“Thanks, El.”

Beaker, on the other hand, looks pissed.

“You didn’t tell me you got into MIT,” she accuses, shuffling the cards like she’s punishing them.

Uh-oh. I’m in trouble. “I didn’t know how to tell everybody,” I try to explain. “I think I wanted some time for the news to sink in before I went public.”

She still looks pissed. Clearly this excuse isn’t good enough for her. She’s my best friend. She should have been the first person I called.

“What about you? Have you heard back from any place yet?” I backpedal.

“Williams College. Sarah Lawrence. Amherst. But I’m still waiting for Wellesley.”

“I’m sure you’ll get in,” I tell her. Beaker’s been fantasizing about Wellesley for a while, something about it being all women and one of the best liberal arts colleges and Beaker wanting to explore career options, since in addition to math and science Beaker loves theater and plays a killer flute solo, and she doesn’t know what she wants to be when she grows up.

She nods, but her expression says she doesn’t forgive me.

We settle into playing rummy. A few minutes into the game I notice that Steven is smiling. Like he can’t stop smiling. A secret kind of smile.

“What?” I ask finally. “What’s going on with you?”

His smile widens. “Nothing. It’s just that I’m happy for you. Truly.”

He picks up a seven of hearts from the discard pile and sets down three pairs of sevens.

Eleanor snorts. “Right. You’re happy for you, too.”

“El,” he warns. “Don’t.”

Don’t what?

She ignores him and turns to me like this is something that needs to be said and she has appointed herself the messenger. “He’s going to Harvard.”

I glance quickly at Steven, who’s blushing. “You got into Harvard?” I gasp.

“I got into Harvard,” he admits.

This is huge. I feel the urge to hug him, to celebrate, but that would be decidedly awkward. “You got into Harvard! Why wouldn’t you want her to tell me that?”

He scratches at the back of his neck. “It felt like we should be celebrating your moment, that’s all.”

Eleanor smirks. “Right.”

I still don’t get what she’s being so cat-ate-the-canary about. “What’s wrong with you?”

She fixes me with a no-nonsense stare, like she doesn’t understand why I haven’t already figured this out. “MIT and Harvard are both in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Did you know that?” she asks.

“I think I did know that, yes,” I say, and I understand immediately where she’s going with it.

“I visited both campuses last year. They’re two miles apart.” She pulls out her phone (which we are not supposed to do in class but Miss Mahoney generally allows because she’s not supposed to be watching YouTube, either) and does a quick search. “Yes. It’s one-point-nine-six miles from MIT to Harvard. Nine minutes, by car. You and Steven will be one-point-nine-six miles away from each other for the next four years. Now do you see why he’s so ridiculously happy?”

“El, come on,” Steven says, and he’s really blushing now.

My face is red, too. I turn to Steven, who’s meticulously studying his cards. “So you’re going, of course. To Harvard. Not to Yale or Dartmouth or any of the others?”

He doesn’t smile this time, but it’s in his eyes. “That’s the plan.”

“I bet your family is thrilled.”

“They’re over the moon. I’m the first Blake male who’s not going to be a farmer, and they could not be happier.”

“And how about you, is it what you wanted?” I know it is. We didn’t discuss it much when we were applying. We didn’t want to pressure each other. But it was the best-case scenario: me at MIT, Steven at Harvard.

It meant the possibility of more.

But that was before.

His warm brown eyes meet mine.

“Well, you know,” he murmurs. “I hear Harvard’s a pretty good place to study chemistry.”

I instantly have butterflies in my stomach, and I try to squash them. I wet my lips and attempt to breathe properly. How does he keep making me feel this way, even with all that’s happened? I should not feel this way.

I think about what Ty wrote in his letter, how it’s so obvious that Steven and I are right for each other. That we fit.

Beaker and Eleanor have been looking back and forth from me to Steven gleefully, like they’d like a bowl of popcorn. Then Beaker throws me a lifeline.

“Hey, are we playing cards here or what?” she asks, rearranging the cards in her hand. “Time is candy, you know.”

We go back to playing, but Steven is still smiling.

I have a hard time concentrating on the game.

I’m so befuddled by the exchange with Steven, the idea of Steven at Harvard, that I forget to ditch eighth period. So I don’t remember about delivering the paper daisy to Damian until the bell rings at the end of the day.

I check his locker. He’s not there. I try his cell phone, but it goes straight to voice mail.

I bump into El in the commons, where everybody is milling around.

“Lex, are you feeling all right? You look scared,” she observes.

I am scared, for a reason I can’t quite put my finger on. Damian should be here. Why isn’t he here? A bad feeling is boiling up from the pit of my stomach. “Can you help me find Damian Whittaker?” I ask El.