, she can’t get this through a screen. 

They wander all over the place. There’s a café with a statue of a horse inside the front display window, so they go inside for that reason alone. (Bosco whispers to Daya that the proportion of the horse’s hind legs are all wrong, that the placement of the joints is too high; Daya laughs and calls her a horse girl.)  There’s a thrift store with a big handwritten sign that says CLOSING SOON, EVERYTHING MUST GO!, so naturally they have to spend some time there too. 

There are also plenty of places where they go in and look around and don’t buy anything at all. “It always makes me feel like I’m doing something wrong,” Daya confesses. “I feel like I tricked them.”

“Good. Businesses are greedy, they deserve to be tricked.” Bosco’s poking through a rack of clothing, eyes dull with disinterest. “Down with capitalism or whatever.”

Daya makes a noise of protest. “No, but what about small businesses?”

“Hm. Yeah, I guess we have to support small businesses.” Contemplative, Bosco’s hand stills on a sequined corset top. “We can buy something if it’s a small business. To show how kind and generous we are. Performative purchasing.”

Their last store of the day, they decide, will be World Market. It’s the closest to the restaurant Bosco finds through a quick search on her phone, the Mediterranean place Daya may or may not have been thinking of. They do a loop around the whole store, and it turns out there’s a sale on candles, so then they have to spend at least twenty minutes smelling every single one. More accurately, Daya wants to smell every single one, Bosco just wants to make fun of the candle scent names.

“Cozy Winter,” she sneers, picking up a white candle. “That’s a concept. You can’t smell a concept.”

Daya cracks a grin. “What about…” She grabs the nearest candle, reading the label. “Refreshing Sunset? Who the fuck was paid to come up with these? I hope they were fired on the spot for this one.”

They pick their candles and go to check out. While she’s paying, Daya happens to notice the shirt of the cashier working one register over, which displays several illustrations of elaborate fantasy worlds and the words ‘Magic the Gathering’ right smack dab in the middle of it. Daya perks up, recognizing the game as the so-called nerd shit Bosco plays with her sister, and she goes to get Bosco’s attention.

Or… she tries to get Bosco’s attention. She doesn’t want to be too obvious, the cashier with the shirt is in the middle of talking to a customer, so she just nudges the back of her hand insistently against Bosco’s. 

She times it poorly. At the same time Bosco turns her head toward Daya, the employee in front of them asks Bosco: “Would you like your receipt?” and Bosco quickly looks forward again. 

“Yes, please,” she says, her voice velvety smooth. And while she says it, she moves her hand around Daya’s so their palms are facing in towards each other, and oh-so-casually interlaces their fingers together.

It takes Daya a second to realize what’s happened. Her brain flat out stops functioning, runs into a solid fucking wall of radio static, and by the time it clears and she can process things normally again they’re already out on the street again, far away from the cashier and the nerd shirt, and Bosco is… reading the receipt she got. Which is in her other hand. The hand that’s not holding onto Daya’s– they’re holding hands. 

Daya giggles, stupid and out of place. 

“What?” 

“I just–” Daya says, through laughter. “Sorry. I just realized why you started holding my hand.”

Bosco looks at her. “What?”

“I was trying to get you to look,” Daya explains. The glee in her voice is barely contained. She tells herself to get a grip. “Okay, granted, I could’ve done it a better way. There was a cashier– you probably didn’t see, there was this other person behind the counter and they had a Magic the Gathering shirt on, I was trying to be subtle–”

“Oh,” Bosco says, an utterance and a laugh in one, and she’s dropping Daya’s hand, which sends sparks of panic through Daya’s veins–

“Nonono,” she rushes to say. “I do want it! I like it.” She takes Bosco’s hand again, slipping her fingers through Bosco’s the same way Bosco had. Daya can’t think too hard about that part, how it had seemed so natural for Bosco to do that. She’ll start to feel faint if she does. “I wasn’t, like, laughing at you. I just thought it was really… nice.”

Cute. Cute is the word she wants to say, and the word she very much cannot say. 

“Whoops,” Bosco says. “Must have just gotten confused from every other time we went somewhere and you were clinging to me like an octopus.”

It’s so blatantly a deflection, a distraction from this incredibly endearing moment that’s just occurred, and Daya’s going to let her have this one because she knows better than anyone how Bosco gets when she’s embarrassed. “That’s me,” she agrees. “Can I be a cool octopus? The one with the blue rings that’s super poisonous and kills people?”

“You can be whatever octopus you want.”

Daya doesn’t let go of her hand, and miraculously Bosco doesn’t let go either. They hold hands all the way to the restaurant, where they only separate because Daya opens the door for Bosco to go in first. “After you,” she says with the tip of an imaginary hat.

“Ew,” Bosco replies without missing a beat. And they’re pretty much back to normal, back to joking around, but also not. Back to unseriousness, but it can’t and won’t change the fact that Bosco had assumed Daya wanted to hold her hand while checking out at the World Market of all places and had obliged her without a second thought. 

.

.

.

The restaurant interior is a lively place, music playing from speakers hidden behind fake plants and a steady stream of chatter from various tables throughout the entire open space. There are light fixtures that remind Daya of Christmas ornaments, modern-looking bauble things that illuminate the families and couples seated throughout the mosaic tiled floor. It’s honestly beautiful. Daya continues to glance around, transfixed, as Bosco talks to the hostess, and as a waitress leads them to a table in a corner of the main dining room. 

“Do you know what you’re gonna get?”

“Well, I just got the menu in my hands five seconds ago,” Bosco muses lightly. “So no, I’m still looking.”

“Sounds like a you problem, I already know what I want.” Daya taps her fingernail on the menu, admiring the way the light reflects off the laminated surface in a shiny wave. “Oh, they have a dessert menu. You want to split something?”

Bosco pokes her tongue out between her teeth. “Oh, maybe.”

Which is absolutely not something that should be exciting. The prospect of sharing a slice of cake, or whatever. Daya’s sure they’ve done that a hundred times before. Yes, this may be essentially a date minus the label of a date, yes, Daya plans to pay for Bosco’s food. That doesn’t mean she can let herself get delusional and actually start thinking of it as a date. 

Appropriately, she allows herself about two seconds to be excited, to smile down at her menu before mentally and physically moving on. She chews on her lip so she isn’t caught smiling, and pretends to watch the couple sitting across the way from them while she’s actually watching Bosco run the same strand of hair through her fingers over and over again.

Dinner’s good. Everything tastes good, and Daya’s not drunk (she still has to drive them home, she’s not that brand of teenage irresponsible) but it feels like she could be. Buzzy, giggly, a touch too warm even after she takes off her jacket but it doesn’t really matter. She picks up her glass of ice water and entertains the notion of pressing it against her cheek, though she doesn’t really do that. Bosco would probably look at her weird, which isn’t something that Daya necessarily minds, it’s just that she’s really unfortunately fond of how Bosco’s looking at her now and she’d hate to do anything to change that. 

They continue to talk even over their mostly empty plates. It’s mostly Daya’s doing, admittedly. She’s the one to keep remembering new things she’d been wanting to tell Bosco, new questions to ask, ones that are on topic and ones that come out of nowhere. Bosco fields it all without batting an eye. She must be used to this by now. Both the way Daya speaks in general, which is a lot of madness without a whole lot of method, and the way she seems to be incapable of letting a good moment end. Especially when it comes to Bosco.

When the waitress brings the check, Daya reaches out a hand to slide it over to her side of the table, and Bosco nearly slams her hand down on top of Daya’s.

“Bosco,” Daya laughs.

“I’d love to know what you think you’re doing,” Bosco says. “Surely not paying the bill. Surely you can’t be so naive to think I would let that happen.”

Daya always forgets how strong Bosco is. The plastic edges of the little container are pressing into Daya’s palm, surely imprinting on the skin. “I wouldn’t call myself naive. I would call myself…  someone who’s going to pay the bill.”

She manages to pull her hand free, sending the plastic tray and the slip of paper inside skidding towards her side of the table, but Bosco is fast. She reaches out and swipes the bill itself, while Daya grabs the pen.

Bosco sighs. “Give me that.”

“So bossy,” Daya teases. “Make me. How are you gonna sign with no pen?”

“How do you know I don’t have one in my purse?”

Daya narrows her eyes. “Do you?”

“…Probably not.” Bosco pulls out her purse to start rifling through it anyway. “It makes more sense for me to pay,” she says as she does. “I’m the one staying with you. This is just me making it even, y’know? Erasing my debt.”

“You don’t owe me anything.” Daya can’t help the plaintive note that sneaks into her tone, even though she knows Bosco’s not being serious. The thought of Bosco being in debt to her, of their friendship being one where everything has to be equal and every kindness is given with the expectation of being returned– ugh. No. “And that’s even more of a reason for me to pay! You’re my guest.”

“Nuh-uh.”

Daya huffs, and resigns herself to watching Bosco pull makeup and hand lotion and hair clips out of her purse. It’s like the bag from Mary Poppins. More and more items appear on the table, appearing out of thin air.

As with so many other cases, the silence makes Daya say things she shouldn’t.

“You know,” Daya says, bold off the atmosphere and the twinkle in Bosco’s eye, “this would be easier if we were dating.”

Bosco doesn’t have any extreme outward reaction to this. She meets Daya’s eye and quirks a brow. “How so?”

Daya shrugs, like this isn’t something she’s thought about a million times. Like her heart isn’t pounding its exhilaration loud and clear against the inside of her ribs. “Well,” she begins. “If we were dating and I planned a date night for us, obviously I’d pay.”

“But did you plan this?” Bosco leans both elbows on the table. “I seem to remember being the one to find this restaurant, was I not? I even looked at the Yelp reviews.”

It’s honestly astounding, how efficiently Bosco’s gotten them right back into arguing and brushed past the prospect of them dating. Daya’s head is spinning a little bit. “You did, but I’m the one who took you to all those stores earlier, if we’re getting technical with it.”

“Mm, does it really count as taking me to places if you were constantly asking where I wanted to go?”

“Wha– sorry I happen to be a considerate date!” Daya’s snickering too much to keep up with this bit. “Okay. I’ll let you pay for your own food, on one condition.”

Bosco gives her a look, a you-better-make-this-a-reasonable-request type of look. “What?”

Daya smiles her most innocent, well meaning smile.

“There’s somewhere I want to take you.”

.

.

.

“Close your eyes.”

Bosco considers Daya for a second. “No.”

“Please. It’ll make it so much better, trust me.”

“Dude.” Bosco shifts her weight onto one leg, her hand going to her shoulder to hitch up the strap of her purse. Daya had thought about telling her she didn’t need it, where they were going, but she’d figured it was best to reveal as few details as possible. “We are in a parking lot with, like, five other cars and zero signs of what this could possibly be, and we’re about to get into an elevator. I don’t think I need to close my eyes, I have no clue what’s going on.”

Daya clasps her hands together under her chin. “No, I know,” she begs, “but you’re gonna know why I had you close your eyes later if you just do it.”

They hear a metallic ding, and there’s an upward arrow that lights up above the elevator doors. Daya turns to Bosco, hopeful. She doesn’t add another please out loud, she thinks that would be excessive, but her puppy dog eyes probably add at least another three.

Bosco just sighs. The doors open and she steps toward them, not looking over her shoulder. “I’ll close my eyes when we start going up.”

And to Daya’s mild surprise, she actually does. She leans against the wall opposite the one at Daya’s back, resting her hands on the railing as the elevator lurches slightly and begins its ascent. Her eyes are closed, her head tipped back against the rigidized metal. It might be creepy to stare at her like this, Daya realizes, but it’s a small elevator and there are only so many places to look. The walls, the floor, the ceiling– oh, and the most perfect face on the planet Earth. Super hard choice on Daya’s part, right?

“This is, like, a fucking skyscraper or something,” Bosco says. “How many floors are we going up?”

Daya snickers. “It’s just a slow elevator,” she says. “We’re almost there.”

At the sixth floor, the elevator dings again. Daya steps forward. “Alright. I’m gonna take your hands and guide you, okay?”

“This is how I die,” Bosco remarks. “Falling off of a skyscraper because you wouldn’t let me open my eyes.”

She lets her hands be taken anyway, and Daya walks her forward until they’re clear of the elevator.

“We’re almost there,” she says. “Where do you think we are?”

Bosco thinks about it. “I can feel there’s a breeze. Maybe you have brought me to the top of a skyscraper,” she says. “But I can’t hear anyone else around, so maybe it’s an abandoned skyscraper. This is some serial killer shit, Daya.”

“Oh my God, I’m not a serial killer, promise. You’d know if I was. You’re the first person I’d tell.” Daya tugs gently at Bosco’s hands, prompting her to start walking again. “I’m leading you, like, fifteen feet max, and then you can open your eyes.”

“Why not.”

They move approximately fifteen feet, fairly slowly. There’s nothing around for Bosco to trip on, really, but Daya knows Bosco is already humoring her by letting her do this and she wants to go at Bosco’s pace. For what it’s worth, Bosco seems fine. Her grasp on Daya’s hands is relaxed, and she’s walking normally. 

Finally, Daya brings them to a gradual halt.

“Okay. Open your eyes.”

Bosco opens them.

The silence stretches on a few moments longer as Bosco blinks rapidly a few times, presumably adjusting to the darkness. Then, she looks around, taking in their surroundings. The empty lot, the parking spaces outlined in neat white stripes, the flickering streetlights. She notices the ledge in front of them (chest height, it might be noted– perfect for resting arms on), and steps forward to peer over it.

“Oh,” she says. And more quietly: “Oh, wow.”

And oh, wow, indeed. Beneath them and stretching out for miles around is the city, breathtaking in its glow, dumbfounding in its sheer scale. The city during the day is already gorgeous, in Daya’s opinion, tons of fun architecture and fountains and blue-green-tinted windows, but the city at night is nothing short of alive. It’s truly some sort of mythical beast, yawning a mouth full of glittering streetlight teeth and blinking its crimson eyes at every twist and turn. 

That’s Daya’s favorite part– the fact that the city is still alive, when the sun has retired for the night. Each light seems to dance and sparkle, appearing and disappearing at will, all coming together in one giant choreographed waltz. On the street below, there’s people wandering up and down with their shopping bags, people getting in their cars to no doubt go home to their families or even to go somewhere else for the night, have a bit more fun after dark. Everyone looks tiny from up here, miniscule ants in a much grander scheme of things, and if anyone were to look up at them they’d surely be just as small. It’s comforting, somehow.  

And of course there are the real stars as well. Daya can tilt her head up and try to count them, make out any constellations she might remember from eighth grade science class. They are a bit harder to see, which is likely because of all the light down here, and that does make Daya sad to think about. Still. There’s something really absurdly magical about being able to look up, and look down again, and see a sea of glimmering stars in both directions. 

“You bring a lot of friends up here?”

Daya glances over, and Bosco’s leaning on the ledge, arms folded over each other. She’s not looking at Daya, but the edges of her are illuminated in pale white and gold and she looks– she looks like something out of a fucking dream sequence. 

“No,” Daya says, feeling her voice rattle in her throat before it comes out properly. “You’re, um, the first.”

Bosco smirks over her shoulder. “Oh, so there will be others after me?”

“No.” Daya steps forward to join her at the edge, and the breeze ruffles through her bangs. “I didn’t say that.”

They stand in the silence, the faint noise of traffic and nightlife below. Daya breathes in, as deeply as she can, and lets it out slowly. The air is crisp. It feels untouched, if that’s even the right word to describe this. Daya knows, logically, that this can’t be true, what with all the pollution, but it certainly feels that way.

Her eyes fall on Bosco again. They always will, every time. 

“You look so beautiful, it’s not even fair.”

Bosco turns to her when she starts speaking, but she turns away again when she registers what Daya’s saying. “Booo.”

“I’m serious,” Daya says. 

“I know.” Bosco ducks her chin down at her hands, examining one of her nails. Daya thinks this is most likely for show. “That’s why I have to boo you. Because you’re too serious.”

Daya laughs. With no walls to bounce off of, the sound is swallowed up by the night.

Bosco looks over at her, then away again.

“Thank you,” she murmurs. Belatedly, though Daya doesn’t mind. “I really like this color on you.”

Daya smiles, gazing down at her shirt even though the lack of good lighting up here makes the color indistinguishable. During the day it’s a deep forest green. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.” Bosco sweeps her hair over her shoulder. “Your prom dress was close to this color.”

“It was.” Daya fully turns to face her, now intrigued. “How the hell do you know that?”

“You posted pictures, idiot.”

“Oh. Right.” And that means you’ve seen them. Bosco can’t see her face, they’re both watching the tiny people milling on the sidewalks, so Daya can wear as dopey an expression as she wants. “Well, thank you.”

Daya always has it in her to run with a train of thought. “Prom was okay. It would’ve been better, if… you know,” she says. “I would’ve wanted it to be with you.”

Bosco just nods.

“Yeah.”

Daya chews on her bottom lip. They’re sort of treading in uncharted territory here, and she wants to steer them away from anything too depressing. “What would you have worn, if you ended up going?”

Bosco shrugs. “Long dress. Probably a darker color… I don’t know.” She sounds flippant about it, but Daya would wager cold hard cash that she’s thought about this extensively. “Doesn’t really matter. From what our friends have said, sounds like everyone would have been looking at you anyway.”

Bosco says it like she’s annoyed by the idea, like this is some inconvenience that Daya’s caused, but there’s a low affect to her voice that electrifies Daya from the inside out. They both know Bosco means it as a compliment. Daya feels her face grow pleasantly warm.

“I would have been looking at you,” Daya tells her.

Bosco’s eyes stay downcast, but she smiles.

“That’s all that matters, then.”

Something about it makes Daya’s heart do a little funny sensation, unfurling like a flower. She doesn’t get Bosco like this very often, all soft and… unraveled. Genuine. The quiet kind of genuine, not the kind she assumes when she talks a mile a minute to their friends and says all the right things to make everyone laugh and Daya can see that she’s calculating every tiny thing that comes out of her mouth. 

And it’s then and there, watching Bosco smile at the ground, that the idea starts to creep in. Not all at once. More like the slow crawl of ink being seeped up by paper, a gradual spread. 

She could try to have that conversation. 

The one they’ve been dancing around all weekend, the one they’ve been masterfully dodging for years despite Daya’s best and most daring efforts to push them in that direction.

The one that high school Daya had rehearsed in her head before falling asleep every single night, so that college Daya could have random fragments of it pop into her head throughout the day. 

It’s a dumb idea, it’s a really fucking dumb idea, but the truth is Daya doesn’t know when they’ll get the chance to do this again. She doesn’t know when the next time is that she’ll be so fortunate to have these conditions– face to face, which is the only way Daya would ever want to do this, and the closest Bosco could ever get to being emotionally sincere. Her guard completely lowered. 

She decides to not fully commit yet. Half-commit. Test the waters, somehow.

“Also, if we had gone to prom together, it wouldn’t have done shit to help all those rumors about us.”

Bosco tilts her head to one side. “Rumors?”

“Yeah,” Daya says. She can’t remember what people sound like when they’re being casual and lighthearted. “Remember? Half our grade was convinced we were, like, hooking up or whatever?”

“Oh,” Bosco says, and she already sounds dismissive even in that one word. “Yeah.”

“Or, like, not hooking up. Dating, more like.” Daya might be pushing it, but she’ll push until Bosco calls her out for it and then maybe it’ll be good for both of them. “Like, we didn’t talk to Jazzy much at the time and I heard from Maddy later that she was convinced we were secretly in love with each other.”

Bosco’s looking down at her hands, drawing her nail slowly back and forth over the outlines of her tattoos. “Really.” She sounds mildly interested, unless that’s Daya’s wishful thinking. “I never knew that.”

“Yeah.” Daya’s eyes trace the movement of Bosco’s nail, momentarily transfixed. “She definitely wasn’t the only one, I know for a fact some of the debate people thought that too. And being each other’s date to prom would’ve totally fed into that.”

“The debate kids were annoying about it,” Bosco mutters. There’s no real malice behind it. “The freshmen, it was always the freshmen. Lydia genuinely believed you were my girlfriend, you know.”

Now it’s Daya’s turn to be surprised. “What? Really?”

“Mhm. I found out at regionals our senior year. We were on the bus on the way there and she was talking about how wanted to ask out some girl from the basketball team, and she asked how I did it with you.”

Daya’s jaw is dropped, hand over her heart. “And you never fucking told me? Bosco, that’s so sweet, what the hell?” she says. “Oh my God, and the fact that she assumed you were the one to ask me out. I’m offended.”

Bosco laughs, a dry sound. She’s turned around now, she has her back against the ledge and her arms crossed at her chest. “And she told all her little friends before this, they were all in on it too,” she says. “All believing we were deeply head over heels for each other at these miserable three-hour debate meetings.”

She’s got a way of making everything sound so derisive. Daya wants to take her words and dissect them, pan them for any nuggets of golden sincerity, comb through them over and over again until she’s sure she understands what Bosco means– and even then, she’ll probably be wrong. 

Daya sees a chance and takes it.

“That’s funny,” she says, keeping her tone light. “They were… I mean. They were kind of onto something, though.”

It’s Daya’s best attempt at something nonchalant and fun and unobtrusive. It doesn’t work. She feels the mood shift immediately, nigh imperceptibly. 

“What?”

Bosco’s looking at her like she’s speaking another language. Brows pinched, expression utterly devoid of comprehension.

Daya sticks to her guns, as terrifying as it is. “Everyone who was… saying that stuff. Lydia, her friends, Jasmine.” 

They’re rapidly approaching a point of no return. Daya knows that whatever she chooses to say in the next five, ten, fifteen seconds is going to determine how the rest of the night goes from here, and quite possibly the rest of their friendship. 

“Maybe they weren’t entirely right, but I can tell you they were at least half right,” Daya says, feeling out of breath even though they’re just standing here. Her pulse races in her wrists and her neck, and she can’t stop to think, she just has to keep hurtling herself toward the brink of everything she’s ever known and everything she’s ever wanted. “Maybe… more than half, but that part is kind of up to you.”

Bosco’s arms are crossed, no longer just an afterthought but a shield. Her shoulders are tensed, and she’s lost that easy slouch to her posture that she’s been wearing like a second skin all evening. 

“What does that mean?” she asks, no louder than a whisper, and suddenly it’s real, this is real, it’s really happening. It’s all too real. Daya feels like she’s about to step off the edge of a cliff. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying– well.”

Daya leaps.

“I’m saying I’m in love with you.”

(Daya’s pictured herself saying these words so many times. She’s practiced, whispering under the covers of her bed, and they always come out slightly different. As a blunt declaration, sometimes, or as a secret she’s spilling forth, or as a broken little admission. It feels fitting that on her first time actually voicing them aloud, to the only person who matters, these words stumble out of her as a simple fact of the universe. Shaky, but convincing. You already know this.)

Bosco’s said nothing, so far.

“I’m in love with you,” Daya repeats, and it comes more naturally this time. “I was back then, and… I am now.”

Years of Daya’s life could be passing and she’d be none the wiser. She’s never known time to pass so slowly, pinned to the spot by Bosco’s silence. The nervous excitement begins to recede, threatening to curdle into panic. 

“Daya.”

Okay, that’s– that’s something. Right? Her name?

“Daya,” Bosco breathes, “don’t do this to me.”

Daya freezes.

Her heart doesn’t have the chance to sink. It’s suspended in her chest, encased in ice, no longer beating. 

Bosco’s shaking her head, more to herself than to Daya by the vacant look in her eyes. What Daya can see of her eyes, anyway, with her face tilted towards the ground. “We are not doing this,” she says, nearly begs. “Daya. You can’t just… fuck.”

Daya doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t know what she possibly could. She’s just here, watching Bosco slowly back away from her as she speaks, and feeling a horrible sickly cavern crack open in the pit of her stomach. 

Bosco stops and runs a hand through her hair, and one blonde lock falls right back out again, unwilling to obey. Daya keeps her eyes on the hair, because it’s better than looking at Bosco’s face and seeing what’s left there, after all the color’s been drained away. She feels sick. 

When she finally breaks the silence again, Bosco’s voice is brittle like glass. “You mean that?” she asks. There could be a slight tremble to her voice, or maybe Daya’s hearing things. Clearly her judgement isn’t to be trusted. “You’re not fucking with me, this isn’t some prank?”

Daya shakes her head no. 

Bosco exhales like she’s been punched hard in the gut, raggedly soft. “Okay,” she says. There’s no surprise in it at all. She sounds like she’s been hollowed out. 

“Can we go back to your apartment? Please?”

Daya really could be sick. Bosco never says please, that’s for customer service workers and her fucking cats when they won’t take their medicine. Now she’s saying please, because that’s how badly she wants to not be here anymore and to not be confronted with what Daya’s just done. 

“Yeah,” she says numbly. “Of course.”

She makes sure to take a good, long look around as they walk back to the elevator. The view of the whole city with its twinkling lights and elegantly silhouetted rooftops, she tries to commit it to memory. It’s seeming unlikely she’ll want to come back here ever again, so… she might as well have something to remember it by, a lasting impression. 

The summer after senior year is probably the most surreal time of Daya’s entire existence.

Nothing feels entirely real. The days are long and sunny and sleepy, but they’re marching Daya and all her friends towards something that carries an insurmountable weight. The fall season will bring with it the first big change in their lives, for most of them. Every moment spent together is treasured just a little more, each laugh shared face to face a little more precious.

She and Bosco…

They’re cool. They can hang out with the rest of the group, they can both be at Angie’s house or the pool or whatever. They interact in fleeting, surface level snapshots of conversation and their friends very kindly don’t say anything (though Daya absolutely catches Jasmine’s eyes lingering on her and Bosco in the in-betweens, wondering without asking. Maybe she asks Willow, or whoever, behind Daya’s back. Daya doesn’t care as long as she doesn’t have to answer questions.)

If it was weird before the banquet, not talking to Bosco, not interacting with the person she’d never noticed her whole life sort of revolved around, then after the banquet is even weirder. Daya doesn’t know where they stand. Not really back to normal, but definitely not strangers or even acquaintances, so they must fall somewhere in between. They’re okay enough to hug after Daya cries like a baby and basically professes her love to Bosco in front of everyone, but are they okay enough to hang out one on one? Are they ‘getting coffee’ okay, or ‘sleepover in Bosco’s basement’ okay? 

Daya doesn’t think so. Not yet. They’ll keep drifting around each other in neutral spaces, these group settings where they make polite small talk and avoid meeting each other’s eyes, waiting for something to change. Orbiting one another, and waiting for their paths to overlap.

Not all of it is so passive. Daya gets brave somewhere around the end of June, and by early July she’s bored of waiting around and just invites Bosco over to her house. 

They agree on 3:00 in the afternoon. Bosco shows up on Daya’s front doorstep at 2:58, with a plastic container of cubed watermelon.

“From my mom,” she says as she holds it out. 

“Sweet.” Daya takes it from her. “Tell her I said thank you.”

She leads Bosco upstairs to her room, although Bosco knows where everything in her house is and could find her way around in her sleep. Bosco stops just inside the doorway, gazing up at Daya’s walls. 

“You rearranged your posters.”

Daya looks up at them too. “I did,” she says. “They’d been like that for a really long time. I had a bunch of new ones I’d been meaning to put up, and I wanted to get it done before moving out, so. Yeah.”

It’s like that at first. A bit awkward, the silences more gaping than Daya’s used to. They manage to find things to say, though, and by the time Crystal pokes her head in hours later they’re laughing so hard that Crystal has to knock several times on Daya’s doorframe for them to even notice she’s there.

“Knock knock,” she says. “Bosco, our mom is asking if you want to stay for dinner. She says you’re more than welcome to, if you like.”

Daya turns to Bosco expectantly.

For once, Bosco doesn’t have an immediate and unfazed answer. She looks from Daya to her sister and back again. “Oh,” she says. “I should probably get home. Um, thank you. I’ll say hi to your mom on my way out.”

Bosco doesn’t end up staying for dinner that time, and the next time she comes over it’s the same thing. She comes in the afternoon, and leaves before dinner. After that, though, they make plans to meet up with the intention of getting dinner. They go to this hole in the wall place that Daya suggests, a Thai place they used to eat at all the time during junior year when they were done with debate and hungry and tired and still had to go home to a mountain of homework afterward. The restaurant looks exactly like Daya remembers, the same watercolor forests stretching out over the walls and fish-shaped tips jar at the front desk. Daya wonders if Bosco feels it too, the uncanny sense of doing something together they haven’t done in a while, falling into rhythms that are still second-nature. Making all their same dumb jokes as before, like nothing’s even happened.

After the Thai place is ice cream, a store that’s just opened right near the beach. After this is another trip to the beach, not just for ice cream but for a whole day lounging on beach towels and walking through the shallows, leaving damp footprints in the sand. Then an afternoon at Bosco’s house, and one at Daya’s house again. This time, Crystal doesn’t even ask if Bosco’s staying for dinner. She comes to Daya’s room and says they’re ordering pizza, asks Bosco if she’s okay with pepperoni and sausage mushroom, and Daya knows. They’re back to normal, or something so closely resembling it that Daya can’t tell the difference.

This is how the summer goes. They start off orbiting, like Daya calls it in her head, which turns out to be really fitting considering that when they find their way back to each other, it is like some sort of planetary collision. Slow at first, at a pace that makes Daya wonder if they’ll ever get anywhere, then faster and faster all at once until they’re so close it’s hard to believe they’d ever been so far apart. 

And going along with this space theme: Daya knows they’re planets and not stars, because there’s no big explosion, no huge supernova of emotions and apologies. That doesn’t happen. It’s a quiet re-introduction of all their old routines, the melding together of two objects that never should have been separate in the first place.

When summer recedes into fall, when they have to part ways again (this time with promises to text and call every day, this time with zero uncertainty about what they are to each other), when the dust has settled and Daya has the time to reflect on it: she decides that if there’s any good she’s gotten out of this experience, it’s a newfound determination not to let anything like this happen, ever again. She’s quite certain, actually, in the fact that it’s not going to happen again. All long-term friendships go through rough patches; this had been theirs. 

That’s what Daya thinks. There’s pretty much no reason Daya can see that they’d ever go back to how they’d been, the awful state of limbo, not knowing what their future as friends looks like because she’s not sure they even have a future together. She certainly won’t be doing anything that puts them in this position, not on purpose.

Why would she ever do that, when she’s already experienced what that’s like once before?

The drive back to Daya’s apartment is excruciating.

It’s dead silence in the car, save for the dull roar of her tires on the freeway asphalt. She doesn’t play music. It would feel too out of place. In the passenger seat, Bosco looks out the window and doesn’t say a single word, doesn’t really move or make a sound. It’s as if she’s not there, except for the fact that Daya keeps glancing over at the back of her head and having to blink back the tears that well up in her eyes, swallowing around the lump in her throat. 

After the third or fourth time it happens, Daya just keeps her eyes trained on the road. She doesn’t let herself turn her head, no matter how badly she wants to. She looks at the road ahead, and if she’s not looking at the road she looks at her knuckles, chalk-white on the steering wheel, and the sick feeling never goes away.

She manages to find parking again, by some impossible stroke of luck. They walk back to her apartment complex, Bosco walking a few paces behind her. The only way Daya knows she’s still following is the occasional crunch of her shoes on the pavement.

They reach her front door and Daya fumbles with her keys, her fingers unsteady and her arms feeling like they’re made of dense rubber. She manages eventually, jamming her door open with her shoulder. She steps inside and moves out of the way for Bosco, waits to hear her come inside, then doubles back to close her door.

She hangs up her keys on their hook and turns around with the question already tumbling from her mouth.

“Are you mad at me?”

Bosco, in the middle of taking off her shoes, stops what she’s doing to stare at Daya. Her eyes are half-lidded with weary disbelief.

“...Yes.”

Hopelessly, Daya laughs. She can’t help it. There’s nothing funny about this, her laugh isn’t one of joy or even relief, it’s just pent-up energy that has no suitable outlet. 

Bosco slips out of her shoes, leaving them where they are on the floor, and walks past Daya to the kitchen. Daya follows. It’s all she’s ever known how to do. 

She hits the light switch on her way in, and the scene that gets illuminated for her is Bosco, standing with her back against Daya’s kitchen sink. She’s in just socks. Her hair is still tied up, except for those unruly strands from earlier, and she hasn’t even taken off her purse. 

“You don’t even know how bad I want a fucking cigarette right now,” Bosco informs her, low and gravelly. 

Daya manages half a smile. “I thought you quit.”

“I did.” Bosco has both hands at the base of her neck, her face angled up to the ceiling. “You’re making me want to start again.”

It’s objectively funny. On another day, it definitely would have made Daya laugh; today, it just so happens that it’s her breaking point. 

Daya thinks, at first, that she’ll get away with it. Bosco’s not even looking at her, and Daya wipes away the tears that fall with the edge of her hand, but then she sniffles and Bosco jerks her chin down instantly and Daya can’t hide anything from her. 

“Daya,” Bosco says, like she’s in physical pain. 

“Sorry,” Daya forces out. She turns her face to the ground. Smiling, smiling so she doesn’t cry harder, smiling because this is humiliating and she knows how much Bosco despises tears. She brings one hand up to press her knuckle into her inner corner, trying to spare her mascara the worst of it. 

“What? No, don’t…”

The next thing Daya knows, from her limited view of her kitchen floor, is footsteps padding across the tile and Bosco’s hands at her elbows. 

“Stop,” she sighs, and Daya wants to get upset and push Bosco’s terribly gentle hands away and say that she’s trying– and then Bosco holds her arms out low for a hug. 

It’s so obviously Bosco’s last resort. The only thing she can think to do, the thing that she knows will work because it’s worked before. A sob rises in Daya’s throat.

She steps into Bosco’s arms, practically falls into them, and cries harder than before. Which is the opposite of what Bosco wanted, she’s pretty sure. She’s got half a mind to try and apologize again, but she’s sort of crying too hard to breathe, so talking is probably not an option, and… Bosco doesn’t seem to mind. “Breathe,” she reminds Daya quietly, and Daya forces herself to consciously take a gasping breath. Bosco hugs her tightly, arms locked around Daya’s waist. She doesn’t let go. 

It’s Daya who pulls away eventually, to wipe at her eyes. Only with one hand. The other clings to Bosco’s shoulder. “I’m sorry, oh my God.” She’s smiling at her own expense again, though it’s harder now and it feels all warped. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

“It’s fine.”

“No, it’s–” Daya scrubs her fingers under her eyes. Fuck the mascara, actually. “You don’t need to do this for me,” she chokes out. Impatient, plaintive, but only directed towards herself. She fixes her eyes off to the side, on the door of her oven. “You didn’t do anything wrong. There’s nothing wrong with, like– not feeling the same way.”

Bosco goes still. She drops her arms just slightly, letting her hands fall to Daya’s lower back. 

“When did I say that?” she asks. 

Daya’s head is fuzzy from crying, her thoughts slow and viscous. “What?”

Bosco clears her throat. “I never said I didn’t feel the same way.”

For the second time in the same hour, Daya stops. Stops thinking, stops breathing. Her heartbeat trips over itself as she tries to process what she’s hearing. 

“What?” She draws back, lips parted and eyes wide. “What did you just say?”

And Bosco fucking shrugs.

“You heard me,” she murmurs. Not unkindly. Not rushing to take it back or defend herself.

Daya rips herself away. She takes a big step back and looks at Bosco, just stares her down and feels the anger start to spread like wildfire, searing her insides white-hot and molten. (Finally, she thinks, an emotion that she can act on. Something she knows what to do with.) 

“You’re telling me,” Daya says, breathing hard, nearly snapping her jaws around every word. ”You’re telling me we went through all that just now, that whole shitshow of a conversation and a miserable car ride and you feel the same fucking way? After reacting like that?” She’s yelling, she can hear herself yelling, but she can’t stop. “Don’t do this to me? Bosco, what the fuck?”

But Bosco isn’t giving her anything to feed off of. She’s not fighting back. She’s standing where Daya left her, arms wrapped around herself. 

“Daya,” she says, and she sounds so uncharacteristically pitiful that Daya’s actually startled out of being mad, for a second. 

A second is all it takes. Bosco closes the distance between them and reaches for her hand. Stunned, Daya lets her take it, and lets her guide them both down to sit on Daya’s kitchen floor.

There’s nothing graceful about it, for once. The tile is cold and soothing under Daya’s palms, and she sits down hard without the mind to lower herself carefully down, and she doesn’t care. She cares about answers. She cares about why, and how, and when, when could this possibly have happened? How could she not have realized, how could she have been so blind–

Bosco’s sitting with one knee bent and pulled close to her chest. She has all of the answers Daya wants, and she’s not talking.

“I don’t understand,” Daya begins. That seems like a good place to start. “You’re in love with me, too.”

Bosco cringes, a small dip of her head that Daya catches easily. 

“Why…” Daya licks her lips, at a loss for words. “Why would you scare me like that?”

Bosco shakes her head. She’s gazing somewhere over Daya’s shoulder. The oven, maybe. “It’s more complicated than that,” she says, a way that immediately has Daya’s hackles rising again. “It doesn’t really matter how I feel if it goes against what I know.”

Frustration prickles at the back of Daya’s neck. “Which is?”

“We wouldn’t work.” Bosco makes it sound simple. Like she knows something Daya doesn’t, which Daya highly fucking doubts. “Not like that.”

Despite herself, Daya feels a fresh wave of tears spring to her eyes. She’s willing to fight for this, fight for them, until she’s run out of words entirely, but it won’t matter if Bosco’s already made up her mind. “How do you know that?” she pleads. “How can you say that when we haven’t even tried? I– I don’t think you understand. I told you, I’ve been– since high school I’ve felt this way about you.” She’s picking up momentum now, gaining some confidence. “This is real for me, okay? This isn’t just some crush. You know how important our friendship is to me, do you really think I’d do this if I wasn’t completely sure?”

“I believe you feel that way,” Bosco says, halting. She sounds like she’s choosing her words carefully. “But… again, it’s not as simple as feeling. There are other things that go into a relationship, Daya, I know you know this.”

“Other things. Like what?” Daya’s head hurts, a steady ache building at the base of her skull. “Bosco, if I’m not what you want, just tell me that. I don’t know if you’re trying to spare my feelings—“

“That’s not it,” Bosco interrupts, firm.

“Then why?”

It takes all the anger Daya has left. She’s not even yelling, more just imploring, but Daya knows as soon as it’s out of her mouth that this is the last time she’ll be raising her voice tonight.

Across from her, Bosco’s blinking down at the linoleum. Daya notices, for the first time, that her bag is resting neatly on the floor over by the sink. She must have taken it off when she walked over to Daya.

She looks small, Daya has time to think. Small and extraordinarily tired.

“You deserve someone…”

She trails off, and Daya’s horrified mind and mouth can’t help but fill in the blank.

“Better?”

“No.” Bosco’s head is bent low, her chin nearly touching her knee. “Someone…”

Daya waits. An eternity seems to stretch out between one burst of Bosco talking and the next.

“Someone more like you, I guess.”

And Daya had sort of suspected she might say that, Daya has an answer ready and waiting on the tip of her tongue for that, but Bosco doesn’t let her get it out.

“Do you remember writing in my yearbook senior year?”

It’s so out of left field that it stops Daya in her tracks. She furrows her brow. “Um,” she says. “Yeah?”

Bosco knows her well. “This has a point to it, I promise,” she says. She pulls her other knee up, too. “We got the yearbooks at a weird time, for us. After prom, before banquet. Everyone was signing each other’s at lunch, and I remember, like… Well. I had just assumed you weren’t going to sign mine, or if you did then it would just be a little H.A.G.S., or something.”

Daya’s already smiling, something watery that doesn’t feel right sitting on her face, because she knows how vastly untrue this is.

Bosco keeps going. “Anyway. I took my yearbook home and didn’t look at it for weeks. I don’t know why I finally decided to look– maybe I got curious, after graduation stuff died down and I got bored. I don’t know.” She takes in a breath, and there’s a pause before she speaks again. “I looked through everything really briefly. The signatures, I was like, I don’t really give a fuck. I don’t know half these people, I’m never gonna see them again. I read what Angie wrote for me, I read Camden’s note, probably some others too.”

Daya nods. “Mhmm.”

“And I found yours.”

Daya watches her carefully. “Mine,” she repeats. 

Bosco’s not looking anywhere near her face, which is unusual. She’s usually the better one with eye contact, between the two of them. “You,” she begins, and right off the bat there’s a rough sandpaper quality to her voice that snags Daya’s attention. “You are so– unbelievable. I was looking through the last few pages, I was looking for something really tiny with your name attached, and then I went back to the very first page of signatures, and…” She shakes her head. “Half a page, right at the beginning. In red ink, like the complete loser you are.”

This gets a laugh out of Daya, startles it out of her more than anything. “Ouch.”

Bosco shakes her head again. Then she goes very still and very quiet.

“It made me cry.”

The admission is so tiny, so low and muttered that Daya’s not sure how she even manages to hear it, but she does and her eyes go huge. 

“It made you cry?” Daya must look like a fish, with her mouth gaping and her eyes bugging out of her skull. “What– I– it was all the same stuff I said to you at the banquet, pretty much!”

“It was a lot more eloquent than what you said at banquet,” Bosco informs her, a touch more solidity to her voice now. Still extremely quiet, almost weightless. “It wasn’t what you said. It was kind of that, but it was more…”

Daya stays silent. Assuming nothing, wanting everything.

“It was more the fact that you put it on the very first page,” Bosco nearly whispers. “I couldn’t get over that. You knew everyone would see it.”

Slowly, Daya nods.

“And that’s what you do.” Bosco lays each word down like a death sentence, like yanking teeth, each word pulled from deep inside her with a great deal of effort. “You do everything so… loud.”

That breaks Daya, makes her laugh. Bosco laughs too, the sound wretched. “Shut up,” she croaks out. “Not like that. You just– you say all this shit and you don’t care who hears it. Actually, it’s not that you don’t care. You want people to hear it. You want people to know.”

All Daya can really do is nod. It’s her, the very essence of her and how she loves people, laid out in front of her. She’s never considered that Bosco would think of her this way, so much that she would be able to put it into words so tangibly.

“It is loud,” Bosco says, impossibly soft. “It’s public. You make it that way, that’s how you like it.”

“Right.”

“I’m not like that.”

It’s delivered with such finality, such staggering limpness, that it takes a moment for Daya to absorb. 

Daya blinks. “...I know.”

Bosco’s looking at her differently now, like she’s told Daya something simple and Daya’s failing to understand. “It’s not by choice,” she says. “It’s– I won’t ever be like that.”

“Yeah, I know.” Daya sits up straighter. “Is– is that all this is? Just that you’re not… like me? Because I didn’t need you to tell me that.”

“No.” There’s something building in the way Bosco’s holding herself, the way she raises her chin and looks at Daya right in her eyes. A kind of pressure, a sense of desperation with nowhere else to go. “I don’t think you understand. It wouldn’t work, Daya.”

“You don’t know that.”

“And you think you know better?” Bosco’s eyes blaze, just a spark, but it’s extinguished in seconds. Daya’s deciding, rapidly, that she hates seeing Bosco like this. Bosco should never look like this. “You think we would work out perfectly? You see no issues with the two of us, being… whatever?”

This is where Daya’s high school self would probably blow this up into a full argument. Snap back, rise to the fight. Daya from tenth grade, Daya from twelfth grade, hell, even Daya from last year. First year of college. She’d try to reason with Bosco, overpower her with logic and reasons and explanation and talk. She’d try to win.

“I didn’t say that,” Daya says, trying to keep her voice even. “I don’t think we’d work out perfectly, I don’t think anyone is supposed to work out perfectly. And I also think you’re trying to decide this for me right now.”

Bosco says nothing. Daya decides to seal her fate.

“I think you’re scared.”

No reaction on Bosco’s face, in her body. She doesn’t move a muscle.

Daya clears her throat. “You’re– so brave,” she starts, and already her voice is trembling a bit and there’s nothing she can do and it’s gonna have to be fine. It is fine. “You’re, like, the bravest fuckin’ person I know. And I do think it’s brave. To tell me all that stuff you just said. I… I know you really don’t talk about shit like this. Ever.”

Bosco has her arms folded up on top of her knees, her nose resting on her forearms. It looks like her eyes are closed, but up close Daya can tell she’s just looking at the floor, the whites of her eyes glistening. 

“I don’t think we’d be perfect. I think we’d be like all the other couples, in some ways. We would fight– we already fight,” Daya says, a shaky laugh ribboning through the words. “We’d still go to different schools. Our friends would find a way to make fun of us, but again, they already do all that. Do you get what I’m saying? There are so many things that would stay the same. It’s pretty much everything except what we’re calling each other, like, on paper.”

A tear drips down Bosco’s cheek, leaving a shiny trail in its wake.

“I’m not asking you to change,” Daya says. “I’m not even– this is not me trying to force you to do anything, or be anything– with me.” She’s stumbling, tripping her way from one idea to the next. Fighting her way through. “I’m only saying…”

She shakes her head, letting out a shuddering breath and wiping the tears from her own eyes. She’s crying, but she’s smiling through it. “God, Bosco, don’t let this be the thing that fucking stops you.” It’s no longer begging. She’s completely sure of herself. It’s the last she has left to give, every last part of herself completely given over to this girl sitting on her kitchen floor. “If you think there’s any way you could feel the same way about me that I feel about you, don’t let this be what keeps us from happening. This idea that I deserve someone different, or that I’d want someone more like me–I don’t want anyone else. I only want you.”

It all happens so suddenly. Bosco’s lurching forward, and there’s a knee jerk response in Daya’s emotion-addled lizard brain that says catch her, which Daya almost acts on before she realizes Bosco’s not falling. 

She uncurls, moves forward on her knuckles and knees and cups Daya’s face in one hand and kisses her. 

Bosco doesn’t kiss her hard. Her hold on Daya is secure, it’s not at all hesitant, but the kiss itself is the softest it could possibly be. It’s warm, it tastes like cocoa butter and smells like Bosco, and Daya feels herself melt into it immediately. 

It’s almost medicinal, which Daya knows is a really weird way to think about a kiss, but it’s true. As soon as Bosco’s lips are on hers, it’s like every ailment she’s ever had, physical and mental and emotional, just ceases to exist. Gone, in the blink of an eye. It feels correct. It feels like she and Bosco were made for this, made for each other, sculpted carefully from the same block of clay to one day reunite and do exactly this, touch each other exactly this way. 

They separate momentarily, to breathe, but they’re not truly separate. Their foreheads are touching, their noses bump against each other.

“I can’t promise you anything,” Bosco murmurs, breathless, against Daya’s mouth. 

“Then don’t.”

Bosco searches Daya’s eyes with her own. “But I want to,” she whispers. Fragile and reaching, brimming with want. Daya wonders if it’s the realest thing Bosco’s ever said to her. 

Daya breaks into a smile. “Then do,” she says.

She kisses Bosco again. Again, and again, and again. Leisurely, taking her time with every movement and sensation– because now they do have all the time in the world. 

Daya Betty is nineteen when she fucks everything up, but she’s glad she does. Some things are better off fucked, she believes. Ripped jeans are always cooler than normal jeans. Sometimes glass looks prettier when it’s shattered, all the different shards of all different colors coming back together to make a beautiful kind of chaos. 

And sometimes even the best things, the things that seem perfect as they are, too pretty and pure and familiar to ever risk fucking up– no, even those. Even the friendship with a girl unlike anyone you’ve ever met before and unlike anyone you’ll ever meet again, the girl you wouldn’t know how to live without because the very molecules that make up you have forgotten what that’s like. Even that can be made better by fucking shit up, Daya’s learned. Upsetting the balance. Not leaving things as they are, even when that seems like the only safe way forward.

It’s something Daya thinks about a lot, both when they’re together and they’re apart. Right now they’re curled into each other on the couch of Daya’s childhood home, but next week she’ll be back at school and Bosco will too and she’ll be thinking about it still— what would have happened if she’d taken her chance, bared her soul to Bosco that night in June and Bosco had refused her, let her down gently or flat out rejected her. Or, in a far more nightmarish turn of events (in Daya’s opinion): if Daya had never been brave enough, if she’d let them go on flirting and not doing anything about it and feeling things they didn’t talk about until the end of time. The heartbreak of rejection, Daya firmly believes, would have been just a drop in the ocean compared to the eternal question mark of never knowing. 

Maybe that technically makes her the loser, in the grand scheme of things. Because she’d folded first. Or maybe it’s the opposite, maybe it means she wins. A lot of the time it feels like she’s won the ultimate prize. (Not Bosco herself, because Bosco obviously isn’t a prize to be won, though she does shine like a trophy and Daya believes she should be proudly shown off to the entire world.)

Whether it makes her the winner or the loser, Daya does take pride in being the catalyst, the one to make the blind leap first. Put her heart in Bosco’s hands, in a literal sense. 

Plus, with Bosco’s head resting on her chest and her hand tangled in Bosco’s hair, her mind free to wander through time and space while her fingers journey over the small of Bosco’s back… it’s hard not to feel like she’s won. 

The alternative to winning is losing, Daya reasons, but the alternative to losing can be finding. She’s found so much in such a short amount of time. It’s dizzying to think about. She can almost forget about it, some days, and then she’ll remember out of nowhere and get so giddy her body can hardly contain it. 

She’s found what Bosco’s lipgloss tastes like and how her eyes flutter shut when they kiss. She's found the unique joy that comes from being able to say literally any lovesick sentiment that crosses her mind in Bosco’s presence, without the need to cage it and disguise it as friendliness, and she’s found that when she does this and plays her cards right she can actually get Bosco to blush. It’s a rush like no other, that one. Daya could never tire of it.

And of course, the best part is that she hasn’t lost anything. She hasn’t lost her best friend. She has her best friend right here, laying on her chest. Daya takes a deep breath, slow and steady so she doesn’t start crying. In response, Bosco brings her hand up to rub her thumb over Daya’s ribs, and Daya ends up blinking away a tear or two anyway. 

Daya thinks she understands, maybe. It’s not her loss, but it might be her win. It’s the two of them versus the entire rest of the world, which means when one of them wins so does the other. It’s them on the same path, the same rollercoaster track, up and down and sideways, in for all the same loop-de-loops and twisty turns. Up together, down together. 

Always together. Daya likes the sound of that.