All of Me

four • the date

• • •

I'm still half asleep fifteen minutes before I need to get behind the wheel on Monday morning. Gray and I have three consecutive classes that fill nearly four hours before I'm due to meet Liam at two. Even if it's awful, date or not, I have the excuse of another class at three thirty.

An hour and a half. The same length as my awful classics class, and I make it through that twice a week. And this isn't class, I have to remind myself. It's just a coffee. A date. The word is barely in my vocabulary. I've never been on a date, nothing remotely close, and I'm still not one hundred percent convinced that it is a date. The specifics of this meeting were never spelled out

Gray nudges me, a piece of toast in his hand. "Are you ok?"

I nod.

"Nervous?"

I nod again. He gives me a comforting smile.

"You know you don't have to go," he says. "If you don't want to and it's just going to make you feel bad, don't go. Give me the word and we can go to McDonald's instead and relive all my terrible dates."

He knows how to put a smile on my face. In just twelve weeks, he has got right under my skin, infiltrating my life to the point that I feel like something's missing when he's not around. He's almost always around, though. If he's not sitting next to me in class or the car or at the table, I can hear him singing to himself next door or I can see him reading in bed before he shuts his blinds.

I know he's right and it's reassuring to hear him say that, the confirmation I need that this decision is mine, but I feel like there are two versions of me at constant odds in my own brain. One is the reserved recluse who tells me to just skip the date and all the stress that comes with it; the other is bolder, pushing me to step out of my box.

The two sides rarely agree. Every decision I make is subject to a million arguments back and forth and no matter what I decide, I often feel like I'm disappointing a part of myself. I tried explaining that to Dad once and he got upset, saying he wished there was something he could do to help. I hadn't been looking for a solution, just a chance to get it off my chest.

"I'm going to go," I tell him. That's the decision I made yesterday and I'm going to stick to it, if only to prove to myself that I can stick to a decision. If I can't bring myself to go on a date where there's a friendly, attractive guy asking, when will I ever?

"Good." He rests his arm on my shoulder and finishes off his toast, reaching for another piece. It's no wonder Gray's dad calls him pacman: he has an insatiable appetite.

• • •

Gray chatters away next to me, distracting me from the fact that we didn't leave until eight thirty on the dot and while the journey can be ninety minutes on the dot, it can take two hours to reach South Lakes. We've been late to class before, and we've never been the latest, and at least I'm not alone, but the thought still fills me with dread.

There's little worse than walking into a class with all eyes on me as Gray and I try to find a couple empty seats that invariably mean squeezing past knees and backpacks crammed into too small a space. I'd sooner sit in the aisle than have to inch my way to the end of a row and squash myself into one of those stupidly small seats with the attached desks that won't budge.

The little town is almost the northwesternmost point in Ohio, just a couple miles east of Indiana and five miles south of Michigan. Ordinarily I like to hop on the 163 and get straight onto the I-90, which carries us almost all the way, but today there's a whole bunch of traffic as soon as we get out of Five Oaks. Gray's in charge of maps and I can see him pulling a face out of the corner of my eye.