Two hours. The next two hours will determine the difference between success and failure. Triumph and loss. Life and death. The next two hours will determine the course of your life. Will determine your job, your monetary status, your husband. Your everything. 

The next two hours will determine who you are.

And as you pick up the pencil and begin perusing the reading comprehension section of the SAT test sitting on the desk before you, all you can think of is Stanford and how you've spent the past eighteen years of your life working towards this one moment.

He's never liked girls like her. Girls with long, sleek hair and whiter teeth than nebulous clouds, with skin the color of honey caramel covering a mouthwatering figure that results from years of soccer and tennis and squats. Girls who shout more than talk and have dirty mouths and dirtier minds, who don't even try and still manage to get straight A's, who just don't give a fuck and have the sweetest, most teeth-rotting personalities. Girls who are perfection incarnate and he hates them, but she still likes him.

Somehow.

Andrew stares uncomprehendingly at her for a long moment, wondering if he's hallucinating-but wait a minute, he doesn’t even do drugs. In the shitstorm that is high school, Andrew has miraculously arrived at senior year relatively unscathed, save for the loss of personality and a sense of being. Then again, hallucinations don’t depend only on drugs, right? Maybe it’s the lack of sleep wearing him down. He’s not addicted to crack, but he certainly takes more shots of espresso in one drink than is recommended for daily consumption. Andrew blinks.

Jesse Arias-Montano is still standing there.

“What the hell?” he barks, voice cracking in the middle, and Jesse’s smile widens.

“I. Like. You,” she enunciates clearly without a shred of embarrassment, and all the stares and laughs from the enormous group surrounding them do little to better the situation. Andrew’s friends have all abandoned him to get mercies of the Latina girl with a mean overhead smash. “Do I have to spell it out to get it through your thick brain? L-I-K-”

“Should you really be insulting the person you're confessing to?” Andrew snaps, momentarily thrown back into the ease of bantering back and forth with her. “I might just say no.”

“So you were going to say yes?” Her eyes sparkle, and Andrew splutters.

“You walked right into that one, man,” a boy calls from the front of the crowd. Andrew doesn’t know him, but Jesse does, because she turns and shoots him a weird look: her eyebrows pull low over her eyes and her upper lip curls, revealing a row of straight white teeth.

It’s a petty sort of satisfaction that wells up in Andrew when he notes that her incisors are slightly crooked.

“No one asked for your opinion, Amun,” she replies, shooting Andrew a wink that looks slightly demented when combined with her quivering lip and wiggling eyebrows. It’s such a Jesse thing to do. “Even if it’s true.”

“Well no one asked for your opinion,” Amun replies in a childishly mocking tone, even going so far as to cross his arms and stick his bottom lip out in a pout. The two stare unblinkingly at each other before cracking up, and, not for the first time, Andrew wonders whether America High School’s student population is an accurate representation of the IQ level of its namesake.

(He can get away with making that joke-he’s Japanese.)

“Even if I wanted to go out with you-which I’m not saying I am,” Andrew hastens to add, glaring at Jesse’s suddenly bright and hopeful expression, “-it’s senior year. What are you expecting out of this?”

Jesse raises an eyebrow, crosses her arms over her chest. “I’ve been waiting since sophomore year for you to ask me out, and now that it’s the beginning of my last year at this high school, I am not about to let you get away. To hell with chivalry, I say. This is me asking you out, Andrew Yamatoto.” Andrew immediately winces as she utterly botches his last name, stretching out the a’s and pronouncing them with the a in “ham” and swapping a t with an m. All in all, it’s a good thing that Jesse isn’t taking Japanese as her language course. “Reject me if you like, but that’s not about to stop me from hounding your ass, mister.”

Andrew gapes at her, and he hears more than a few camera shutters go off. “Excuse me?” Is she for real? This girl can’t even pronounce his last name correctly, and now she’s threatening to stalk him?

Jesse beams, and Andrew is momentarily taken aback by the genuine warmth in the expression even as she exclaims, “I’ll make you like me!”

Then he remembers that she’s a crazy psycho. “No.”

“But-”

“No.”

“Andrew-”

“No.”

“You’re not even going to-”

“No.”

“-listen to what I’m trying-”

“No.”

“Fucking Andrew!”

“No.”

Jesse throws her hands up into the air, ponytail bobbing up and down with the movement. “How the hell do I even have a crush on you?”

“I ask myself that too.”

She glowers at Andrew, a muscle feathering along the line of her (sharp) jaw. “Just go on a date with me.”

Andrew sighs, already regretting going to school today. He usually does, but he regrets that decision even more so now. Maybe if he rushes at her, he’ll take her by surprise and will be able to dash through that tiny path through the crowd right behind her. The he’ll run out the front doors and hop into his car and drive far, far away-

But then he remembers that he has a physics test next period.

Not to mention that Jesse’s a varsity soccer player for a reason.

(And the only reason Andrew’s stomach doesn’t fall out of his shirt is because he inherited his mother’s fast metabolism.)

“I’d really rather not.”

“Why not?” Jesse’s eyes glint challengingly at Andrew, her entire body tensed and poised, as if daring him to say that he already has a crush on another person (which may or may not be true).

Andrew’s more of a wimp than he’d like to admit. “You’re a sweet person-” Not. “-really, but we’ve been friends for a long time, and I don’t really think that I’ve ever thought of you in that way-”

“No.” Jesse points a finger at him, shaking her head hard enough for her ponytail to whack her chin every time she turns her head from side to side. “No, no, no, you are not friendzoning me. I refuse to be friendzoned.”

This time, Andrew’s the one who throws his arms up in frustration. “Well, what do you want from me? Lie to your face and tell you that I’ve always loved you since the moment I first saw you just to save your precious feelings from reality? News flash-I don’t feel that way, and I don’t like you enough to even try.”

He immediately regrets the words when Jesse flinches, narrowed eyes widening then returning to their normal rounded state. She drops her hand, balling it into a fist by her side. “Oh.”

Sheer disappointment and poorly concealed hurt drips from her voice and slumped shoulders. Andrew has the sudden urge to punch himself in the face for being an insensitive asshole. Sure, Jesse was being unreasonable, but his way of response was completely unnecessary and needlessly rude. He can feel several sets of glares burning into his back and face as he swallows and forces himself to spit out the words, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it that way.”

Jesse shrugs, drawing her shoulders up and straightening her back. A wide smile forces its way onto her face as she tries to make herself as cheery and unaffected as possible. Watching her attempting to act as normal as possible hurts more than if she had burst into tears right then and there. “No, no, it’s fine. Really, I realize now that I was being...extremely rude.” Her accent has gotten a little thicker in the face of her sadness. “I shouldn’t have been so pushy. It’s my fault.”

Andrew sighs, staring at her twitching face. He can practically hear the thoughts parading around in both his and her friends’ heads. FIX THIS. Before he can think about it, he blurts out, “If you really like me that much, prove it.”

“What?” Her head lifts, eyebrows pulled low over her dark brown eyes. The skin in between her brows wrinkles, and more petty satisfaction wells up inside of him. God, he’s such an asshole.

Andrew sighs again, awkwardly reaching up and running his fingers through his hair. “Well, what I mean is that…” For a wild moment, Andrew panics because he has nothing to offer-he hadn’t even been planning to give Jesse a chance anyways. “Give me thirty-seven reasons.”

“...What?”

Andrew wishes he could bash his head against the lockers and put himself into a self-induced coma that’ll last until the end of senior year. Or until Jesse’s dead, that works fine too. But there’s no way of rescinding his words without seeming like even more of an asshole, so he bravely (stupidly) soldiers onward. “If you give me thirty-seven reasons as to why I should li-love you, then I’ll reconsider.”

Andrew curses his mouth, brain, and everything else under the sun. Whatever ungodly demon that possessed his tongue just long enough to spit out the dreaded “l-word” must be laughing its ugly ass off because now the hallways are filling with cheers and catcalls. Jesse’s lips thin, and Andrew really hates people like her. People whose every thought and emotion are painted across the faces, and no one even cares. “Why?”

He fishes around for an arbitrary reason as to why he decided to give her chance other than the true I felt sorry for you. “...because you’re nice.”

That self-induced coma option is starting to sound super appealing.

Somehow, Jesse thinks that his panicked brain fart is funny, because she laughs, albeit less brightly than before. “You’re pretty nice too, Andrew. So...it’s a deal then.” Her eyes light up, and she no longer looks as sad and lonely and disappointed as earlier. Andrew’s starting to really regret this. “I’m going to show you why I’ll be the best girlfriend ever! In thirty-seven reasons!”

Before Andrew can even blink, her arms are around him and a pair of soft lips is pressed against his cheek. She pulls back a second later, grinning brightly up at him before whirling around and running squealing to a group of her girl friends.

The crowd seems to dissipate within seconds, just as quickly as it had originally formed.

It's a confession in the most unromantic of places, and Andrew has just made a deal with the devil. 

零 (líng) he thought he loved him but it was really just hate wrapped in mistakes

一 (yī) and she thought that there would be a forever but it wasn’t written in the stars

二 (èr) she watched the rain trace an icy finger down the side of her face and she thought to herself that this is what she deserved

三 (sān) he thought that maybe there was a chance anyways

四 (sì) she thought for a long, long time that she really had mattered to them, but maybe it was all just a lie in the end

五 (wǔ) and when they met, purple hearts and blue stars collide into fiery supernovas

六 (liù) she fell in love and no one was there to catch her

七 (qī) he fell out of love and found himself still there

八 (bā) they drank cups of warm milk and curled up under fur blankets and felt like children again

九 (jiǔ) she has grown up and he is stuck in the past

十 (shí) let sleeping beasts lie, and so they do

They haven't been working out. She thinks maybe it's time for other people, and he thinks they just need more time. She spends the night staring up at shadowy ceilings, and he falls into the sweet embrace of dreams about futures where they can afford an ice cream cone without having to work overtime. She's a realist, and he's a romantic.

And maybe that's why they had felt so drawn to each other at the beginning. She was twenty years old and busting her ass in community college, hoping to attract some passing interest from a private college, anything better than the run down cesspit she's trapped in right now. He was eighteen years old and fresh out of high school. She thought he looked too young, he thought she looked too old. But they fell in love anyways.

And maybe they're falling out of love now. 

The once carefree afternoons that had been filled with pillow fights and wild laughter are coiled tightly, both of them too afraid to break the tension. She wants to be anywhere but here. He wants to hold her in his arms and never let go. She's too afraid of what will happen to the starry-eyed, too naive little boy she had almost run over when they first met. He's too afraid of how she'll react if he buries his nose into her hair and pretends like nothing has changed.

She clacks away on the keyboard of her battered computer, bought from four pairs of hands. She's working on her thesis, and stress has reached an all time high. She'll be graduating community college in the next month, and it's a constant question that neither of them dare voice aloud for fear of acknowledging its reality.

They'll have to someday. 

He scratches out vague answers to his seminar questions, knowing that he can do better, knowing that no one will really care. He's two years younger than her, and he's already been offered a scholarship to a university halfway across the country. He still hasn't told her, because he knows that she'll tell him to go, and he wants to believe that she still loves him the way she has since she first appeared, offering to pay for his hospital fees off the skin of her back.

There's a knock on the door, and his head snaps up. Before he can say anything, she has stood up and climbed over the couch that doubles as a bed. Her hand is on the doorknob, and it slowly opens. There's a gasp, and her legs give out from underneath her.

He worries his bottom lip with his teeth as he slowly comes up behind her kneeling form and wraps his arms around her shoulder.

"I'm sorry," he offers, a paltry substitution for what he just took from her, but he loves her too much to let her go. He doesn't even care that his friend stands off to the side, watching silently as she shakes with silent sobs in his arms. "I'm so sorry."

She holds the velvet box in her hand, the simple silver band winking up at her. He was only able to afford the one jewelry piece. Her shoulders are shaking, and he rests his cheek against her hair, closing his eyes.

And as much as their love is stagnating, she has to choke, "I will, I will, I will," as the foundations of her world crumble beneath her feet and the only anchor she can touch is the boy who cannot stop this toxic love just as much as she herself cannot.