Fangirl

top of him. She’d spent hours on top of him. Curled over him like a vampire. Even exhausted, she couldn’t stop rubbing her numb lips into his flannel chest. “You’re all mouth,” he said.
    “Sorry,” Cath said, biting her lips.
    “Don’t be stupid,” he said, pulling her lips free of her teeth with his thumb. “And don’t be sorry … ever again.”
    He hitched her up, so her face was above his. Her eyes wandered down to his chin, out of habit. “Look at me,” he said.
    Cath looked up. At Levi’s pastel-colored face. Too lovely, too good.
    “I like you here,” he said, squeezing her. “With me.”
    She smiled, and her eyes started to drift downward.
    “Cather…”
    Back up to his eyes.
    “You know that I’m falling in love with you, right?”
     
    “You knew all along?”
    “Not all along,” Penelope said. “But a long. At least since fifth year, when you insisted we follow Baz around the castle every other day. You made me go to all of his football games.”
    “To make sure he wasn’t cheating,” Simon said, out of habit.
    “Right,” Penelope said. “I was starting to wonder whether you’d ever figure it out. You have figured it out, haven’t you?”
    Simon felt himself smiling and blushing, not for first time this week. Not for the fiftieth. “Yeah…”

    —from Carry On, Simon, posted March 2011 by FanFixx.net author Magicath

 
    THIRTY-TWO
    Wren was back, and it felt like someone had turned Cath’s world right side up. Like she’d been hanging from the floor all year long, trying not to drop through the ceiling.
    Cath could call Wren now whenever she wanted. Without thinking or worrying. They met for lunch and for dinner. They wrapped their schedules around each other’s, filling in all the small spaces.
    “It’s like you got your lost arm back or something,” Levi said. “Like you’re a happy starfish.” The way he was beaming, you’d think he was the one who got his sister back. “That was some bad medicine. Not talking to your mom. Not talking to your sister. That was some Jacob-and-Esau business.”
    “I’m still not talking to my mom,” Cath said.
    She had talked to Wren about their mom. A lot, actually.
    Wren wasn’t surprised that Laura hadn’t stayed at the hospital. “She doesn’t do heavy stuff,” Wren said. “I can’t believe she even came.”
    “She probably thought you were dying.”
    “I wasn’t dying.’”
    “How do you not do the heavy stuff?” Cath said, indignant. “Being a parent is all heavy stuff.”
    “She doesn’t want to be a parent,” Wren said. “She wants me to call her ‘Laura.’”
    Cath decided to start calling Laura “Mom” again in her head. Then she decided to stop calling Laura anything at all in her head.…
    Wren still talked to her (She Who Would Not Be Named). She said they texted mostly and that they were friends on Facebook. Wren was okay with that amount of involvement; she seemed to think it was better than nothing and safer than everything.
    Cath didn’t get it. Her brain just didn’t work that way. Her heart didn’t.
    But she was done fighting with Wren about it.
    Now that Cath and Wren were Cath and Wren again, Levi thought they should all be hanging out all the time. The four of them. “Did you know that Jandro’s in the Ag School?” he asked. “We’ve even had classes together.”
    “Maybe we should go on lots of double dates,” Cath said, “and then we can get married on the same day in a double ceremony, in matching dresses, and the four of us will light the unity candle all at the same time.”
    “Pfft,” Levi said, “I’m picking out my own dress.”
    The four of them had all hung out together once or twice, incidentally. When Jandro was coming to get Wren. When Levi was coming to get Cath.
    “You don’t want to hang out with Wren and me,” Cath had tried to tell him. “All we do is listen to rap music and talk about Simon.”
    There were only six weeks left until The Eighth Dance came out, and Wren was more stressed out about it than Cath was. “I just don’t know how you’re going to wrap everything up,” she’d say.
    “I’ve got an outline,” Cath kept telling her.
    “Yeah, but you’ve got classes, too. Let me see your outline.”
    Usually, they huddled over the laptop in Cath’s room. It was closer to campus.
    “Don’t expect me to tell you apart,” Reagan said when this became a routine.
    “I have short hair,” Wren said, “and she wears