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I lean back and try to relax in my chair.
It doesn’t work, though, because my heart is pounding too hard for me to be even remotely calm. I can’t stop thinking about Harper, what’s going to happen, how I’m going to react to seeing her. Will she show? Or will I sit here, waiting, for hours and hours? And if she does show, how is it going go to go? Will I work up the courage to tell her how I really feel? If I do, will she reject me? Or say yes and we make out passionately? (That would be the preferred option.) Or worse, what if she doesn’t react at all?

Then another thought hits me:
she said she only lived twenty minutes away, so will I recognize her when I see her? I shake my head at that. I don’t know a Harper in real life. Of course I won’t recognize her. Still, even as I think it, I have this inexplicable feeling that I already know her.

After a few more minutes of silently freaking out and getting in
to staring contests with the old ladies, a message from Harper in our chatroom comes in. I let out a breath of relief I didn’t even realize I was holding. At least she isn’t dead.

on my way
, she says.
sorry. was caught in traffic. see you in a minute.

get ready for epicness,
I respond. I’m smiling now, because above all the anxiety I realize this is really happening. I’m really about to meet the girl I’ve been thinking about,
dreaming
about, for longer than I can even remember.

okay, I’m here.
remember to watch for the I <3 Sam Green shirt
, Harper replies a minute later.

Of course.
Don’t doubt my skills.

Oh, I already do…

Now my whole body is on overload, and I can feel my skin tingling with anticipation. Holy crap. This
really
is happening. Instinctually, I glance down at my own meet-up shirt, which is really just an old white T-shirt with “Harper Knight Is Cooler Than Pizza-Eating Cows” scrawled across it in fading blue sharpie, as I promised.

I take a sip of water, my eyes trained on the door
, trying to remain calm. But I can’t. I mean, she’s here. She’s here! OH MY GOD SHE’S HEEEERE! In less than a minute, I remind myself, I’ll meet Harper Knight for the first time.

J
ust like that, there’s a sound at the coffee shop door. A jolt of energy rushes through me, and I lean forward, my fists anxiously clenching and unclenching. I take a deep breath, waiting. The door rattles again, and this time it swings open a sliver, then a little more, until it’s finally open all the way. I wait, and my heart seems to leap in my throat. A girl steps inside, but as hard as I try, I can’t see her face. Still, I wait.

My whole body is on alert now, and all I want is for the anticipation to end, for me to just meet her already.
The smell of vanilla coconut permeates through the room, and I recognize the smell, I’m just too distracted to say from where. I can’t look away as Harper turns toward me, slowly, like in all the best cliché chick flicks, and I see…

I stop.

I see… Cat?

Cat is walking toward me?

My heart sinks. Why is Cat here? And where the hell is Harper?

“Hey,”
she says as she approaches, in a shy, embarrassed kind way I’ve never heard her speak to me with before. Her face is red and glossy, and her vanilla scent engulfs me as she nears the table. Actually, I realize, this is her flirting voice. Weird. Maybe she just came from an impromptu date or something?

“Hey?”
I frown, but she just blushes and sits down across from me. I have no idea what’s going on. Please tell me Cat didn’t find out about Harper and is here to talk some sense into me about meeting her.

“Oh,” I say, still entirely confused. “I’m actually expecting someone…”

Her blush fades a little, and she looks at me
now, her jaw tight. “You don’t notice?” she says flatly.

“Notice what…?”

She closes her eyes like she’s debating telling me something, takes a deep breath, and whispers. “My shirt.”

Painfully slowly, she
lifts up the writing for me to see. My heart rate slows, and then races again.
I <3 Sam Green
, it reads in big, loopy letters. The shirt Harper promised she’d have on.

But how could Cat have
on Harper’s shirt?

Unless…

Oh my god…

“I’m Harper Knight,” Cat whispers, her blue eyes locked on mine. She doesn’t move, doesn’t flinch, jus
t takes a deep breath and says, “I made her up.”

As soon as the words leave her mouth, m
y mind explodes with thoughts. I feel my insides go cold, and my whole stomach tightens. Harper isn’t real? I’ve been falling for a made-up human this whole? Oh god, oh god, oh fucking hell. Somehow, this is even more pathetic than falling for a sixty-year-old creeper.

“So you did this all… why? As a joke?” I stand up, my hands shaking.
This
cannot
be real. My one last chance at love, gone in an instant. I had my heart set on Harper, and this is what I get? A slap in the face?

“No—”
Cat starts to blurt out, but I cut in again.

“You’re my best friend,” I whisper, not
turning away from her. “I thought I trusted you.”

“West, that’s not—”

“Not what?” I shake my head and run my hands through my hair. This can’t be happening. This
can’t
be. I finally thought I’d found someone, someone for me, and it turns out the person I trust most in this world made it all up? Shit shit shit. What is even going on anymore?

She closes
her eyes. “Not… how I meant it,” she says softly.

“Then how
did
you mean it?” I’m angry now, and I can’t help but let the rage slip into my voice.

This time, she stops. She looks at me, hard and sad. I’ve never seen Cat look at me like that before.
“West?” Her hands tighten at her sides, and I can feel the old ladies watching us with excitement, like we’re their newest soap opera. The sad thing is, they’re probably right. My life in the past year has been just about the equivalent to that of characters in soap operas. “You really want to know?”

In that instant, by the seriousness of
Cat’s voice, I know I don’t, in fact, want to know. But I’m too curious for my own good. “Yes.” I taste bile in my mouth as soon as I say it, and the nausea washes over me in a rush. All I want to do is leave, run away and keep screaming and crying until I wake up from this nightmare.

Cat
takes one last breath, reaches out, and brushes the tips of her fingers against my arm. Our eyes lock—hard—and we stare at each other for the longest time before Cat finally whispers, her eyes misting with tears, “I didn’t make up Harper because I wanted to prank you. I made her up because I love you.”

***

When your best friend tells you she loves you, you can do one of three things:

1)
                  
You can tell her you love her too and then make out with her passionately.

2)
                 
You can run away.

3)
                 
Or you can just stare at her for what feels like a century without speaking a word like a senseless idiot and only create more awkwardness for everyone.

Guess which reaction
is mine? You betcha. #3. I think it’s a solid five minutes of me gawking, not knowing how to respond, not knowing what the hell I’m
supposed
to do, before anything happens. Yeah. That awkward.

My heart is hammering now, and I swear my tongue has refused to work because as much as I try to open my mouth and speak, no words will come out. Beads of sweat drip down my neck, and the
throbbing in my head pounds harder, harder, harder.

Cat is in love with me.

Oh my god.

“You know what? Forget it,” Cat says
when I don’t react, shaking her head and gathering up her things. “This was stupid. Forget it ever happened.”

“Wait, Cat,” I say,
reaching blindly for her arm, as if I could possibly make this anymore awkward. (Hint: apparently, I can.)

She pushes past my grip.
“No, no…” She grabs her bag, turns, and starts to fast-walk to the exit. “I made a mistake. I shouldn’t have… I shouldn’t have done this to you.”

“Cat,” I call
after her, but she’s already rushing to the door, pulling it open, and getting the hell out of here like I should’ve done long ago. My whole body screams at me to
just do something
and to
fucking fix this already
, but I can’t. I can’t think. Can’t move. “That’s not…” I start to blurt out, but she’s already gone. “…what I meant,” I finish, dropping my voice, even though she can’t hear me.

And now I’m standing in the middle of a failure of a coffee shop that doesn’t even sell coffee, with the cashier snoring to my right and a group of three old women staring at me like I’m from another planet and the one person I care about
most in this world running away from me. Oh, and also, as if this could get any more exciting, the girl of my dreams doesn’t exist.

Somehow, this is not how I pictured the meet
-up going.

“Well?” one of the old ladies, who is dressed in her oversized sweater and pink scarf, says. “Aren’t you going to run after her?” I don’t
respond. I just stare at her, dumbfounded, like a complete moron. Words still refuse to come. It’s like I’m back in fifth goddamn grade and trying to recite my thirty-line poem in front of the whole school; I have a serious case of tongue-brokenness and no idea how to fix it. “You know if you don’t run after her you’ll lose her, right? Why would you want to lose your girlfriend?”

“She’s not…” I say
, shaking my head. “She’s not my girlfriend.”

The old lady raises her eyebrow. “I
noticed the look in that girl’s eyes the moment she saw you. If that wasn’t the love of a girlfriend, I don’t know what it is.”

I stop. My heart slows. “What look?”

“Bah,” she says, turning to her two old-lady cohorts and sharing a smile like they know something I don’t. “Young people these days,” she says and the other two burst into sluggish, 90+-year-old laughter. The woman turns back at me. “Hun, from that one look of hers, I know you have a girl who loves you more than anything in the world. That’s valuable stuff. Don’t let her go.”

“Are you… are you sure?” I can’t think clearly anymore.

“I am most certainly sure,” she says, reaching out a bony hand.

And I must be crazy because now I’m taking advice from random old ladies, but the next thing I know, I run after Cat. I burst through the coffee shop door,
cheered on by the three of them, sprint down the sidewalk, and follow Cat’s bobbing head over the crowd of people.

I push past stranger after stranger, keeping my
gaze trained on Cat, and I just keep running and running. The wind whips against me and the air tastes like cigarettes, but I barely notice any of it. All of my concentration is on Cat now.

When I
finally catch up to her, she’s fast-walking through another crowd of people, speeding up with each step. I grab her arm and pull her back, breathing heavily. “Hey,” I say. She tries to fight my grip. “
Hey
.”

“Let go of me!
” she shouts, jerking away from me and nearly taking out a little girl to her right. “I told you I’m sorry! What more do you want from me? Do you want my dignity too? My happiness? My life? Because I’m sure that’s just about up for sale at this point.” She spins back around to face me, her eyes wild and sad at the same time. Tears sting her eyes, and it hurts to see her like this—like, physically hurts. She looks at me, exasperated. Cat, the strong one who always kept
me
in balance, exasperated. Oh my god, what have I done? “Well?” she says when I don’t respond. My jaw is still totally slack. “Aren’t you going to say something? I just told you I love you and you have zero fucking reaction?”

I’m consciously aware of my hand
on her arm, my skin touching her skin. She is warm and shaking, rattled in a way I’ve never seen her before. I have no idea what to say, what to do. I feel so fucking pathetic all of a sudden, because she just told me probably the biggest thing you can tell someone and I can’t even find the words to respond.

“You really made that account because you love me?” I
finally say like a blundering idiot, too scared to meet her gaze, to focus on anything but the slight tremble in my toes.

“I did,” she says slowly,
watching me as if I’m about to pull I knife on her. I nod. She sighs then, and I watch as she turns her head to look out at the sun beyond the crowded street of people.

“What, Cat?” I ask.

She shakes her head.

I step forward. “Cat,” I say. “Tell me.”

She hesitates, but does. “Remember when we were thirteen and we decided to prank our English teacher?” she says softly, still looking out at the sun—at anything but my face. “So we snuck into his classroom while he was stuffing his face with chocolate cake or whatever in the teacher’s lounge, and we super-glued his markers together? We felt so cool and untouchable at the time, like we’d just reached the holy grail of pranks, and when he yelled at about it to the class the next day just because he wanted to yell, we were giggling like idiots in the back, thinking we were the baddest kids this school has ever seen.” She says it with such fondness, with that same twinkle in her eyes from last night, like she’s telling me a story of a magical world we’ll never quite reach.