“What Happens After You Confess Your Feelings to Someone?” Chapter 1 (Sample)
Julia Sudnitskaya/Shutterstock.com
Chapter 1
More2come81: hey
Simplesnowflake: hey
More2come81: u busy?
Simplesnowflake: not really
More2come81: can we talk?
Simplesnowflake: sure
Mordecai Terhune—a.k.a. More2come81—is the love of my life. And he knows that. One too many late-night phone calls dragged the truth out of me. I’ve never been very good at keeping secrets from the guys I love.
I still remember that day. I could hear his smile through the phone. I could hear the satisfaction in his voice. I could hear his knowing—his knowing that I loved him enough to do just about anything for him, though I told him I only liked him a little. I hate feeling that way—I hate that weakness I can’t control—that uncomfortably transparent emotion. But there’s nothing to be done. Mordecai knows now.
And what’s worse—I know he doesn’t feel the same way. I know because he gets a new girlfriend about every two weeks, and that girlfriend is never me.
He tells me he would ask me out if I were allowed to date. I’m a sophomore in high school—fifteen years old—and my parents say I can’t date until I’m a senior. But if he really cared about me, he would wait. Then again, it is high school. Everyone who can date dates. Even most kids who aren’t allowed date secretly. So, I suppose I can’t really blame him for not waiting for me. I’m a good girl. I intend to follow my parents’ rules.
But still, it would be nice if I could forget about him. It would be nice if I could just let him go, at least until I’m allowed to date. But I can’t let go. I can’t forget. And why not? Because Mordecai Terhune is the love of my life.
Tonight is not a school night. That means I’m allowed to stay up as late as I want. And since Mordecai needs to talk, that means I’ll be staying up as late as he wants.
He calls me a few minutes after signing off the instant messaging or IM application we use. The year is 2005. I don’t have a cellphone, so Mordecai calls me on my house phone. Before he got a cellphone, I called his house so many times that the number is now forever engrained in my memory. I’m still working on getting his cellphone number to that place.
“Hey,” I say when I pick up.
“Hey,” he says. “What’s up?”
“Nothing much.”
“Done all your homework for the weekend?”
I laugh. “Not yet.”
“Uh oh. A little behind, are we? I thought you usually rush through homework on Fridays so you have the rest of the weekend to relax.”
I smile. “Actually, I usually do homework on Saturdays, too. I have a paper I’m planning to write tomorrow.”
“I see,” he says. Brief pause.
“So, how’s April?”
“April?”
“Isn’t that your girlfriend’s name?”
“Oh, you mean Avril.”
“That’s just April in French. She should quit trying to be so fancy.”
“I’ll tell her you said that.”
“Don’t you dare!”
He laughs. His laugh always makes me melt. “I’m just kidding, Chloe.” Shivers when he says my name. “And Avril’s fine.”
“Why aren’t you hanging out with her tonight?” I wonder.
“She’s visiting her aunt in New York this weekend.”
“You could still call her.”
“I decided to call you.”
“Why?”
“’Cause I had a long day, and you always make me feel better after a long day.”
“I should think your girlfriend should be the one to provide that service for you.”
“She provides other services,” he says.
“I imagine she does,” I say, trying not to let images of the two of them together take over my mind. Hold onto your sanity, I tell myself.
“Hey, it’s not what you think. I just mean, I feel differently about her than I do about you.”
“How do you feel about her?”
“I love her.”
“And how do you feel about me?”
He pauses. “You’re my best friend.”
“I thought that was Keith.”
“He’s my best guy friend. You’re my best girl friend.”
“Shouldn’t you be dating your best girl friend?”
“Now why do you want to go and complicate everything, Snowy?”
“I told you not to call me that,” I say, actually thrilled every time he uses that pet name. “It’s Chloe.”
“Then why is your IM name Simplesnowflake, which is actually redundant since snowflakes are already pretty simple?”
“It’s none of your business.”
“Tell me, Chloe.”
“No.”
“Tell me.”
“No.”
“You know you’re going to tell me. You always tell me everything.”
“I do not.”
“Snowy…”
“Ugh, fine. But only if you promise to stop calling me Snowy.”
“I make no such promise.”
I roll my eyes and continue anyway. “Once in first grade, we were making paper snowflakes to decorate our classroom for winter. The first snowflake I made was a mess. It had snips in all the wrong places and was practically falling apart. But just before I started to cry over my obvious failure, my teacher came to me and said, ‘Why not try a simpler snowflake, Chloe?’ And she showed me how to make a nice, simple snowflake with no excessive snips.”
“And so Simplesnowflake was born.”
“Exactly. But it took me a long time to find a good use for it.”
“I think you found an excellent use for it.” He pauses, then says, “Oh, hey, I gotta go. Avril is calling me.”
“Of course. I’ll talk to you later.”
“Later. Wait!”
“What?”
“You still like me, right?”
I sigh. “Yeah, I do.”
“Ok, good. Just checking,” he says. “Goodnight.”
“Goodnight.”
I know he’s dating someone else. I know there’s a chance he may never choose me. But this is a good night. This is one of those conversations that will make me smile for days afterwards. The bad conversations I always try to forget as quickly as possible.
I don’t know when I’ll hear from Mordecai again, though I hope it’ll be soon. He doesn’t usually talk to me much while he’s dating someone, which is undoubtedly for the best. Still, I wait all day Saturday to see if he’ll go on IM, but he doesn’t. And he doesn’t call either. There is a bright side to this, though—I’m able to finish my paper without interruptions.
*****
The next day is the same. Mordecai doesn’t go on IM and he doesn’t call. I spend most of the day reading, writing in my journal, and playing a board game with my parents.
My mom and dad—Lucienne and Max Cushing—are both first-generation Haitian immigrants. They came to the US in the early seventies, and now they’re both American citizens and doctors at a hospital.
If you’re wondering why Cushing doesn’t sound much like a Haitian last name, it’s because my paternal grandfather was British. He was on vacation in Haiti when he met my grandmother and fell in love with her. They married, but my grandfather passed away soon after my father was born, leaving my grandmother to raise him with limited resources. She and my dad fled Haiti as soon as they could, as did my mother and her family, whose situation wasn’t much better.
I think my parents complement each other nicely. They’re both more concerned with facts and figures than feelings and other flighty things, but my dad tends to be more rigid than my mom.
If I need help solving a complicated math problem, I go to my dad. But if I need compassion because, say, my best friend Krista Hallowell and I just had a fight, I turn to my mom. But neither of them is much help in the boy department. If I so much as mention a boy in a non-school context, I always get the same response—no boys until senior year. Needless to say, they know nothing about Mordecai. And I’m glad to live in a time when they don’t really understand IM.
Speaking of understanding, I don’t speak or understand French or Creole, though my parents speak both languages fluently. But I’m studying French in school. Soon we’ll be able to speak it together—though, at the rate I’m learning it, probably not very soon.
My dad is relatively short for a man, and my mom is much shorter than him. My height is somewhere between theirs. We all have caramel-colored skin, brown hair, and brown eyes. But while my dad wears his hair natural, as is typical for men with his tight-curled hair texture, my mom and I have perms to straighten our hair. I’ll get into the implications of what that means later. (And, yes, I did mean to say perm.)
That afternoon, my mom, my dad, and I play rounds of chess. I’m not very good at it, but I love playing because I love to see my dad’s genius at work. And I have to admit that, while we’re playing games, I sometimes wonder if someday Mordecai will join us. As of right now, that seems unlikely.
Copyright © 2025
In the next chapter, you’ll get to meet Chloe’s best friend Krista. You’ll also get a taste of Chloe’s daily routine, including her internal debate about whether to send Mordecai a message.
Ready for Chapter 2? Click here if you are!